Hi to all ,

Thanks for the warm welcome ... I see some familiar faces over here ... Scott, Dustin ... always a pleasure .. Special thanks to Dustin, for introducing me to Mangolassi ..

Mangolassi ? I wonder why an IT forum is named after an Indian beverage ? hehehe... never-the-less, I like the drink, and the name ...

I've been in the IT field for a little over 3 years, most of which were spent as tech support (Win desktop, and then server)... Recently, I switched to a small (but growing) company, as their IT admin ... I've been assigned with the task to roll-out Virtualized server enviroment, with redundacy/fail-over...

I look forward to contributing to this community ...

Hi thwr,

Thanks for your response. ... Just to fill you in ...

We currently have 2 physical servers (The configs are not similar, but can be upgraded to be so) - The Primary server is used as DC/DNS/Fileserver + an MIS Application called Shuttleworth + an accounting software + Taxation software ..

The second physical server hosts an application called Apogee Prepress...

Both servers run Windows 2008 R2

Now, I've been assigned the task to switch to a complete Virtualized server environment, with HA (kind of .. We can tolerate a down-time of up 90mins) ; which would have been pretty straightforward, if it wasn't for the dismal budget of $1200 sanctioned for it .. Hence, I'm forced to look @ free options ...

@thwr

Yep, I'm looking for a shared-nothing type solution, cause (a) A NAS enclosure + HDD would be out of budget. (b) Even if we bought a NAS and stored all VM+DATA on it, it would still be a SPOF... no use ...

I did look @ the free Starwind Virtual SAN, but from what I read, I understand that the free version will allow only storage and not compute, on the same host... That's allowed, only in the paid version... ??

I'm not even looking @ running a HA Cluster with live Migration ... the VM replicated to the secondary host would like dormant on the secondary host... If the primary host fails, we don;t mind a few minutes of downtime, while the replicated VMs on the secondary host are manually powered-up...

wow .... errr... have I opened-up a can of worms here ?

Hi,

Sorry, was caught-up with some personal issue ... Anyway, it's sorted, and I'm back ...

Dustin, thanks for the follow-up ... I'm yet to hear from the bosses... so, nothings changed ..

@KOOLER said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

I did look @ the free Starwind Virtual SAN, but from what I read, I understand that the free version will allow only storage and not compute, on the same host... That's allowed, only in the paid version... ??

I've never heard of that limitation. that would be a new and surprising one. I'm quite confident that you can put your storage on your compute nodes.

Checking with @KOOLER @StarWind_Software

I'm making this statement, based on my understanding of the Free vs Paid document, found on https://www.starwindsoftware.com/whitepapers/free-vs-paid.pdf

Please look @ the comparison on the second-last page of this PDF... It says, next to Deployment Scenarios , that Hyperconvergence, is available only for Certain User Statuses (Check Status)

Please ping me off-line and I'll be happy to help with the keys you need

Thanks would be fantastic ... Thanks ...

@KOOLER said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@dafyre said in Converting to a virtual environment:

Their Endoint Recovery Free would work for backups in this scenario as well. And with that one, you do get file-level restores.

Unfortunately, it'd have to be loaded per VM, and is Windows only at the moment (Linux version just hit beta).

They are improving greatly and we'll get releases and fully commercially supported versions soon. VERY soon

Hi,

So, before rolling-out this project, I wanted to get a confirmation from all the vendors, on how their application would perform/react in a Virtualized environment, including vSANs (such as StarWind)... None , except one vendor (Apogee PrePress), seemed to have any issues... The surprising response we received from Apogee is that they've never tested their system with vSAN, nor do they have any customer references for the same... Hence, they would not be supporting it ... Major bummer !! :slight_frown:

Also, how are databases affected, when stored on a vSAN ?

@scottalanmiller

Yep... all well now .. Thanks :slight_smile:

Hi,

Sorry, was caught-up with some personal issue ... Anyway, it's sorted, and I'm back ...

Dustin, thanks for the follow-up ... I'm yet to hear from the bosses... so, nothings changed ..

@KOOLER said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

I did look @ the free Starwind Virtual SAN, but from what I read, I understand that the free version will allow only storage and not compute, on the same host... That's allowed, only in the paid version... ??

I've never heard of that limitation. that would be a new and surprising one. I'm quite confident that you can put your storage on your compute nodes.

Checking with @KOOLER @StarWind_Software

I'm making this statement, based on my understanding of the Free vs Paid document, found on https://www.starwindsoftware.com/whitepapers/free-vs-paid.pdf

Please look @ the comparison on the second-last page of this PDF... It says, next to Deployment Scenarios , that Hyperconvergence, is available only for Certain User Statuses (Check Status)

Please ping me off-line and I'll be happy to help with the keys you need

Thanks would be fantastic ... Thanks ...

@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL ÆtherStore will work fine for files but would lose perms if you are using a copy command instead of backup software. If you are using backup software and/or taking snaps it will work just fine.

geez Scott ... when do you get sleep ...

Yes, I was wondering about the permissions ... So, whats your take on the viability of AetherStor, as a proper, production use backup pool (given that I'll use a proper backup software)

@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@BRRABill said in Converting to a virtual environment:

You could throw Linux on a spare machine and accomplish what you are looking for pretty cheaply.

And that's why USB drives are never used... there is always a better, simpler way.

IF you have a spare machine sitting around.

(Yes, I am kidding.)

We have desktops, almost all of them have 500GB disks ... These are used, simply to host the Operating System and client-side applications, which lie on a 100 - 150GB primary partition... The rest is un-used, which in my opinion is a complete waste ... If somehow, one could pool the free storage from all these desktops (say even 20), then you'd get around 2TB of storage space , good enough for backups ... AetherStor ? The one down-side (?) with AetherStor is that, currently it offers only FAT32 based storage ... I wonder how it would work if we backed-up NTFS files to FAT32

@scottalanmiller

@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

hmm... We have around 600 - 700GB of data, on 1 server .. , and around 200 - 250GB on another ...

So which machine has the 1TB VM?

None ... I just used 1TB to get an idea of the restore time-frame ....

hmm... We have around 600 - 700GB of data, on 1 server .. , and around 200 - 250GB on another ...

If you'll say that an External USB HDD, won't be upto the task to backup/restore the VM, then this idea is moot ..

@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:

At 90 minutes, a good backup system can almost always restore your VMs in that window. It require the backup system to be able to push a restore that quickly AND your servers to be able to ingest a restore that quickly. So a lot of ifs, but it can be done and might be the cheapest path to your goal. You still use virtualization to make the "magic" happen on this, but using the storage of the two nodes to handle this is only one option, using the backup system to get rapid backups and rapid restores is a very viable approach when you don't need to recover "in seconds."

So, you're saying that one can backup all VMs(Data n all), onto an external media, and when the Primary host goes down, the VMs can be restored onto the secondary host ...

Our current backup scenario is rather straight-forward... We use a backup Software (called Easus) to perform daily incremental backups (at EOD), with 1 weekly full-backup. This has worked well for us (Tried n Tested)

So, going by what you're suggesting, can we incrementally (Every 30 mins) backup the VMs to the same USB drive, but this time, using a VM specific backup solutions such as Veeam Free...

Also, with something like Veeam Free, does the backup source host & restore target host have to be the same ? While restoring, can I just select another host as the restore target, and boom, it'd be up n running ?

Also, how long would be take to restore a 1TB VM ?

@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

I did look @ the free Starwind Virtual SAN, but from what I read, I understand that the free version will allow only storage and not compute, on the same host... That's allowed, only in the paid version... ??

I've never heard of that limitation. that would be a new and surprising one. I'm quite confident that you can put your storage on your compute nodes.

Checking with @KOOLER @StarWind_Software

I'm making this statement, based on my understanding of the Free vs Paid document, found on https://www.starwindsoftware.com/whitepapers/free-vs-paid.pdf

Please look @ the comparison on the second-last page of this PDF... It says, next to Deployment Scenarios , that Hyperconvergence, is available only for Certain User Statuses (Check Status)

wow .... errr... have I opened-up a can of worms here ?