Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions
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@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
I know there's pressure from above to get something in place quickly because the gear has been sitting for a bit since it was ordered (short on man power before I came here in December). I believe Dell wants to replace hardware with hardware (EMC Unity, Compellent, etc.) so they can stick it to us on maintenance costs of the SAN over time and then try to sell us another one someday. With them taking the PowerVault back and us going with some some type of VSAN solution (Starwind or other), I don't think their margins are as high over time.
Yeah, not even close. You could always just cancel the whole deal and move to another vendor, too. If Dell gives you any pressure, send it all back. The sale was in bad faith, you shouldn't be responsible for "fixing it."
They should be happy that you are willing to work with them at all at this point. They should be bending over backwards to not lose a customer.
They have not pressured us at all (quite the other way around, actually). From what I have heard the account team say (even after not having been on all the calls), they seem to truly want to do what it takes to make things right and retain a happy customer at the end of the day. But I did mention to the boss that I found it extremely interesting they never offered a VSAN type solution even as an option when looking at "alternatives."
Well, likely they don't offer it because they don't make it. Even fixing a sale you don't expect someone to switch to a competitors product. Now, technically, VMware VSAN is part of Dell so it is their solution to sell. But they are a separate operating company and the Dell team probably doesn't see it as a single entity.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
Well, likely they don't offer it because they don't make it. Even fixing a sale you don't expect someone to switch to a competitors product. Now, technically, VMware VSAN is part of Dell so it is their solution to sell. But they are a separate operating company and the Dell team probably doesn't see it as a single entity.
They were the ones who suggested Infinio, and I don't even think they sell it. But I see what you mean.
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@scottalanmiller If your doing a 3 node vSAN for a low cost deployment you should go single socket and get more core's per proc. Leaves you room to scale later and costs the vSAN cost in half.
Also that cost study on vSAN is funky. The costs don't make sense to me based on quotes I've seen (I suspect no one actually was trying to get a discounted quote, and put 5 years or support or something on it). It also uses SATA drives (not certified for vSAN) for capacity instead of NL-SAS drives, and looks to be using a non-certified cache tier drive.
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@scottalanmiller They have a different compensation plan (although it changed as we are now in FY18 for Dell's calendar year) so you'll see different behaviors in their sales force from different people.
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@John-Nicholson said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
Also that cost study on vSAN is funky. The costs don't make sense to me based on quotes I've seen (I suspect no one actually was trying to get a discounted quote, and put 5 years or support or something on it). It also uses SATA drives (not certified for vSAN) for capacity instead of NL-SAS drives, and looks to be using a non-certified cache tier drive.
Listed MSRP in both cases. So neither side uses a discount.
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@John-Nicholson said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@scottalanmiller If your doing a 3 node vSAN for a low cost deployment you should go single socket and get more core's per proc. Leaves you room to scale later and costs the vSAN cost in half.
They are likely stuck here with whatever was already bought. But good info for a greenfield deployment. Or if they manage to return these for three R730 for example.
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Honestly, I would return EVERYTHING.
Then I would sit down and design it the right way, using a few R730xd servers, with appropriate specs to accommodate your needs. With that and Starwind vSAN, you can get your HA.
Do you actually need HA? Does the company feel spending the money for real HA is a business requirement and makes financial sense?
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Tim has a point. At some point you need to start over. This is the core of the business, right? Does anyone really want the core of the business to be a huge compromise based on "fixing" layer after layer of bad decisions before? The design wasn't the best, the products weren't right, the products that are okay were based on products that were not, etc. Start over, do it right the whole way. Go to management, explain that this isn't a place where you rush or compromise - this has to work.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@John-Nicholson said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@scottalanmiller If your doing a 3 node vSAN for a low cost deployment you should go single socket and get more core's per proc. Leaves you room to scale later and costs the vSAN cost in half.
They are likely stuck here with whatever was already bought. But good info for a greenfield deployment. Or if they manage to return these for three R730 for example.
I'm not entirely certain we'll be stuck with what we bought. My boss and I were on a conference call with folks from Dell yesterday afternoon. They were talking about different options in SAN devices that would meet our requirements (whether it was Compellent, EMC, etc.), but the biggest issue was that these options were so expensive. Again, not one of them mentioned the potential for a VSAN deployment, so we brought it up (using either VMware VSAN or Starwind). The Dell team has to go back and redesign a quote for gear that would better support a VSAN deployment. In their words, they would likely have to return the servers and the PowerVault we have right now (not sure about the other gear - PowerConnect switches, TrippLite devices, APC PDUs, AppAssure appliance, and ip KVM switch).
I'll be curious to see what comes back when they re-quote.
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@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@John-Nicholson said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@scottalanmiller If your doing a 3 node vSAN for a low cost deployment you should go single socket and get more core's per proc. Leaves you room to scale later and costs the vSAN cost in half.
They are likely stuck here with whatever was already bought. But good info for a greenfield deployment. Or if they manage to return these for three R730 for example.
I'm not entirely certain we'll be stuck with what we bought. My boss and I were on a conference call with folks from Dell yesterday afternoon. They were talking about different options in SAN devices that would meet our requirements (whether it was Compellent, EMC, etc.), but the biggest issue was that these options were so expensive. Again, not one of them mentioned the potential for a VSAN deployment, so we brought it up (using either VMware VSAN or Starwind). The Dell team has to go back and redesign a quote for gear that would better support a VSAN deployment. In their words, they would likely have to return the servers and the PowerVault we have right now (not sure about the other gear - PowerConnect switches, TrippLite devices, APC PDUs, AppAssure appliance, and ip KVM switch).
I'll be curious to see what comes back when they re-quote.
Why do they have to design a quote? You just tell them what you want, they give you a price. Other than "looking up the price", what are they doing?
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It's great that they are being so open and flexible. I mean they should be, but so often people are not.
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@Tim_G said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
Honestly, I would return EVERYTHING.
Then I would sit down and design it the right way, using a few R730xd servers, with appropriate specs to accommodate your needs. With that and Starwind vSAN, you can get your HA.
Do you actually need HA? Does the company feel spending the money for real HA is a business requirement and makes financial sense?
If I were commenting on this post, I would be asking the same thing. In this case, management agrees HA is a business requirement (not buying a feature that is touted as HA but actually implementing HA for our workloads).
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I want to make sure I understand how Starwind works in a 2-node VMware configuration. Here's the overview on their site - https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-vmware. We would get 2 hosts on the vSphere HCL with enough internal spinning disks to get the capacity we need (roughly 10-12 TB), some SSDs for caching, and plenty of RAM. If I read that page correctly, in the VMware world, Starwind runs on a VM on each of the hosts and mirrors the storage between hosts for you (I assume presenting just one giant LUN to your ESXi hosts), and the hosts are connected to one another directly through a dedicated NIC for the mirroring and heartbeating.
I'm also assuming you are turning RAID off on each host so Starwind can provide RAIN for you (thus creating the storage pool). But if Starwind has to run on a VM on your hosts, wouldn't that mean you'd have to have some storage on your hosts that is setup as a datastore already so that Starwind's VM can actually run on it (i.e. two disks in a RAID 1 presented as a local datastore to each host on which you'd create the VMs for Starwind)?
If you look at page 8 of this comparison guide (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/whitepapers/free-vs-paid.pdf), the deployment scenarios say you can run this VM-less inside the hypervisor.
I saw some articles about having the compute and storage separated (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/technical_papers/StarWind_Virtual_SAN_Compute_and_Storage_Separated_2-Node_Cluster_iSCSI_VMware_vSphere.pdf), but in this case you would have 2 ESXi hosts and then two other hosts that ran Windows and Starwind to act as your VSAN pool.
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@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
I'm also assuming you are turning RAID off on each host so Starwind can provide RAIN for you (thus creating the storage pool).
No, you leave RAID on on the hosts and Starwind provides Network RAID. There is no RAIN here.
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@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
I saw some articles about having the compute and storage separated (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/technical_papers/StarWind_Virtual_SAN_Compute_and_Storage_Separated_2-Node_Cluster_iSCSI_VMware_vSphere.pdf), but in this case you would have 2 ESXi hosts and then two other hosts that ran Windows and Starwind to act as your VSAN pool.
You can do that, you would not do it at this scale. You need to be closer to a dozen physical hosts to consider that.
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@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
I'm also assuming you are turning RAID off on each host so Starwind can provide RAIN for you (thus creating the storage pool).
No, you leave RAID on on the hosts and Starwind provides Network RAID. There is no RAIN here.
So you'd leave RAID on and then make a small local VMFS datastore for the Starwind VM to run on so that Starwind can use the rest of the unformatted storage on the host for its network RAID?
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@John-Nicholson said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@scottalanmiller If your doing a 3 node vSAN for a low cost deployment you should go single socket and get more core's per proc. Leaves you room to scale later and costs the vSAN cost in half.
Also that cost study on vSAN is funky. The costs don't make sense to me based on quotes I've seen (I suspect no one actually was trying to get a discounted quote, and put 5 years or support or something on it). It also uses SATA drives (not certified for vSAN) for capacity instead of NL-SAS drives, and looks to be using a non-certified cache tier drive.
I remember you mentioning that once before about going single socket. That's a good point for consideration in all of this.
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@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@scottalanmiller said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
I'm also assuming you are turning RAID off on each host so Starwind can provide RAIN for you (thus creating the storage pool).
No, you leave RAID on on the hosts and Starwind provides Network RAID. There is no RAIN here.
So you'd leave RAID on and then make a small local VMFS datastore for the Starwind VM to run on so that Starwind can use the rest of the unformatted storage on the host for its network RAID?
You just follow the Starwind install guide. But yes, that is what is going on.
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@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
If you look at page 8 of this comparison guide (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/whitepapers/free-vs-paid.pdf), the deployment scenarios say you can run this VM-less inside the hypervisor.
They've always had that for Hyper-V, have they added it for VMware?
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@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:
Before I started here a couple of months ago, my boss purchased a couple of Dell R630s and a PowerVault MD3820i (20 drive bays) to be our new infrastructure at HQ. We have dual 10Gb PowerConnect switches and two UPS devices, each connected to a different circuit. The plan is to rebuild the infrastructure on vSphere Standard (licenses already purchased) and have a similar setup in a datacenter somewhere (replicate the SANs, etc.). We're using AppAssure for backups (again, already purchased).
The PowerVault has 16 SAS drives that are 1.8 TB 7200 RPM SED drives and 4 SAS drives that are 400 GB SSD for caching. Well, we made disk groups and virtual disks using the SEDs (letting the SAN manage the keys), but it turns out we cannot use the SSDs they sent us for caching. In fact, they don't have SED SSDs for this model SAN.
At the time the sale was made, Dell ensured my boss everything would work as he requested (being able to use the SSDs for caching with the 7200 RPM SED drives). Now that we know this isn't going to be the case, we have some options.
First, they recommended we trade in the PowerVault for a Compellent and Equalogic. The boss did not want that because he was saying you are forced to do RAID 6 on those devices and cannot go with RAID 10 in your disk groups. As another option, Dell recommended we put the SSDs in our two hosts and use Infinio so we can do caching with the drives we have. In this case we would make Dell pay for the Infinio licenses and possibly more RAM since they made the mistake.
But I'm wondering if perhaps there is another option. Each server has 6 drive bays. So we have 20 drives total. Couldn't we have Dell take the SAN back, give us another R630, and pay for licenses of VMware vSAN for all 3 hosts? Each server has four 10 Gb NICs and two 1 Gb NICs. That might require we get additional NICs. But in this case, I'm not sure drive encryption is an option or if we can utilize the SEDs at all.
I've not double-checked the vSAN HCL or anything for the gear in our servers as this is just me spit balling. Is there some other option we have not considered? We're looking to get the 14 TB or so of usable space that RAID 10 will provide, but the self-encrypting drives were deemed a necessity by the boss. And without some type of caching, we will not hit our IOPs requirements.
Any advice is much appreciated.
Keep R630s, refund PowerVault, refund AppAss. Get VMware VSAN and Veeam (accordingly).
