Follow up on Hyper-V High availability? or only VMware
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This is a follow up on Hyper-V High availability? or only VMware
For those that do not want to read the whole thread, I'll summarize it here:
- Our servers are old
- We need more reliable server for our production team
- Our IT consultant suggest us to go with 2 server 1 SAN w/ WMware Essential Plus for high-availability (which was deemed IPOD)
- I started off at the wrong foot and was too deep in the rabbit hole so this thread is to ask for advice and disregard everything our IT consultant has suggested
We have 2 physical server. Both are File servers. My boss want to have them seperate for reasons. I will call it FS-A and FS-B for simplicity. FS-A contain public files and those that can be access by anyone in production team. FS-B is confidential files and only accessible by Managers and higher ups. Also, FS-B contain accounting application.
Because our servers are old, we need to replace them soon. I made a mistake and order the 2 servers without proper consultant. The specs are:
- 1 E-5 2620-v3
- 32GB ECC memory
- 4x 1TB SATA HDD (RAID 10 = 2TB usable) (Each server has about 800GB - 1TB of files)
I will take in any suggestions. So far I agree to Starwind VSAN with Hyper-V cluster. The IOPs on these 2 servers are about 120-150 IOPS.
Thanks!
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Is there room for expansion on these servers? Can you add more RAM or more disk?
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@LAH3385 said:
I will take in any suggestions. So far I agree to Starwind VSAN with Hyper-V cluster. The IOPs on these 2 servers are about 120-150 IOPS.
That seems low on IOPS, I'd be surprised if that is all that you get. Plus when you add any RAID controller cache that will increase too.
I think that Starwind RLS and Hyper-V and RAID 10 is all perfect for this. Fast, good use of what you have, extremely safe.
Given that.... what is the next question? For the parts that you are mentioning it sounds like you have things well in hand.
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I don't know if it has been asked.... are the VMs going to be Windows fileservers? If so, you either need to put both on one server and save money on the licensing OR you need to have a Windows Standard licensed for each machine so that you can run half of the workload from each which is the only way to leverage the IOPS that you have, which are pretty lean as it is.
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@coliver said:
Is there room for expansion on these servers? Can you add more RAM or more disk?
There are plenty for expansion. I do not know exact available slot but Dell installed 2x 16GB stick. 4 empty hot-swapable slots. 1 empty slot.
@scottalanmiller said:
@LAH3385 said:
I will take in any suggestions. So far I agree to Starwind VSAN with Hyper-V cluster. The IOPs on these 2 servers are about 120-150 IOPS.
That seems low on IOPS, I'd be surprised if that is all that you get. Plus when you add any RAID controller cache that will increase too.
I think that Starwind RLS and Hyper-V and RAID 10 is all perfect for this. Fast, good use of what you have, extremely safe.
Given that.... what is the next question? For the parts that you are mentioning it sounds like you have things well in hand.
Dell ran it for 1 day (Monday.. the most busiest day for us)
I am running IOP again for a whole week. it will be complete on this coming Monday.@scottalanmiller said:
I don't know if it has been asked.... are the VMs going to be Windows fileservers? If so, you either need to put both on one server and save money on the licensing OR you need to have a Windows Standard licensed for each machine so that you can run half of the workload from each which is the only way to leverage the IOPS that you have, which are pretty lean as it is.
We are going with the second options. I game my input but my boss wants to have what we have the way it is plus vm them.
Since we have 2 machines and 2 licneses, then we can run 2 VMs on each machine.. creating clustering.@scottalanmiller I looked into starwind vSAN and noticed they have FREE and PAID. FREE utilize NFS and PAID utilize iSCIS. Any suggestion? Can you grab Kooler in here as well?
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@LAH3385 said:
@scottalanmiller I looked into starwind vSAN and noticed they have FREE and PAID. FREE utilize NFS and PAID utilize iSCIS. Any suggestion? Can you grab Kooler in here as well?
That's incorrect. I think maybe you are not seeing the free options specific to the community. The iSCSI version is definitely free for your use case. @kooler was around a little bit ago, he will pop in.
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With that range of IOPS, it could be easily worth it to invest in another four drives, two going to each machine, to move that RAID 10 array from four to six spindles. That's a 50% increase in performance over what you have now for probably relatively little money. The CPU and memory are overkill for your needs, but the disks are a bottleneck.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I think that Starwind RLS and Hyper-V and RAID 10 is all perfect for this. Fast, good use of what you have, extremely safe.
Why even add in starwind? There is no use case for here for anything beyond local storage and built in replication for failover.
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@JaredBusch said:
Why even add in starwind? There is no use case for here for anything beyond local storage and built in replication for failover.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831716.aspx
Hyper-V Replica is nice, but it is async rather than full sync. So you get what we used to call the "Veeam Replication" model. It's all built in and a great value add to the platform but Starwind lets you have full fault tolerance with full sync storage rather than async snapshots.
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Certainly for most use cases Hyper-V Replica is enough. The question here would be, is the effort of Starwind enough to make the benefits worth it. My vote is for yes, it protects not just against downtime and small data loss but also against data corruption that, while unlikely, can happen.
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@scottalanmiller said:
With that range of IOPS, it could be easily worth it to invest in another four drives, two going to each machine, to move that RAID 10 array from four to six spindles. That's a 50% increase in performance over what you have now for probably relatively little money. The CPU and memory are overkill for your needs, but the disks are a bottleneck.
Can you go over the bottleneck part? How can I tackle this to improve performance? We are 85/15 R/W
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
I think that Starwind RLS and Hyper-V and RAID 10 is all perfect for this. Fast, good use of what you have, extremely safe.
Why even add in starwind? There is no use case for here for anything beyond local storage and built in replication for failover.
Because HA is mentioned in the title, even though it's not mentioned in the OP. Also it was mentioned in the old thread.
If not for those things, I too would say that StarWind would be overkill.
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My question is - Are you still running VMWare, or have you moved to Hyper-V?
Why are you running two servers instead of just one? The VM's are completely separate, so splitting them over two pieces of hardware really doesn't gain you anything, other than higher electricity bills, higher cooling costs, more HDs to purchase. More warranty to purchase. etc etc
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@Dashrender said:
My question is - Are you still running VMWare, or have you moved to Hyper-V?
Why are you running two servers instead of just one? The VM's are completely separate, so splitting them over two pieces of hardware really doesn't gain you anything, other than higher electricity bills, higher cooling costs, more HDs to purchase. More warranty to purchase. etc etc
The 2 servers came into play mainly for vSAN. If my understanding is correct: vSAN required identical storage capacity on at least 2 nodes. I even want to create a cluster where 2 VMs per host (4 VMs total). but my boss... told me he wants them separate. He's old school and never heard of VM until 2 months ago when I brought it up. To him VM is very new.. even it has bee naround for years.
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It's to bad you can't show him and have him understand/believe that this stuff is a decade+ old (for VMWare) and 8 or so years old for Hyper-V. Definitely not new.
Moving onto Scott's licensing comment.
Assuming you have two server licenses today, unless you want to purchase additional licenses, you should only create one VM on each host. This will allow you to remain fully licensed, legally. Why? Because, since each license allows you to have a 2 VMs, you'll never have more than two VMs per host, so you'll be covered.
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@Dashrender said:
It's to bad you can't show him and have him understand/believe that this stuff is a decade+ old (for VMWare) and 8 or so years old for Hyper-V. Definitely not new.
Moving onto Scott's licensing comment.
Assuming you have two server licenses today, unless you want to purchase additional licenses, you should only create one VM on each host. This will allow you to remain fully licensed, legally. Why? Because, since each license allows you to have a 2 VMs, you'll never have more than two VMs per host, so you'll be covered.
Licensing is quite confusing per wording. But, according to Microsoft License agreement, 1 license cover [ 1 host + 2 vm on the same host] it does not cover 2 vms on separate host.
Source: Virtual Machine Guest Licensing and Hyper-V (2012 & 2012 R2)
I did not read the whole article just skim through it. -
@LAH3385 said:
@Dashrender said:
It's to bad you can't show him and have him understand/believe that this stuff is a decade+ old (for VMWare) and 8 or so years old for Hyper-V. Definitely not new.
Moving onto Scott's licensing comment.
Assuming you have two server licenses today, unless you want to purchase additional licenses, you should only create one VM on each host. This will allow you to remain fully licensed, legally. Why? Because, since each license allows you to have a 2 VMs, you'll never have more than two VMs per host, so you'll be covered.
Licensing is quite confusing per wording. But, according to Microsoft License agreement, 1 license cover [ 1 host + 2 vm on the same host] it does not cover 2 vms on separate host.
Source: Virtual Machine Guest Licensing and Hyper-V (2012 & 2012 R2)
I did not read the whole article just skim through it.This is correct. As long as you only use that host as a hypervisor and Dom0 and have no other roles installed on it.
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That's correct - and I might even be wrong in my belief that you'd be good to go in my presented solution.
Scott, what do you think? Would he need a total of 4 licenses no matter what? The two for the normal location of the VM, and two for the failover location?
Or because they are VM's, would he be able to failover the VM to the open VM license spot on the other server.
I tend to think my solution works because of how Datacenter licensing works. DC allows you unlimited VMs, so you have unlimited slots open to accept an existing VM from another host into this one.
Let's look at this another way.
Let's say I had 5 VM hosts, each with one VM (for example purposes only) I have a 6th VM host that is a BIG Boy. I setup the first 5 VM hosts to fail over only to the 6th. I believe that I could purchase DC license only for the 6th host, and standard license for the others and be fine.
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@Dashrender said:
That's correct - and I might even be wrong in my belief that you'd be good to go in my presented solution.
Scott, what do you think? Would he need a total of 4 licenses no matter what? The two for the normal location of the VM, and two for the failover location?
Or because they are VM's, would he be able to failover the VM to the open VM license spot on the other server.
I tend to think my solution works because of how Datacenter licensing works. DC allows you unlimited VMs, so you have unlimited slots open to accept an existing VM from another host into this one.
Let's look at this another way.
Let's say I had 5 VM hosts, each with one VM (for example purposes only) I have a 6th VM host that is a BIG Boy. I setup the first 5 VM hosts to fail over only to the 6th. I believe that I could purchase DC license only for the 6th host, and standard license for the others and be fine.
I'll wait for Scott to give a better answer but here is my point of view:
Standard and DC is pretty much the same license as far as Host goes. Host can only have 1 role and that is Hyper-V. However, Standard license allow to be use on 2 VMs that is on the same Host. DC, on the other hand, can be use unlimited time as resources allowed.. but it has to be on the same host as DC.
So the real question is how many VMs will be on the BIG Boy? 2 or less = Standard. 2+ then DC.
That's my understanding. Would love if someone to clarify this as well.There really need to be an infograph on Microsoft licensing. I have to read EULA couple of itmes to grasp the concept
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@LAH3385 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
With that range of IOPS, it could be easily worth it to invest in another four drives, two going to each machine, to move that RAID 10 array from four to six spindles. That's a 50% increase in performance over what you have now for probably relatively little money. The CPU and memory are overkill for your needs, but the disks are a bottleneck.
Can you go over the bottleneck part? How can I tackle this to improve performance? We are 85/15 R/W
Bottleneck: Your server is doing around 200 IOPS, my desktop does around 100,000 IOPS
In nearly any server, it is the storage that is the part that will slow you down. Disks are super slow compared to CPU, memory and other components. So this is where you tend to invest to really speed things up.
RAID 10 arrays increase in performance linearly (for all intents and purposes.) So by moving from four disks to six disks in the array we got 50% IOPS. Going from four to eight would give us a 100% boost! Moving to faster drives gives us a big boost too. Going from 7200 RPM to 10K RPM is a nearly 50% increase again. Going from SATA to SAS makes drives more efficient, often to the 5 - 15% range.
RAID controllers have a cache (normally) that can do a lot to improve performance, especially of writes. And SSDs and SSD Caches can take us into completely different performance categories.
