@scottalanmiller

Why three? The "MSP" is trying to force these guys to purchase a solution from Scale Computing. As I understand it, they require three hosts. In any case, I feel this MSP is providing a solution that the MSP wants and is ignoring any and all business needs of their customer.

Thanks to all for the feedback. Some of these sales-only MSP organizations are making a mess of our industry. They are taking advantage of small companies and doing the exact opposite of what they say they are doing.

These same clowns are telling us you only need 16 cores worth of Server 2022 Datacenter to properly license these 3 proposed hosts. MS requires a min of 16 per host even if you only have 8 cores. Even if they have a license to re-allocate, they are still short.

They are just as bad at SQL licensing telling us you only need 2 cores to license a VM.

Unfortunately I was hired on after this process started and now have to try and unwind this mess before the purchase goes through. I worry I may be too late though.

I agree financially and technically, the single host approach is what makes sense here. I just have to put in the work to convince my new team that they have been fed a bunch of crap.

@scottalanmiller

Thanks for all the links. I've got some homework to do for sure and appreciate the guidance.

@dashrender said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

Mind if I ask what your team is?
Are you in IT in your company?

I am the new internal IT guy for the company being screwed. We are a small manufacturing company. The previous IT guy was not really an IT guy and never took an interest in his job. I think the VAR identified this pretty quickly and are trying to one-up themselves with what they can get away with.

I'm no slouch but I am also not an IT expert. My background is mostly software development and manufacturing automation but also have experience with things like ERP and MES. Most jobs I take are with small companies and I end up doing or assisting with a lot of the IT work.

My frustration is that I don't even do this full time and can't find a single drop of value this VAR is adding even though they claim to be experts at this.

I step away for a day to work in the shop and come back to a group of mind readers. My next question was literally going to be how you handle situations where your best support is 4hr resolution but next business day for any resulting parts.

Assuming not a disk array failure, it would seem to depend on cost of one day of downtime and the cost to recover/regenerate any data since your last backup if your recovery method was via backups.

In the past suggestions have been to buy the same hardware and just swap the array over since, at least in cases of Dell, the array config is stored on the drives and the controller. This assumes matching controllers and firmware but still presents some risk.

You'd save the cost of the extra drives and complexity of HA but still have the capital waste of an idle asset. I think you limit excess licensing with open licensing. Is this even a semi-reasonable approach?

I step away for a day to work in the shop and come back to a group of mind readers. My next question was literally going to be how you handle situations where your best support is 4hr resolution but next business day for any resulting parts.

Assuming not a disk array failure, it would seem to depend on cost of one day of downtime and the cost to recover/regenerate any data since your last backup if your recovery method was via backups.

In the past suggestions have been to buy the same hardware and just swap the array over since, at least in cases of Dell, the array config is stored on the drives and the controller. This assumes matching controllers and firmware but still presents some risk.

You'd save the cost of the extra drives and complexity of HA but still have the capital waste of an idle asset. I think you limit excess licensing with open licensing. Is this even a semi-reasonable approach?

@scottalanmiller

Thanks for all the links. I've got some homework to do for sure and appreciate the guidance.

@dashrender said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

Mind if I ask what your team is?
Are you in IT in your company?

I am the new internal IT guy for the company being screwed. We are a small manufacturing company. The previous IT guy was not really an IT guy and never took an interest in his job. I think the VAR identified this pretty quickly and are trying to one-up themselves with what they can get away with.

I'm no slouch but I am also not an IT expert. My background is mostly software development and manufacturing automation but also have experience with things like ERP and MES. Most jobs I take are with small companies and I end up doing or assisting with a lot of the IT work.

My frustration is that I don't even do this full time and can't find a single drop of value this VAR is adding even though they claim to be experts at this.

@scottalanmiller

I thought it was a minimum of 4 cores, sold in 2 core packs.

Thanks to all for the feedback. Some of these sales-only MSP organizations are making a mess of our industry. They are taking advantage of small companies and doing the exact opposite of what they say they are doing.

These same clowns are telling us you only need 16 cores worth of Server 2022 Datacenter to properly license these 3 proposed hosts. MS requires a min of 16 per host even if you only have 8 cores. Even if they have a license to re-allocate, they are still short.

They are just as bad at SQL licensing telling us you only need 2 cores to license a VM.

Unfortunately I was hired on after this process started and now have to try and unwind this mess before the purchase goes through. I worry I may be too late though.

I agree financially and technically, the single host approach is what makes sense here. I just have to put in the work to convince my new team that they have been fed a bunch of crap.

@scottalanmiller

Why three? The "MSP" is trying to force these guys to purchase a solution from Scale Computing. As I understand it, they require three hosts. In any case, I feel this MSP is providing a solution that the MSP wants and is ignoring any and all business needs of their customer.

@travisdh1

That was another thought as well. I don't think their existing 2 node ESXi system is n+1 anyway so they essentially are already in this position, but maybe without extended warranty. Hard to tell as I am just digging in and their internal knowledge is not great.

The concern with that approach would be minimizing data loss. Primarily transactions in the ERP, though the volume of these transactions is low relative to other companies. But I would guess with proper backups at the DB level, this could be minimized as well if they had to recover via a backup.

With redundant PSUs, a healthy RAID setup, incoming power filtering, etc, the failure isn't likely to be a server death sentence. The issue (RAM, CPU, MB, etc.) would be resolved, fire back up the server and go back to making money.

Is there truly a case for a hyperconverged infrastructure for a small business? When I say small, I'm saying a company with 8 virtual machines and operating schedule of 12 hours per day, 5 days per week. While cost per hour has not been nailed down specifically, a couple hours of unplanned downtime is not something that would cause a lot of pain (assuming it is not a regular occurrence).

Currently they run ESXi on two slightly aging nodes and are looking to upgrade. The current proposed solution is a three node hyperconverged system with pedestrian specs and a $70k price tag. To me this doesn't pass the smell test.

I feel ESXi is already an overkill solution here. They are an all Windows shop and a relatively small number of VMs. The heaviest hitter on the system is an ERP system but this is a low volume business model, so not a crazy work load.

Why is a $70k hyperconverged solution better than Hyper-V on two Dell R740s with better specs coming in around $20k. Pair this up with Starwinds vSAN to improve the reliability. With only two nodes you could avoid the 10G switching gear and just go direct connected.

These hyperconverged systems say you can do more with less hardware and cost but I am not seeing it. Even when trying to look at the fully loaded cost over the life of the system. What am I missing here?