Any Vmware VSA users

[hotcrandel]

A little back history;

I've been preparing my company to migrate fully to a virtualized HA front-end, with a redundant SAN back-end. I've been re-utilizing existing hardware [Think dell PE2950/2970's] to continue to add capacity for our business and better utilize the hardware [before everything was one server, one service, etc].

I started moving down the road to use HP Lefthand [P4000] SAN units, purchased two a year or two ago and have had 0 problems. They are fast and easy to use. I planned on purchasing additional units to move our important services/files etc on these very robust hardware, and eventually put a small ESX cluster in front of it. All of my existing ESXi boxes are severely RAM limited [think 4-8 cores ~2.0ghz, 16GB RAM] at capacity, and I have about 6 of them.

I calculated that I would need something like ~96GB of RAM total, and about 8TB of disk space after formatting to run all development environments, file servers, print server, database servers, domain controllers, etc etc etc. The whole company, basically. Overall just about every server isn't very "busy"; its all development.

3x servers with ~128GB memory and 8-12 modern cores would be sufficient for future growth, and expandable, and be something like $15k, then another $5k for licensing for the vmware small business pack.

Looking at the servers, adding 10k/15k SAS drives and RAID cards to the ESX servers, and serving the space up via VSA would cost about $2500 more, and then maybe add $3-5k per server in cost for hdd/raid depending on configuration and capacity.

I guess I have it in my head that buying 2 more HP SAN units [about $30k total] and then the servers and software on top of it [~$20k], vs doing it all in one shot [$~30k?], you can see what I'd rather go with.

I'm wondering if people have any experience using VMware VSA, hardware to recommend [10k/15k SAS vs 7.2K, cpu/memory usage, gigabit fast enough or do you need more, etc]

And overall, How do you like it? Strange issues? Hardware incompatibility? Fast? Is my math bad?

 

[stevebaynet]

if u have the HP P4000's, how come your adding drives to the ESX servers and serving up data via VSA? Why not use the P4000's as shared storage for the ESX servers? (or am i not understanding something, totally possible)

 

[hotcrandel]

I am currently using the P4000 units, but they don't have enough capacity for my entire system, not even close.

As I get closer to buying my cluster I'm considering outfitting those new servers with HDD/RAID, and then using VSA since the cost/gigabyte should be cheaper, and it should play nice with the P4000 units I have already.

 

[stevebaynet]

I am currently using the P4000 units, but they don't have enough capacity for my entire system, not even close.

As I get closer to buying my cluster I'm considering outfitting those new servers with HDD/RAID, and then using VSA since the cost/gigabyte should be cheaper, and it should play nice with the P4000 units I have already.

Ok, i understand now, thanks for the clarification. I have heard about VSA but have not had a chance to play with it myself. So hopefully someone will chime in here in that regard. I'm working on setting up a new ESX cluster too but will be using centralized storage (ZFS/Nexenta) rather than a distributed model like VSA, definitely intriguing tho.

If you dont get much of a response here, i believe there is a vmware subforum in here somewhere.