Why Hyperconverged For Small Business

scottalanmiller

@pete-s said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

@woodbutcher said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

Is there truly a case for a hyperconverged infrastructure for a small business?

Not if you're looking for high availability.

Most small businesses lacks a lot of things to get a fault-tolerant high availability system. You need to look beyond the servers themselves because there are a lot of dependencies that also needs to be highly available. Like network, power, cooling etc.

Look at a commercial datacenter. It's usually redundant all the way through, from one end to the other.

Pete is spot on. The ability to do full HA by a company under 1,000 employees is nearly impossible and almost never valuable. The cost to actually do it is so absurd. But if you move to hosted, it can cost almost nothing. We have HA on things for pennies. The HA discussion is a big piece driving the ERP purchasing decision. WHoever chooses the ERP is the core decision maker about HA. Sounds like they likely decided HA was pretty far from a priority (which is reasonably accurate.)

1337

@scottalanmiller said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

@woodbutcher said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

The concern with that approach would be minimizing data loss. Primarily transactions in the ERP, though the volume of these transactions is low relative to other companies. But I would guess with proper backups at the DB level, this could be minimized as well if they had to recover via a backup.

Unless you have DB level HA, nothing in your current set up (or in the HA setup!!!) will protect against transactional losses. Only proper database protection does that and nothing being discussed here touches on that.

I know you know Scott, but it bears repeating how HA usually works in pool/cluster of virtualized hosts.

The hosts in a HA cluster have storage in common but not much else.

When a host dies all data in each VM that has not been saved to disk (and replicated) is lost.

When the other hosts detects that one host is dead, all VMs that were running will now start and boot up again on other hosts. Since the storage is shared the VMs will have the same files as the ones that died.

The effect for the VM, and availability of the service the VM provided, will be about the same as killing the power to a server mid-operation and then power it up again.

That why it won't work reliably without transaction loss on a database.

scottalanmiller

@pete-s said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

@scottalanmiller said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

@woodbutcher said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

The concern with that approach would be minimizing data loss. Primarily transactions in the ERP, though the volume of these transactions is low relative to other companies. But I would guess with proper backups at the DB level, this could be minimized as well if they had to recover via a backup.

Unless you have DB level HA, nothing in your current set up (or in the HA setup!!!) will protect against transactional losses. Only proper database protection does that and nothing being discussed here touches on that.

I know you know Scott, but it bears repeating how HA usually works in pool/cluster of virtualized hosts.

The hosts in a HA cluster have storage in common but not much else.

When a host dies all data in each VM that has not been saved to disk (and replicated) is lost.

When the other hosts detects that one host is dead, all VMs that were running will now start and boot up again on other hosts. Since the storage is shared the VMs will have the same files as the ones that died.

The effect for the VM, and availability of the service the VM provided, will be about the same as killing the power to a server mid-operation and then power it up again.

That why it won't work reliably without transaction loss on a database.

Right. In that sense we would call it a "crash consistent HA". Basically HA where the recovery is lightning fast, but only to a crash consistent level. Perfect for say a static website but bad for a database.

Dashrender

I agree with everyone else here - That's a setup that's overkill in hardware already (most likely) and potentially underkill in hypervisor (assuming ESXi Essentials).

Today you'd likely be fine with a single host running ProxMox, Xen or KVM and good backups.

The question is - how much down time can the company really handle?
When I first started here, I was told we could handle 7+ days of down time (we do everything on paper). At this point we're shooting for well under 1 business day. Of course since we using SaaS as our primary app is web based - if our ISP goes out - we are just hostage until that gets fixed... we're currently investigating cellular data backup.

woodbutcher

@scottalanmiller

Why three? The "MSP" is trying to force these guys to purchase a solution from Scale Computing. As I understand it, they require three hosts. In any case, I feel this MSP is providing a solution that the MSP wants and is ignoring any and all business needs of their customer.

woodbutcher

Thanks to all for the feedback. Some of these sales-only MSP organizations are making a mess of our industry. They are taking advantage of small companies and doing the exact opposite of what they say they are doing.

These same clowns are telling us you only need 16 cores worth of Server 2022 Datacenter to properly license these 3 proposed hosts. MS requires a min of 16 per host even if you only have 8 cores. Even if they have a license to re-allocate, they are still short.

They are just as bad at SQL licensing telling us you only need 2 cores to license a VM.

Unfortunately I was hired on after this process started and now have to try and unwind this mess before the purchase goes through. I worry I may be too late though.

I agree financially and technically, the single host approach is what makes sense here. I just have to put in the work to convince my new team that they have been fed a bunch of crap.

Dashrender

@woodbutcher said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

@scottalanmiller

Why three? The "MSP" is trying to force these guys to purchase a solution from Scale Computing. As I understand it, they require three hosts. In any case, I feel this MSP is providing a solution that the MSP wants and is ignoring any and all business needs of their customer.

Ding Ding Ding...

scottalanmiller

@woodbutcher said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

@scottalanmiller

Why three? The "MSP" is trying to force these guys to purchase a solution from Scale Computing. As I understand it, they require three hosts. In any case, I feel this MSP is providing a solution that the MSP wants and is ignoring any and all business needs of their customer.

THat's because it isn't an MSP, that's a VAR. Scale is great, I mean truly fantastic. But doesn't apply to anything you are describing.

So the REAL question is, WHY do you have someone allowed to talk to your staff, who is lying about being an MSP, and is intentionally proposing solutions that have no benefit to your company?

This isn't just totally horrible business practice, it's also a security issue.

ANY true MSP would start with "what are your requirements" and then work out "how we best meet your needs." From your description, none of that has been done yet. Which means, by definition, no IT work has been done. The people claiming to be an MSP are obviously (must be, there's no way around it) sales people, not IT people.

THey are representing the vendor, not representing you. That defines them as sales people. IT by definition represents the business (you.) So you know that they aren't IT. The business knows that they aren't IT. ITs job would be to protect the business from corrupt sales people trying to trick them, not to be the ones tricking them.

scottalanmiller

@woodbutcher said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

Some of these sales-only MSP organizations

You can combat this practice by not allowing themselves to claim to be an MSP. I do this all the time "Our MSP.." Stop, you admitted they aren't an MSP, call them a VAR.

It helps, a lot. Forcing people to stop repeating a lie, even if it is just a word, changes how the brain works. It's easy to act like someone claiming to be an MSP should be listened to. It's hard to act like a greasy sales person should be giving advice. Allowing your own team to repeat the word MSP when you know they aren't an MSP (true MSP doesn't sell, VARs sell, it's black and white) empowers them to trick your staff.

scottalanmiller

@woodbutcher said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

They are just as bad at SQL licensing telling us you only need 2 cores to license a VM.

ACtually taht part is generally correct.

scottalanmiller

@woodbutcher said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

Unfortunately I was hired on after this process started and now have to try and unwind this mess before the purchase goes through. I worry I may be too late though.

Easy to unwind. It's an ethics breach and any contract with them would be in bad faith. Offer to let them just walk away before you sue.

As they are sales people claiming to be IT, you have zero responsibility to follow through in paying for any solution that they sold you under that false pretense.

scottalanmiller

@woodbutcher said in Why Hyperconverged For Small Business:

I agree financially and technically, the single host approach is what makes sense here. I just have to put in the work to convince my new team that they have been fed a bunch of crap.

My entire YouTube channel is dedicated to that information.