New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster
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@DustinB3403 said in Ovirt:
I have 24 cpanel servers that I cant have go offline.
This statement here leads me to think that you need to purchase support. Period. Or host these in the cloud.
On-premise is the "I can accept some downtime option".
Exactly - how are you protecting these servers from an hour+ long power outage? Do you have multiple ISPs delivering you internet access? etc. HA requires so much more than just multiple servers with shared storage, etc.
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I have multiple ips, 2 generators, on LP.
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ISP
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I get everyone view on this. However, I have a ton of equipment. I already have 5 year contracts with fiber. It would cost me more money to cancel the contracts 20K per ISP for me to put my stuff in the cloud. SO While I have all this equipment here that is collecting dust I can use it to make sure I stay up and running.
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@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
I get everyone view on this. However, I have a ton of equipment. I already have 5 year contracts with fiber. It would cost me more money to cancel the contracts 20K per ISP for me to put my stuff in the cloud. SO While I have all this equipment here that is collecting dust I can use it to make sure I stay up and running.
And that is fine, it's a cost of business for you at this point in time.
To offset that though, your business is setup so that downtime is unacceptable and is also acceptable at the same time.
Get the point where we are when we look at the topic?
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You can setup a 200 node pool and have only the transfer time of your VMs.
Nothing would be shared and downtime would be completely minimal with very little to have to learn. Commodity hardware would work perfectly for this and you'd use tools and systems that have a wealth of community support available to you at no charge.
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@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@DustinB3403 yes that is correct. I have a scale cluster already 1150. But its 3 years old. Harddrives are failing. And I cant manage it at all. It just runs and that's it.
Afraid if it craps out I am screwed.
More or less, yes. Purchasing any kind of appliance means a 100% dedication to maintaining support on it for the life of use, it's just part of the initial decision process. You should be able to manage it just fine, but replacing hardware that dies will be a major issue.
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@DustinB3403 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@JaredBusch said in Ovirt:
@DustinB3403 said in Ovirt:
I'm assuming you require HA from a Scale type offering and that is why you are looking at oVirt. But I'm just confirming that you actually require this.
Since you said you're so small that you can't get support.
Thanks for fucking up another thread.
@scottalanmiller can you split this.
What the fuck are you on about. He has a scale solution today, and is needing to move to oVirt because he can't afford the support.
Hence the question, do you actually require HA?
It's not that it's a bad question, it's just different than "How to Manage oVirt". It's good to be asked, just better to be asked in a new thread is all.
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If you are familiar with Hyper-V and require Hyperconvergence, why not use Hyper-V and StarWind vSAN?
Absolutely free and scalable, support may be a bit more difficult but I'm sure the support costs are reasonable.
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@Dashrender said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@DustinB3403 yes that is correct. I have a scale cluster already 1150. But its 3 years old. Harddrives are failing. And I cant manage it at all. It just runs and that's it.
Afraid if it craps out I am screwed.
Why can't you manage the Scale cluster? The demos I've seen seem to make it super simple. Didn't seem that hard to manage.
If it's failing drives - buy the drives direct from the manufacturer, done.
I'm not sure that you can do that. Buy drives from the manufacturer, that is. Scale hardware is not generic and you can't just slap anything in there.
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@DustinB3403 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@Dashrender said in Ovirt:
If it's failing drives - buy the drives direct from the manufacturer, done
Exactly my thought, and my question relates directly to the obvious answer. Scale uses hardware raid. So replacing the drives should be the easy part.
Scale does not use hardware RAID. In fact, it uses neither hardware nor RAID. It is software RAIN.
But replacing drives is super simple. Acquiring properly firmwared drives might not be.
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@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
I would build it and know the bones and how it function. Beside the hardware I will know how. to fix things if it breaks.m
It would function the same as the Scale, just with some different shared storage solution instead of SCRIBE. The hardware will be essentially identical, Scale was just standard Dell servers at the time.
Basically you'd be building another, similar era cluster using the same components as the Scale you have now, but with needing loads of special knowledge, but with way easier ability to replace parts.
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@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@JaredBusch Its all me with my company.
What's their plan if you are sick, hit by a bus, get a better offer elsewhere, etc.?
With the Scale, they pick up the phone and get 100% support instantly. With a built it yourself solution sure, they could call some of us, and hey, we'd love that. But it's not quite the same as having primary vendor support for the entire stack instantly.
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@scottalanmiller said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@JaredBusch Its all me with my company.
What's their plan if you are sick, hit by a bus, get a better offer elsewhere, etc.?
With the Scale, they pick up the phone and get 100% support instantly. With a built it yourself solution sure, they could call some of us, and hey, we'd love that. But it's not quite the same as having primary vendor support for the entire stack instantly.
I'm assuming this is a 1 man band.
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@DustinB3403 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
Posted for formatting
@DustinB3403 said in Ovirt:
So to ask a few questions.what about the scale system are you unable to support?
So here was a situation that I had, A hard drive failed and the system wouldn't recognize the new harddrive I put in. So I had to call them to do something in the backend to active port 2 to reanalyze and make the drive active
Yeah, this is where I think you get stuck. Third party hardware is unlikely to work in the Scale, even at the hard drive level. Because the system does firmware management, if the drive doesn't match perfectly it will not use it, AFAIK. Hence his fear and struggle to support the hardware.
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@Dashrender said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
I know Scott does both with Hostadillo - but he doesn't use his own hardware - he offloads that to Vultr. It's not worth his time/effort, etc to manage the hardware. He resells Vultr(or others) hosting while also selling web deving.
That's true, but that's also because of scale (web hosting doesn't need a lot of costly features like big storage), and because it does need crazy bandwidth. So things like Vultr are tuned perfectly for that workload.
His workload might be polar opposite. Say he is running NextCloud, that works extremely poorly on any public cloud and is easily cheaper to buy your own servers for.
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Found it From a post somewhere @scottalanmiller, @mroth911 said he has 24 cPanel systems that can't go offline.
He's hosting websites of some sort locally.
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@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
To ask the question again, does your own personal business actually require HA? Or would Near-HA be good enough?
I would like the avaliblity that if one server goes off, the whole things doesn't shit the bed.
So that's reasonable, to a point. But here is what I always say...
This should never be a "I would like" or "I want". It should be numbers, and numbers only. HA is always a math decision. How much risk do you have of downtime? How much does downtime cost? What is the downtime mitigation path(s)? How much does HA cost?
If the cost of downtime doesn't outweigh the cost of HA, you don't do it. If it does, you do. It's that simple (the math is hard, the resulting decision is simple.) There is no place ever for an emotional view of wanting or not wanting HA. In a lab you might want HA because you want to learn and support HA systems, that's fine. But once we are talking production, math is our sole tool for deciding the direction.
It sounds like the decision processes for the original Scale that can't be supported now are playing out again, that's what we are trying to protect against. When that Scale was purchased, the money to fully purchase it (maintain support till end of life) was not guaranteed and now you are looking to retire a good cluster at half its lifespan making its "per year" cost astronomically higher than it should have been. And now starting down maybe a cheaper, but still potentially much more expensive than necessary, path that doesn't really sound like it makes sense.
Servers with warranties are cheaper than multiple servers. The rule of thumb is, you never get HA without good support warranties. If you even question having a warranty, you've already ruled out HA as making sense.
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@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@Dashrender said in Ovirt
I do both, and it just seems easier when I have build an application, or custom dev, I can just spin up a machine in my own environment and do what I need to do. plus I have all this equipment already.
I actually often fine the opposite. So easy to spin up on cloud. But that's not here nor there. The decision around that is based on other factors.
