ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload
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@coliver That's what I was thinking. Somebody somewhere (Seems lik I remember Scott mentioning this) has said that XenServer uses DRBD under the hood for this.
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What DAS chassis would someone recommend for this setup?
@donaldlandru mentioned that he needed at least 9 TB for the dev trio of servers, but not how much was needed for operations two servers.
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@dafyre said:
If that's the case, then @donaldlandru could just build one big 5-host cluster (assuming he can get the Politics taken care of and the CPUs are compatible -- if that is even an issue) on XenServer and be happy... Upgrade to 4 or 6TB drives per host (RAID 10) and also be happy.
Yes. Getting big drives and RAID 10 are critical to getting necessary speed. Using WD RE SAS drives is probably best to get up to the kinds of IOPS that he needs. Best to get some kind of caching going on to really make sure enough performance is there.
With RAID 10 WD RE SAS we are probably looking at around 500 - 700 Read IOPS per machine, which is tons better than what was stated as needed, but without the shared IOPS you want extra overhead on a node by node basis to be "safe" in performance terms.
The additional capacity will be a huge win. With 3TB drives he would have 6TB usable PER NODE rather than 9TB usable for all five machines. That's huge. Leaping from 9TB total to 30TB total. Go to 4TB, 5TB or 6TB drives and those numbers skyrocket to as high as 60TB total available space!
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
By dropping VMware vSphere Essentials you are looking at a roughly $1200 savings right away. Both HyperV and XenServer will do what you need absolutely free.
Did the price of Essentials double? I thought it was $600 for three nodes for Essentials? and something like $5000 for Essentials Plus.
Those are the rough numbers. He has five nodes so that means either buying all licenses twice (so $1200 and $10,000) or being disqualified from Essentials pricing altogether and needing to move to Standard licensing options.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Currently you have an inverted pyramid of doom, not the best design as you know.
This is true, in all scenarios we are playing out we are left with this giant SPOF. This is why I really like the alternatives shared solutions, ZFS, openindiana, etc. because it will allow me to build a second storage node and do replication for failover.
The business is also screaming for reliability and 110% uptime, but falls short when it comes time to writing the check for what they want.
Do the dev environments need to be highly available -- IMO no, but the business sees that as it's bread and butter, they are aware that we still have not fulfilled this requirements.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
By dropping VMware vSphere Essentials you are looking at a roughly $1200 savings right away. Both HyperV and XenServer will do what you need absolutely free.
Did the price of Essentials double? I thought it was $600 for three nodes for Essentials? and something like $5000 for Essentials Plus.
Those are the rough numbers. He has five nodes so that means either buying all licenses twice (so $1200 and $10,000) or being disqualified from Essentials pricing altogether and needing to move to Standard licensing options.
This is very much the case here.
To get this all into a single cluster (and hopefully using something like VSAN) would require us to upgrade to standard or higher, we would be able to use acceleration kits to get us there but is no small investment.
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@donaldlandru said:
The politics are likely to be harder to play as we just renewed our SnS for both Essentials and Essentials plus in January for three years.
<snip>
Another important piece of information with the local storage is that everything is based on 2.5" disks -- and all but two servers only have two bays each, getting any really kind of local storage without going external direct attached (non-shared) is going to be a challenge.He brings a good point about the 2 bays and 2.5" drives... Do they even make 4 / 6 TB drives in 2.5" form yet?
If not, would it be worth getting an external DAS shelf for each of the servers?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
By dropping VMware vSphere Essentials you are looking at a roughly $1200 savings right away. Both HyperV and XenServer will do what you need absolutely free.
Did the price of Essentials double? I thought it was $600 for three nodes for Essentials? and something like $5000 for Essentials Plus.
Those are the rough numbers. He has five nodes so that means either buying all licenses twice (so $1200 and $10,000) or being disqualified from Essentials pricing altogether and needing to move to Standard licensing options.
Aww, gotcha - you were doubling them up.... His current spend was $5600.
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@donaldlandru said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Currently you have an inverted pyramid of doom, not the best design as you know.
This is true, in all scenarios we are playing out we are left with this giant SPOF. This is why I really like the alternatives shared solutions, ZFS, openindiana, etc. because it will allow me to build a second storage node and do replication for failover.
The business is also screaming for reliability and 110% uptime, but falls short when it comes time to writing the check for what they want.
Do the dev environments need to be highly available -- IMO no, but the business sees that as it's bread and butter, they are aware that we still have not fulfilled this requirements.
The question is - do they loose more money when the operations systems are down or when the dev environment is down?
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@donaldlandru said:
This is true, in all scenarios we are playing out we are left with this giant SPOF.
It's important to recognize that it is a SPOF. But being a SPOF is not the core issue, believe it or not, just the one that causes the biggest emotional reaction. If you were to buy a super high end active/active EMC or HDS device for this (mainframe class storage, start around $50K for the smallest possible units) the fact that it was a SPOF would be heavily mitigated. The whole mainframe concept is built around making a SPOF that is unlikely to fail.
But your issues are bigger. Here are the big issues that you are left with in both of your scenarios:
- Single point of failure on which everything rests (the thing most likely to fail causes EVERYTHING to fail.)
- No risk mitigation for the other layers in the dependency chain. This isn't a 3-2-1 as traditionally described but actually a (1/1/1-1) meaning ANY server failure results in unmitigated (literally) failure AND any storage failure results in total failure. You have a dramatic increase in failure risk with this design, not just a small or moderate increase like most people see (because most people are confused and heavily mitigate risk at one or two but not all three layers.) So it is very important to realize that this is at least one full order of magnitude more risky than a traditional inverted pyramid of doom.
- The single point of failure that you have is actually a pretty fragile one. Probably more fragile than the servers themselves. So not only is the risk of failure doubled by having two completely places for things to fail, but the single point of failure that impacts everything is the most fragile piece of all.
- This has the highest cost both today AND going into the future.
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@donaldlandru said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
By dropping VMware vSphere Essentials you are looking at a roughly $1200 savings right away. Both HyperV and XenServer will do what you need absolutely free.
Did the price of Essentials double? I thought it was $600 for three nodes for Essentials? and something like $5000 for Essentials Plus.
Those are the rough numbers. He has five nodes so that means either buying all licenses twice (so $1200 and $10,000) or being disqualified from Essentials pricing altogether and needing to move to Standard licensing options.
This is very much the case here.
To get this all into a single cluster (and hopefully using something like VSAN) would require us to upgrade to standard or higher, we would be able to use acceleration kits to get us there but is no small investment.
But that is completely unnecessary if you move to Xen (or is it XenServer - still confused) or Hyper-V
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@dafyre said:
@donaldlandru said:
The politics are likely to be harder to play as we just renewed our SnS for both Essentials and Essentials plus in January for three years.
<snip>
Another important piece of information with the local storage is that everything is based on 2.5" disks -- and all but two servers only have two bays each, getting any really kind of local storage without going external direct attached (non-shared) is going to be a challenge.He brings a good point about the 2 bays and 2.5" drives... Do they even make 4 / 6 TB drives in 2.5" form yet?
If not, would it be worth getting an external DAS shelf for each of the servers?
It's been 15 years, but I've seen DAS shelves that can be split between two hosts. Assuming those are still made, and there is enough needed disk slots, that would save a small amount.
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@donaldlandru said:
To get this all into a single cluster (and hopefully using something like VSAN) would require us to upgrade to standard or higher, we would be able to use acceleration kits to get us there but is no small investment.
Going to VSAN, Starwind, DRBD, etc. would be an "orders of magnitude leap" that is not warranted. It just can't make sense. What you have today and what you are talking about moving to are insanely "low availability." Crazy low. And no one had any worries or concerns about that, right?
What I am proposing is that you make the single order of magnitude leap from "acceptably low" reliability to "standard reliability which is good enough for any normal SMB" while dropping your cost dramatically. It's a massive win. Saving a fortune AND leaping far beyond your reliability needs.
Going to something like VSAN just can't make sense. You didn't need something like this before, why would you suddenly need to leapfrog from "super low availability" right over top of normal all the way to "they don't even need this on most of Wall St" super high availability at massively high cost that would require that you upgrade your compute nodes and licensing high cost storage replication technologies? Not only would it require that but it would require bigger or more nodes in order to handle those needs. It's a little like someone who has been riding a bicycle for years (but paying a fortune for it) finding out that they can get a Chevy Cruze for half the price, but having seen what cars are like, deciding that they should buy a Ferrari for their first car when a bicycle was fine all along.
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@Dashrender said:
It's been 15 years, but I've seen DAS shelves that can be split between two hosts. Assuming those are still made, and there is enough needed disk slots, that would save a small amount.
DAS by definition can be split.
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@Dashrender said:
But that is completely unnecessary if you move to Xen (or is it XenServer - still confused) or Hyper-V
If he moves to HyperV or XenServer he would still need proprietary replicated local storage options at his node count. But it would be free at the platform layer (saving $10K at least) and far cheaper at the storage layer (saving many thousands more.)
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's important to recognize that it is a SPOF. But being a SPOF is not the core issue, believe it or not, just the one that causes the biggest emotional reaction. If you were to buy a super high end active/active EMC or HDS device for this (mainframe class storage, start around $50K for the smallest possible units) the fact that it was a SPOF would be heavily mitigated. The whole mainframe concept is built around making a SPOF that is unlikely to fail.
But your issues are bigger. Here are the big issues that you are left with in both of your scenarios:
- Single point of failure on which everything rests (the thing most likely to fail causes EVERYTHING to fail.)
- No risk mitigation for the other layers in the dependency chain. This isn't a 3-2-1 as traditionally described but actually a (1/1/1-1) meaning ANY server failure results in unmitigated (literally) failure AND any storage failure results in total failure. You have a dramatic increase in failure risk with this design, not just a small or moderate increase like most people see (because most people are confused and heavily mitigate risk at one or two but not all three layers.) So it is very important to realize that this is at least one full order of magnitude more risky than a traditional inverted pyramid of doom.
- The single point of failure that you have is actually a pretty fragile one. Probably more fragile than the servers themselves. So not only is the risk of failure doubled by having two completely places for things to fail, but the single point of failure that impacts everything is the most fragile piece of all.
- This has the highest cost both today AND going into the future.
Ok if we split this into two separate topics the only unmitigated failure point in operations in the single SAN. Two options to mitigate the risk are:
- Add a second SAN that replicates with the first (HP MSA easy to do, not so nice price tag)
- Move to local storage and create redundant servers for items that can't be down (split-scope DHCP, second Exchange server) not sure how to mitigate the risk to SharePoint being offline since it is the free version, plus the SQL server would be another single point
When dealing with the Microsoft licensing to create the redundancy to obtain the reliability the business wants I think we are coming in at around the same price. Going with local storage here would reduce the complexity and if I can convince the organization to go with Office 365 we actually have a lot lower risk here and wouldn't need to create a bunch of highly available services.
The second topic (scope) is the development environments and you are 100% correct, even if we have active/active SAN clusters the failure will always be at the server level. The lack of vmotion in this "cluster" and the lack of available resources to do a failover, make the compute layer the biggest problem. If we lose a compute node those servers are offline until replaced. The business accepts that risk as long as we have a fast way of spinning down VMs and bringing up the VMs the team is working on. This is much easier with shared storage than local, in my opinion.
So I do have multiple problems to solve, with different sets of requirements.
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If you were going to go with RLS, which is completely crazy given the scenario and historically accepted risk then the best investment would be to do the following:
- Replace all nodes with adequately sized nodes built on the HP DL380 G9 platform or the Dell R730xd platform. These have enough compute to replace several of your nodes in one, enough memory to handle all of your needs and more than 600% greater per node storage capacity!
- Move to either HyperV + Starwind or XenServer + DRBD (HA-Lizard)
- Make two clusters of two servers each keeping every software piece free and simple
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Going the XenServer HA route, the guy who actually makes HA-Lizard is here in the community so that is a big deal that not only do you have XS resources here, but you have *the XS HA resource.
