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I have a VMware-based cluster of two ready-nodes purchased from Starwind https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance half a year ago so I will try to share my experience on that matter. These are completely DELL-based and the pricing is very fair compared to what DELL OEM-partners want for the same configurations.
As already mentioned above, in this particular scenario, StarWind runs inside a VM on each host. The underlying storage is presented over a standard datastore. Alternatively, you can pass-through the whole RAID controller to StarWind VM in case if your ESX resides on a bootable USB/SD/SataDOM/whatever which is a common and good practice nowadays. The usage of hardware RAID makes the overall performance of a single server much faster than you can achieve using software RAINs provided by either VMware vSAN or MSFT S2D (I’ve done some benchmarking on that matter).
ESX hosts are connected over iSCSI to both StarWind VMs simultaneously. These VMs are mirroring the internal storage and presenting this storage back to ESX as a single MPIO-capable iSCSI device. Since round robin policy is used there is no storage failover in case if one StarWind VM is being softly restarted for patching or the whole physical host suddenly dies. In the case of single host power outage, only the migration of production VMs takes place but storage remains active which I find quite awesome.
Another thing that I do enjoy in StarWind is that it uses RDMA-capable networks (I have Mellanox Connectx3) for synchronization which leaves a lot of CPU resources for primary tasks instead of serving storage requests.
Right now I am waiting for Linux-based StarWind VSA implementation which is told to arrive soon.

@danp said in Migrating away from XenServer:

Have you taken a look at StarWind V2V Converter?

Thanks for mentioning StarWind, just wanted to make an addition of the features available in the V2V Converter which includes a Windows Repair Mode which may become useful in the process of converting to VHDX. The end result would be the automatic VM adaptation to the given hardware environment, negating any possible compatibility problems.
Take a look here - https://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter for any other additional information.

Recently implemented 2 nodes starwind hybrid cluster https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance for one of my customers. It came completely pre-configured including hyper-v, failover cluster, tiering, shared storage and VEEAM backup, all in the same boxes and backup instance with VEEAM was set up FT/HA too. Took me only 10 minutes of a joint remote session with their support engineer to join new servers to existing AD and allow customer's IT guy to proceed with the migration from their old hardware (2 x old SuperMicro servers and a SAN). What I really like about this offering is that Starwind guys allow you to bring own licenses and install free hyper-v on bare-metal if it fits which I find quite incredible. Thus the pricing is usually far below the range Nutanix or Scale do.

BTW they give their VSAN software for free. I like using it for HA file servers on old hardware since it's very simple and works pretty great.

I see no reason to overpay for the solution from HP in this case. Dell offer seems pretty okay and I think it is exactly the case when you get what you pay for. We've been using Dell for a while and I did not have any major issues with their hardware. Even when we requested some assistance, we have got decent support from them. And I would also prefer VSAN more than a dedicated box, for that matter.

As already mentioned above, Starwind https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free seems to be a good fit here. It is capable of using directly attached local drives in two (or more hosts) and turns them into a mirrored, highly-available storage pool that is accessible over iSCSI or can be used as a base for SMB or NFS share on top of Scale-Out File Server role.

For dedicated storage purposes you can do it with a free version and if you plan to run VMs on the same storage hardware (hyper-converged) you have to get a full license but it is not expensive at all.

@scottalanmiller said in Cost Study: 4 Node Scale vs. 4 Node VMware IPOD:

@John-Nicholson and I have been talking about the death of RAID for years. RAID pretty much exists as a vestige for very small environments that still see their infrastructure in terms of "a single server" and not as clusters and clouds. Once you get beyond the "each node handles its own storage" point (which only applies to one or possibly two host clusters) RAID has no value. Gluster, CEPH, and anything perceived as "cloud storage" and anything like VSAN, Starwind or hyperconvergence are all RAID-less. We've long been in the post-RAID world, RAID remains almost solely for the smallest SMBs.

We have a Starwind cluster of two all-flash nodes that runs on top of hardware RAID5 making a redundancy over redundancy like RAIN1 on top of RAID5 which is quite awesome since there is a consistent set of data on each host in the cluster which is impossible with RAIN stuff like VMware VSAN or S2D does. I treat it like additional hardware offload for storage managing and it performs better than pure software RAID for sure.

@scottalanmiller And Starwind ships their ready nodes armed with RAID https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance so i think they still keep doing RAID and i am sure it is for a reason some of them I've mentioned above.

@KOOLER said in Views on Halizard:

We'll keep free version CLI-managed, like Hyper-V is. Initially Linux-based VSA with a web mgmt will be free as well

That's awesome! Do you have any ETA's yet?

Here are some good explanations on the rule:
https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware.com/explanation/the-3-2-1-backup-rule/
https://www.veeam.com/blog/the-3-2-1-0-rule-to-high-availability.html

We have a highly-available cluster based on StarWind https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san and thus having 2 copies of data as a synchronous replica and a third copy as an on-site backup (which is part 3 of the rule). Obviously, cluster is running on primary internal storage and backups are stored on a separate NAS (wich is 2 part of the rule). And we have a VTL virtual machine https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/starwind/starwindvtl/ running in Azure that hosts our offsite backups (which is part 1).

Well, there are various options to do a cloud backup both cloud vendor and technology. We are using a couple of them:

1. Amazon Storage Gateway - https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/ - a virtual machine that acts like a virtual tape library and transparently offloads your tapes to Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier. Works nice with MSFT DPM and VEEAM.
2. StarWind VTL - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/starwind/starwindvtl/ - a virtual machine in Azure with virtual tape library that is connected over iSCSI to a local backup virtual machine with VEEAM.
3. AcloudA - http://www.aclouda.com/ - a very cool thing, a hardware-based SAS/SATA cloud gateway that presents itself to a host as a usual drive offloading all the data at block level directly to cloud over iSCSI or SMB.

I would recommend you to try StarWind V2V Converter https://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter. It does hardware patching during conversion and can automatically enable PC rescue mode. Saved me a lot of times and time. Of course it supports most of the common virtual machine drive formats.

Have you considered a backup ready node like StarWind does for example https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-storage-appliance? They usually go preconfigured having all the required licenses including VEEAM. As far as I know, iSCSI/SMB/NFS are present and there is an option to seamlessly offload your backups to the cloud. Unfortunately, it is currently out of my budget so I am using their free product https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free which converts two of my older storage servers into a single mirrored backup pool. Works great so far.

2 x SuperMicro MiniServers

Running:

• Free Hyper-V 2016 Server (was Nano initially but MSFT killed baremetal deployments)
• Free Starwinds VSAN
• NethServer
• FreePBX
• Dozens of VMs with various stuff for experiments.

As for Homelab 3 node scenario, you could choose either 3-way or 2-way replication.
3-Way replication means you have 3 copies of the data across all three hosts. 2-way replication in 3 node cluster means that:
target1 is on Node1 & Node2
target2 is on Node2 & Node3
target3 is on Node3 & Node1

And there is no need to partition the drive. We'll place a container file and mirror them across nodes.

I would consider the web server which you have the most experience are usually going to be the most secure.

Security depends on all of the layers, not just the web server. If you pick one with very few vulnerabilities, but don't understand how to configure it, you will most likely not understand how to configure it securely.

@thwr said in Who is at Fault?:

Someone exposed RDP on the firewall? Are you serious? Put a VPN tunnel in front for remote access.

This! Forwarding sensitive stuff like RDP to WAN is just... you know. You can try doing this, however, to see how thousands of brute connections (mostly Chinese IPs) start to initiate within a couple of minutes. Looks pretty scary

I've had a similar situation with one of my customers already a while ago. At the end of the day, I landed up with pre-built hyper-converged appliances (a pair of them). Since the budget was the main constraint and DELL was a requirement, I've purchased very customized servers by starwind https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance (almost no storage and powerful CPU for SQL). These were exactly DELL R630 (not sure if they still ship those) delivered by xByte. One is located in the server room on ground floor and the other one is 2 floors higher. Interconnection is 2 x 10 GBe links. Pretty happy so far.

@scottalanmiller said in I can't even:

I was actually consulting on a backup design just yesterday where we were using Hyper-V in exactly this way as a backup target, but building the backup system using Starwind. It was a backup device in every way, no expectation of VMs to run there, no live systems ever, just Hyper-V + Starwind used to handle the replica-based file backups.

That's a good setup if you need HA/FT backups and there is a particular requirement to always be able to recover. We have a similar configuration using free version https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free on top of two decommissioned DELL servers packed with drives and SMB share as VEEAM repository on top. Works like a charm.

I would treat RAID as a kind of hardware offload since RAIN is known to consume more resources and thus resulting in less performance from the storage array. That is probably one of the major reasons why vendors like StarWind keep using hardware RAID. Especially on smaller deployments (storage capacities).

My primary home lab (2 x SuperMicro 1U servers) runs inside IKEA shelf (slightly modified though). The second home lab (2 x SuperMicro SuperServers E300) is hosted inside LEGO chassis we've built together with my son

Currently, I am in the middle of Patrick Rothfuss - The Name of the Wind.