Hardware refresh review
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@hobbit666 said in Hardware refresh review:
So I want to do my own tests and come up with an alternative (maybe 2, Scale and a Home build with Xen7 and some VSAN type thingy). But before I recommend I need to know what I need in power
There is already two leaps here. One by the vendor to screw over the company, the second is that you jumped to HA when the vendor didn't propose one. So you are fighting multiple battles, none of which have a foundation in goals.
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Start with:
- Why are we doing this at all?
- What are the goals that we want to meet? What matters to us?
- Don't define anything like "we need HA", define "HA is worth X dollars to us".
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You need to know the capacity, performance and reliability of the system. What are the needs today, what are the needs for at least six months.
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You need to sit down with management and have a base talk about business fundamentals. How did a non-technical sales guy who is clearly out to undermine your business get in the door to talk to anyone? Don't just approach this as a business problem (keep it non-technical) but also as a security one - the enemy was just brought in to give advice!!
Print these out and make them read them:
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2011/07/never-get-advice-from-a-reseller-or-vendor/
http://www.smbitjournal.com/2016/06/buyers-and-sellers-agents-in-it/ -
@scottalanmiller said in Hardware refresh review:
First:
What is driving you to want to purchase the server? How did you decide to purchase one in the first place?
That is where you start, even that many people miss.
Over the last year we have added 12 sites to our list and the increase of users has made the Dynamics GP/SQL run a bit slower. i.e. doing sales transactions is taking longer for the "system" to process.
Also the hardware is now 5 years old so warranty will be coming up soon. -
@scottalanmiller said in Hardware refresh review:
There is already two leaps here. One by the vendor to screw over the company, the second is that you jumped to HA when the vendor didn't propose one. So you are fighting multiple battles, none of which have a foundation in goals.
This I kind of agree on. Do we need it? Management and the IT Manager would say yes.
I would say we need to recover in under an hour. So HA might be the best fit to get to that. -
@scottalanmiller said in Hardware refresh review:
You need to know the capacity, performance and reliability of the system. What are the needs today, what are the needs for at least six months.
This is more what I want. How do I get this info from my current system? How is it preforming?
I can get capacity info easy, just look at disks size and usage.As a growth estimate I would just use how we have grown over the last 2-3 years as we expect to grow at the same rate if not a bit lower.
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@hobbit666 said in Hardware refresh review:
@scottalanmiller said in Hardware refresh review:
First:
What is driving you to want to purchase the server? How did you decide to purchase one in the first place?
That is where you start, even that many people miss.
Over the last year we have added 12 sites to our list and the increase of users has made the Dynamics GP/SQL run a bit slower. i.e. doing sales transactions is taking longer for the "system" to process.
Also the hardware is now 5 years old so warranty will be coming up soon.This answers "why we need more capacity than we currently have and we need a support plan." But question that decision as well: do you need the things that run there (probably, but think about it.) Then ask "what is the best way to run those applications?" Maybe a server is the answer, but don't just assume.
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@hobbit666 said in Hardware refresh review:
@scottalanmiller said in Hardware refresh review:
There is already two leaps here. One by the vendor to screw over the company, the second is that you jumped to HA when the vendor didn't propose one. So you are fighting multiple battles, none of which have a foundation in goals.
This I kind of agree on. Do we need it? Management and the IT Manager would say yes.
I would say we need to recover in under an hour. So HA might be the best fit to get to that.You NEVER have an answer of "how quickly must we recover", ever. The answer is always in dollars per minute, always. Any other answer means the question was not understood.
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@hobbit666 said in Hardware refresh review:
This is more what I want. How do I get this info from my current system? How is it preforming?
I can get capacity info easy, just look at disks size and usage.Yup, something is making you feel that you need more power, use that. Also, tools like DPACK help a lot. What made the power of the past okay, but not today? What growth or change caused the performance issue? That should guide you as to your needs. Look at your historical RAM usage, that will tell you quite a bit about what RAM would be useful in the future. CPU is harder to estimate, but if you look at your capacity planning charts you should be able to glean info about "threadiness" and what CPU aspects would be likely beneficial.
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Also, even if you calculate the $ per minute and come up with an hour to be the answer, is that hour a total DR recover or an on site recover? Because that is a huge numerical difference.
A big scale cluster generally gets you the onsite easily, but not the offsite.
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@JaredBusch said in Hardware refresh review:
Also, even if you calculate the $ per minute and come up with an hour to be the answer, is that hour a total DR recover or an on site recover? Because that is a huge numerical difference.
A big scale cluster generally gets you the onsite easily, but not the offsite.
Right, you have to isolate all of those failures. And platform HA doesn't address software failures, LAN failures, WAN failures, site failures and so forth. So you have to say what the value of the platform failing or not failing is, not the value of the company or a "nothing fails" scenario.
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OK so i'm going to jump back completely. Approach this a bit different.
Instead of jumping straight to the "We need new Hardware" what can I do to review usage and resources and see if the SQL server (or any other server) just needs a bit more RAM or an extra CPU? Do the VM's have enough IOPS maybe?
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How you get your disk, CPU, and RAM current usage numbers depends on what platform you are on now.
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@hobbit666 said in Hardware refresh review:
OK so i'm going to jump back completely. Approach this a bit different.
Instead of jumping straight to the "We need new Hardware" what can I do to review usage and resources and see if the SQL server (or any other server) just needs a bit more RAM or an extra CPU? Do the VM's have enough IOPS maybe?
Get DPACK to see what you're currently using.
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@Dashrender said in Hardware refresh review:
Get DPACK to see what you're currently using.
Done a quick 24 hour run just now
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@hobbit666 said in Hardware refresh review:
@Dashrender said in Hardware refresh review:
Get DPACK to see what you're currently using.
Done a quick 24 hour run just now
Awesome.
