It's a little political - I'm not responsible for it but I have enough of an interest (and likelihood of being expected to deal with any issues depending who's around) that it's important it's done correctly.
I'm pretty sure VSTP would do what we need by handling loops at a VLAN level - just...
Things did move on a little since the original post - we now *think* that a hybrid model with a single physical link with SVI's for the routed links and L2 trunked where we need it would work using VSTP to handle blocking on a per VLAN basis.
There wouldn't ever be L3 loops on the RVIs so it...
Fair point and apologies, I know enough to get by but not enough "official" terminology :)
This is the best parallel I've found to the situation we have: http://packetlife.net/blog/2011/feb/9/hybrid-access-layer-design-revisited/
Right now we're literally flat network, no routing at all.
I'm reasonably sure that the "right" way to redesign our currently massive flat network is to look to do OSPF between core and distribution - nothing unusual there.
I'm also reasonably sure that we will be doing L2 between distribution and access for our own VLANs such as data and voice - L3...
I'm not sure if that's entirely true, if I've understood the question - we had a stretch cluster HP StoreVirtual and I could absolutely switch off or "steamroller" half of it and the cluster IP and storage would fail over without any interruption.
I don't know if I wish I was on that scale or if I'm glad I'm not :)
I suspect there's a fair bit of CYA in there - terminal failures with any vendor seem fairly rare but when it happens if I was in the spotlight I'm sure HDS or EMC buys a few points vs. explaining why I chose...
We have a couple of baby HDS arrays - cheap enough, pretty dumb, HDS reputation for being deathly reliable.
We're an average SME but I take a simple view which is if the storage is having a bad day everything else is going to have a bad day so I don't take chances - frustrating sometimes as...
I must admit I don't really get the point - you're buying a solution just as when you buy an array from HDS/Netapp/Pure/EMC or whoever you don't generally query how the cost is split between the hardware and the OS.
I get that software defined means you can split the tin from the software...
That's always been the gig with Nutanix and Hyperconverged though - you're not paying for magic hardware the value (if you see it to be worth it) is in the software.
Not really surprising. They might run on commodity hardware but I wouldn't think for a moment that you aren't going to have to buy their SKU if you want support etc. just as with any other enterprise storage product.
That's quite interesting, we only looked at Nutanix very briefly and it was six months or so ago way before the Dell partnership.
Must admit I'm a little unsure what the point of Nutanix and the likes is now that EVO/VSAN is getting more traction - I'm not sure I'd feel comfortable dropping...
What are you looking to do?
For stuff like VDI Nutanix and the likes look amazing, but for "general use" I've recently done a refresh and looked at Nutanix and Simplivity but simply couldn't get beyond the pricing and the fact that they (as with any hyper-converged solution) assume that your...
We use Juniper EX.
You can buy cheaper switches but if you want something in the same tier as Cisco I'd say they're up there - performance is great and when we've needed support they've been good.
One of the reasons we went the EX route was consistency - I quite like HP switches but AIUI you...
I'd be interested to know which Cisco you're comparing the EX2200 against - I'm guessing it's one of the "small business" range?
I may sound a little snobby here but I'm not sure those are "real" Cisco tbh, though they were the cheap dlink/linksys/whatever stuff?
What else is the SAN doing?
I don't know masses about Nimble but if you're hitting a ton of stuff that isn't in the SSD cache then you're basically hitting a 7.2K SATA (maybe NL-SAS?) RAID6.
They are what they are, dull boring dumb as a bunch of rocks but reliable as hell.
We have an SSG at the very perimeter of our network simply to act as a "doorman" to inbound and outbound traffic before our smarter stuff sees it - it's never skipped a beat.
We tried it.
Have to admit I really liked it but in the end it wasn't for us.
The dedupe didn't so well with our particular type of workload, though I could see how it would produce some amazing results with certain types of data.
The backup and restore/cloning blew my mind.
In the...
If we went with running StoreVirtual on these they would be clustered anyway.
I wouldn't be cutting corners either it would be decent spec i.e. LSI Nytro's, Intel SSDs in RAID5, Seagate Constellation ES SAS drives in RAID10.
Essentially RAIN with vSphere approved Metro Cluster via software...
Might be worth looking at the StoreVirtual VSA.
You can put together something seriously nice and seriously redundant at box and node level using a couple of servers stuffed with a tier of SSD and a tier of enterprise SAS and a RAID controller with SSD cache behind it.
I'm looking at...
I have a total environment refresh due in a few months and storage as software is very appealing for all the obvious reasons.
Dell, HP and the likes charge a small fortune for SSD and enterprise SAS drives plus the minute you want to go over 12 drives a chassis it's "Oh now you need an...
That's a very likely option - the lack of viable alternatives is surprising though.
For example I'd love to use NFS for the VMs but other than Netapp or true roll-your-own I can't find anything that does unified with failover/HA.
How do you define "fairly easy"?
I've never really played with ZFS so I'll be bp968's wife for this one, let's assume he's not available :) I wake up one morning and in the middle of the night a drive's failed - what steps are involved?
Easy to setup is not the same as easy to maintain though. If you buy a prosumer or professional NAS or even just use hardware RAID you usually have the benefit of alerting for things like failed drives and can usually replace them live if they're hot swapable.
What do you do on a ZFS box...
If you take Microsoft's official support stance on Exchange at face value then no company in the world that uses Netapp runs Exchange on it.
Their official support stance is crazy. How it is implemented it apparently much more sane.
Can I ask a question?
Respectfully, it seems like the setups you're looking at are more than most SME's would have, so does your wife have some extreme performance requirements or are you coming at this from simply wanting to do something geeky?
Basically what I'm asking is are you looking...
SME with around 12tb of data, fully virtualised (VMware), AD, Exchange, File Servers etc.
We have a large physical campus with our own fiber everywhere which means we can do things like stretch clusters very easily.
I have a bit of an issue with paying huge premiums for proprietary vendor...
Wondered where you stand on SAN/NAS on whether you prefer hardware over software.
Let's say you need a 5TB NAS/SAN.
You can go out and you can buy any number of hardware units that range from a $1000 Synology/ReadyNAS up to $50k worth of 3PAR and so on.
Or you can take the view that a...
I'm planning our imminent storage/server refresh.
Right now we have P4000 split across 2 sites with 10GbE and a third witness site on 1GbE.
Our IOPS is very low (< 2000 @ 95th percentile).
My current plan is to spec up a pair of ML350's each with 16x3tb nearline SAS drives in RAID10 and...
I haven't really played with ZFS but my understanding was that even if you didn't use any of the funky RAIDZ stuff that there are still plenty of benefits that would apply if you were running virtualised?
I'm thinking dedupe, snapshots etc.
I'm planning our imminent storage/server refresh.
Right now we have P4000 split across 2 sites with 10GbE and a third witness site on 1GbE.
Our IOPS is very low (< 2000 @ 95th percentile).
My current plan is to spec up a pair of ML350's each with 16x3tb nearline SAS drives in RAID10...
If you're under support and upgrade to 5.1 you should get VMware Data Recovery, though it's reported to be pretty damned awful and just about the last thing you want to be counting on when you need your data back.
vSphere Replication might also be worth a look though that's more about having...