How would you build this
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You are much more familiar with Hyper-v, if you are supporting this you might be better off.
Plus the other benefits of choice you mentioned.
Is this a super high performance application where it seems likely that then vendor will blame the hypervisor if there are problems?
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Personally I'd run it on my own KVM machine. That way I could add the upstream QEMU repos for exporting snapshots through libvirt. But then again I manage 12 KVM hosts so I'm probably a little partial.
I'm not surprised at only supporting RHEL. After it took over a month for CentOS to catch up to 7.3 I realized the merger didn't help any with releasing patches faster. I still use CentOS by default but I can understand where they are coming from, we have applications that are the same way.
Anyway I vote for using your own host and what you know best.
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@stacksofplates said in How would you build this:
Anyway I vote for using your own host and what you know best.
That would be my recommendation as well.
Just the fact that they're giving me supported options is a great thing, that already rules out many software products.
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An obvious question is... does the customer have any needs beyond this that might influence it?
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If we're talking a $10k solution, I would likely pick option one to simply avoid the finger pointing game and all of that.
If this were a $100k solution, I'd opt to take the 20% savings.
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@JaredBusch said in How would you build this:
@Tim_G said in How would you build this:
It sounds like the hardware will just be running one VM. Built-in back up on Hyper-V Server 2016 all the way via the host, no issues there if you can use block-level storage for your backups. It's so much easier and faster to backup and restore the VM as a whole anyways... no VM agent needed. Also, you get the option of "production" checkpoints (snapshots) on 2016. That's definitely noteworthy.
What specific features are you talking about here? I have Hyper-V 2016 server up in a lab environment but have yet to actually test anything.
I mentioned two in there. Windows Server Backup, and "Production Checkpoints".
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Ok if it is a Vm what kind of finger pointing could be there? I think about performance and special setups. Virtualization is expected to abstract hw. If the vm image format is convertible I don't see why hypervisor/hw should matter.
As first I could thick about performances, then guest agents not being available in vendor image, third strange network configs hard to be attained without kvm.
For sure centos+your hw (can you buy the same machine?) should be near 100% ok!
Other combinations should be checked for previous 3 points and if they are ok don't see any issue -
@scottalanmiller said in How would you build this:
An obvious question is... does the customer have any needs beyond this that might influence it?
Wait is it to be run for your business or for a customers of yours? If it was for internal usage my previous post still hold. Otherwise I think that keeping the default witha 3rd party is better. Can they understand where a real issue is in case of finger pointing?
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Beyond the aforementioned finger pointing, what prevents you from running the VM on your current virtual infrastructure w/o purchasing an additional server?
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@Danp said in How would you build this:
Beyond the aforementioned finger pointing, what prevents you from running the VM on your current virtual infrastructure w/o purchasing an additional server?
just the hypervisor I think
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@Danp said in How would you build this:
Beyond the aforementioned finger pointing, what prevents you from running the VM on your current virtual infrastructure w/o purchasing an additional server?
Current infrastructure or not is a separate discussion point, and not one I need to have here. I know what is where with current infrastructure and how much that will weigh into a decision.
This discussion is strictly regarding the information provided in the OP and follow up clarification posts.
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@Tim_G said in How would you build this:
@JaredBusch said in How would you build this:
@Tim_G said in How would you build this:
It sounds like the hardware will just be running one VM. Built-in back up on Hyper-V Server 2016 all the way via the host, no issues there if you can use block-level storage for your backups. It's so much easier and faster to backup and restore the VM as a whole anyways... no VM agent needed. Also, you get the option of "production" checkpoints (snapshots) on 2016. That's definitely noteworthy.
What specific features are you talking about here? I have Hyper-V 2016 server up in a lab environment but have yet to actually test anything.
I mentioned two in there. Windows Server Backup, and "Production Checkpoints".
I was not sure if those were that actual names of the features. I will have to check into them.
Obviously Windows Server Backup used to be a specific thing in full installs of Windows Server. Likewise, Checkpoints are a standard thing, but I have not heard about Production checkpoints.
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@JaredBusch said in How would you build this:
@Tim_G said in How would you build this:
@JaredBusch said in How would you build this:
@Tim_G said in How would you build this:
It sounds like the hardware will just be running one VM. Built-in back up on Hyper-V Server 2016 all the way via the host, no issues there if you can use block-level storage for your backups. It's so much easier and faster to backup and restore the VM as a whole anyways... no VM agent needed. Also, you get the option of "production" checkpoints (snapshots) on 2016. That's definitely noteworthy.
What specific features are you talking about here? I have Hyper-V 2016 server up in a lab environment but have yet to actually test anything.
I mentioned two in there. Windows Server Backup, and "Production Checkpoints".
I was not sure if those were that actual names of the features. I will have to check into them.
Obviously Windows Server Backup used to be a specific thing in full installs of Windows Server. Likewise, Checkpoints are a standard thing, but I have not heard about Production checkpoints.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/hyper-v-on-windows/user-guide/checkpoints
Windows 10 and Server 2016 Hyper-V
Standard Checkpoints -- takes a snapshot of the virtual machine and virtual machine memory state at the time the checkpoint is initiated. A snapshot is not a full backup and can cause data consistency issues with systems that replicate data between different nodes such as Active Directory.Production Checkpoints -- uses Volume Shadow Copy Service or File System Freeze on a Linux virtual machine to create a data-consistent backup of the virtual machine. No snapshot of the virtual machine memory state is taken.
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This is fairly low cost. Go with the vendor for the extra 20%. 2k isn't much. Should you save that now, and lose 'all' support, its only a few days of work on one issue, unsupported, perhaps less if you have to hire additional help, and that 2k is spent.
One place to point the fingers at - spend the 2k.
I'd make sure to have the support contract read and understood in detail to make sure that 2k actually gives me good support though.
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@black3dynamite said in How would you build this:
Production Checkpoints -- uses Volume Shadow Copy Service or File System Freeze on a Linux virtual machine to create a data-consistent backup of the virtual machine. No snapshot of the virtual machine memory state is taken.
always using these in my hyper-v
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Thanks for your comments all.
