@scottalanmiller And Starwind ships their ready nodes armed with RAID https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance so i think they still keep doing RAID and i am sure it is for a reason some of them I've mentioned above.

@Dashrender said in Cost Study: 3 Node Scale vs. 3 Node VMware IPOD:

@wirestyle22 said in Cost Study: 3 Node Scale vs. 3 Node VMware IPOD:

@Mike-Davis said in Cost Study: 3 Node Scale vs. 3 Node VMware IPOD:

@Dashrender yes, I was thinking of agentless solutions like Veeam. So if it has KVM support it will work with Scale?

I wish I could help you with this. No place that I've worked at has needed something that big 😞

I came really close - I just missed the Scale boat. 3 years ago when looking at a replacement EHR I posted about some ridiculous needs. Many conversations with Scott - and Scale never came up. Looking back, I have to assume that Scale wasn't something we knew about quite yet. Instead I was looking at a $100K two server setup with something like 20 disks each (mainly for IOPs - this was pre acceptable SSD pricing). Management went with another solution (one they hate today) because the startup costs where so high.

Found my old crazy thread.
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/310103-new-greenway-install?page=2

Yeah I was reading your thread earlier. It's interesting.

@John-Nicholson said in Cost Study: 3 Node Scale vs. 3 Node VMware VSAN:

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said in Cost Study: 3 Node Scale vs. 3 Node VMware VSAN:

VMware VSAN Support Cost: $25,440 ($1060 per CPU for each year after the first)

Wow - why even sell VSAN at that point - why don't they just do subscription and get over with it - wow that seems expensive. Is this in line with support contracts for other SAN products? I know it's hard to judge that because this is based on CPU (luckily not cores) where I'm assuming typical SAN support is more based upon capacity.

Because that's not what vSAN costs for a 3 node cluster. The capital cost is 15K List for a 3 node cluster. I'm guessing he's bundling the first 3 years of support in or something and putting zero discounting on the cost.

This cost study is also using 4TB SATA drives which vSAN doesn't certify. Also the only 1.9TB drive I"m familiar with that Dell sells (this could have changed) is a PM863 that gets awful write latency consistency and is only certified for capacity usage not write cache. Beyond that you would be better served by 2 smaller write intensive SSD's. This cost study ignores the HCL, the design and sizing guide.

Because there is no good way to an apples to apples comparison. Yes the cost of both has the support for the term built in. And the need for higher cost, lower density drives for vSAN would not be favourable to the vSAN solution - so while it could follow the HCL, it would look as if I was attempting to skew the numbers to make the vSAN look bad. Most importantly, this gives the best cost analysis advantage to the vSAN, even at the cost of not being officially on the HCL. If you want HCL'd hardware exclusively, then the cost is higher. As this is only a cost, not a design, comparison I felt that that was the more important attribute. Should have been noted, though.

Server is back online now. Bringing the files in one by one and making sure they had the right name seemed to do it.

@Dashrender said:

Interesting - by that same token, good backup software should not allow you to delete and previous portions of a backup as long as any other backup references files contained in said backup.

i.e. FB - i1 - i2 - i3 - i4

A good backup package won't let you just delete FB and allow you to keep i4 because i4 would be worthless.

But in this case i4 isn't worthless. You could completely restore from it. Just not have the old data from FB. So for DR is really nice.

That's definitely very slow.

It is only a file system change, so while there is storage risk there is not essentially any system level risks, if that makes sense. The risk here is pretty much that the files corrupt in the process (or the entire filesystem does.) It should be extremely reliable but should anything go wrong, there is essentially no concern around the platform not continuing to work and so a restore is all that would be needed.

How did this go?

Understanding the difference between a good risk decision, and getting lucky....

Youtube Video

@thwr Correct 🙂

Darn. I got it over to Hyper-V but it just goes to automatic repair and won't boot to windows. I guess I should have removed VMware Tools first I forgot. Hopefully that's the only issue.

@scottalanmiller said:

It may not be empty. Depends on the filesystem and what has happened. Just because the pointers to those files are gone doesn't mean that the bits have been erased. You could zero out the empty space.... but be careful or that will expand the VMDK to full size.

That is what I did, but I knew there was enough space for the entire disk to expand out.

img

@JaredBusch
Yeah, when you name your server OS's with the same words - but in a different order, it makes searching quite difficult. SEO nightmare.

I think that that is becoming less and less true. Quirky environments are becoming less and less the norm. The need to install locally is rapidly going away. There are still things that get installed locally but the variety and commonality is dropping at a prodigious pace and the isolation of programs is getting to be quite good.

Awesome!

@art_of_shred said:

@NetworkNerd said:

@ajstringham said:

@NetworkNerd said:

Maybe I could use the HP DL 385 G5 I have with the MSA 70 and run something like FreeNAS on it for another datastore option?

That's one option. Something that would be good for, to be honest, would be your StorageCraft server, if you go with that.

I was thinking use it as a NFS datastore and a place to store the VM files for my current physical machines like was mentioned above. That saves money on a secondary backup solution.

Actually, that would be a tertiary backup solution, as you have Veeam and BE already. The original decision seemed to be "buy hardware or buy another backup solution". It seems that utilizing current hardware like that could avoid both?

I'd get rid of BackupExec with the P2V of the physical boxes and be able to use Veeam. That eliminates cost of software. But, I cannot avoid some investment in increasing backup storage. So this does not completely eliminate a need for more hardware but does decrease the cost of the hardware needed by a large factor.

Thanks everyone for your input.

I'll grab the the appliance and have a good look at it.
Now I can get on to planning the upgrade 🙂