Help choosing replacement Hyper-V host machines and connected storage
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That is universally the story that I have been told and what has been reported online. Every case, no exceptions.
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@JohnFromSTL said:
From my initial conversation with the Dell enterprise sales rep he intimated that "we may disagree on certain issues, but at the end of the day be able to work together to come up with the best solution that fits our needs".
The problem is... that could be true or it could be an example of how high pressure that they are: that they tell you that what they are doing is to find something that fits your needs. This is both what low pressure as well as high pressure would look like.
Did they ask you your needs? The business needs, that is? Or are they only looking at capacity? If they don't do a huge amount of business investigation, why do they know what does or does not suite your needs?
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JohnFromSTL said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Not if that guy is based in the UK. And why would someone pay for it if Dell provides the results for free?
I don't consider a sales pitch free, And I'm wondering since they went to the efforts of doing this free thing for you, will they put the high pressure on the sales pitch?
That's a good point. My only counter to that is that.... nearly anyone willing to go through the effort of avoiding that sales pitch and using a solution like this to work around it likely will not be swayed by the sales pitch. Maybe I'm wrong, but I am guessing that that is true.
It is a pretty high pressure process, from what I am told.
From my initial conversation with the Dell enterprise sales rep he intimated that "we may disagree on certain issues, but at the end of the day be able to work together to come up with the best solution that fits our needs".
Sure, but in the real world we've talked to literally hundreds of companies that have gone through that process and not one reports ANY variation for the inverted pyramid of doom being shoved down their throats relentlessly even after they've shown that it would be costly and reckless to do so and in no way meets their needs. We've yet to have anyone report back that their rep had ever even asked for the necessary information to begin determining their needs either.
If you want to go through this process and see if you can get a different result, feel free. But so far the reports are 100% that the IPOD is pushed as the only option even when clearly it is the worst one.
@scottalanmiller I must say that folks on this blog have gone out of their way to patiently help me understand the perils of IPOD. I am not even considering implementing this as a possible solution. My only reason for contacting Dell and obtaining DPACK access was to utilize their tools.
Taking into consideration that DPACK revealed my IOPS are not very high, is the 730xd overkill OR is it still the best solution due to the large amount of usable storage I'd have available for my VMs?
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@JohnFromSTL said:
Taking into consideration that DPACK revealed my IOPS are not very high, is the 730xd overkill OR is it still the best solution due to the large amount of usable storage I'd have available for my VMs?
R720xd and R730xd have the same IOPS, or so close that it doesn't matter. It's CPU that varies between them.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JohnFromSTL said:
From my initial conversation with the Dell enterprise sales rep he intimated that "we may disagree on certain issues, but at the end of the day be able to work together to come up with the best solution that fits our needs".
The problem is... that could be true or it could be an example of how high pressure that they are: that they tell you that what they are doing is to find something that fits your needs. This is both what low pressure as well as high pressure would look like.
Did they ask you your needs? The business needs, that is? Or are they only looking at capacity? If they don't do a huge amount of business investigation, why do they know what does or does not suite your needs?
Aside from the initial phone call regarding DPACK I haven't spoke to the Dell rep since 23 October. When I did speak to the rep he didn't spend much time learning about our current\future business needs; he was relying on DPACK to give him any information.
If our developers/programmers had their way our environment would be:
VM 01 - SQL Server 2005 (to be used only for database migrations from 2005 to SQL 20xx)
VM 02 - SQL Server 2008 (to be used only for database migrations from 2008 {some customers installed 2008 instead of waiting for 2008 R2 and the SQL migration tools are very picky} to SQL 20xx)Physical Server 01 - SQL Server 2008 R2
Physical Server 02 - SQL Server 2012
Physical Server 03 - SQL Server 2014
Physical Server 04 - Oracle 11g
Physical Server 05 - Oracle 12cSQL Server and Oracle are perfectly capable of running in a Hyper-V environment...provided everything is meticulously planned out in advance.
The developers are afraid of running SQL and Oracle in a virtualized environment because our current VMs are very inefficient. They do not seem to hear me when I say "I agree, our current virtual environment is awful. How do you propose we change the mindset of an owner who believes a high-end desktop is perfectly acceptable to be used as a server?"
It's very difficult to educate someone when they know more than you do about everything and wants you to know that.
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@JohnFromSTL said:
Aside from the initial phone call regarding DPACK I haven't spoke to the Dell rep since 23 October. When I did speak to the rep he didn't spend much time learning about our current\future business needs; he was relying on DPACK to give him any information.
That's what we've been saying. That's the hard sell. The DPACK tells him only capacity planning data. ALL of the important stuff comes from you, not the DPACK. So an IT Pro would have no means of even remotely providing you a recommendation from the DPACK alone. He's purely a salesman, not an engineer. He is only sizing his sales pitch, not doing anything to consider what is applicable to you or your business.
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@JohnFromSTL said:
The developers are afraid of running SQL and Oracle in a virtualized environment because our current VMs are very inefficient.
And developers make infrastructure designs or have input because...... why?
That's like asking a hotel customer what building material to use in the foundation of the building. It's none of his business.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JohnFromSTL said:
The developers are afraid of running SQL and Oracle in a virtualized environment because our current VMs are very inefficient.
And developers make infrastructure designs or have input because...... why?
That's like asking a hotel customer what building material to use in the foundation of the building. It's none of his business.
Because the owner trusts them more, developers/programmers spend < 5 minutes looking at results from a Google search and become instant experts and I am the sole IT person who squeezes blood from turnips while keeping things operational and is perceived as only wanting to spend money to buy "new" equipment and will only break things in the process.
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Why does he have IT if he wants non-IT people doing IT instead? That's just weird. I wouldn't hire a mechanic and then have the receptionist fix the car while the mechanic explains that she doesn't know anything about cars!
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If the developers are the experts, why are you employed?
Ask your boss the same thing (if your gutsy enough), and follow up with, asking that the developers stick to their profession.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Why does he have IT if he wants non-IT people doing IT instead? That's just weird. I wouldn't hire a mechanic and then have the receptionist fix the car while the mechanic explains that she doesn't know anything about cars!
This is the same person who takes a $25,000 hit when trading in a car which he paid $100,000 for because the bumper-to-bumper warranty is expired and an oil change costs $250 at the Mercedes dealer. Oh yeah, the car was two years old and had fewer than 10k miles.
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After talking with the boss he is prepared to spend some money on these servers. I've decided to split the VMs between 2 hosts and have a 4 total servers for load balancing/redundancy.
NewHost01
SQL 2005 -----------750GB
SQL 2008 R2 --------750GB
SQL 2012 -----------750GB
SQL 2014 -------------1TB
Oracle 11g ---------750GB
Oracle 12c ---------750GB
Usable Local ------4.75TBNewHost02
StorageServer (Server 2012 R2) ------2500GB
AppServices01 (Server 2012 R2) -------100GB
AppServices02 (Server 2012 R2) -------100GB
WebServices01 (Server 2012 R2) -------100GB
MSTeamServer01 (Server 2012 R2) ------100GB
ClientVM01 (Windows 10) --------------100GB
ClientVM02 (Windows 10) --------------100GB
ClientVM03 (Windows 10) ---------------80GB
ClientVM04 (Windows 10) ---------------80GB
ClientVM05 (Windows 10) ---------------80GB
ClientVM06 (Windows 7) ----------------80GB
ClientVM07 (Windows 7) ----------------80GB
ClientVM08 (Windows XP) ---------------40GB
ClientVM09 (Windows XP) ---------------40GB
Usable Local Storage ----------------3.58TBNewHost01 needs to be the more powerful of the two machines. I really like the 730xd for the shear power, but would the 720xd be a better option? I plan on installing Server Core for Windows Server 2012 R2 on two 400GB SAS SSD drives. I'll be using local storage to host the Hyper-V clients. I don't feel comfortable using SATA drives in these servers, and I have zero experience with NL SAS drives. Any thoughts on this? I will have to justify why the cheaper SATA drives aren't a good idea and will just put my foot down if necessary. I'm trying to keep the total under $25k for the four servers. Thanks to all of you for the amazing advice.
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@JohnFromSTL said:
I plan on installing Server Core for Windows Server 2012 R2 on two 400GB SAS SSD drives.
SD card, on the main array, not on its own array and definitely not on SSD. Hypervisor goes on the slowest, cheapest storage. Every penny for capacity or performance is totally lost.
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@JohnFromSTL said:
I don't feel comfortable using SATA drives in these servers, and I have zero experience with NL SAS drives. Any thoughts on this?
SATA is just a protocol, where are you getting a "concern" from?
NL-SAS is just a trade term for SAS at 7200 RPM, it's not something you have "experience with." It would be like saying you drive the highway regularly but don't have "experience driving at 40 MPH."
There are two types of drives, SAS and SATA. SAS are more efficient at mixed workloads, that is all. The speed of the spindles changes nothing but the speed. You no more need experience on a spindle speed than you do on a CPU frequency.
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@JohnFromSTL said:
I will have to justify why the cheaper SATA drives aren't a good idea and will just put my foot down if necessary.
Well, start by justifying why SAS are better here. If you can't articulate to techs why SAS would be better, maybe they are not. The value of SAS is determined by the IOPS that you need and the type of workload. NL-SAS is often so close in price to SATA that we generally start there because the price increase is often around 1% while the performance is generally closer to 10%.
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Four total servers meaning two hosts with four VMs? I'm unclear why there are four hosts.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@JohnFromSTL said:
I don't feel comfortable using SATA drives in these servers, and I have zero experience with NL SAS drives. Any thoughts on this?
SATA is just a protocol, where are you getting a "concern" from?
NL-SAS is just a trade term for SAS at 7200 RPM, it's not something you have "experience with." It would be like saying you drive the highway regularly but don't have "experience driving at 40 MPH."
There are two types of drives, SAS and SATA. SAS are more efficient at mixed workloads, that is all. The speed of the spindles changes nothing but the speed. You no more need experience on a spindle speed than you do on a CPU frequency.
I simply haven't used them before.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Four total servers meaning two hosts with four VMs? I'm unclear why there are four hosts.
Four servers total, two for redundancy.
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@JohnFromSTL said:
I simply haven't used them before.
SATA drives? It's totally transparent to you. SATA is what is in desktops and laptops and nearly any SMB NAS device or SAN device. You'll normally encounter SATA at least ten to one over SAS. But other than the speed difference, they are the same drives. It's literally nothing but an "under the hood" protocol for the drives to talk to the RAID controller. Other than being listed as SATA instead of SAS in the RAID card's interface, you have no way to tell them apart.
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@JohnFromSTL said:
Four servers total, two for redundancy.
Oh.... all running Hyper-V, two as production and two for failover for those two?
