@scottalanmiller said in Caching Needs and SSDs:
One of the biggest benefits to Starwind is that it uses RAM cache in its SAN stack to give you millions of IOPS, instead of tens of thousands of IOPS, for lots of operations.
Yes we do! Will be happy to help to anybody who wants to play with it. Here:
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free
@tim_g said in Storage Spaces and ReFS:
@travisdh1 said in Storage Spaces and ReFS:
@brianlittlejohn said in Storage Spaces and ReFS:
@travisdh1 said in Storage Spaces and ReFS:
Not something I'd normally be up to, as most of you who know me probably already realize!
Anyhow, brought some blanked drives home from the old work place. Tossed em into my gaming desktop, because it's the only case I have that'd fit them all. And now I'm off to new adventures in Windows and it's storage subsystem. We'll see how things go in the long term here.
Yes, I actually have Storage Spaces and ReFS in use now, please don't feint on me now.
Travis using windows? Is the world ending?
Just because I refused to ask my previous employer to pay for Windows Server licensing doesn't mean it can't be useful. IE Playing games, not nearly enough games available for alternative OS yet
With wine and playonlinux you can get plenty of Windows games running great. Wine has actually come a long way now.
This is true. If you can have an access to source code you can build things with WineLIB and do hybrid applications (Wine-running core calls Linux native libs) and performance and stability is "good enough". It's not what it was five years ago
@fateknollogee said in Compuverde: vNAS or Hyperconverged:
Anyone using or testing this? http://compuverde.com/products/
SDS is a dining concept at best. With all major hypervisors having some built-in preferred virtual SAN tech spending money and time on anything third-party is... Waste of time at best. You have to have a reason. What's your reason?
@r3dpand4 said in Compuverde: vNAS or Hyperconverged:
@fateknollogee I mean that's depending on your deployment, it's included with 2016 Datacenter....
So is Storage Replica and whole bunch of things you aren't going to use if you aren't within hyperconverged setup. VMware with a separate SKU for VSAN got a better idea. ImHO.
@jrc said in Xenserver and Storage:
So currently I have 2 HP servers that are being used and XenServer hosts. The shared storage is on an HP MSA1040 SAN, connected via 8Gb/s Fiber.
The servers have worked flawlessly since I got them, not a single issue and have only been re-booted for updates and upgrades. I cannot say the same for the SAN. It has gone done about 4 or 5 times, and these outages have highlighted the fragility of my setup.
The HP servers have 24 2.5" drive bays. So I am contemplating filling them with drives and moving away from the SAN, but in order to that I would need the space to be shared between the two hosts.
How can I do that? What would that look like? What kind of cost would it be (outside of buying the drives) and is it a good idea?
Someone mentioned VSAN to me while I was talking about this, but I am not that clued up about VSANs and how they work or how they are put together.
Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated. But please don't lecture me on how bad a SAN is, and that my setup is doomed or that I am an idiot for doing it this way. I am looking for a path forward and not a beratement for things that have long since passed.
You can mount some NVMe performers and some high-capacity spindles into your Xen hosts to run VMs from and leave aging HP SAN for backup purpose only. Two hosts with a SAN make zero sense really...
Forget about 15K spinners. For consumer-grade SSDs make sure your SDS of choice is OK with them (StarWind is OK, VMware vSAN / S2D are NOT OK f.e.)
https://fojta.wordpress.com/2014/01/12/monitor-wear-and-tear-of-your-vsan-ssds/
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/filecab/2016/11/18/dont-do-it-consumer-ssd/
@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication, Starwind, or something else?:
@doyler3000 said in Hyper-V replication, Starwind, or something else?:
Out of roughly 30 VMs, 2 are Windows server instances. We're mostly running Centos here.
I'll look into SA licensing. I'm not very familiar with it.Given that skill set, why look at Hyper-V instead of KVM? Both have been officially dropped from Starwind support temporarily until their new product roles out, which is KVM first, that's their key focus as they see it as the one with the greater future and potential. Hyper-V in general is more complex to manage than KVM. It's a fine product, but given your skill set and existing products, KVM seems like a more natural fit. Generally, Hyper-V makes sense only when you require a specific feature of it.
I'd tend to agree here, KVM running Linux VMs sounds like a better choice. Hyper-V makes sense if it's a "free" offering comping as part of already paid Windows Server licenses.
P.S. Not sure about VM backup with KVM.
@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-V replication, Starwind, or something else?:
@doyler3000 said in Hyper-V replication, Starwind, or something else?:
Oh and I've already got Veeam backup and replication (a 30 vm license) which gives me good agentless backup options for Hyper-V. 5-nine manager or something like it would likely be required as well.
5-Nine would be "extra" stuff only needed because Hyper-V doesn't have the native options that it provides. Another reason for KVM.
Veeam is great, but they have agent based for your scenario. We have another thread right now talking about this, but why do you see agentless as even something you want, let alone a driving factor in decision making? It sounds nice, but is very rarely (especially in such a large, diverse shop) viable.
Well, Microsoft released WAC (Windows Admin Center, ex- "Project Honolulu") to fill lack of management gap, but... I'm very pessimistic about WAC so far: too many compatibility issues and no single scenario is covered from Day Zero till the very end. Bottom line: You'll have to learn PowerShell and Windows Server management cmdlets.
@pmoncho said in I think I am missing something about Hyper-V....?:
@kooler said in I think I am missing something about Hyper-V....?:
In general we shift our focus from "Hyper-V and VMware" to "VMware and KVM". Reason: Hyper-V doesn't grow anymore and KVM has very high chances to supersede it. VMware... There's just more money there
Could you expand on your statement about Hyper-V not growing? Thanks
% between VMware, ESXi and KVM for acquired number of customers doesn't look good for Microsoft.
