What Are You Doing Right Now
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@dafyre said:
In our case, the SAN fit the business goals perfectly.
This is where I disagree. Is saving money not a business goal? How can it not be in a business? Even a non-profit or a government can use the money for other things. Doing more good, paying more bonusses, whatever.
Did the SAN cost money? What did it add to make up for the extra money? Did you have huge scale and so the purpose of the SAN was to lower cost at scale and HA was something that you were doing either way? SAN cannot be select for the purpose of HA. It can be selected in situations where HA is needed, but SAN does not provide HA, it just doesn't always take it away.
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@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
OMG... I swear the people over there are freaking incompetent... the number of people on SW that just "fear" anything virtual, hosted or remote is crazy.
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1374462-starting-over-do-i-need-avtive-directory
It should be worth noting that "avoiding the MS train" is not a business decision. Yes you can build a comprable suite of tools completely open source and free, but how long will that take, and how much work to maintain in that fairly small environment? Would that choice help or hurt the businessbin the long run? Prepare proposals both ways, then let the management make that decision.
It can be done in less time, less resources, and less management. It's like people think you need to compile every program that you run in Linux and then manually patch upgrades in config files by comparing with diff.
The media has left those that have never touched Linux with this impression -
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@johnhooks said:
Buy a tower server, install a hypervisor, VMWare or HyperV, and install a server instance. Given the size of the business I reckon you can get away with a single server instance running; DHCP, DNS, AD, GP, WSUS, PS and FS. That is a lot of acronyms! Anyway, the central management of AD, GP and WSUS in particular will make your life a lot easier, no running around installing updates on every machine.
Wow.
Why wow? Assuming he is going to stick fully to Windows (VMWare should be dumped as an option) instead of going with a single instance, I'd use the license to create two VMs and split the load of those options between them.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
How does it not? The "SAN" I am talking about is an Active/Passive cluster so it is not an IPOD at the storage level. We already had the redundant servers, power, and network links. We didn't have to worry about "syncronizing" files across multiple servers and stuff like that since the SAN handled it for us.
It doesn't do it because you have that functionality already without a SAN. What did the SAN ADD. I'm not saying that the SAN took it away, just that it didn't add it. I can do this today without a SAN. So what did the SAN provide is the question.
I'm not saying that the SAN is an IPOD, I understand how it is used here. It's HA and does the job. I'm just wondering why the SAN was selected when you could do this for free without it.
We could have done file synchronization, or DFS, sure. But we had some major issues in the limited time we tried DFS, and we weren't going back to that. The File Synchronization would likely have worked as well, but at the time, that was not on our radar (we likely didn't think too long about it).
What we gained, though was the ability to live migrate VMware machines from one server to the others for maintenance that would have normally taken out 2/3s of our infrastructure otherwise. (Extended power outage in the main server room for instance). This was before Shared Nothing live migration was even a term.
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@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
Buy a tower server, install a hypervisor, VMWare or HyperV, and install a server instance. Given the size of the business I reckon you can get away with a single server instance running; DHCP, DNS, AD, GP, WSUS, PS and FS. That is a lot of acronyms! Anyway, the central management of AD, GP and WSUS in particular will make your life a lot easier, no running around installing updates on every machine.
Wow.
Why wow? Assuming he is going to stick fully to Windows (VMWare should be dumped as an option) instead of going with a single instance, I'd use the license to create two VMs and split the load of those options between them.
Wow because of VMWare and having all of that on the DC. He could split it, but that wasn't mentioned in that post.
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@dafyre said:
What we gained, though was the ability to live migrate VMware machines from one server to the others for maintenance that would have normally taken out 2/3s of our infrastructure otherwise. (Extended power outage in the main server room for instance). This was before Shared Nothing live migration was even a term.
Again, though, all things that have been available without a SAN. None of these are features that SAN provides. There are literally no features that come from SANs. SANs do not add features to your infrastructure, they just add storage consolidation which adds risks and overhead but can save money at massive scale. So they are always a tradeoff specifically against the things that you are stating as the business requirements.
Yes, that you are using VMware severally limits your options but there has always been VSAN (or VSA) before that from at least three vendors specifically for VMware plus the option of fixing the bigger picture of VMware to solve these problems without spending they money on a SAN.
My guess is that VMware was purchased via the same process of going through the sales people? With Xen, KVM or Hyper-V you can do all of this for even less with more features. I realize that this is not a new project and it is hard to know exactly what the options were at the time compared to what they are now and VMware was a very good option just a few years ago unlike today. But SAN has never been an enabling technology for any of this - it's just what the sales channels push because all of the money is there.
I know that we were doing SAN-less failovers like you describe for big medical customers in Texas by 2008 for free with all local storage. It's not a new thing. SANs use local storage to do this under the hood. So it always has to exist in servers before it does in SANs.
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@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
Buy a tower server, install a hypervisor, VMWare or HyperV, and install a server instance. Given the size of the business I reckon you can get away with a single server instance running; DHCP, DNS, AD, GP, WSUS, PS and FS. That is a lot of acronyms! Anyway, the central management of AD, GP and WSUS in particular will make your life a lot easier, no running around installing updates on every machine.
Wow.
Why wow? Assuming he is going to stick fully to Windows (VMWare should be dumped as an option) instead of going with a single instance, I'd use the license to create two VMs and split the load of those options between them.
Wow because of VMWare and having all of that on the DC. He could split it, but that wasn't mentioned in that post.
Might not have licenses to split it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
Buy a tower server, install a hypervisor, VMWare or HyperV, and install a server instance. Given the size of the business I reckon you can get away with a single server instance running; DHCP, DNS, AD, GP, WSUS, PS and FS. That is a lot of acronyms! Anyway, the central management of AD, GP and WSUS in particular will make your life a lot easier, no running around installing updates on every machine.
Wow.
Why wow? Assuming he is going to stick fully to Windows (VMWare should be dumped as an option) instead of going with a single instance, I'd use the license to create two VMs and split the load of those options between them.
Wow because of VMWare and having all of that on the DC. He could split it, but that wasn't mentioned in that post.
Might not have licenses to split it.
I thought it came with licenses for 2 VMs?
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@dafyre said:
We could have done file synchronization, or DFS, sure. But we had some major issues in the limited time we tried DFS, and we weren't going back to that.
DFS would be one approach but not what I was meaning to imply. I was still assuming using the hypervisor platform for failover and getting all of the features identical to how you have them today.
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@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
Buy a tower server, install a hypervisor, VMWare or HyperV, and install a server instance. Given the size of the business I reckon you can get away with a single server instance running; DHCP, DNS, AD, GP, WSUS, PS and FS. That is a lot of acronyms! Anyway, the central management of AD, GP and WSUS in particular will make your life a lot easier, no running around installing updates on every machine.
Wow.
Why wow? Assuming he is going to stick fully to Windows (VMWare should be dumped as an option) instead of going with a single instance, I'd use the license to create two VMs and split the load of those options between them.
Wow because of VMWare and having all of that on the DC. He could split it, but that wasn't mentioned in that post.
Might not have licenses to split it.
I thought it came with licenses for 2 VMs?
Two, yes, if he has Standard. I didn't read the thread to see.
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I am doing my daily routine of
- hoping I can find a deal for a 1-day pass to Universal Orlando
- checking the prices for Universal Orlando
- being disappointed there are no deals
What did they say about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results?????
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@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@johnhooks said:
@Dashrender said:
@johnhooks said:
Buy a tower server, install a hypervisor, VMWare or HyperV, and install a server instance. Given the size of the business I reckon you can get away with a single server instance running; DHCP, DNS, AD, GP, WSUS, PS and FS. That is a lot of acronyms! Anyway, the central management of AD, GP and WSUS in particular will make your life a lot easier, no running around installing updates on every machine.
Wow.
Why wow? Assuming he is going to stick fully to Windows (VMWare should be dumped as an option) instead of going with a single instance, I'd use the license to create two VMs and split the load of those options between them.
Wow because of VMWare and having all of that on the DC. He could split it, but that wasn't mentioned in that post.
Might not have licenses to split it.
I thought it came with licenses for 2 VMs?
Two, yes, if he has Standard. I didn't read the thread to see.
Ok. Ya I don't think it was mentioned.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
We could have done file synchronization, or DFS, sure. But we had some major issues in the limited time we tried DFS, and we weren't going back to that.
DFS would be one approach but not what I was meaning to imply. I was still assuming using the hypervisor platform for failover and getting all of the features identical to how you have them today.
lol. Today they have it easy. They use Scale Computing in a new primary DC with a UPS, 25kw generator for extended outages, and multiple paths back to campus network.
Edit: The new primary DC actually was a room that already existed on campus -- including the 25kw generator!
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@dafyre said:
lol. Today they have it easy. They use Scale Computing in a new primary DC with a UPS, 25kw generator for extended outages, and multiple paths back to campus network.
Much better approach. That Scale does this so well is a great example of how powerful the SAN-less approach is. Scale does this wonderfully.
In other news, we just learned that we are getting three more Scale nodes!! So excited.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
lol. Today they have it easy. They use Scale Computing in a new primary DC with a UPS, 25kw generator for extended outages, and multiple paths back to campus network.
Much better approach. That Scale does this so well is a great example of how powerful the SAN-less approach is. Scale does this wonderfully.
In other news, we just learned that we are getting three more Scale nodes!! So excited.
For lab or for production?
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@coliver said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
lol. Today they have it easy. They use Scale Computing in a new primary DC with a UPS, 25kw generator for extended outages, and multiple paths back to campus network.
Much better approach. That Scale does this so well is a great example of how powerful the SAN-less approach is. Scale does this wonderfully.
In other news, we just learned that we are getting three more Scale nodes!! So excited.
For lab or for production?
Lab. But a very production lab.
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I think at this point when we hit the datacenter we are looking at a baker's dozen lab servers. 6x Scale, 3x Dells, 3x HP Proliants and one Sparc that we have not bought yet but I am determined to get. Then at least four storage systems on top of that (Synology, ReadyNAS, Drobo and, we are told, an Exablox.)
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Watching 2 guys climb our tower to take down our old 5.8GHz Wireless T1 simualtor and put up our new Ubiquity 24 wireless bridge solution
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@jt1001001 said:
Watching 2 guys climb our tower to take down our old 5.8GHz Wireless T1 simualtor and put up our new Ubiquity 24 wireless bridge solution
nice. that is quite the upgrade.
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@scottalanmiller Did a 30 day demo of Exablox about 6 months ago. Was NOT impressed. Very slow throughput, management was I would call it sub-par at best. Was looking to use as a file share (NAS) and backup target, either primary backup storage or secondary. Now, admittedly, they did release their newer boxes about 2 months after our demo so may be worth a second look.
