Moving to local storage?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@jasonlow said:
We already have the VMware licensing for 2 hosts and according to VMware have HA so I'm not sure what the extra licensing costs would be if we stick with VMware.
It might not be any more money today, but VMware will continue to be more licensing overhead, fewer features and more money (even if very little) for forever. It's technical debt that you have an opportunity to shed, potentially.
Gotcha, that's something I would consider but converting to local storage without having to learn Hyper-V is a big enough project at this point. I'm waiting on a quote for added capacity so will see where the numbers land. I'm hoping it's feasible and I don't have to look at third party hard drives, but I know they are much cheaper.
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Are you willing to look at non branded storage? Could save a bundle there.
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@Dashrender said:
Are you willing to look at non branded storage? Could save a bundle there.
If I need to cut costs, yes. I like the HP support and warranty but it may come to that. I will also shop around once I have CDW's proposal. The hard drives I want are listed over $800 each and I would like to get 32 of them ideally. I'm sure they will be less in the proposal but I also found the same HP brand drives on Amazon for less than half the cost.
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Check out refurbished parts. Often much cheaper while remaining fully supported and functional. Nearly all of our physical gear is refurbed.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It should also be mentioned vis a vis the VMware vs. HyperV situation that in both cases with two nodes and going for HA, the only reasonable storage option today is Starwind (paging @kooler @StarWind_Software ) and Starwind is better on HyperV. So while not a strict VMware vs HyperV benefit, in practical real world functionality, HyperV has a storage advantage in the case where you have two nodes AND go for HA.
Yes we can absolutely do that! Just in case OP can see:
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san
We'll also extend our NFR program for free hyper converged version to cover Mangolassi guys soon. Just let me return from MVP Summit and kick web guys with a long long stick :)))
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@scottalanmiller said:
Check out refurbished parts. Often much cheaper while remaining fully supported and functional. Nearly all of our physical gear is refurbed.
+100500
xByte is a great source of refurb Dell hardware!
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@scottalanmiller said:
Check out refurbished parts. Often much cheaper while remaining fully supported and functional. Nearly all of our physical gear is refurbed.
Do you know of one for HP?
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Didn't ServerMonkey handle refurbished HP? And now that I look at their website, they do.
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@Reid-Cooper said:
Didn't ServerMonkey handle refurbished HP? And now that I look at their website, they do.
Yup, they do. They used to be in ML too but @MattKing is not with them anymore (or in IT at all, anymore.)
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@scottalanmiller said:
Check out refurbished parts. Often much cheaper while remaining fully supported and functional. Nearly all of our physical gear is refurbed.
Thanks, I will do that once I have the part numbers from CDW.
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Apropos timing, this got published yesterday but I did not realize until today:
https://www.storagecraft.com/blog/making-the-best-of-your-inverted-pyramid-of-doom/
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Ok, so the plan is to purchase 16 1.2TB drives for the current servers (8 in each), run ESXi from USB drives, and continue to run 2 hosts for failover. This will more than double our current space, decrease our risk, and hopefully improve performance a little. I was able to cut the cost by about 3/4 by scaling it back slightly and using Amazon instead of CDW. Hopefully the parts are legit.....
With that said does anybody have a recommended USB drive for this set up? I read somewhere about this being a good one. http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-SDCZ33-008G-B3SanDisk-Cruzer-SDCZ33-008G-B35-Flash-Drive5-Flash-Drive/dp/B005FYNSUA
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Mostly we use "whatever is cheap" as far as the USB drive goes. No need for much of anything.
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I got the new drives which are sealed genuine HP drives. Never will I buy HP from the "big" vendors again. I'm planning to tackle this project next week. Here's the plan, please let me know if something doesn't make sense or if you think I'm missing the mark.
I have 2 hosts so I plan to move all of my VM's to one host. I believe I can then export the settings from the VMless host. I will then install ESXi on a USB drive connected to the server and import the settings from the old host. At that point I should be able to format all of the local hard drives and add the local storage as datastores. After that I should be able to move all of the current VM's to the new datastores. Power them on and test them. Then basically do the same thing on the other host but only moving some of the VM's to balance the load.
Any advice or suggestions are appreciated. I can't find a way in vSphere to export the host settings so I assume I have to use command line. One question is should I configure RAID before or after I install ESXi on the flash drive? I'm thinking it may have to be done at the same time? Would it be wise to run any ESXi updates on the current host before I export the settings or should I just run the updates on the new host after I've imported the settings?
Thanks in advance!
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why ESXi?
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Agreed... Time to move to Hyper-V or Xen
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I appreciate that you aren't fans of VMware but that's what we own, what we are licensed for, and what we know. I'm not ruling out a change in the future but now is not the time.
If anyone has comments or suggestions about my plan besides scrapping VMware I would appreciate it.
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@jasonlow Looks good, just make sure you have a good backup before you start. Also I would setup the raid before the install... i don't like changing hardware after I install stuff.
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@brianlittlejohn Thank you!
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Depending on your VMware licensing, you may be able to live-migrate the VMs without any down time (Storage VMotion, I think it what its called).
