New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster
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@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
I have multiple ips, 2 generators, on LP.
Not IPs, but ISPs, I assume you mean.
That stuff is awesome, but that sounds like a hella lot of money to spend to avoid saving money on cloud. How can you afford all of that stuff, but not basic support on small systems? On one hand, it sounds like you have money pouring out of your ears, on the other, there isn't as much as I have at home.
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@scottalanmiller said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
I have multiple ips, 2 generators, on LP.
Not IPs, but ISPs, I assume you mean.
That stuff is awesome, but that sounds like a hella lot of money to spend to avoid saving money on cloud. How can you afford all of that stuff, but not basic support on small systems? On one hand, it sounds like you have money pouring out of your ears, on the other, there isn't as much as I have at home.
I'd take the other approach.
I'm spending so much money on these services for my business that I can't afford to spend money on supporting my infrastructure.
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@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
I get everyone view on this. However, I have a ton of equipment. I already have 5 year contracts with fiber. It would cost me more money to cancel the contracts 20K per ISP for me to put my stuff in the cloud. SO While I have all this equipment here that is collecting dust I can use it to make sure I stay up and running.
Kind of. I get it, money has been spent. I guess this is starting to explain why money has run out. I'm assuming that at some point there was lots of funding, people bought gear willy nilly, used up all of the money, and now it's just you having to make due with the cast offs of an earlier investment era while the money runs out?
It's a truly bizarre situation. But okay. I still wonder if the amount of things needed to be learned to support it properly are not going to be so risky as to create more risk than you should have. Making your own HC is cool, and can do a lot. But you really have to get it right and really have to know how to support all of the parts or even the smallest thing could mean downtime way bigger than if you'd never done it.
Remember that no "HA" system comes without its own risks. Only takes a small accident for HA to spell disaster as all of the pieces are so much more interdependent.
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@DustinB3403 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
If you are familiar with Hyper-V and require Hyperconvergence, why not use Hyper-V and StarWind vSAN?
Absolutely free and scalable, support may be a bit more difficult but I'm sure the support costs are reasonable.
He might be familiar, but he's also been on KVM for the last three years. So that might be a factor.
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@DustinB3403 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@scottalanmiller said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@JaredBusch Its all me with my company.
What's their plan if you are sick, hit by a bus, get a better offer elsewhere, etc.?
With the Scale, they pick up the phone and get 100% support instantly. With a built it yourself solution sure, they could call some of us, and hey, we'd love that. But it's not quite the same as having primary vendor support for the entire stack instantly.
I'm assuming this is a 1 man band.
You mean, one man total and if he gets sick the company would just evaporate regardless of if there was support or not?
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@scottalanmiller said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@DustinB3403 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@scottalanmiller said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@mroth911 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@JaredBusch Its all me with my company.
What's their plan if you are sick, hit by a bus, get a better offer elsewhere, etc.?
With the Scale, they pick up the phone and get 100% support instantly. With a built it yourself solution sure, they could call some of us, and hey, we'd love that. But it's not quite the same as having primary vendor support for the entire stack instantly.
I'm assuming this is a 1 man band.
You mean, one man total and if he gets sick the company would just evaporate regardless of if there was support or not?
Yeah, sick or hit by a bus.
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I love Scale, but they are not the right solution for everything. They definitely do not sound like the right solution here.
Honestly, move your stuff hosted and take the hit to cancel your fiber services.
Choose a solution with geo redundancies and such.
Either that, or pay for your support renewal and plan the exit in 5 years when the contracts term.
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@scottalanmiller said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@DustinB3403 said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
If you are familiar with Hyper-V and require Hyperconvergence, why not use Hyper-V and StarWind vSAN?
Absolutely free and scalable, support may be a bit more difficult but I'm sure the support costs are reasonable.
He might be familiar, but he's also been on KVM for the last three years. So that might be a factor.
He's been on Scale for the past 3 years, with support. Using it is vastly different than maintaining it when you have 100% support to 0% support because of finances.
If the goal is to use commodity hardware (which he has) and require a HC solution that costs nothing additional (besides setup and maintenance time) StarWind vSAN seems to be the option.
He could of course use XenServer and HALizard as well if he wanted.
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So assuming all that is correct, and there are moderately okay servers to work with (710 are pretty old, that's our retired lab stuff here, too old to really bother running typically.)
There are three key options, all are pretty equal in overall production readiness. The differences are in a few small features, how support is obtained, how much support costs, and how much you like the interfaces.
- KVM with Gluster, CEPH, StarWind, etc. (You are calling this oVirt, but oVirt isn't the important part of the stack.)
- XCP-NG this has its own clustered shared storage, you don't use a third party.
- Hyper-V with StarWind
That's it. That's the list. ESXi is off the table, you don't have the funds for it. Leaves those three. You CAN use other options, like KVM with DRBD, but it's not practical or easy. These are the three reasonable choices.
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@JaredBusch said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
Either that, or pay for your support renewal and plan the exit in 5 years when the contracts term.
This is almost certainly the right choice. It is in place, it is supported, and it gives you years of guaranteed functionality to get yourself to cloud where you need to be.
Anything you build yourself you are going to be on the hook for hardware replacements as you go and it is still just a hold out till you can cancel the services you have and get to cloud. But you'll have to keep investing in new hardware to keep it working once you are dependent on it. The drives in those old R510s are likely to die pretty often once they go back into use, that could get quite costly, quite quickly. Especially if they are SAS.
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@scottalanmiller said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
So assuming all that is correct, and there are moderately okay servers to work with (710 are pretty old, that's our retired lab stuff here, too old to really bother running typically.)
Just reading this thread top-to-bottom and wondered if anyone would mention that. OP is running 10 year old servers so the risk of downtime due to component failure has become exponentially greater.
I'm not certain if I'd be more comfortable having an HA setup between 3 very old servers or no HA on a new server (with warranty) myself... -
@manxam said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
I'm not certain if I'd be more comfortable having an HA setup between 3 very old servers or no HA on a new server (with warranty) myself...
Totally agree. But one costs money and the other he has, so I get that. But it's not going to be super reliable. Three really old machines, all past standard retirement, without warranty or support, but with HA on top. It's not horrible, but it isn't great. But the failure rate on components could make it rather costly to maintain. Plus the higher cost of power consumption doesn't help.
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If the three R710 servers are identical then use StarWind VSAN for the HA/VM setup and iSCSI Target the D2D4324-G2?
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@PhlipElder : Not intimately familiar with SW's vSAN only having tried it a few times years ago, but I assume you're suggesting using the servers for compute and HP for storage? Doesn't that completely eliminate HA as you now have a single point of failure that will affect 3 servers?
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@manxam vSAN is a hyper-converged setup with local storage being used on each node to provide HA storage for the compute.
The iSCSI Target on the standalone unit could be for backups, archival storage, or any other storage requirement that comes to mind.
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@PhlipElder : Thanks for the clarification!
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@PhlipElder will look into that as well.
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@manxam said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:
@PhlipElder : Not intimately familiar with SW's vSAN only having tried it a few times years ago, but I assume you're suggesting using the servers for compute and HP for storage? Doesn't that completely eliminate HA as you now have a single point of failure that will affect 3 servers?
Absolutely no one here has or will suggest anything that involved external high risk storage. All of us are trying to get you to some form of hyperconvergence which by definition means that the storage is local and shared.
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Meh, I don’t see the issue. Those are just standard Dell servers, oldie in truth. Sell it in bundle and buy a new R740 with mission critical support. You can get a very convenient quote that include VMware and Veeam. The latest Veeam (9.5u4) can do native S3 (and S3-like) archive tiering and support direct restore to both Azure and AWS.
If we’re talking about steady-state workloads, on-premise or colo is always cheaper than IaaS. Oh, don’t forget that with the new iDrac/iLO you can treat the server effectively as a colo machine with all the good stuff like remote KVM, proactive support, remote automated installation etc., all with good html5 interface. Yes, that crappy activex/java is gone.
