Best posts made by jasonlow

We are thinking about switching to local storage for VMware and need recommendations. We have 2 HP DL380P G8 servers, both running ESXi 5.0. Currently have 2 RAID 1 146GB drives running ESXi. Considering moving ESXi, if it's not too much of a job, to a USB drive and then putting high capacity drives in the servers for local storage. I then would like to migrate our current VMs from our SAN to the local storage. I am looking at going with 1TB or larger disks. Should I look at off-brand drives for the servers (any recommendations)? Cost is always a factor but I can sell the switch as long as it will boost performance of the VM's. We are bassically at capacity with our SAN and need to do something, which is the reason we are looking at making the change.

Is this a good idea? Pros and cons......Thanks!

@gjacobse said:

@jasonlow said:

Our SAN has 7.2TB running RAID 10, so approximately 3.6TB usable. There is about 415GB free. I like VMware and we own it so I hate to move away from it. We are a non-profit so our cost is feasible both on the VMware and Microsoft side.

I would be interested in the cost to contract with NTG to run DPACK.

First question is have you used TechSoup?

Yes, we use Tech Soup as much as possible, especially for Microsoft licensing. I don't believe they carry any VMware products though.

@scottalanmiller said:

Check out refurbished parts. Often much cheaper while remaining fully supported and functional. Nearly all of our physical gear is refurbed.

Thanks, I will do that once I have the part numbers from CDW.

When we've seen this issue it's usually been saved credentials in Windows credential manager. For some reason they can authenticate but then Outlook randomly tries the credentials in credential manager. If the credentials are old you will get a login prompt. That's always the first thing I check.

Our SAN has 7.2TB running RAID 10, so approximately 3.6TB usable. There is about 415GB free. I like VMware and we own it so I hate to move away from it. We are a non-profit so our cost is feasible both on the VMware and Microsoft side.

We have these servers now:
2 DCs
1 Exchange Server - hoping to move to 365 in future
1 File Server
6 Application Servers - 2 for our EHR software, 1 Spiceworks, 1 for our old EHR software, and 2 for smaller applications
2 Terminal Servers - Will be adding a 3rd once we have the capacity
1 vCenter Server
1 WSUS Server
1 SEP Server

We probably don't NEED HA. We do have two decent servers so could probably drop down to one and use the second as a backup in case the first one goes down. I don't know the answer on the IOPs.

I would be interested in the cost to contract with NTG to run DPACK.

Currently there are 8 drive bays, but if I remove the optical drive I can expand to 16.

Ok, so the plan is to purchase 16 1.2TB drives for the current servers (8 in each), run ESXi from USB drives, and continue to run 2 hosts for failover. This will more than double our current space, decrease our risk, and hopefully improve performance a little. I was able to cut the cost by about 3/4 by scaling it back slightly and using Amazon instead of CDW. Hopefully the parts are legit.....

With that said does anybody have a recommended USB drive for this set up? I read somewhere about this being a good one. http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-SDCZ33-008G-B3SanDisk-Cruzer-SDCZ33-008G-B35-Flash-Drive5-Flash-Drive/dp/B005FYNSUA

@dafyre Yes, I believe you are right but we don't have the Storage vMotion licensing. It's still the same process but without the licensing the VMs have to be powered off before they can be moved.