£10K

[garethEds]

So there is £10K to spend on improving back end systems. This means getting rid of some servers that are between 6 and 9 years old and hopefully moving to HyperV solution.

 

What should I get? This is based on an old project that was shelved the other month due to lack of funds - but there is light at the end of the tunnel.

 

Was thinking of 2 servers and a SAN. Has to be reliable. Had a quote from HP and fell of my chair.

 

Gareth

[FN-GM]

£10k probably wont get you much to be honest.

[Gibson335]

How many virtual servers do you intend to run? What jobs will they be doing - i.e. SIMS, Exchange, etc? How much storage do you need on your SAN?

[SHimmer45]

do you really need a SAN?

 

10K isnt a huge amount of money if you are going down that route.

for servers its worth looking at system builders who use Intel servers as these are solid and tend to be cheaper than options from Dell and HP tho they are a bit more barebones in terms of management and you are relying on the support from the company who supplied them

[zag]

Forget the SAN, pointless in a school environment imo.

 

This is what we have, cost around 10k

 

6 x Dell R320's with 32gb RAM £1,100 each

6 x 600GB Intel 320 SSD drives £612 each

3 x Veam essentials 2 socket backup software £600 total

 

Then maybe run 4 of those servers as hyper-v hosts (i'd recomend Microsoft Server 2012 as it has the clone option). We run about 19 virtual servers on those.

 

Use 1 extra server for live cloning

Use the other server as a backup server running Veam or for Manual virtual machine exports.

Edited November 30, 2012 by zag

[FN-GM]

pointless in a school environment imo.

 

Why?

 

 

 

 

 

Are the prices above inclusive of warranty?

 

Thanks

[zag]

Why?

 

Are the prices above inclusive of warranty?

 

Thanks

 

Total Overkill imo. SANs are designed for huge data centers not schools with 1000 users

[FN-GM]

We have users into the 1,000's here

 

You dont need a massive one, but they are shared storage at the end of the day. Ideal for failover etc.

[3s-gtech]

Involving a SAN will blow that budget away in most cases. We built a (IMO) pretty decent VM solution for about half that.

 

1 x HP ML385 G5P with 4 x 146GB 10K SCSI (20GB RAM, 1 socket)

1 x HP ML385 G7 with 4 x 300GB 10K SCSI (16GB RAM, 2 sockets)

 

Running ESXi. Could do with more RAM in both, but it's cheap, and they're only running 9 VMs between them. We then have an NFS NAS which handles the backups. We got a good deal on both, the second came with a free processor (£500 or so). We are only running ESXi Free, but it's okay for now, and it's not expensive to upgrade.

[localzuk]

I'd look at 2x HP ProLiant DL360p Gen8 - Xeon E5-2... 670638-425 with more RAM, an extra CPU and basic disks, then one of these HP ProLiant DL380p Gen8 - no CPU -... 665554-B21 for the storage.

 

Its basically what we've got here.

[ricki]

Sans are ot about the number of users they are about the amount of data and when you go virtual having a place to store data instead of having masive amounts of hard drives in the physical server that runs the virtual servers

 

Richard

[RTFM]

Forget the SAN, pointless in a school environment imo.

 

Crikey, we have 2, we are doubley pointless!!! :( :(

 

Total Overkill imo. SANs are designed for huge data centers not schools with 1000 users

 

We have 1200 users, 700 clients. We probably have, across a 5 period day, over 2000 logins a day in total, 5 days a week.......

 

I dont think a SAN is overkill for that level of use

[mattianuk]

Spent £22k on virtualising a new network this summer, we have about 15 VMs (one per task), and host everything from a SAN (Which was about £13k). We have a MS HyperV Failover cluster, so two identical hosts for that.

 

And we only have 600 students!

 

However the fact that we can loose a whole server, loose 3 HDDs in the SAN and if one of the VMs dies we only loose the single service - its worth it imo. You can have all the power in the world and its nothing if you have no redundency. Currently arranging our second backup room to have air con and will use VEEAM to backup to our new NAS in there.

[Gibson335]

Hmm. Can't agree SANs are pointless in a school environment. Horses for courses, as they say. MAY not be required for some places, but VERY handy in others, I'd say.

[garethEds]

How about this kit:

 

SAN

2U Supermicro 12 Hotswap Bays, Redundant 1200W Power supplies, Dual

gigabit

LAN, KVM remote management

X1 intel Xeon E3-1230 3.2Ghz

32gb

DDR3 1333 ECC RAM

X10 600Gb 3.5" 15K SAS

4 port 6Gbps SAS Raid Controller

Inc Battery back up

 

2 x

1U Supermicro 4 hotswap sas/sata bays Redundant PSU Supermicro

ServerBoard,

x4 GB LAN, IPMI

X2 6 Core E5645 2.4Ghz Xeon CPU's

128Gb

DDR3 1333 ECC Registered RAM

X2 500Gb Enterprise Sata

* the servers above now have a total of x4 1gb lan ports with x1 dedicated

LAN for remote management

 

Any opinions? They are from ServerNation who were recommended to me by a fellow Edugeeker.

 

Gareth

[Domino]

How about this kit:

 

SAN

2U Supermicro 12 Hotswap Bays, Redundant 1200W Power supplies, Dual

gigabit

LAN, KVM remote management

X1 intel Xeon E3-1230 3.2Ghz

32gb

DDR3 1333 ECC RAM

X10 600Gb 3.5" 15K SAS

4 port 6Gbps SAS Raid Controller

Inc Battery back up

 

2 x

1U Supermicro 4 hotswap sas/sata bays Redundant PSU Supermicro

ServerBoard,

x4 GB LAN, IPMI

X2 6 Core E5645 2.4Ghz Xeon CPU's

128Gb

DDR3 1333 ECC Registered RAM

X2 500Gb Enterprise Sata

* the servers above now have a total of x4 1gb lan ports with x1 dedicated

LAN for remote management

 

Any opinions? They are from ServerNation who were recommended to me by a fellow Edugeeker.

 

Gareth

 

And how're you gonna link them together?

[garethEds]

We've been told that for now and until we can afford it that cat6 would be okay. If that's wrong then we cannot afford fibre channels at the moment.

 

Maybe it would be better if we ditch the virtualisation option and just buy 10 cheap servers :-) Bugger the Eco/green credentials.

 

How should we be linking them together?

 

Gareth

[Domino]

I'd say fibre would probably be best for this - no need for a fibre switch if the SAN has enough ports.

 

However if you're thinking iSCSI you'll definitely need more ports. 4GB to split between storage, networking and machine failover is not gonna be great. at all.

[pcstru]

I sympathise with zag but it does depend what you call a "SAN". It seems sensible to me to provision lumps of storage via iSCSI on a separate network from user/service traffic. So that could be a small managed switch and a cheapish box running FreeNAS or a basic NAS appliance. I think that would qualify as a "SAN" (storage area network). With Hypervisors in the mix, running guest servers in clusters I want the advantage of vmotion and high availability (or simmilar) , so I need something that will service the IOPS (even relatively inexpensive devices will service the throughput). That tends to mean chucking lots of spindles in a box.

[Gibson335]

Does the SAN have a dual controller? Can be a pain if the controller link fails otherwise.

[localzuk]

As I said in my PM, we are using Windows 2012 on our storage server and 2 hosts, with SMB3 instead of ISCSI. We have 10GbE for our interconnects. Its expensive unless you have a modular switch to work with I'd say.

 

FC can be done pretty cheap, but its only any use if you have software on the storage device that supports it properly.

[rich_tech]

most of the systems we are thinking of virtualising are not heavy duty as far as I would categorise them, as our LEA manage the major things at this time (AD/Exchange/anti-virus protection/SIMS) (also view to moving some stuff to cloud based services in the future possibly) though we are looking to replace 9 year old RM hardware in some of the cases, as its on its last legs, 3 most major things at the moment we run are our impero server, printer server (pcounter) and our rebuilding machine - WDS/MDT box lot of the other stuff we run at the moment are fairly small applications mostly on 1/2 per box maximum (obviously on the old RM kit the hard disks are fairly small as well)

[garethEds]

Thanks for chipping in.

 

Gareth

[garethEds]

So maybe I am just better getting 5 powerful box servers and not virtualising anything. Could be cheaper. I'm sure there are some nice Dell racks out there or some refurbs from ICT-Direct - could save me a packet. The big question is - do I need to virtualise?

 

Gareth

[dhicks]

Was thinking of 2 servers and a SAN. Has to be reliable. Had a quote from HP and fell of my chair.

 

Just get the 2 servers and skip the SAN, you don't need it. £5,000 should get you a very nice server - multi-processor, multi-core, at least 32GB of RAM, with some high-I/O speed harddrives (15,000RPM SAS drives, if you like). Get two of those and have each one mirror the other's storage, so if one goes down you can simply switch to running the virtul machine images on the other machine. Ideally, of course, your servers would be in two separate physical locations to guard against diasaster. You can mirror storage in real-time, I've used DRBD for that in the past, but it can be a bit fiddly to set up and use in practice, so I'm guessing periodic snapshots transferred between machine might be more appropriate for a school environment.