Cannot decide between 1U servers for growing company
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@ntoxicator said:
So, company I work for has finally started to gather a budget. Although I'm director of IT (if want to call it that - wont go off on a rant). They've told me to go out and price servers that we need and new network equipment to sustain future growth
Right now at 120 employee's. Plans to add 30 more employee's within 2016. Afterwards growth to up over 400. (moving to new larger facility)
Right now I'm Virtualizing everything.
Current: SuperMicro Barebone 1U AMD 6220's server. Citrix Xen Server
Also have 3 - 1U Sun Sunfire X servers running HA Cluster with proxmox. This was a testing area for me on personal servers. Company VM's have been flooding on here because.... current single 1U server is at max capacity
Network: Synology NAS's. RAID-10.. etc. LACP link aggregation on 1GBe network...
Looking at new servers:
I'm 100% fanboy of the Oracle SunFire servers. Anyone have opinions?
Also looking at the LENOVO System X (IBM Line) of servers.
However, CISCO has their servers now.... But -- this brings back very bad memories for TAC Support and the website needs to die. Cant find shit on their website.
Plans are to use ProxMox VE for HA cluster for all the servers.
NAS in RAID-10 array (multiple) on 10GbE backbone.
10GbE PCi-e add-on cards for the servers 10Gbe interconnect 10Gbe on NAS servers.
1Gbe switching for local data.
ISCSI storage from one of the NAS servers to attach to a Windows VM for all Data storage.
NFS Storage pool for the HA ProxMox server cluster. This would ride on the 10Gbe backbone network.
Ofcourse. All iSCSI traffic & data traffic would be on seperate VLAN - Which already is.
Any server suggestions or NAS/SAN suggestions?
I've even pondered the thought of InfiniBand (Direct connect to servers)Dell, HP, and Supermicro are really the only ones I would look at. Lenovo has had some questionable practices over the past year that make me shy away from them (they are 100% Lenovo now there is nothing IBM about them). Don't do Cisco you are going to pay a lot of money for things that you can get for less somewhere else.
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How much storage do you have? It would probably be less expensive and more reliable to build the storage in your new servers and use the StarWinds vSAN to turn it into shared storage.
Any reason you are going with ProxMox over XenServer?
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I have no experience with the Oracle Sunfire servers so someone else will have to comment on those.
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Get away from the idea that you want 1U and use NAS
you add a failure point that way...
As @coliver stated, you can possibly have lower costs by having internal storage.
Look at xByte for boxes too.
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Dell PowerEdge 710 Rack
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@gjacobse said:
Get away from the idea that you want 1U and use NAS
you add a failure point that way...
As @coliver stated, you can possibly have lower costs by having internal storage.
Look at xByte for boxes too.
Why immediately jump to a NAS?
It sounds as if he need compute power and storage.
I'd look at a 2U server, @ryan-from-xbyte can help find you some great units.
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Thanks for your comments and replies!
I'll look into HP servers before DELL. It concerns me about their price/performance now as I feel their quality has deteriorated over the years. Supermicro I know is always a good choice, as I've used them for years. its just the time to configure and build the whitelabel machines and then also the warranty/support. Comes at a cost.
Anytime we have a minute of downtime. I have COO & CEO breathing down my neck screaming.
ProxMox reason: It has straight KVM or OpenVZ support. also has enterprise features. Why pay more for Citrix Xen Server when its complete BULLSHIT in my eyes. Sorry.. I dont see the benefits of Citrix Xen Server (KVM based).
No true experience with VMware eSXI.
Right now we have 6TB of storage in RAID-10 Array. But gets depleted pretty quickly. Using right about 2TB of that for company storage and user data. Working to re-work the storage needs and just use iSCSI LUN and attach to Windows Server 2008.
Right now the DATA Storage is piped through Citrix Xen Server in means of ISCSI LUN and mapped as a Drive associated to the VM. This was not smart on my behalf years ago. I would of been better to just directly attach a LUN right to Windows server using the ISCSI initiator. Everything was a blur 2 years ago when was scrambling to put the build together at the time.
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Ok
Right now we have:
1 - Primary Domain Controller
5 - Terminal Servers (Load balanced with 2X Application server)
1 - Terminal server for Remote Users
1 - Terminal server for Application gateway Server & HTTP web (2X server)We host all customer software internally on the servers and our employee's launch it via 2X Wrapper. This helps with the management aspect. Rather than having to goto each individual workstation and install and setup different customer software or application. As there is quite a bit of employee turn-over; or employee's will get shifted to different accounts; which may be a different software application.
100% Could cut down the number of Virtualized Servers if we had beefier hardware to support the workload.
I Enjoy the idea of servers in HA Cluster and centralized storage.
1 server happens to go down for whatever reason, running VM's migrate to another Node or spare. Data is centralized and can be easily backed-up or moved around.
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Welcome to the community, by the way!
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Just my two cents; look into 2U servers if you have the space or the option. I find they run much quieter, cooler and (generalization of the day) for longer without hardware issue. Something to be said for having more room for heat sinks and larger fans.
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@ntoxicator said:
Thanks for your comments and replies!
I'll look into HP servers before DELL. It concerns me about their price/performance now as I feel their quality has deteriorated over the years. Supermicro I know is always a good choice, as I've used them for years. its just the time to configure and build the whitelabel machines and then also the warranty/support. Comes at a cost.
You may be surprised. Look at XByte they have refurbished servers at an amazing quality/price ratio. Plus they do support.
ProxMox reason: It has straight KVM or OpenVZ support. also has enterprise features. Why pay more for Citrix Xen Server when its complete BULLSHIT in my eyes. Sorry.. I dont see the benefits of Citrix Xen Server (KVM based).
XenServer is not KVM based. It uses the Xen hypervisor and has been the contender for second place in the enterprise market for a significant amount of time. It run the majority of the cloud platforms on the market today. XenServer is just a distribution of this hypervisor with some built in tools. I would suggest you take another look at it really worth the time to learn and use.
No true experience with VMware eSXI.
That's alright I wouldn't recommend it unless you had a lot of spare cash to burn.
Right now we have 6TB of storage in RAID-10 Array. But gets depleted pretty quickly. Using right about 2TB of that for company storage and user data. Working to re-work the storage needs and just use iSCSI LUN and attach to Windows Server 2008.
Don't do this... this seems like a bad idea the Windows iSCSI implementation is terrible and you will have tons of issues associated with it.
Right now the DATA Storage is piped through Citrix Xen Server in means of ISCSI LUN and mapped as a Drive associated to the VM. This was not smart on my behalf years ago. I would of been better to just directly attach a LUN right to Windows server using the ISCSI initiator. Everything was a blur 2 years ago when was scrambling to put the build together at the time.
Get rid of iSCSI if you can it adds an additional point of complexity that isn't needed.. You don't have that much data and could easily look at moving this storage locally.
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@ntoxicator said:
Ok
Right now we have:
1 - Primary Domain Controller
5 - Terminal Servers (Load balanced with 2X Application server)
1 - Terminal server for Remote Users
1 - Terminal server for Application gateway Server & HTTP web (2X server)We host all customer software internally on the servers and our employee's launch it via 2X Wrapper. This helps with the management aspect. Rather than having to goto each individual workstation and install and setup different customer software or application. As there is quite a bit of employee turn-over; or employee's will get shifted to different accounts; which may be a different software application.
100% Could cut down the number of Virtualized Servers if we had beefier hardware to support the workload.
I Enjoy the idea of servers in HA Cluster and centralized storage.
1 server happens to go down for whatever reason, running VM's migrate to another Node or spare. Data is centralized and can be easily backed-up or moved around.
You can get these features with local storage. What happens when you storage system goes down? Do you have a redundant system?
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@ntoxicator said:
ProxMox reason: It has straight KVM or OpenVZ support. also has enterprise features. Why pay more for Citrix Xen Server when its complete BULLSHIT in my eyes. Sorry.. I dont see the benefits of Citrix Xen Server (KVM based).
Xen is completely free, you'd be paying to have them give you support when you need it, not for the software....
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@ntoxicator said:
I'm 100% fanboy of the Oracle SunFire servers. Anyone have opinions?
Preaching@Choir. Absolutely love Sun gear. We have five SunFires here ourselves (at @ntg.) Oracle makes some of the best servers in the world. When I was managing IT for IBM we had SunFires pretty much everywhere that something was critical (and whiteboxes where it wasn't.) Our division at IBM was the one physically making the SunFires, which was pretty cool.
I've dealt with more than 40,000 SunFires in my day. Some of the best servers ever.
These days, though, Oracle is really focused on their Sparc lines (my favourite) and if you are not using Sparc you might not get the value from them that you would hope. Well worth considering, but Dell, HP and SuperMicro are the big players here today.
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@ntoxicator All current enterprise Hypervisors are free. If you're spending money it probably is for support.
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@ntoxicator said:
Thanks for your comments and replies!
I'll look into HP servers before DELL. It concerns me about their price/performance now as I feel their quality has deteriorated over the years. Supermicro I know is always a good choice, as I've used them for years. its just the time to configure and build the whitelabel machines and then also the warranty/support. Comes at a cost.
Anytime we have a minute of downtime. I have COO & CEO breathing down my neck screaming.
ProxMox reason: It has straight KVM or OpenVZ support. also has enterprise features. Why pay more for Citrix Xen Server when its complete BULLSHIT in my eyes. Sorry.. I dont see the benefits of Citrix Xen Server (KVM based).
No true experience with VMware eSXI.
Right now we have 6TB of storage in RAID-10 Array. But gets depleted pretty quickly. Using right about 2TB of that for company storage and user data. Working to re-work the storage needs and just use iSCSI LUN and attach to Windows Server 2008.
Right now the DATA Storage is piped through Citrix Xen Server in means of ISCSI LUN and mapped as a Drive associated to the VM. This was not smart on my behalf years ago. I would of been better to just directly attach a LUN right to Windows server using the ISCSI initiator. Everything was a blur 2 years ago when was scrambling to put the build together at the time.
As @coliver said, XenServer is free and based on Xen not KVM. Proxmox also isn't supporting OpenVZ any longer, it's now LXC. Just for fun the other day I set up a Proxmox test environment and it was really slow compared to straight CentOS 7 with KVM. If you're set on KVM, I wouldn't use Proxmox, as you can script essentially everything it does. You can use Virt-Manager to control it if you don't want to do CLI.
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@ntoxicator said:
Also looking at the LENOVO System X (IBM Line) of servers.
The one vendor I would totally avoid. Literally nothing would make me consider ever doing business with them. They are outright crooks.
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@johnhooks said:
As @coliver said, XenServer is free and based on Xen not KVM. Proxmox also isn't supporting OpenVZ any longer, it's now LXC. Just for fun the other day I set up a Proxmox test environment and it was really slow compared to straight CentOS 7 with KVM. If you're set on KVM, I wouldn't use Proxmox, as you can script essentially everything it does. You can use Virt-Manager to control it if you don't want to do CLI.
Honestly, if you are interested in KVM you need to be looking at Scale. Fully managed KVM environment with HA features all baked in and high performance clustered storage all baked in. True HA top to bottom (except for the app level, that's still up to you) with full support.
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Thank you for info.
I'll take another look at Xen Server. As I've used 6.0 and 6.1. Also helped maintain a smaller datacenter that supported ~200 users in a healthcare facility.
Again. We Presently have one(1) Supermicro server running Xen Server 6.0 and hosting the primary Domain Controller VM. But the primary of the data. 2TB Worth of data is connected to Xen Server through iSCSI LUN and then a drive attached to the Virtual machine through Xen Server.
issue: Looking to Migrate this domain controller to a more potent server. How though with 2TB of data? As its mapped through Citrix Xen server. So if I was to clone the VM disk and migrate to ProxMox - i cannot necessarily re-attach the iSCSI LUN back to the same server. Now, if we stayed on Citrix - moved to larger server. I cloned the Operating System disk. Migrated. And then re-attached the same iSCSI LUN and setup back to new node; that could probably work
I just seen as Windows iSCSI initiator working much better; more manageable and not limited.
Would I rather use NFS over iSCSI? Absolutely..
UPDATE: Yes, we're currently using Xen Server FREE edition. Works fine. I've used the Xen Server Enterprise at the data center I helped manage. It was better, although it had its own issues.
I personally just find ProxMox better features over Citrix Xen Server (free edition)
Maybe its my background with hosting game servers and that experience as well? As I'm also versed with SolusVM
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@ntoxicator said:
However, CISCO has their servers now.... But -- this brings back very bad memories for TAC Support and the website needs to die. Cant find shit on their website.
I've used Cisco and I considered them a viable enterprise player. One of the best engineers that I know, @John-Nicholson swears by them. I've had less than stellar experiences. Never had them be bad, just failing to be as good as other options. Too costly and complicated, not enough value. Just not Cisco's wheelhouse.
