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Virtualizing Data Center Best solution?

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  • Business Computing
  • Servers
Last response: in Business Computing
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May 14, 2014 7:25:40 AM

We are looking to move from a 5 server environment to a single server, 5 VM's environment, I have a question for the world as my mind needs a fresh perspective away from the sales reps.

We have 1 DC, 1 Web Server, 1 Finical Software package software server (With SQL) an exchange server and a file server. We have about 5 TB of total storage, but cleaned up it will a little less, I'd say future proofing till the next server "upgrade" we would want aound 8 TB of storage.

Does anyone have any recommendations to virtualize this? We have looked at the dell VRTX and are leaning this way heavily right now, but I'm the lone voice saying we can do this a lot cheaper. The VRTX quote only has the Dell 520 servers in 2 blades with a backplaned SAN.

My thoughts were to get our own 2 blade fail over solution (Or 2 servers with failover) with a SAN on a pair of redundant switches. We do not have a huge data center.
Any thoughts?

More about : virtualizing data center solution

May 14, 2014 6:33:51 PM

First off, the thing you should really be questioning is do you NEED a SAN. This is a huge investment, perhaps the largest IT investment any company can make. And today there are many other alternatives to help with cost because SAN systems have always been such a difficult expense for small businesses.

A lot of places I have heard are moving to local storage for greater performance and reduced cost on things that need that performance. For those that don't need performance, you don't need anything huge and expensive for a SAN if you do need full highly-available fault tollerance. Setting up a Synology NAS with iSCSI can perform quite well even for many usage scenarios, but I've also seen people set up a two-node server cluster with a third server running iSCSI targets for the cluster and all for a fraction of the cost of a dedicated specialized SAN device.

I'd say before looking into details of how and with what, I would be sure you ask the question WHY, as in why do I need to have a dedicated SAN? And if you determine that you do to meet your needs, then what is the capacity and especially the performance need? If you don't need the performance (or can instead utilize something else like local storage or server replication for that part of your services) then setting up a basic iSCSI SAN shouldn't be very cost prohibitive. Is it going to match with the robust performance capabilities of a VRTX or a full SAN solution? Not really.
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September 12, 2014 1:12:51 AM

From my point of view moving from a physical environment to a virtual environment is a good step. Virtual environment has a lot of advantages over physical environment like less hardware requirement, low hardware maintenance, reduced overhead. For more information you can click here.
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Best solution

September 12, 2014 12:59:11 PM

From the services specs alone you're providing i would go for vSphere Essentials Kit (http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/compare.html -> bottom of the page)

This is a package VMWare sells as an introductory package to virtualization and gives you some of the features the more advanced enterprise class licensing offers, it also benefits from the fact that you could basically install this on "almost-any" enterprise class hardware that you have and still run (e.g. IBM SystemX 3XXX towers or similar) and keep a low cost virtualized enviroment.

In case you need failover solutions like HA you could go for the Essentials Plus Kit that has vMotion, HA, Data Protection, etc.

Its ultimately up to you if in addition to that you want to add an external SAN or NFS or work with local disks and backups.

Hope this helps you.
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September 12, 2014 8:09:16 PM

Your storage description is MINISCULE in datacenter terms. I would recommend a NAS with 10GE. Use iSCSI for the database, and SMB/NFS for shared storage. A NAS with dual controllers has redundancy, is simpler to manage than a SAN and should have the performance for your workload. IF you REALLY have to have IOPS for your database, look at some of the SSD accelerators that are available.

Pizza-box servers have greater expandability that do blades. Blade servers have cost advantages over pizza-boxes, since you don't have all the extra power supplies and redundant infrastructure.

I have worked with HP and IBM blade servers and HP, Dell, and SGI pizza-box servers. I personally prefer the pizza-boxes over the blades. For the limited number of blades that you would require/desire the blade chassis cost might outweigh the benefits.
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