Help choosing replacement Hyper-V host machines and connected storage
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@StrongBad said:
@KOOLER said:
Scale needs 3 nodes, they don't have anything to install on existing servers like OP has and Scale has no Hyper-V support.
Scale would be a change of direction. No need for John to manage his hypervisor or storage. Everything in a single package, ready to go.
I cannot say better!
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@scottalanmiller said:
@ryan-from-xbyte said:
The newer CPUs are so powerful at the low end and therefore so inexpensive, it is hard to justify other the 12th generation.
Except for when you are building storage devices. The R720xd really shines where CPU makes no difference.
If you don't need CPU performance and only need storage, I would recommend the R510. If you need the spindles, then the 24x2.5" R720xd would be a good fit. For raw capacity, the R510 will give you a cheaper option.
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@ryan-from-xbyte said:
You don't even need to go with a R720xd when comparing the R910. You can go with a R620 and get 10x2.5" drives. Cluster a couple of those together and you are far better off than getting an R910 and you will save a fortune on power.
He's going to need LFF drives, I think, for this. He needs 16TB per node, from what I can tell, which is pretty big. If we have 2TB NL-SAS drives in RAID 6 that will require ten LFF bays just to hit the 16TB usable number.
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@ryan-from-xbyte said:
If you don't need CPU performance and only need storage, I would recommend the R510. If you need the spindles, then the 24x2.5" R720xd would be a good fit. For raw capacity, the R510 will give you a cheaper option.
For storage capacity the R510 could definitely do it. I think that the R720xd with the 12x LFF drive option is probably where he needs to be. Enough drive capacity to do the 16TB usable and the improved CPU performance without breaking the bank.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@ryan-from-xbyte said:
You don't even need to go with a R720xd when comparing the R910. You can go with a R620 and get 10x2.5" drives. Cluster a couple of those together and you are far better off than getting an R910 and you will save a fortune on power.
He's going to need LFF drives, I think, for this. He needs 16TB per node, from what I can tell, which is pretty big. If we have 2TB NL-SAS drives in RAID 6 that will require ten LFF bays just to hit the 16TB usable number.
I could probably shave 2-3TB off the SQL and Oracle VMs. I've included more just in case we need the space as databases are migrated from one version to another.
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@JohnFromSTL said:
I could probably shave 2-3TB off the SQL and Oracle VMs. I've included more just in case we need the space as databases are migrated from one version to another.
You don't want to cut these things too closely.
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One thing we have not considered is database storage performance. Yes we can get what we need by going with NL-SAS or even SATA (ugh) on RAID 6 and that will be pretty decent for read performance, but write performance will be really weak, especially for a database.
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What about 10K SAS drives? Are any available that are big enough for that? What about 1.8TB 10K SAS?
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Moving from 2TB drives up to 4TB RE drives won't hit 10K RPM per drive but the move from RAID 6 to RAID 10 will help a lot with database performance.
http://www.amazon.com/SAS-Enterprise-Hard-Drive-WD4001FYYG/dp/B0090UGQ2C
$203 for a 4TB RE SAS drive.
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And for databases you will definitely want SAS over SATA, the access patterns heavily favour the SAS protocol. You could see as much as a 20% difference in performance between the protocols alone.
RAID 10 will double the write performance over RAID 6 as well for database writes, in nearly all cases. As these are probably going to be twelve bay, not ten bay, servers going to all twelve bays will improve storage performance too.
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With RAID 10 and twelve bays you would get:
2TB Drives: 12TB Usable
3TB Drives: 18TB Usable
4TB Drives: 24TB UsableSo likely 3TB drives will make sense as that would be a nice amount of extra overhead.
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$280 for genuine Dell 4TB NL-SAS with the tray and everything.
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What is your current setup for storage? How many IOPS do you have available to your systems today?
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$350 for the 3TB NL-SAS drives, I'm thinking that it would be better to just stick with the 4TB ones.
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Okay then, I guess the smaller 3TB drives are just a silly choice. I can only imagine that this is because they are in short supply or something.
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So I'm bored and looking into drive options. Here is another one...
1TB NL-SAS 2.5" drive. This would work in the other R720xd with the 25x 2.5" drives. They are $260 so this would cost a lot more but let you go for performance by having lots of drives. But that would more than double the storage cost and I think only RAID 6 is an option to get enough to fit into the chassis. So other than more spindles it does not work out very well. Still just 7200 RPM NL-SAS so not super fast.
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Here is the more interesting small drive option: 900GB 10K SAS 2.5" for $280. You would need even more of these and they are not cheap per GB but they are a lot faster than the NL-SAS options.
25 of these in an R720xd would be $7,000 just for the drives in one of the two servers. So that is the entire budget just for drives. With RAID 10 you could get 10.8TB, so not enough to even consider it. RAID 6 would be the only option and that would be 20.7TB which is plenty. So you could use one of the drives as a hot spare or buy a few fewer drives to save money, but then you would be losing performance again.
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1.8TB 10K SAS 2.5" drives. This would fix the RAID 10 issue, but it is NOT cheap. That's not a good option.
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Okay, I think that we have a pretty good round up of the options at this point. Until we have more information from the OP, like if there is more money, new requirements or specific disk requirements this seems to be the consensus:
Solution 1: The bare bones, cost saving solution is a two node Dell R510 or R720xd with 8x 4TB NL-SAS drives in RAID 10 (add drives as needed for performance up to 12) cluster. The 4TB 3.5" drives are just too cheap to not use and RAID 10 probably makes them the reasonably fast choice even though they are NL-SAS rather than 10K. Use HyperV and StarWind to do the clustering and failover. Might be able to come in somewhere around the assumed budget limits.
Solution 2: The expensive but easy approach. Scale with three nodes and everything included (hyperconverged) in a single package. A fraction of the work to set up or to maintain. Will grow easily in the future. Likely far more expensive than the OP can justify.
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I agree, that seems to be where we are. RAID 10 makes sense, that workload is almost all database and there don't seem to be affordable 10K SAS drive options so we are a bit stuck there. Not very many options with those kind of budgetary constraints. Kind of just have to do what has to be done.
