SW Port - New Server for virtual host - Sanity Check
-
@DustinB3403 said in SW Port - New Server for virtual host - Sanity Check:
- Dell R630 - 10 2.5'' drive bay chassis - I normally buy 2U servers for the drive capacity, but I figured 10 drive bays should be pretty good as I can use RAID 5 now to get better capacity and still have half my drive bays empty in case of future expansion.
I would only do this if you have a strong aversion to the extra 3" of rack space being used and if you are super confident that you would never want large capacity storage. This might not sound limiting now, but it might be very limiting when needs change in two years.
-
@beta said in SW Port - New Server for virtual host - Sanity Check:
@scottalanmiller yes I just joined xD
Awesome. Welcome to the community and I guessed at your username and it worked!
-
@scottalanmiller We are already running ESXi, it's what I know and am comfortable with. If this was greenfield project, I'd consider Hyper-V, but that's what we are on now.
-
@DustinB3403 It is definitely more than enough for now. I figure in 5 years time, since I have extra drive bays, I can add more disk if needed.
-
As for the other hardware specs, I'd say they are perfectly acceptable.
I also have my questions about ESXi in this configuration, but you've already mentioned why you're using it.
-
@beta said in SW Port - New Server for virtual host - Sanity Check:
@DustinB3403 It is definitely more than enough for now. I figure in 5 years time, since I have extra drive bays, I can add more disk if needed.
You can, but only as a separate array, which you'll have to introduce into ESXi.
I try to evaluate my growth over the past 5 years, and determine what that delta is per year. Once I have that (5 year sum) I add 20% for storage.
Makes life simpler.
-
@DustinB3403 Yes, I took that into consideration too. I do have in my favor we are a non-profit, so I can get MS licensing from Techsoup which is MUCH cheaper than anywhere else so the updated MS licensing doesn't hurt us too badly.
-
@beta said in SW Port - New Server for virtual host - Sanity Check:
@scottalanmiller We are already running ESXi, it's what I know and am comfortable with. If this was greenfield project, I'd consider Hyper-V, but that's what we are on now.
Gotcha. I would still consider it, it's an expanding cost that you can nip in the bud. Every new hardware purchase is a great trigger for a huge cost savings.
-
The generally considered best practice is OBR (one big raid) for the life of the server.
Splitting arrays was never really a good thing to do.
-
@beta said in SW Port - New Server for virtual host - Sanity Check:
@DustinB3403 It is definitely more than enough for now. I figure in 5 years time, since I have extra drive bays, I can add more disk if needed.
Yup, and SSDs will get bigger and cheaper all of the time. But there is something nice about knowing you CAN pop in 10TB HDs as a separate tier, too.
-
@beta said in SW Port - New Server for virtual host - Sanity Check:
@DustinB3403 Yes, I took that into consideration too. I do have in my favor we are a non-profit, so I can get MS licensing from Techsoup which is MUCH cheaper than anywhere else so the updated MS licensing doesn't hurt us too badly.
But it hurts some. Why spend the extra for something that you won't have a true benefit of?
-
@DustinB3403 said in SW Port - New Server for virtual host - Sanity Check:
Splitting arrays was never really a good thing to do.
It was, just before you were in IT.
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/12/the-history-of-array-splitting/
-
@DustinB3403 said in SW Port - New Server for virtual host - Sanity Check:
Dell R630 - 10 2.5'' drive bay chassis - I normally buy 2U servers for the drive capacity, but I figured 10 drive bays should be pretty good as I can use RAID 5 now to get better capacity and still have half my drive bays empty in case of future expansion.
Go for the R720/xd. It's not that much more in the long run and you will be able to upgrade/add storage on demand. It's a really nice system.
2xIntel E5-2640v4 10-core 2.4GHz - This seems to me the best compromise between cores and GHz. I currently have 28 vCPUs provisioned.
You could probably get away with 8-core processors. You may want to look at the total average GHz used (very easy to do with ESXi) over a week or two. This will give you a better understanding of how much actual compute capacity you'll need. Not the best measure of CPU usage but it helps get an idea. Windows licensing (and ESXi) aren't cheap and since they are both done via CPU now you need to be aware of that.
-
Have you considered getting another R720 that matches and instead of Veeam replication, using Starwind for a real high availability setup for the same or less money?
-
@scottalanmiller I was just about to say that . . .
-
Which a nice thing about using Starwinds is you wouldn't have to worry about your database, or possible corruption while trying to back it up.
They even have a free version for life if I recall correctly.
-
@DustinB3403 said in SW Port - New Server for virtual host - Sanity Check:
Which a nice thing about using Starwinds is you wouldn't have to worry about your database, or possible corruption while trying to back it up.
They even have a free version for life if I recall correctly.
Yes, it's all free. Only the GUI isn't free after the first month.
-
@scottalanmiller Briefly, my concerns with that though is the way I understand Starwind works with VMware is I need to create Windows Server VMs which host the storage I think? It just seemed like it added a little more complexity.
-
@beta said in SW Port - New Server for virtual host - Sanity Check:
@scottalanmiller Briefly, my concerns with that though is the way I understand Starwind works with VMware is I need to create Windows Server VMs which host the storage I think? It just seemed like it added a little more complexity.
A couple thoughts there...
- As a non-profit, this affects you less than most.
- It's not the complexity that it feels like and results in a vastly superior result, so a bad factor to use in deciding against it.
- It adds complexity in that you need to make a VM, but reduces complexity by giving you a simpler storage system.
- This is complexity that only exists because of the desire to use VMware, move to Hyper-V and there is no need for the VM and that complexity vanishes.
-
@scottalanmiller So, a few questions:
- Would it matter that 1 host would be SSD and the other HDD?
- Would it matter that the old R720 has less storage than the new server?
- I posted this on SW a while ago because I was trying to understand where vSAN fits in: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1976492-replicated-local-storage-virtual-sans-versus-application-ha and from what I had read (and some comments you had made to other posters) it seemed like things like SQL, Exchange, AD, etc are usually exempted from other types of HA in favor of their native application HA so I didn't really know if SQL would be a good candidate for vSAN.
