Hyper-V High availability? or only VMware

dafyre

I wonder if @scottalanmiller would still recommend OBR 10 instead of RAID 6 for use with Starwind?

LAH3385

We have 2 main production team: I'll call them A and B for simplicity.
A requires File Server as they only need to gather documents and other stuff. Applications that they need are Chrome, Adobe, Office.
B requires some File Server and DB access (Access, SQL, some other accounting programs). B is a more mission critical. For B, the server cannot goes down during production.. period. B is what really require HA

Currently both A and B are on different physical servers but B still has some files on A server. When server B goes down, it cause DB corruption. The fix is easy and only takes 30 minutes to relink files and restore some as needed from back up.

AD that got corrupted back in July cause File Server inaccessible and that was what really dealt the most damage. If File Server is the only Mission Critical then failover DFS should be enough. but my boss wants the OS to be failover-able.

Dashrender

The question is why? I'm guessing because he's old school (kinda like me). But he and I both need to join the 21st century.

Using Application Level failover is much better than using hardware fail over whenever possible. Of course it's not always possible, so we have hardware fail over as another thing we can add to the reliability chain.

Dashrender

@LAH3385 said:

AD that got corrupted back in July cause File Server inaccessible and that was what really dealt the most damage. If File Server is the only Mission Critical then failover DFS should be enough. but my boss wants the OS to be failover-able.

What caused your AD corruption? Did AD corruption prevent access to the server completely?

scottalanmiller

@Dashrender said:

But even that seems really undesirable (RAID 6 that is) because of the performance penalties - I 'feel' like a single server would be better in general in that case with RAID 10 Spinning Rust, or RAID 5 SSD.

Depends on the workload. Most SMB workloads are perfectly fine on RAID 6. Remember you two arrays here, not just one, so your getting some performance from each, but you do have write overhead of the network.

scottalanmiller

@dafyre said:

I wonder if @scottalanmiller would still recommend OBR 10 instead of RAID 6 for use with Starwind?

All depends on the workload. In this case you would normally gravitate towards OBR6 unless you need the speed of OBR10 rather than looking primarily at reliability.

scottalanmiller

@LAH3385 said:

but my boss wants the OS to be failover-able.

Did you explain to him that the OS failing over could DIRECTLY undermine the ability to meet the business need of keeping the files available? OS failing over is a fallback for when your file server fails to fall over, it's not his goal.

Sounds like he is leading with "proximate" needs rather than "goal" needs.

scottalanmiller

@LAH3385 said:

Currently both A and B are on different physical servers but B still has some files on A server. When server B goes down, it cause DB corruption.

We should address this and fix why the database is corrupting as a good starting point.

JaredBusch

At this point of the conversation, I will restate. You need to just step back and start over.
Hire a new consultant, get a proper idea of what things will take to get done and move forward then.

LAH3385

@JaredBusch said in Hyper-V High availability? or only VMware:

At this point of the conversation, I will restate. You need to just step back and start over.
Hire a new consultant, get a proper idea of what things will take to get done and move forward then.

I am rethinking what exactly that need to be done. As SAM has mentioned:

@scottalanmiller said:

@LAH3385 said:

but my boss wants the OS to be failover-able.

Did you explain to him that the OS failing over could DIRECTLY undermine the ability to meet the business need of keeping the files available? OS failing over is a fallback for when your file server fails to fall over, it's not his goal.

Sounds like he is leading with "proximate" needs rather than "goal" needs.

Maybe I am too deep and trying to create a system that is not the solution for us.

scottalanmiller

@LAH3385 might be good to start a thread and try to determine what your needs are before going down the path of technology. By the time you were asking this question, you were already in pretty deep assuming certain products, product categories and platform HA. We should start with a business needs analysis, use that to set goals and then use the goals to select technology approaches.