Posts made by LAH3385

@scottalanmiller apparently only Cyborg works for me. The rest are all white. I'm using chrome.

@scottalanmiller Just a side note.. how can I change the background color from while to black or darker color. white is killing me too bright

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Can he stay with one VM on each machine and then transfer the VM at will (less than 90 days) and still be OK?

No, once every 90 days he can "failover the license" to another location. He can run any VM in any location as long as no location has more VMs than for which it is licensed. So either he can have two on two or four on one. But never three on one and one on one.

You've changed the question.. My question revolves around each host only having ONE VM, not two.

@scottalanmiller said:

@LAH3385 said:

My thought is to have 1 VM per host and during any DR, migrate the failed VM to the other host. This will end up with 2 VM on 1 host while the other host is being service.
Is that a good approach?

That's perfect. You will need two Windows Server Standard licenses and since you have the license capacity to run anything anywhere anyway you can then move them around all that you want.

How will this work with hyper-v clustering? I am still shallow in clustering portion so sorry for any misunderstanding terminology.

1 hyper-v core with 2 vms?
during any DR or maintenance the heartbeat will live migrate the VM over to the other host? or...

1 hyper-v core with 1 vm each.
during any DR or maintenance the heartbeat will boot up the failed VM on its host?

@scottalanmiller said:

@LAH3385 said:

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.

The host bit is technically correct but effectively confusing. HyperV is free and should not be installed in conjunction with Windows Server. So while there is a license that lets you do this, it's not a best practice or necessary so adds a whole world of complication that is best avoided.

My thought is to have 1 VM per host and during any DR, migrate the failed VM to the other host. This will end up with 2 VM on 1 host while the other host is being service.
Is that a good approach?

@scottalanmiller said:

@LAH3385 said:

To him VM is very new.. even it has bee naround for years.

How out of touch is he? VMs have been around since 1964 and the industry standard for critical workloads since the 1990s and the best practice even in the SMB since it was feasible around 2005.

He graduate with Computer Science and started his own company ever since. I could safely say he has been in a personal management position for the past 25 years or so.. with little to no involvement in IT management.
He's the CEO if that make any different

@scottalanmiller said:

@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.

I am planning on getting some SSD next year Q2/Q3 for some application or vSAN cache.
I asked the question here Still waiting for xByte to reply

@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

Can't wait for enterprise SSD price to goes down. I'm hopping SSD will one day replace HDD as USB replace CD/DVD as they replace floppy disks.

@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.

@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.

@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

@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?

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!

@brianlittlejohn said:

They should reply. They are enterprise grade SSDs.

http://www.xbyte.com/Edge-Enterprise-SSD.aspx

Thanks, I'll wait for their reply

@brianlittlejohn said:

Your best bet is to get an EdgeSSD from XByte, the firmware on those will work with the PERC Controller.

Are they enterprise grade SSD?

@Dashrender said:

Yeah, definitely reach out to @xByteSean and see what they can help you with.

Do I message them or will they reply to this thread?

Any one knows if Dell R430 w/ PERC H730 support Samsung 850 Pro?
I want to run a VM for myself but I do not want to use the HDD that came with it. I heard that some PERC does not support TRIM and using SSD w/o TRIM is a bad idea. I also read from somewhere else that 850 PRO can sustain couple of years on card w/o TRIM. Any idea?

@JaredBusch said in Hyper-V High availability? or only VMware:

At this point of the conversation, I will restate. You need to just step back and start over.
Hire a new consultant, get a proper idea of what things will take to get done and move forward then.

I am rethinking what exactly that need to be done. As SAM has mentioned:

@scottalanmiller said:

@LAH3385 said:

but my boss wants the OS to be failover-able.

Did you explain to him that the OS failing over could DIRECTLY undermine the ability to meet the business need of keeping the files available? OS failing over is a fallback for when your file server fails to fall over, it's not his goal.

Sounds like he is leading with "proximate" needs rather than "goal" needs.

Maybe I am too deep and trying to create a system that is not the solution for us.

We have 2 main production team: I'll call them A and B for simplicity.
A requires File Server as they only need to gather documents and other stuff. Applications that they need are Chrome, Adobe, Office.
B requires some File Server and DB access (Access, SQL, some other accounting programs). B is a more mission critical. For B, the server cannot goes down during production.. period. B is what really require HA

Currently both A and B are on different physical servers but B still has some files on A server. When server B goes down, it cause DB corruption. The fix is easy and only takes 30 minutes to relink files and restore some as needed from back up.

AD that got corrupted back in July cause File Server inaccessible and that was what really dealt the most damage. If File Server is the only Mission Critical then failover DFS should be enough. but my boss wants the OS to be failover-able.

@JaredBusch

Can you shade some light based on the requirement I stated earlier. I don't need us to have our own life support (although it would be nice to have such feature) but we should not stop our production due to internal issue that is preventable. Which is what this post is all about. True HA seem to cost both arms, legs, and some limbs for SMB. If we need to get 3 servers with more storage then I will take that into consideration. As SAM pointed out:

@scottalanmiller said:
Exactly. 95% of the risk is in overspending, technical debt or become reliant on a third party to handle what could be simple and internal. But definitely, with a good backup and general data protection strategy, HA is massive overkill for a normal SMB so the risk "anti-HA" IPOD / SAN design generally only introduces a kind of risk that probably wasn't important anyway.

I do not want to overspend on something that can be done and deliver similar result for less. I have many more area I could use some more budget on.

@scottalanmiller said:
In comparing Hyper-V and VMware, there is only practical approach today for an HA cluster at two nodes and that is using StarWind (which is free) to handle the replicated local storage.

StarWind is more stable and performant on Hyper-V than on VMware. This is a result of an architectural difference that is VMware's decision to not allow StarWind into the kernel space. The result is that given VMware does not have an equivalent product, in the two node space Hyper-V's technology is just as good but the available components and real world options put Hyper-V as a clearly superior technical option than VMware even if VMware was free, which it is not.

What kind of HDD type is recommended for Starwind VSAN? RAID10 with at least 3TB storage space. SATA7.2K or SAS 10K/15K? I doubt we can afford SSD.

What I mean by High Availability is for our production team to keep on working without interruption. Currently our file server is on the same server as DC AD DHCP DNS, etc... Back in July, AD got corrupted and went into BSOD loop. This cause our production to freeze for half a day before we are able to get the backup restored.

That incident cost us potential thousands of dollar in only half day. If it happens again and it goes down for days then we may be out of business. What that said, we are looking into redundancy servers or high availability.

We are not 24/7 but at least 6a-8p hours M-Sat.

What do we want? We want a server that can be a RAID 5 but for server. We want a system that will allow our production team to keep on doing what they need to do without interruption. We are not looking into Apocalypse-proof so we won't be investing in a generator. Any major or wide area outage is kind of OK since it will mostly be out of our control. But for anthing that is within our control we like to be able to prevent it as effective as possible.

I am looking into Xenserver at the moment.
Thanks all