ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload
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@donaldlandru said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
My next biggest concern, like any technology, is how do I get there from here. I have enough budget for a storage node, and we are going to run out of space within the next 60 days. I do not have, and will not receive additional funding this year for new servers. So some form of "in-place" style of upgrade has to occur. Obviously, this is a server down, convert vm bring it back up type of process that has an unknown LoE.
So when someone says "You will not get more funding" you need to reply "You will not get more IT for no spend". Apply quota's to the file servers, implement aggressive archiving cut back vCPU and memory allocations so your cluster can fail over, quota mailboxes on Exchange and in general "enforce" their "no new budget policy". Turn on FSRM reporting and post reports that show who's using the most space (Dump similar reports from Exchange). Don't let things hit a wall and crash, start putting the breaks on growth. IT is not a magyver episode where your expected to conjure IOPS and capacity and RAM from thin air.
Trying to not paint a picture of a rock and a hard place, but realistically where else am I at right now?
Your not between a rock and a hard place they are. Follow the rules above, and they will either find you capital to invest in so they can continue to use more storage and compute, or they will agree that its not worth the spend. THIS IS NOT YOUR PROBLEM. Your problem is to quantify what it will cost to deliver x and deploy if funded. It is not your job to be given an arbitrary budget and produce y. I remember when I realized this, and my job became a lot more Zen like. "Do what you say you will do" was my old office motto. Because of that people said no a hell of a lot.
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@scottalanmiller You say free storage migrations?
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@scottalanmiller said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@donaldlandru Cuts licensing for VSAN in half (single CPU)
Can you fill in the background on this comment for the rest of us?
He said he only had single sockets deployed on one of his clusters. VSAN is licensed by socket (well, among other options but this would be the most common in his case)
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@bhershen said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
Hi Scott,
Donald mentioned SM and referenced generic ZFS (could be Oracle, OpenIndiana, FreeBSD, etc.) solutions which have uncoordinated HW, SW and support. Nexenta is packaged to compete with EMC, NetApp, etc. as primary storage in the Commercial market.
If you would like to get an overview, please feel free to ping me.
Best.Weird I've seen it packaged as software only (as a virtual NAS piece to run on top of HCI).
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@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@bhershen said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
Hi Scott,
Donald mentioned SM and referenced generic ZFS (could be Oracle, OpenIndiana, FreeBSD, etc.) solutions which have uncoordinated HW, SW and support. Nexenta is packaged to compete with EMC, NetApp, etc. as primary storage in the Commercial market.
If you would like to get an overview, please feel free to ping me.
Best.Weird I've seen it packaged as software only (as a virtual NAS piece to run on top of HCI).
Yes, for a long time that was all that they had, I'm pretty sure. Maybe they phased that out as I could imagine that it was difficult to support and not a big money maker while the appliances were a clearer product line.
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@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@scottalanmiller said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@donaldlandru Cuts licensing for VSAN in half (single CPU)
Can you fill in the background on this comment for the rest of us?
He said he only had single sockets deployed on one of his clusters. VSAN is licensed by socket (well, among other options but this would be the most common in his case)
Oh okay, cool. I figured but wanted to be sure. Doesn't that cause VSAN some license disparity with Essentials Plus users, but line up well with Standard users?
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@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@scottalanmiller You say free storage migrations?
I just saw that last night
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@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
Your not between a rock and a hard place they are. Follow the rules above, and they will either find you capital to invest in so they can continue to use more storage and compute, or they will agree that its not worth the spend. THIS IS NOT YOUR PROBLEM.
This can't be overstated. Do the best that you can, of course, but don't feel that you have to deliver the impossible. If that were really the case, every business would require that all IT run on zero budget.
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@scottalanmiller said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@scottalanmiller said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@donaldlandru Cuts licensing for VSAN in half (single CPU)
Can you fill in the background on this comment for the rest of us?
He said he only had single sockets deployed on one of his clusters. VSAN is licensed by socket (well, among other options but this would be the most common in his case)
Oh okay, cool. I figured but wanted to be sure. Doesn't that cause VSAN some license disparity with Essentials Plus users, but line up well with Standard users?
Actually it works fine with essentials plus (i've deployed it). Not VSAN includes a vDS license so you'll get that and NIOC thrown in with it.
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@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@scottalanmiller said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@scottalanmiller said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@donaldlandru Cuts licensing for VSAN in half (single CPU)
Can you fill in the background on this comment for the rest of us?
He said he only had single sockets deployed on one of his clusters. VSAN is licensed by socket (well, among other options but this would be the most common in his case)
Oh okay, cool. I figured but wanted to be sure. Doesn't that cause VSAN some license disparity with Essentials Plus users, but line up well with Standard users?
Actually it works fine with essentials plus (i've deployed it). Not VSAN includes a vDS license so you'll get that and NIOC thrown in with it.
Oh I know it works. I meant if you get single socket servers you pay for double the EP license, but VSAN you only pay for what you use.
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@donaldlandru said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@scottalanmiller said:
@donaldlandru said:
Back to the original requirements list. HA and FT are not listed as needed for the development environment. This conversation went sideways when we started digging into the operations side (where there should be HA) and I have a weak point, the storage.
Okay, so we are looking exclusively at the non-production side?
But production completely lacks HA today, it should be a different thread, but your "actions" say you dont need HA in production even if you feel that you do. Either what you have today isn't good enough and has to be replaced there, or HA isn't needed since you've happily been without it for so long. This can't be overlooked - you are stuck with either falling short of a need or not being clear on the needs for production.
Ahh -- there is the detail I missed. Just re-read my post and that doesn't make this clear. Yes, the discussion was supposed to pertain to the non-production side. My apologies.
I agree we do lack true HA in the production side as there is a single weak link (one storage array), the solution here depends on our move to Office 365 as that would take most of the operations load off of the network and change the requirements completely.
We have qasi-HA with the current solution, but now based on new enlightenment I would agree it is not fully HA.
To be clear, Exchange (2010 on) shouldn't be putting that much load. What could/can happen is your arbitraging DiskIO for CPU (CPU threads waiting on disk IO) and Memory (cache). If your running cached mode for your users a single reasonably sized Exchange server can serve thousands of users....
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The way I look at it is you can still "Expand in place" buy buying VSAN licenses later.
I had one customer start with 3 single socket CPU's on essentials plus (needed to run 7 VM's) only started with a single disk group in each server with only 1 cache device and 2 capacity devices. They were growing show and quickly (startup). By the end of the year they had expanded to 4 nodes, doubled the CPU's, added more disk groups, increased cache sizes and were running 100+ VM's. The nice thing was they wanted nothing along the way, and as they were using SuperMicro they could buy enterprise flash at commodity prices so flash went from being $2.50 to ~$1 a GB over the course of working with them. Last I checked its at ~52 cents per GB for samsung capacity grade flash, so over a 3 year period the system became cheaper to expand (and they could expand it with single drives if they wanted, rather than needing a full raid group).In an era of 18 Core processors, going single proc isn't actually that limiting. Can still run a TB of RAM on some platforms as crazy as that sounds...
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@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
In an era of 18 Core processors, going single proc isn't actually that limiting. Can still run a TB of RAM on some platforms as crazy as that sounds...
I agree, as do a lot of box vendors. Single proc servers should be quite standard. A huge Xeon or Opteron will run insane loads. And that's before we look at Sparc or Power that have come single socket for forever for exactly that reason. We just need licensing to catch up with the hardware designs.
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@scottalanmiller said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
In an era of 18 Core processors, going single proc isn't actually that limiting. Can still run a TB of RAM on some platforms as crazy as that sounds...
I agree, as do a lot of box vendors. Single proc servers should be quite standard. A huge Xeon or Opteron will run insane loads. And that's before we look at Sparc or Power that have come single socket for forever for exactly that reason. We just need licensing to catch up with the hardware designs.
It has, just different vendors have different attitudes. The thing to consider is Essentials Plus is really a "3 servers with no more than 2 sockets" license". That's what the EULA states (The key technically allows 6 sockets, and as of 4.x you could actually put it on a single 4 way box despite it being a EULA violation).
Microsofts progression was to go from Charging "not a lot" (2008R2) per socket for datacenter to charging "a lot and forcing 2 sockets" (2012R2) to charging a yuuuuge amount (2016 per core). They want to try to capture the same revenue per Virtual Machine on the core hypervisor, and so for small shops ideally squeeze them into Azure. This is honestly the biggest "risk" to the guys like Scale targeting the tiny side of SMB, as Email, LOB apps are all going hosted. I've walked into a 50 man office that didn't actually have AD or anything bigger than a NAS because GoogleApps handled email, their ERP was hosted by IBM, and everything else they did was SaaS. For people who Need "IaaS" I'm seeing the telco's sell lease this and tie it to service contracts at or below what you could directly lease in a move to make their contracts stickier.
VMware is trying to capture the same or more revenue by up-seling other stuff (NSX, vRA, View, vROPS, VSAN). Effectively if you track Moore's law, Essentials Plus's socket based licensing has become "Cheaper" as time has gone on. If you can run 100VM's on the license where previously you would have run 10 back in the day, its 10x cheaper now. VSAN's got the same thing as when people first deployed it 2 years ago 400GB was a "big" SSD, and now people are deploying 4TB without having to pay anything extra.
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@scottalanmiller said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
In an era of 18 Core processors, going single proc isn't actually that limiting. Can still run a TB of RAM on some platforms as crazy as that sounds...
I agree, as do a lot of box vendors. Single proc servers should be quite standard. A huge Xeon or Opteron will run insane loads. And that's before we look at Sparc or Power that have come single socket for forever for exactly that reason. We just need licensing to catch up with the hardware designs.
Are you seeing Opteron's? Last survey I saw was sub 5% in Enterprise.
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@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@scottalanmiller said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
In an era of 18 Core processors, going single proc isn't actually that limiting. Can still run a TB of RAM on some platforms as crazy as that sounds...
I agree, as do a lot of box vendors. Single proc servers should be quite standard. A huge Xeon or Opteron will run insane loads. And that's before we look at Sparc or Power that have come single socket for forever for exactly that reason. We just need licensing to catch up with the hardware designs.
Are you seeing Opteron's? Last survey I saw was sub 5% in Enterprise.
Now they are. I still see people buying them, though, just not like in the late 2000s when they were over 50%. They've dropped a lot. But they still have some good value and I see a few places deploying them.
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@dafyre said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@scottalanmiller Holy cow... can I borrow $5k ??
For $10k he could build 2 x 16TB usable storage units and use StarWind to make them happy.
(https://beta.wellston.biz/xByte SAM-SD R520.pdf)yeah we can do that
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free
there are some limitations with a free versions (no iscsi and only smb3/nfs) but OP can ping me offline and we'll be happy to help with a custom stuff
anton AT starwind DOT com
P.S. DRBD is another one for sure
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Edit: I don't always use WD NAS (RED) drives, but when I do I use the WDIDLE tool to fix that problem
The problem is that its a 5400RPM drive that is way to damn slow to use for virtual machines that have any kind of transactional workload. In order to get any functioning amount of IOPS out of the drive you have to wide stripe across a bunch, and then operate at deep queue depth (driving latency through the roof).
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@donaldlandru said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
If I can sell them on Office 365 this time around (third times a charm), but that is for a different thread
What version of Exchange are you on?
2010 is in extended support (That's why OWA is broken in Chrome, Microsoft doesn't care). Its time to START budgeting to move to the current version. Show the hardware costs to deploy a 2 or 3 site DAG (this is apples/apples with 365), show the current version CALs, show the cost for backup software that can handle it if you do not have that, and show the cost of GSLB's to front the DAG cluster.
Don't show the cost to "keep running your 2007 server into the ground". Present real options, not hobo IT stuff that's cheap.
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I would recommend looking at StarWind SA for example.
That solution fits your requirements perfectly, it will also provide you with HA storage that will ensure the business continuity.
As for support, they offer a single point of contact no matter what issue you face, plus the system will be shipped to your site fully preconfigured and pretested.
