I have a VMware-based cluster of two ready-nodes purchased from Starwind https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance half a year ago so I will try to share my experience on that matter. These are completely DELL-based and the pricing is very fair compared to what DELL OEM-partners want for the same configurations.
As already mentioned above, in this particular scenario, StarWind runs inside a VM on each host. The underlying storage is presented over a standard datastore. Alternatively, you can pass-through the whole RAID controller to StarWind VM in case if your ESX resides on a bootable USB/SD/SataDOM/whatever which is a common and good practice nowadays. The usage of hardware RAID makes the overall performance of a single server much faster than you can achieve using software RAINs provided by either VMware vSAN or MSFT S2D (I’ve done some benchmarking on that matter).
ESX hosts are connected over iSCSI to both StarWind VMs simultaneously. These VMs are mirroring the internal storage and presenting this storage back to ESX as a single MPIO-capable iSCSI device. Since round robin policy is used there is no storage failover in case if one StarWind VM is being softly restarted for patching or the whole physical host suddenly dies. In the case of single host power outage, only the migration of production VMs takes place but storage remains active which I find quite awesome.
Another thing that I do enjoy in StarWind is that it uses RDMA-capable networks (I have Mellanox Connectx3) for synchronization which leaves a lot of CPU resources for primary tasks instead of serving storage requests.
Right now I am waiting for Linux-based StarWind VSA implementation which is told to arrive soon.

@danp said in Migrating away from XenServer:

Have you taken a look at StarWind V2V Converter?

Thanks for mentioning StarWind, just wanted to make an addition of the features available in the V2V Converter which includes a Windows Repair Mode which may become useful in the process of converting to VHDX. The end result would be the automatic VM adaptation to the given hardware environment, negating any possible compatibility problems.
Take a look here - https://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter for any other additional information.

Recently implemented 2 nodes starwind hybrid cluster https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance for one of my customers. It came completely pre-configured including hyper-v, failover cluster, tiering, shared storage and VEEAM backup, all in the same boxes and backup instance with VEEAM was set up FT/HA too. Took me only 10 minutes of a joint remote session with their support engineer to join new servers to existing AD and allow customer's IT guy to proceed with the migration from their old hardware (2 x old SuperMicro servers and a SAN). What I really like about this offering is that Starwind guys allow you to bring own licenses and install free hyper-v on bare-metal if it fits which I find quite incredible. Thus the pricing is usually far below the range Nutanix or Scale do.

BTW they give their VSAN software for free. I like using it for HA file servers on old hardware since it's very simple and works pretty great.

I see no reason to overpay for the solution from HP in this case. Dell offer seems pretty okay and I think it is exactly the case when you get what you pay for. We've been using Dell for a while and I did not have any major issues with their hardware. Even when we requested some assistance, we have got decent support from them. And I would also prefer VSAN more than a dedicated box, for that matter.

As already mentioned above, Starwind https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free seems to be a good fit here. It is capable of using directly attached local drives in two (or more hosts) and turns them into a mirrored, highly-available storage pool that is accessible over iSCSI or can be used as a base for SMB or NFS share on top of Scale-Out File Server role.

For dedicated storage purposes you can do it with a free version and if you plan to run VMs on the same storage hardware (hyper-converged) you have to get a full license but it is not expensive at all.

@scottalanmiller said in Cost Study: 4 Node Scale vs. 4 Node VMware IPOD:

@John-Nicholson and I have been talking about the death of RAID for years. RAID pretty much exists as a vestige for very small environments that still see their infrastructure in terms of "a single server" and not as clusters and clouds. Once you get beyond the "each node handles its own storage" point (which only applies to one or possibly two host clusters) RAID has no value. Gluster, CEPH, and anything perceived as "cloud storage" and anything like VSAN, Starwind or hyperconvergence are all RAID-less. We've long been in the post-RAID world, RAID remains almost solely for the smallest SMBs.

We have a Starwind cluster of two all-flash nodes that runs on top of hardware RAID5 making a redundancy over redundancy like RAIN1 on top of RAID5 which is quite awesome since there is a consistent set of data on each host in the cluster which is impossible with RAIN stuff like VMware VSAN or S2D does. I treat it like additional hardware offload for storage managing and it performs better than pure software RAID for sure.

@scottalanmiller And Starwind ships their ready nodes armed with RAID https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance so i think they still keep doing RAID and i am sure it is for a reason some of them I've mentioned above.

@KOOLER said in Views on Halizard:

We'll keep free version CLI-managed, like Hyper-V is. Initially Linux-based VSA with a web mgmt will be free as well

That's awesome! Do you have any ETA's yet?

Here are some good explanations on the rule:
https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware.com/explanation/the-3-2-1-backup-rule/
https://www.veeam.com/blog/the-3-2-1-0-rule-to-high-availability.html

We have a highly-available cluster based on StarWind https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san and thus having 2 copies of data as a synchronous replica and a third copy as an on-site backup (which is part 3 of the rule). Obviously, cluster is running on primary internal storage and backups are stored on a separate NAS (wich is 2 part of the rule). And we have a VTL virtual machine https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/starwind/starwindvtl/ running in Azure that hosts our offsite backups (which is part 1).

Well, there are various options to do a cloud backup both cloud vendor and technology. We are using a couple of them:

1. Amazon Storage Gateway - https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/ - a virtual machine that acts like a virtual tape library and transparently offloads your tapes to Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. Works nice with MSFT DPM and VEEAM.
2. StarWind VTL - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/starwind/starwindvtl/ - a virtual machine in Azure with virtual tape library that is connected over iSCSI to a local backup virtual machine with VEEAM.
3. AcloudA - http://www.aclouda.com/ - a very cool thing, a hardware-based SAS/SATA cloud gateway that presents itself to a host as a usual drive offloading all the data at block level directly to cloud over iSCSI or SMB.

@IRJ said in New VM keeps turning off:

You might consider setting up some type of monitoring for it temporarily

I've had a similar issue a while ago that was caused by a memory leak in Exchange itself. It kept consuming more and more RAM and at the end of the day crashed the whole VM with a blue screen. It was happening like once a week usually on weekends thus I didn't pay too much attention to the issue since nobody complained. However, it got worth with time so I had to investigate what is actually going on and take measures like adding more ram, defragging the DB and so on.

Drop some monitoring agent inside the Exchange VM like Veeam One Monitor to be able to understand what's going on or choose something from the recommended tools here.

I have postponed the laptop/desktop updates in WSUS for a week or so until this stuff is fixed. I don't want to mess with colleagues that complain they are not able to search and find something anymore

There was an issue with US NTP servers multiple users reported during this week. Not sure if it might be the case here but still.

We are a mixed shop, having Mac, Windows and different Linux flavors including some weird ones. IP is the only way for us to get everything working.

But even in a pure Windows environment, I would stick to IP. WSD is crappy. WSD + some HP Devices is a noitmare.

As I already mentioned above the goal is to manage virtual machines. Literally. With salt.modules.virt I can do a lot of things with KVM like list_snapshots, migrate, pause, reset and resume the named VM along with setmem, setcpu and other great stuff. The idea is to have a script or possibly a set of scripts or some kind of self-made console that would allow me to manage VMs centrally on both Hyper-V and KVM the same way without having to rewrite each salt.modules.virt command using PowerShell or direct WMI calls. Of course it's doable and will work but seems to be out of SaltStack concept for me.

Recently implemented 2 nodes starwind hybrid cluster https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance for one of my customers. It came completely pre-configured including hyper-v, failover cluster, tiering, shared storage and VEEAM backup, all in the same boxes and backup instance with VEEAM was set up FT/HA too. Took me only 10 minutes of a joint remote session with their support engineer to join new servers to existing AD and allow customer's IT guy to proceed with the migration from their old hardware (2 x old SuperMicro servers and a SAN). What I really like about this offering is that Starwind guys allow you to bring own licenses and install free hyper-v on bare-metal if it fits which I find quite incredible. Thus the pricing is usually far below the range Nutanix or Scale do.

BTW they give their VSAN software for free. I like using it for HA file servers on old hardware since it's very simple and works pretty great.

I would split those depending on the infrastructure size like:

• Small business with only 2-3 hosts would be completely fine with Hyper-V
• For a larger one with up to 10 hosts I would prefer going with VMware
• For everything larger KVM or XEN. Probably KVM because of larger community and better self-supporting options...

Currently looking at SaltStack as a centralized management tool for my servers. As far as I see SaltStack has great support for KVM (libvirt) that allows one to do almost everything in a virtualized environment based on KVM. Windows capabilities are pretty great for massive deployment and servers/computers management but I can not find something similar to libvirt capabilities for Hyper-V. The only thing I could find is this one https://github.com/bougie/salt-hyperv-formula but it allows only the installation and configuration of the role itself and is not developed for 3 years already.

So far the only way to manage Hyper-V virtual machines that I see is using PowerShell commands being sent through SaltStack which seems not the best option. Am I missing something?

I've tried Guacamole on CentOS and Debian. Both worked fine, but it was a bare-metal install (not docker). Check Guacamole and Tomcat logs to identify if they are running at all and try to see your connection attempts there. If there is nothing it has to be firewall/connectivity issue.

I've had a similar situation with one of my customers already a while ago. At the end of the day, I landed up with pre-built hyper-converged appliances (a pair of them). Since the budget was the main constraint and DELL was a requirement, I've purchased very customized servers by starwind https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance (almost no storage and powerful CPU for SQL). These were exactly DELL R630 (not sure if they still ship those) delivered by xByte. One is located in the server room on ground floor and the other one is 2 floors higher. Interconnection is 2 x 10 GBe links. Pretty happy so far.