In my case I'm a SMB/Non-Profit, so as much as I would love to go SSD for the server, its a harder pitch for me when I'm barely able to get the drives I need (at least 10k) already. I've learned to not go splurge on new servers at all and to trust vendors who do refurbished with warranty and extended warranties so it helps to keep cost down. That alone helps me out tremendously.

Spending time with Dell and HP and explaining our use case has been helpful too. I have some awesome program I hope will help us lead to lower purchase cost for Dell servers but it was only available through Tech Soup and I haven't placed an order yet. If that pans out well, then yea I cna probably afford ssd's.

Case and point, I still manage our fleet of workstations individually. I'm JUST NOW able to an affordable imaging solution like Smart Deploy for the first time.

From Spiceworks, I have had numerous people tell me to kinda back away from RAID1/10 with my consumer/prosumer SSD drives. Only because IT WILL wear those drives out faster.

@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:

e expensive 15K drives and just go all SSD. You can drop RAID 10 and go RAID 5 at that size with SSD.

RAID5 and me won't ever be friends anymore. I had one RAID5 fail on me, its my current job. LoL. When I worked in Enterprise and our backup team had a RAID5 fail it took I believe close to a week to rebuild. Nah i'll pass

Only reason I say 15K is because there are too many remarks about NOT going with SSD in my use cases. I'm usually on dell hardware and to my understanding, me going to by prosumer grade ssd's from samsung won't eliminate that about 1-2 drives absolutely will fail. I'm just getting used to the idea of using pcie-ssd's and they look to be where everyone should be going when cost normalize.

For shits and giggles, my current Dell Power Edge T100 has a 4 SSD Setup with RAID 10, its not recommended though.

No, I was just testing it. I had used it 1 year prior, I used Ghetto method before.

Small storage just under 600 GB / SSD

Yea installing ESXi to usb is so easy I wish they all could be so simple.

It is easier to me but I have used all 3 - Hyper-V, ESXi and XS and between the 3, I favored XS. But if your use to windows tools I find it hard to believe one wouldn't love hyper-v and 9nine tools. I did have to remount the data store and it was painful because I didn't have a proper backup, I still made it work but wow I had some downtime. Had I spent more time getting used to XO I wouldn't have had the issue.

Adding storage to ESXi was pretty straight forward. I used iscsi, local drives, raid 1, raid 10. I went nuts. That was for testing purposes and for learning.

When I do my entire infrastructure over, I'm going full XS+X0 with Windows Server Data Center 2012 to as of now, just 1 host with a minimum of 32 GB of RAM with RAID 10 Storage hopefully using 15K drives. I have to shoot for the moon because i'm part of a non profit. My storage needs are kinda paltry. at the moment 1-2 tb is almost more than enough for all my VMs and really I could get by with 1 TB. My actual file server is where I'm rethinking my strategy as I split my nas using iscci to handle some of FS requirements and instead will stop us using my for split storage (vms/shares) and let it just be for backup.

I can say this, coming from ESXi to XenServer was almost painless, it saved my arse. But please oh please learn about XO because I had to get help from the community because I had a poorly thought up backup plan (aka didn't make it that far) and it came back to bite me in the arse.

I think install XenServer compared to ESXi is about equal except for I can install to ESXi to a USB like it requires nothing That had to be my biggest draw to ESXi. Outside of that, I mean managing XS is actually kinda straight forward but I think the way the gui works its better than ESX it just takes getting used to.

Adding hard drives is my current dilemma thats where in my test environment I'm getting painnnnnnnnnnnn. But once you put it on a proper raid / server you should be fine.

NTG is having their cake and eating it

Absolutely

Let me rephrase that they have been here, but I haven't had them reach out to me or my small circle of non profit IT lately in Birmingham. Good thing is they are less than 3 min from my office downtown, bad thing is they are less than 3 minutes from my office space haha. They want lunches are other fun things to occur. However, I have dealt with enough vendors to know when your trying to sell me

They just started advertising here locally in BHAM so it was good to meet them of course I don't drink all the kool-aid they have

The sales rep eventually got quiet, I actually think the sales rep wanted to be in favor of me, but the engineer kinda took the wheel. He wants me to go full VDI. I don't want full VDI.

Coincidentally, I talked to my dell rep and engineer and we all got along quite nicely. We have a spec in place and I should start testing with them this week or next.

Well the engineer came at the request of the sales rep not me.

Oh I forgot to mention this SAM, I told him about you and he wanted me to send him some of your articles and I said I sure GLADLY WILL

He really wants to sell me on buying a dual server setup (which I might) just not because of his reasoning.

I explained that really sticking with a single server and beefing it up and having the things that break on site is really the best cost/case scenario. At that point he brought out the "what if the motherboard breaks" chat and I said in a case like that, thats where the 4 hour or NBD would come into play, but I would still have a good plan in place to limit/mitigate complete failure.

No pressure so far but I know if I let the engineer have his way lol it would come at some point. Knowledgeable guy! I'm interested also in getting a relationship with them locally (as well with Dell) just for the philanthropic side of it.

SAM yea its just for servers not necessarily external storage. We just plan on using Windows Multipoint Server is small deployments for classrooms which is its best use case. We got on the topic of storage just for the local host, I still plan on having a local NAS and then site to site back up via rsync.

Of course he got on the topic of external storage and I immediately let em know I got a synology nas with raid 10 works fine I leave it alone lol

No, still quoting 10K & 15K since its just for Windows Multipoint Server 2012. I refuse to go to 2016 currently.

Good morning guys! Just coming off a great weekend! Hope everyone is ok

I spoke with HPE last friday about a new installation I'm doing and one of the engineers wasn't necessarily debating me, but strongly held onto the notion of RAID5 for our scenario for our new installation for our nas and a local server. I explained I have friends in the industry well more versed than I that have had LENGTHY discussions about why NOT to use RAID5 for most of my needs (since its just virtualization and NAS is about all I care about these days) and that RAID10 is usually the best to use depending on certain scenarios.

Is it just me or is it that some people still believe RAID5 is the goto thing in 2016?

Seems to me that the industry should want to support the USB adoption of hypervisor installs as a mandatory thing. I see it being easier to recover from and not waste precious hdd space.

Dustin's more genuis than I am lol! We ran into some serioush issues with my install. So I'm gonna come back and revisit the best practices cause I untimately want to use a USB to install XS to and then have XO as a VM so it can help out with backups.

I thank Dustin big time he has helped me out tremendously!