Posts made by Net Runner

@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?

@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.

@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.

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.

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.