Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?
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@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey what is your status on having potentially enough power for this? Is that a major issue, or the 10U rack space? I'm assuming that you have the capacity to physically plug it in?
Do you have any older gear that could be used to build a SAM-SD? By doing that maybe you could make this into a lab or testing environment or secondary production (treat it as a separate machine in the cluster) and provide storage in that way? That would make for a good learning project on the storage side.
Nope - We'd have to buy new equipment in order to be able to throw storage at this thing :-/...
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@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey what is your status on having potentially enough power for this? Is that a major issue, or the 10U rack space? I'm assuming that you have the capacity to physically plug it in?
Do you have any older gear that could be used to build a SAM-SD? By doing that maybe you could make this into a lab or testing environment or secondary production (treat it as a separate machine in the cluster) and provide storage in that way? That would make for a good learning project on the storage side.
Nope - We'd have to buy new equipment in order to be able to throw storage at this thing :-/...
A server with enough stuff to run a lab from Xbyte might cost less
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@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Jimmy9008 said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
Can you ask HPE if you can remove the kit list and just pick out your own that totals $60k? If its not useful to you, then what is the point.
My understanding is that the parts list was listed ahead of time, not a surprise. So, in theory, only people for whom a blade center with some blades in it was useful would have entered. While I'm no fan of blades, @PSX_Defector is right that lots of shops use them and would like more of them. There are people for whom this would fit their business use case and they would like to win it. The issue here, I think, is that the winner turned out to be someone for whom it did not apply and now that we are examining it, it's not useful to him.
Yep, I was ignorant of what I was signing up for. I just saw $60,000 worth of free stuff from HP and thought "Oh snap, that'd be awesome to win that!". If I had done my research and really looked at the equipment ahead of time, I would've realized that it wasn't a good fit for us
It happens, hard to resist free stuff. And the chances of winning are low.
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Building storage could make sense. If the goal is a lower cost of entry to good storage, you can get into it in the HPE world via the SAM-SD approach. For most things that you would do, all of the vendors (VMware, Xen) recommend NFS. Doing NFS on a SAM-SD is super simple. And while you are not looking at crazy high end storage with extreme reliability, you can get "quite reliable" for super cheap.
Taking that a step up, doing something like a Starwind storage cluster with two nodes to back everything would be more than twice as much, but not a tonne.
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@Shuey what hypervisors do you use?
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@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey what hypervisors do you use?
ESXi 6
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@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey what hypervisors do you use?
ESXi 6
Then NFS storage will work very well.
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@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey what hypervisors do you use?
ESXi 6
Then NFS storage will work very well.
What's wrong with DAS?
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So the good options are....
If you want high availability from your storage, which doesn't make a lot of sense since you have only one blade chassis, so no failover should it have any issue, you would likely get an HA SAN which would either be something like a 3PAR or something like a dual Proliant Starwind cluster. @KOOLER
If you don't want high availability, but are just going to add reasonable low cost storage to make the blades have some place to store VMs, then a single Proliant based SAM-SD running CentOS or FreeBSD is perfect.
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@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey what hypervisors do you use?
ESXi 6
Then NFS storage will work very well.
What's wrong with DAS?
Can you use DAS with a blade server? Most often you cannot. But I don't know this model for sure.
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@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey what hypervisors do you use?
ESXi 6
Then NFS storage will work very well.
What's wrong with DAS?
Can you use DAS with a blade server? Most often you cannot. But I don't know this model for sure.
Sorry, I got side-tracked. I meant for our existing ESXi hosts. You told me that our existing DAS (MSA60 on each host) should be thrown out, but the hosts themselves don't have enough drive bays for internal storage. When I asked you for info about "new" storage earlier, I was talking in terms of our existing VMware infrastructure (because remember we had that near disaster when one of the MSA's suddenly wasn't visible at boot?)
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@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey what hypervisors do you use?
ESXi 6
Then NFS storage will work very well.
What's wrong with DAS?
Can you use DAS with a blade server? Most often you cannot. But I don't know this model for sure.
Sorry, I got side-tracked. I meant for our existing ESXi hosts. You told me that our existing DAS (MSA60 on each host) should be thrown out, but the hosts themselves don't have enough drive bays for internal storage. When I asked you for info about "new" storage earlier, I was talking in terms of our existing VMware infrastructure (because remember we had that near disaster when one of the MSA's suddenly wasn't visible at boot?)
Ah, then you should replace the servers with proper ones. Adding an MSA to an old server is throwing good money after bad (sunk cost fallacy) in nearly all cases. Rather than spending money to support a series of bad decisions, the best option is normally to fix the original bad decision - in this case someone failing to spec the servers before purchase. If you check, chances are you can get the right servers more cheaply than you can keep external storage on them. Having the MSA attached to a single server basically doubles the cost of the server while adding complexity, bottlenecks, power consumption and risk.
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The biggest problem that you face there is going to be politics internally. Why were those servers purchased, why are there MSAs now, why weren't the servers fixed when they realized that they had the wrong ones, etc. So the logical and financial factors might not help here. In which case, there isn't much to go on for advice. I can tell you what "can" be done, and I can tell you what makes business sense. But if there is an irrational element, you might be stuck doing "whatever that element tells you to do."
Given that having one to one DAS just because a server is improperly purchased is irrational, we can't know from that if having a new MSA, a better device, a lesser device, support on the existing device or whatever will support the goal of the earlier irrationality. If that makes sense.
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Assuming HA isn't needed, you might be able to migrate all of your work loads from those two servers onto a single new server with DAS.
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@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@Shuey what hypervisors do you use?
ESXi 6
Then NFS storage will work very well.
What's wrong with DAS?
Can you use DAS with a blade server? Most often you cannot. But I don't know this model for sure.
Sorry, I got side-tracked. I meant for our existing ESXi hosts. You told me that our existing DAS (MSA60 on each host) should be thrown out, but the hosts themselves don't have enough drive bays for internal storage. When I asked you for info about "new" storage earlier, I was talking in terms of our existing VMware infrastructure (because remember we had that near disaster when one of the MSA's suddenly wasn't visible at boot?)
Someone should also mention that DAS doesn't have to be inside the same chassis as the server. You can but a disk shelf and connect it to a RAID controller inside the server and it's still considered DAS.
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@Dashrender said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
Assuming HA isn't needed, you might be able to migrate all of your work loads from those two servers onto a single new server with DAS.
You mean local storage?
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@Dashrender said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
Someone should also mention that DAS doesn't have to be inside the same chassis as the server. You can but a disk shelf and connect it to a RAID controller inside the server and it's still considered DAS.
Local Storage = Inside the Chassis
DAS = Outside the Chassis, but directly attached -
MSA60 is a DAS (external SAS attached disk array) not a server.
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@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
MSA60 is a DAS (external SAS attached disk array) not a server.
OH.. thanks didn't know that.
Then... what's the problem? Does the MSA60 have a flaw causing issues? -
@Dashrender said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:
MSA60 is a DAS (external SAS attached disk array) not a server.
OH.. thanks didn't know that.
Then... what's the problem? Does the MSA60 have a flaw causing issues?One weekend when Hurricane Matthew was headed our way, we shut down all equipment for 2 days. When I came back in to power everything up, one of the MSAs that we have hooked up to one of our VM hosts was no longer recognized as having a logical drive. Scott was saying that we should get rid of them because they're old and no longer under support contract. They really shouldn't be part of this thread because we won't be connecting them to the new equipment (which we likely won't be getting now because I told HP that it's not a good fit for our environment). They're going to call me about a possible consolation prize and pick a new winner for the main package that we've all been conversing about.
