@Reid-Cooper said:
@DustinB3403 said:
Single disk performance: IO/s MB/s
Read performance: 540
Write performance: 520Those numbers are very small for IOPS from SSDs. I would expect at least one hundred times those numbers. Maybe more.
Those numbers are the max r/w speed is MB/s not iops numbers, as @scottalanmiller pointed out above really don't matter in this question...
To add some on topic input. Last year I ported 50 lines from TDS Telecom ($25k/year for hosted PBX with metered use) and it took almost three months to port all of our numbers. In the end we ended up being unable to port some, namely ones that had been previously ported from Vonage to TDS. Now we run FreePBX in house with all Polycom IP450 (found a lot of them going for $35 each) and spend far less than that.
My point here is, even if you get approval to move forward, and for the political reasons outlined above I wouldn't poke the bear, it will likely be an uphill battle with TDS.
@scottalanmiller said:
SSDs save a TON on power over Winchester drives. That's for sure.
I agree there. I'd have to look it up but willing to bet taking out the two 15k, adding the ssd will still be a net power savings
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@donaldlandru said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
The UPS and power do come into play but at 200 watts (one server in question) is a small piece of the pie
Size of the pie can be misleading. Absolute cost is what would matter in this instance.
200w 24/7 @ $0.12 KWh is $211/annually
Why does 200w seem so low?
That feels very low. You've got dual procs I assume, that's normally over 200W alone. Then the PSU and UPS overhead. The power of the SSDs, memory, fans, etc. It adds up. Can't imagine getting in under 300-400W.
Currently he has 2 or no drives in the server, but that will change when he adds the SSDs. So I suppose it's possible with a single Proc and no drives.
One of the drives I am looking at has information I think are not correct. https://www.sandisk.com/home/ssd/extreme-pro-ssd claims .15watts while active. The Samsung data center model is the other one which claims 3.4watts while active. Assuming the 3.4 that is 28 watts per server added
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
- Being 24/7 means I can't drop the whole thing for maintenance.
How much maintenance do you do? What is the annual downtime caused by VMware? Only VMware and hardware maintenance is assisted by having the second server.
Assuming a non DFRS file server, that would be assisted by this as well.
@donaldlandru , you said you have 7 servers. can't you install a DC on one of those? Are any of those virtualized or are they all bare metal?
2 servers are client owned hardware we have zero control over. I believe these are KVM.
2 more are the servers on topic here
Finally 3 servers are the "development" silo. With resource reservations I could put a domain controller and possibly a couple other services as well. Every resource used here detracts from revenue that can be generated from box, not that the business is keeping track but I am.
So yes I could use this for limited services
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
@Dashrender said:
@donaldlandru said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
The UPS and power do come into play but at 200 watts (one server in question) is a small piece of the pie
Size of the pie can be misleading. Absolute cost is what would matter in this instance.
200w 24/7 @ $0.12 KWh is $211/annually
Why does 200w seem so low?
With the assumption of 100% to the psu (450 watts) we are at just shy of $500 year for power which is noteworthy
Only a single PSU?
Redundant PSU, but it would be foolish (and not sure if even possible) to exceed the limit of one supply
Absolutely, but the second one draws power when not in use. Not a ton, but some.
My power consumption comes from both looking the my apc pdus and using a kill a watt meter before sizing the UPS.
I've noticed mine automatically load balances on the PSU at about 50%
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
@Dashrender said:
@donaldlandru said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
The UPS and power do come into play but at 200 watts (one server in question) is a small piece of the pie
Size of the pie can be misleading. Absolute cost is what would matter in this instance.
200w 24/7 @ $0.12 KWh is $211/annually
Why does 200w seem so low?
With the assumption of 100% to the psu (450 watts) we are at just shy of $500 year for power which is noteworthy
Only a single PSU?
Redundant PSU, but it would be foolish (and not sure if even possible) to exceed the limit of one supply
@Dashrender said:
@donaldlandru said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
The UPS and power do come into play but at 200 watts (one server in question) is a small piece of the pie
Size of the pie can be misleading. Absolute cost is what would matter in this instance.
200w 24/7 @ $0.12 KWh is $211/annually
Why does 200w seem so low?
With the assumption of 100% to the psu (450 watts) we are at just shy of $500 year for power which is noteworthy
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
The UPS and power do come into play but at 200 watts (one server in question) is a small piece of the pie
Size of the pie can be misleading. Absolute cost is what would matter in this instance.
200w 24/7 @ $0.12 KWh is $211/annually
This server is using 4% of the UPS, if I take that as one time that is $200 worth of UPS.
@Dashrender said:
@donaldlandru said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
- Being 24/7 means I can't drop the whole thing for maintenance.
How much maintenance do you do? What is the annual downtime caused by VMware? Only VMware and hardware maintenance is assisted by having the second server.
Now there is an aha moment and presents me a question to bring back to the business. How much downtime is acceptable die to server hardware failure vs spending an additional $1600 to eliminate all but a dual server failure from impacting the services provided by these virtual machines (other disasters of course not included).
exactly! That's why I mentioned the 4 hours of anticipated downtime over 7-8 years. If one server is expected to only have 4 hours of downtime over 7-8 years, is it worth spending $1600 plus heating/cooling/power/UPS, etc to prevent that 4 hours?
The heating/cooling on this is probably an atypical situation as the building provided dedicated cooling but does not pass through the cost of this to our organization it is included in the base lease. Even on an estimated usage our lease is for 10 years and just signed this year.
The UPS and power do come into play but at 200 watts (one server in question) is a small piece of the pie
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
- Being 24/7 means I can't drop the whole thing for maintenance.
How much maintenance do you do? What is the annual downtime caused by VMware? Only VMware and hardware maintenance is assisted by having the second server.
Now there is an aha moment and presents me a question to bring back to the business. How much downtime is acceptable die to server hardware failure vs spending an additional $1600 to eliminate all but a dual server failure from impacting the services provided by these virtual machines (other disasters of course not included).
@Jason said:
@donaldlandru said:
- We are a 24/7 organization we have users in multiple locations working at anytime throughout the day. I will still need to service application and workstation authentication.
Being 24/7 doesn't mean you can't afford down time. @scottalanmiller has a lot of posts on this. It's about how much that costs you, not about how often you work. We are a fortune 100 and we have down times. Heck we have pretty regular momentary (once a month or so) blips with our exchange systems
Let's look at it from a different angle
To me, saying lets discard this server we already own and license in favor of now creating outages for maintenance does not make any sense.
@Dashrender said:
You mention that you're having performance issues today - do you know where those issues are coming from? Disk IO not enough? Production network not fast enough, etc?
It is definitely in the storage network that is slowing us down. I am sharing 8 SATA spindles for too many virtual machines. Plus MPIO on the 1Gig side gets saturated quite frequently, but upgrading the controllers in the P2000 to 10GB iSCSI is more than the SSDs I referenced above.
@Dashrender said:
Since your current solution is designed to be able to run everything on a single server, after you migrate most of that load to O365 I don't see why you wouldn't retire the second server completely.
By running two servers you have:
twice the cooling cost
twice the number of servers to manage/update
twice the power consumption
twice the amount of UPSAnd best of all, you'd have twice the storage to purchase and an extra 10 Gb card to buy.
According to Scott, these servers have something like 4 hours of downtime every 7-8 years, on average. Unless you really need to lower that downtime, the expense of those drives and everything else I listed is pretty high.
Interesting thought. It is really 1 of 7 servers in this location.
So a few bullet points to support the multiple servers:
I would agree with your solution in a smaller, single location business -- it just wouldn't jive with the way we operate.
@dafyre and @Jason - I see where you are coming from and this makes sense. What if I do a hybrid approach to this.
Steps:
Steps 1 and 2 could be done in a few hours and gives me something to do before our Office 365 deployment which is currently looking like a Q2 activity. I could then work on any remaining tasks in parallel with the Office 365 migration. This doesn't cause me to migrate any data unnecessarily, every VM I move gets the immediate bonus of better disk IO and no more IPOD and I can do that sooner as I already have the budget for a storage upgrade this year.
Thoughts?
@dafyre said:
I would suggest migrating to O365 and getting your Exchange and Sharepoint servers shut down being the first step, even before upgrading the other VM OSes.
Are you able to run your entire infrastructure on a single server at this point? Say of VMH-OPS1 explodes or has a melt down?
Basis for the O365 first? Curious if there is benefit or other reasoning?
Yes, the system was designed to hold both servers work load if required. Neither server is currently more than 30-40% utilized.
Which leaves us with even more leftover resources after the 365 migration. Which we may want to use for a 10 user RDS environment.
@dafyre said:
I am assuming that you are planning to stay with VMware at this time, yes?
At this time yes. We have the license, support, inhouse experience, and most recently we purchased Veeam Availability suite this year. Migration to a different hypervisor may be an option in the future, but for the moment is not.
Warning! Wall of text ahead. Tried to provide the same details I am considering so I can receive the best feedback. Please help me think about things I already haven't or insert additional ideas. Thanks!
Problem Statement: Operations (production) virtual environment is running in an inverted pyramid of doom. Performance of storage array is low due to oversubscription. Looking for advice to correct this.
Background: This is a continuation of my other thread (http://mangolassi.it/topic/6236/zfs-based-storage-for-medium-vmware-workload) where I was looking for feedback on our delivery "development" environment storage. Our operations network consists of the following hardware and dependency chain. (See diagram at bottom for overview)
VMHost hardware
Storage hardware:
Primary Network to VMHosts
Storage Network to VMHosts
Services currently hosted on the operations platform
I acknowledge this setup should not have been deployed inexperience coupled with an outside vendor pushing this solution is what drove this implementation.
Opportunity: The business has decided to move to Office 365 next year on the E3 plan. This allows us to move Exchange/SharePoint off of the on-premise infrastructure and shrink our storage needs. Given the recent discussions around SSD and the likely return of RAID5, I set out to examine how to remove risks and dependencies in the chain.
Q1 and Q2 Goals:
@scottalanmiller since you are the only one who has said they are running this. I have a couple questions that I think add value.
According to the techspecs they say the product is unsupported on server core installations, I would think any Windows device is susceptible to malware if one tries hard enough.
@DustinB3403 said:
@WingCreative I would expect the Endpoint solution.
Anything not centrally managed is just more costly to attempt to manage. At any size.
Maybe I am reading this wrong, but I think what @WingCreative was asking is the Malwarebytes Endpoint Security $50 vs Malwarebytes Anti-Malware for Business $30 , both of which have centralized management.
According to This comparison chart the only difference between the two is "Advanced anti-exploit protection
(Patent-pending exploit mitigation technology)"
Please correct me if I am wrong; however, I am not sure what "Advanced anti-exploitation" is other than a marketing term, let alone is it worth an extra $20 per PC .