Storage Question
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@BRRABill said:
Are you really recommending NOT to have a backup DC. Everything I have always read said to definitely do it. I think I'd feel better with it, but I can be talked out of that!
That's because of several factors:
- Lots of people like MS and their partners make money selling you extra licenses. There is a lot of incentive to push them.
- Companies of any significant size need things like this to failover because the impact is many times larger and the cost of extra licenses is nothing to them. So they assume you are bigger than you are.
- They assume AD being tied into other systems where there is no cache layer.
- IT folks often want to add complexity to make their jobs appear harder than necessary.
- Hubris. IT must be mission critical, right? It would be unthinkable that we could live without it for a few hours.
For small businesses, it is actually decently rare that the cost of a second AD DC is justified. If you had a second server anyway for other reasons, like most medium sized businesses and larger do, the second AD DC might be free. But for you, it is a LOT of money.
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If I decide to put a 3rd party RAID card in there...
- Will it work with the hot-plug backplane that is currently in there?
- Will it work in the T320 itself? Assuming/hoping it would just be a plug and play.
- Will the drive lights work, or will I still have blinking amber? I know it can read SMART, but what control the lights on the drive carrier?
- Any recommendation on a particular card?
Has anyone ever done this on the T320?
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If only we could also cut the costs of the CALs of my bill, too!
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@BRRABill said:
If I decide to put a 3rd party RAID card in there...
- Will it work with the hot-plug backplane that is currently in there?
Yes, that is just hardware.
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@BRRABill said:
- Will it work in the T320 itself? Assuming/hoping it would just be a plug and play.
All it gets from the server is power
It's a standard PCIe device. As long as the computer is a PC and supports PCIe, it has to. -
@scottalanmiller said:
@BRRABill said:
If only we could also cut the costs of the CALs of my bill, too!
Well.... Linux.
My head has gone from
9am: swimming
2pm: spinning
5pm: almost off axisLinux would be the end of me.
I'm finding out if I can take 1 license off the paperwork. Maybe I'll order the 3rd party RAID controller and my day will be complete!
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@BRRABill said:
- Will the drive lights work, or will I still have blinking amber? I know it can read SMART, but what control the lights on the drive carrier?
Not likely, the lights are not part of the controller or the drives. that would be part of the proprietary mechanisms.
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@BRRABill said:
- Any recommendation on a particular card?
LSI with 1GB or more of cache. You can get one that basically is the H710 but directly from LSI without being rebranded or having the Dell firmware.
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Have we even talked about what hypervisor to use yet? I think it was HyperV but don't remember if we saw that or I just imagined it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Not likely, the lights are not part of the controller or the drives. that would be part of the proprietary mechanisms.
Not likely the amber will keep blinking, or not likely any lights will work at all.
Also, with that kind of setup, where do the SMART alerts go? I'm just used to using DELL stuff and it all goes through their Server Admin product.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Have we even talked about what hypervisor to use yet? I think it was HyperV but don't remember if we saw that or I just imagined it.
Yes, going with Hyper-V.
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@BRRABill said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Not likely, the lights are not part of the controller or the drives. that would be part of the proprietary mechanisms.
Not likely the amber will keep blinking, or not likely any lights will work at all.
I'd expect no lights at all.
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@BRRABill said:
Also, with that kind of setup, where do the SMART alerts go? I'm just used to using DELL stuff and it all goes through their Server Admin product.
Up the stack. The drives report to the RAID card. The RAID card reports to the driver in the OS. The driver reports to the OS.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@BRRABill said:
Also, with that kind of setup, where do the SMART alerts go? I'm just used to using DELL stuff and it all goes through their Server Admin product.
Up the stack. The drives report to the RAID card. The RAID card reports to the driver in the OS. The driver reports to the OS.
The OS in this case is Hyper-V
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Right, OS/Hypervisor. Whatever is sitting on the hardware.
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Again, excuse my DELL ignorance here, but on our current servers, if the hard drive was going, the server would turn orange, and OMSA would throw up an error.
I am assuming with a 3rd party RAID controller that all will be gone.
So in your setups, how is this handled? One of my original things was to keep the predictive alerts in place, and it seems like this solution is moving away from that.
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you'll have to setup alerts through Hyper-V to notify you when there is a problem. The Dell stuff wouldn't work any more.
Perhaps you want to see if the H170 will support non Dell drives. Might be more in line with what you want.
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@BRRABill said:
Again, excuse my DELL ignorance here, but on our current servers, if the hard drive was going, the server would turn orange, and OMSA would throw up an error.
I am assuming with a 3rd party RAID controller that all will be gone.
Correct, all gone.
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@Dashrender said:
you'll have to setup alerts through Hyper-V to notify you when there is a problem. The Dell stuff wouldn't work any more.
Perhaps you want to see if the H170 will support non Dell drives. Might be more in line with what you want.
XByte might have some more answers about that. They are dell reseller that works on the new and used side. They might be able to tell you what 3rd party SSD work with different Dell RAID cards.
