ehhh. if you mean cool and in 'cold'.. haha. Going to upstate NY to visit family for Christmas. First Christmas with them in 5 years

Set internal DNS to IP (A-record) to be different than outside world?

meaning, Internal or LAN will point to DNS address that is specific to internal?

Typically I do similar.

Internal DNS i would create an A-Record that points to internal LAN IP server address. External DNS A-record will point to my ISP provided IP address (12.12.12.12)

So hosts internally will auto-map to internal owncloud server, and not have to re-route over interwebz? maybe my logic is flawed

I'll upgrade to 6.1 after holiday when i return from small vacation im taking away from office. Once on 6.1, I'll incremental upgrade to 6.2. from there.. 6.5

hopeful it will go smooth. see what happens

@Aconboy - awesome. thank you!

cheers

Yes - I'm aware of colo'ing servers.

Yes - i can negotiate or buy half rack or full rack for power and bw

We have a local data center down the road as well.. I've been wanting to negotiate shared rack space for power + BW as alternative backup area or for future hosting needs. That is separate topic for another day. Sure I'll get flamed for that one lol.

Gotcha.. Yah I seen that the Promise was not nearly Business level.

the drobo though i question of how business level it is. But SSD caching option is a huge plus! This be much simpler storage solution

only hiccup would be pulling down their current dropbox data to this drive. This would take installing DB software locally and then point the storage to a Volume on the drobo.

I need to read documentation. If the Drobo can do different volumes on the RAID array. Then Im sold. Otherwise, I have to lean to the Synology NAS unit as it is more universal.

@Aconboy - East Coast.... Florida

@coliver

I'm anticipating 50k budget. Considering the millions of dollars we're grossing. They made comment of wanting something that will hold out until 2018 or so. To support ~300-400 employee's

@Aconboy - nice!

I thought was going to be more than that..... next week lets maybe get together for webinar and review. like to see the entire rundown

also there any documentation on migrating from XenServer VM to HC scale? Or does it support the same disk image

@Aconboy

Cool! Would this be HC-Scale you're talking?

so..

Promise Pegasus R4 disk array

VS

DROBO D5 unit?

Both thunderbolt devices

What about user management on mac and the network... I dont really see any Linux server options avail? Unless can integrate OSX machines into a Linux server Active Directory server (zentyal or similar)

Thanks everyone for continued input

Lenovo & Sever X are now off the list and will not be mentioned again or brought up for pricing.

I can re-provision these NAS units for back-up targets as suggested. Keep what is already here and then spend the money to do HA-setup using localized storage on the nodes

Its getting the CEO to pull bandaid off and spend some $$. We generate plenty in gross revenue and plenty to spare for net profit. 50 grand worth of new equipment I think would not be all that bad considering it can left in production for probably 4+ years

@Dashrender

And quite frankly its scary to think about if NAS chasis failure. yes all the VM's would be down and be entire SOS panic mode. eggs in one-basket at the moment. I've explained and shouted my concerns to CEO. Told him that it will be his responsibility if downtime as prior investment $$ was not there.

2013 year when installed it, I wanted dual servers + dual NAS. Pricing was only given for single units. There is an LSI raid card in the current Supermicro server and disk in raid-1 array. but thats a moot point

@Dashrender said:

@ntoxicator said:

Its a very fast pace office environment, ever one in the 'now' mentality. Any blip or downtime I have employee's bitching or CEO down my back to get it up.

So yes, wanted HA.

This is a dollars and cents game. You design a properly sized single server that can handle your entire current load (maybe one that's over sized by say 10% so you have a little room for growth, unless you KNOW about growth that is coming, otherwise never plan for future 'talk').

Then also present the HA solution. Give estimates on downtime differences in cases of issues. Find out the real cost of down time to the company to discover what the RTO and RPO need to be.

My doctors all scream bloody murder at downtime, but when they consider the cost of a HA system, they are willing to live with the few outages we rarely have.

You're previous NAS solution, to put it bluntly, got lucky. You either never had an outage or you found quick solutions when you did. But what if you would have had a complete chassis failure on your NAS? You would have been completely down until it was fixed, and the recovery of that NAS might be more difficult than recovering traditional servers.

You are correct.

We work on the back-office. We provide medical billing solutions to doctors offices (Hospital + and larger clients). Millions of billable dollars yearly billable to insurances.

CEO and team are anticipating adding another 30 employees by Q1 2016. Afterwards due to the clients in pipline, we will need additional 5-10 employees per month for remainer of 2016 year

Anticipated growth was 200 employees by end of 2016

Also making the assumption when running HA for localized storage (VSAN) or HA-Lizard iSCSI for XenServer.

The storage on each node will have to be the same so it can replicate on each node.

I'm going for storage array. You're the one who keeps pushing the localized storage.

As I would want to have over 4TB of localized storage to be on safe-side for future. As its locallized and CANNOT grow it

So at this point of localized storage. Appears HC Scale would be the kicker here.

@Dashrender

I would rather have 2 servers in HA. I could most likely slam everything on one node.

each VM uses about 8GB of ram. (Domain controller uses under 4GB right now).

All our employee's connect to Terminal Servers.... due to 2X Application Gateway server..

Its a very fast pace office environment, ever one in the 'now' mentality. Any blip or downtime I have employee's bitching or CEO down my back to get it up.

So yes, wanted HA.

The NAS would be 2 of them running HA for centralized storage.

Otherwise, I can spec refurbished servers from xByte and be done with it

Just built a DELL R720

5 - 2TB 72000 RPM DELL certified hard drives (RAID-10, PERC H730)
2 - 50GB SLC Solid state drives - to install XenServer on - raid-1
750W Dell dual power supplies

3 year onsite support/service

Right at 5,000 per server

Gotcha

Well the entire plan for the upgrades and future planning was to have 10Gbe all the way around. Have 10Gbe dual port cards on each server node.

and then dual port 10Gbe in the NAS device. Along with a 10Gbe Switch using SFP cables to interconnect. the servers & NAS would inter-connect to the 10Gbe Switch and be on their own IP network