Hyper-V High availability? or only VMware
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Hi @LAH3385,
As said on the SW topic, your IT Consultant has recommended an Inverted Pyramid of Doom. Likely on RAID 5 to boot. I'd fire them if I had the choice.
All of the major hypervisors offer High Availability, only ESXi requires you to pay through the nose for features that are free with the other top 3. Xen HyperV and KVM.
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First question is always: Are you sure that you need high availability?
HA costs money, one way or another, and requires a lot more than just products to make it happen. One of my favourite quotes in the industry is from @John-Nicholson:
High Availability is something that you do, not something that you buy.
His meaning is that just getting the HA product name from VMware or Microsoft doesn't mean anything, your system design, your management of it, your power supply, your datacenter, your HVAC, your generators, etc. need to all be part of the solution. HA is the result of lots and lots of things coming together.
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What I mean by High Availability is for our production team to keep on working without interruption. Currently our file server is on the same server as DC AD DHCP DNS, etc... Back in July, AD got corrupted and went into BSOD loop. This cause our production to freeze for half a day before we are able to get the backup restored.
That incident cost us potential thousands of dollar in only half day. If it happens again and it goes down for days then we may be out of business. What that said, we are looking into redundancy servers or high availability.
We are not 24/7 but at least 6a-8p hours M-Sat.
What do we want? We want a server that can be a RAID 5 but for server. We want a system that will allow our production team to keep on doing what they need to do without interruption. We are not looking into Apocalypse-proof so we won't be investing in a generator. Any major or wide area outage is kind of OK since it will mostly be out of our control. But for anthing that is within our control we like to be able to prevent it as effective as possible.
I am looking into Xenserver at the moment.
Thanks all -
While Scott is right, it may be best to pick one thing at a time and improve its redundancy and reliability, and keep moving towards true HA. To start with, Hyper-V 2012R2 is nice, and you get features that help you plan for HA thrown in for free. For Hyper-V 2012 R2, you don't have to have a SAN (shared storage) to get the ability to perform planned Maintenance. You don't have to set them up in a cluster.
(Short, Short Description): Just have more than one Hyper-V server and tell it to move the VM from Server A to Server B, and wait for the transfer(s) to complete before you shut down Server A. (This can take along time, depending on the size of your VMs). There's a few more steps than that, but that's really all there is to it.
If you really want shared storage, I think StarWind would work well for you with only 2 servers. They do have a free version available if you want to use it. Keep in mind if you do that, you'll need the same amount of storage in BOTH servers. It will greatly speed up your Live Migrations, just like a SAN would while keeping more of the reliability of local storage (@scottalanmiller can correct me here if he thinks I'm wrong
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@LAH3385 said:
What I mean by High Availability is for our production team to keep on working without interruption. Currently our file server is on the same server as DC AD DHCP DNS, etc... Back in July, AD got corrupted and went into BSOD loop. This cause our production to freeze for half a day before we are able to get the backup restored.
That incident cost us potential thousands of dollar in only half day. If it happens again and it goes down for days then we may be out of business. What that said, we are looking into redundancy servers or high availability.
We are not 24/7 but at least 6a-8p hours M-Sat.
What do we want? We want a server that can be a RAID 5 but for server. We want a system that will allow our production team to keep on doing what they need to do without interruption. We are not looking into Apocalypse-proof so we won't be investing in a generator. Any major or wide area outage is kind of OK since it will mostly be out of our control. But for anthing that is within our control we like to be able to prevent it as effective as possible.
I am looking into Xenserver at the moment.
Thanks allYou don't need HA. You need better designed systems.
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@DustinB3403 said:
As said on the SW topic, your IT Consultant has recommended an Inverted Pyramid of Doom.
Keep in mind Having a SAN is not the only thing that makes it an Inverted Pyramid of Doom. It's having only 1 SAN. You can infact have a good SAN setup with multiple SAN Devices, replication etc. However this is far outside of the budget of most [any] SMBs. It's better for most SMBs to just use replicated local storage. Our SAN systems here are more than most companies whole IT budget.
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Oh I totally agree, but his IT Consultant literally said 2 Compute nodes 1 SAN that is an IPOD.
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@LAH3385 said:
Our IT consultant recommended 2 servers and 1 SAN + VMware Essential Pro. 2 Servers run us about $2.5k each. 1 San run us about $10-12K for 2.4tb. VmWare Essential Pro license is about $5k. That totaled to $20K!
At $20K you can't even get a highly available SAN, they start at around $30K - $35K minimum. So this solution would not even remotely be highly available for a few reasons:
- It's a low availability architecture with a Single Point of Failure
- That SPOF is cheap and fragile, so less reliable than a normal server
Put together, the proposed solution is very far from HA today. Even if it was affordable or within your budget, this does not remotely match your stated objective. It actually moves you away from high availability well into low availability.
I'm not saying that you don't realize this I just want to make sure that it is clear that that proposed solution is totally backwards from what you wanted to get.
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With solid backup methods, I do not consider a SAN by itself a major issue in a IPOD. It you need compute node more than storage, this can be a viable solution as long as things are backed up in case of failure and able to be recovered. (Unitrends, Veeam, Altara, etc.).
Yes it is still a SPoF. But you always have a SPoF someplace in an SMB because the normal SMB simply cannot afford anything else.
That said, I still think a SAN is generally a complete waste of money for any SMB.
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All four enterprise hypervisors (Xen, KVM, HyperV and ESXi) do full failover options like you are looking for. That part is not a deciding factor between them. You are totally free to choose based on HA needs.
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@scottalanmiller said:
All four enterprise hypervisors (Xen, KVM, HyperV and ESXi) do full failover options like you are looking for. That part is not a deciding factor between them. You are totally free to choose based on HA needs.
It is my understanding that Xen (XenServer), KVM, and Hyper-V do the HA for free. VMware wants an arm (and maybe a leg too) for the HA features.
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@JaredBusch said:
With solid backup methods, I do not consider a SAN by itself a major issue in a IPOD.
It's not a "major issue" per se, unless you count the factors like "does not meet stated goal" and the cost versus doing something much better. The average (by far) SMB can use an IPOD without being in any "danger." But wasting money is always a factor. If the solution doubles or triples the cost I would call that an issue itself. It's not that it is "so dangerous", just that it is more dangerous than a far cheaper solution.
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@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller said:
All four enterprise hypervisors (Xen, KVM, HyperV and ESXi) do full failover options like you are looking for. That part is not a deciding factor between them. You are totally free to choose based on HA needs.
It is my understanding that Xen (XenServer), KVM, and Hyper-V do the HA for free. VMware wants an arm (and maybe a leg too) for the HA features.
That's correct. HA features are completely free from every vendor except VMware.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
With solid backup methods, I do not consider a SAN by itself a major issue in a IPOD.
It's not a "major issue" per se, unless you count the factors like "does not meet stated goal" and the cost versus doing something much better. The average (by far) SMB can use an IPOD without being in any "danger." But wasting money is always a factor. If the solution doubles or triples the cost I would call that an issue itself. It's not that it is "so dangerous", just that it is more dangerous than a far cheaper solution.
Which I stated later in my post.
@JaredBusch said:
That said, I still think a SAN is generally a complete waste of money for any SMB.
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@JaredBusch said:
That said, I still think a SAN is generally a complete waste of money for any SMB.
Exactly. 95% of the risk is in overspending, technical debt or become reliant on a third party to handle what could be simple and internal. But definitely, with a good backup and general data protection strategy, HA is massive overkill for a normal SMB so the risk "anti-HA" IPOD / SAN design generally only introduces a kind of risk that probably wasn't important anyway.
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@JaredBusch said:
Which I stated later in my post.
Sorry, was still typing. Been lot of interruptions here this morning.
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In comparing Hyper-V and VMware, there is only practical approach today for an HA cluster at two nodes and that is using StarWind (which is free) to handle the replicated local storage.
StarWind is more stable and performant on Hyper-V than on VMware. This is a result of an architectural difference that is VMware's decision to not allow StarWind into the kernel space. The result is that given VMware does not have an equivalent product, in the two node space Hyper-V's technology is just as good but the available components and real world options put Hyper-V as a clearly superior technical option than VMware even if VMware was free, which it is not.
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The only two reasonable considerations for two node HA clusters is Hyper-V + StarWind or XenServer + HA-Lizard. Both do two nodes, are totally free and have no extra licensing concerns to make things complex.
Also, here in MangoLassi, you have direct access to Microsoft, VMware, Starwind and HA-Lizard!
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Can you shade some light based on the requirement I stated earlier. I don't need us to have our own life support (although it would be nice to have such feature) but we should not stop our production due to internal issue that is preventable. Which is what this post is all about. True HA seem to cost both arms, legs, and some limbs for SMB. If we need to get 3 servers with more storage then I will take that into consideration. As SAM pointed out:
@scottalanmiller said:
Exactly. 95% of the risk is in overspending, technical debt or become reliant on a third party to handle what could be simple and internal. But definitely, with a good backup and general data protection strategy, HA is massive overkill for a normal SMB so the risk "anti-HA" IPOD / SAN design generally only introduces a kind of risk that probably wasn't important anyway.I do not want to overspend on something that can be done and deliver similar result for less. I have many more area I could use some more budget on.
@scottalanmiller said:
In comparing Hyper-V and VMware, there is only practical approach today for an HA cluster at two nodes and that is using StarWind (which is free) to handle the replicated local storage.StarWind is more stable and performant on Hyper-V than on VMware. This is a result of an architectural difference that is VMware's decision to not allow StarWind into the kernel space. The result is that given VMware does not have an equivalent product, in the two node space Hyper-V's technology is just as good but the available components and real world options put Hyper-V as a clearly superior technical option than VMware even if VMware was free, which it is not.
What kind of HDD type is recommended for Starwind VSAN? RAID10 with at least 3TB storage space. SATA7.2K or SAS 10K/15K? I doubt we can afford SSD.
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@LAH3385 said:
Ultimately, I am trying to prove that Hyper-V is better in our scenario and we do not need to spend a fortune for it.
The onus should be completely on VMware to show how it is even a viable option, which I don't believe that it is. It is about $5K more and even at that higher price it delivers a technically inferior solution. VMware carries no benefits here, only technical and financial downsides. I'd question how it would even make the consideration list let alone how better solutions justify against it. Hyper-V should only need to show that it is better than XenServer. VMware is the fourth option, the "only when nothing else is available" option.
