@scottalanmiller said in ESXi cluster, advice needed:

@rtfm said in ESXi cluster, advice needed:

our organization is rich in terms of money but poor in terms of IT intellectual capital. Therefore we need outsourced support. in our place it is hard to find that, so we usually address ourselves to certified solutions.

This is a misunderstanding of markets. There is no such thing as a place with hard to get IT. IT has no location and there are essentially unlimited numbers of available excellent resources ready to assist any business. Businesses simply choose not to look for or hire them and instead hire sales people who screw them and hide their costs in "products" rather than honest or qualified advice. Every business should have outsources support, almost no company is big enough to have all the right people internally. But no business is in a location or situation that it can't get good people.

Certified solutions is really just a way to say "expensive products that are focused on resellers" or, another way, bad solutions that cost you far more to operate. They are channel products designed beginning to end to take advantage of this mindset and to get as much money out of companies that believe this as possible. It's an extremely common and effective game that they play.

If your company doesn't know how to achieve this, then the first thing that they need is a real outsourced CIO. A good CIO will save you a fortune in hours. Running without one is financially reckless.

i agree 100% and i am looking forward to convert your theory into practice.

@scottalanmiller said in ESXi cluster, advice needed:

@rtfm said in ESXi cluster, advice needed:

would you suggest a 2-node setup with local datastores and a fast network and that's it, given that we take as proper backups as possible

Under most conditions, yes. Fast, easy, effective. If you need absolute uptime, do so higher in the stack at the application level. If you just need really good uptime, take excellent backups, be able to restore really quickly, and probably keep a recent (like hours old) "copy" on the second host so that you can spin up in minutes.

Two stand alone hosts with good backups is often a "couple minutes" of downtime during a crisis solution, instead of a few milliseconds. Sure, a few minutes is relatively long compared to a few milliseconds, but to most businesses (and certainly most governments) a few minutes of downtime every few years doesn't matter at all.

From the requirements perspective i totally agree to your words! Considering our poor in-house human resources an RPO of even one day is totally satisfactory and acceptable! In that case i understand that there is no actual need to mess with HA, FA, SRM etc...

BTW your comment about how "system integrators" try to sell bare metal and certifications instead of brains was more than appropriate!