Cannot decide between 1U servers for growing company
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@ntoxicator said:
Right now looking at costs of new to present to Finance & CEO.
Otherwise, More than likely I'm sure they'll say no way and I'll just spec a server from xByte
I'm sure I could spec the servers enough with local storage to support the needs. However, then I be diving into HA-lizard terratory and would completely get away from our current NAS centralized storage.
Then its the though, Ok... then why not go with a packaged solution such as HC Scale.
Why are you still using a NAS solution? Didn't we get a lot of advice basically saying that was a terrible idea... why didn't you look at Scale? They seem like they would be a perfect fit for your environment.
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Will be 100% looking at Scale. wanted to jump in their webinar yesterday; but was stuck on a conference calls
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@ntoxicator said:
LENOVO & the Lenovo IBM Server X were thecheapest so far
Stay away from Lenovo. IBM and Lenovo are not the same. IBM only sells enterprise stuff now. Lenovo is crap and can't be trusted.
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@ntoxicator said:
LENOVO & the Lenovo IBM Server X were the cheapest so far
That's because they aren't in the same class of hardware as the rest. They are built around desktop PC specs.
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Also with local storage.
Would still need PCIe 10GbE cards in each server host. And they inter-connect as "backplane" And this is how the data syncs, assuming DRBD
Ofcourse localized SAS 10k disks will be hella-lot faster than TCP/IP 10Gbe to a directly connected NAS/SAN
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Yes, Staying away from LENOVO per advise given here.
However, I have been using Lenovo here for the SFF' desktops. Have ~100 of them.
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@ntoxicator said:
However, I have been using Lenovo here for the SFF' desktops. Have ~100 of them.
The US Court systems use lots of Lenovo too. I don't trust either one of them.
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@ntoxicator said:
Also with local storage.
Would still need PCIe 10GbE cards in each server host. And they inter-connect as "backplane" And this is how the data syncs, assuming DRBD
Ofcourse localized SAS 10k disks will be hella-lot faster than TCP/IP 10Gbe to a directly connected NAS/SAN
Yes, you will probably need 10Gbe.... or port bond a quad port gig adapter. Which may work just fine in your scenario. You would still need 10Gbe on your NAS if you wanted to get rid of that bottleneck.
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Gotcha
Well the entire plan for the upgrades and future planning was to have 10Gbe all the way around. Have 10Gbe dual port cards on each server node.
and then dual port 10Gbe in the NAS device. Along with a 10Gbe Switch using SFP cables to interconnect. the servers & NAS would inter-connect to the 10Gbe Switch and be on their own IP network
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@ntoxicator said:
Gotcha
Well the entire plan for the upgrades and future planning was to have 10Gbe all the way around. Have 10Gbe dual port cards on each server node.
and then dual port 10Gbe in the NAS device. Along with a 10Gbe Switch using SFP cables to interconnect. the servers & NAS would inter-connect to the 10Gbe Switch and be on their own IP network
So... why wouldn't you just do that with server nodes with local storage and get rid of a massive point of failure? The NAS device is introducing unnecessary risk to this setup and will be much slower and much less reliable then having the storage on board.
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I'm still wondering why you need HA like this?
Sure every CEO thinks he can't afford downtime, but really 5 mins or even an hour is often well within the realm of acceptability when the dollars are added up.
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One thing I'm not sure anyone has considered - do you really need more than one server? Can your entire load be handled from a single server?
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Its a very fast pace office environment, ever one in the 'now' mentality. Any blip or downtime I have employee's bitching or CEO down my back to get it up.
So yes, wanted HA.
The NAS would be 2 of them running HA for centralized storage.
Otherwise, I can spec refurbished servers from xByte and be done with it
Just built a DELL R720
5 - 2TB 72000 RPM DELL certified hard drives (RAID-10, PERC H730)
2 - 50GB SLC Solid state drives - to install XenServer on - raid-1
750W Dell dual power supplies3 year onsite support/service
Right at 5,000 per server
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@ntoxicator said:
Its a very fast pace office environment, ever one in the 'now' mentality. Any blip or downtime I have employee's bitching or CEO down my back to get it up.
So yes, wanted HA.
The NAS would be 2 of them running HA for centralized storage.
Otherwise, I can spec refurbished servers from xByte and be done with it
Just built a DELL R720
5 - 2TB 72000 RPM DELL certified hard drives (RAID-10, PERC H730)
2 - 50GB SLC Solid state drives - to install XenServer on - raid-1
750W Dell dual power supplies3 year onsite support/service
Right at 5,000 per server
Ok... for RAID-10 you will need an even number of drives that's just how RAID 10 works... why are you installing your hypervisor on SSDs? It is just loaded to RAM and those expensive disks are going to waste. Generally hypervisors should be run from the cheapest slowest disk you have since you are rarely writing or reading from them except on boot.
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Wow - that performance is not going to be very good on the disk side of things.
Especially when you are looking to do VSAN.
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I would rather have 2 servers in HA. I could most likely slam everything on one node.
each VM uses about 8GB of ram. (Domain controller uses under 4GB right now).
All our employee's connect to Terminal Servers.... due to 2X Application Gateway server..
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@ntoxicator said:
5 - 2TB 72000 RPM DELL certified hard drives (RAID-10, PERC H730)
2 - 50GB SLC Solid state drives - to install XenServer on - raid-1
750W Dell dual power suppliesWhy are you splitting the drive types?
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I'm going for storage array. You're the one who keeps pushing the localized storage.
As I would want to have over 4TB of localized storage to be on safe-side for future. As its locallized and CANNOT grow it
So at this point of localized storage. Appears HC Scale would be the kicker here.
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Also making the assumption when running HA for localized storage (VSAN) or HA-Lizard iSCSI for XenServer.
The storage on each node will have to be the same so it can replicate on each node.
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@ntoxicator said:
Its a very fast pace office environment, ever one in the 'now' mentality. Any blip or downtime I have employee's bitching or CEO down my back to get it up.
So yes, wanted HA.
This is a dollars and cents game. You design a properly sized single server that can handle your entire current load (maybe one that's over sized by say 10% so you have a little room for growth, unless you KNOW about growth that is coming, otherwise never plan for future 'talk').
Then also present the HA solution. Give estimates on downtime differences in cases of issues. Find out the real cost of down time to the company to discover what the RTO and RPO need to be.
My doctors all scream bloody murder at downtime, but when they consider the cost of a HA system, they are willing to live with the few outages we rarely have.
You're previous NAS solution, to put it bluntly, got lucky. You either never had an outage or you found quick solutions when you did. But what if you would have had a complete chassis failure on your NAS? You would have been completely down until it was fixed, and the recovery of that NAS might be more difficult than recovering traditional servers.
