Network pics thread

I've been installing R720 ESXi hosts like crazy...they are really nice servers for rackmount, love the mirrored SD cards..etc. Dell has really stepped up their game with 12g servers and their blades. I'm working on a huge VDI project right now for a school system that will provide DaaS. They've already invested in Dell M1000e or else I would be pushing UCS-B, but they are a prime candidate to look at the new m420's along with the EqualLogic Blade Arrays (pending what comes out of the Liquidware Labs Stratusphere FIT assessment) . I'm really looking forward to deploying the 420's with the EqualLogic Blade Arrays in the real world:

 
I bought 10 R720s. One's already had a bad motherboard. Luckily I found it when I burnt it in, instead of being in production. If/when we start looking into VDI, my boss and I have decided that UCS will be the platform of choice. Since we already have a Nexus core and NetApp storage, I'll be building a FlexPod.
 
Good choice....we are actually debating becoming a NetApp partner..i'm pushing them pretty hard because we do not have a "converged" architecture other than vStart but Dell makes it so difficult to get into that and get a validated design, it's not worth it. Problem is our main distro partner is Ingram Micro and they do not do distribution for NetApp so that's why they are pushing back a bit.

I'm working on a larger college VDI design now with Cisco UCS-B, Nexus, and Compellent ...though i'd rather have NetApp due to the validated architecture.etc.

VDI is absolutely exploding for us right now, on average I have 3-4 VDI assessments going on at once and several in the pipeline. Larger Financial Institutions, Health Care, and Education Verticals seem to be the majority.

I was really surprised coming into the Partner space last summer at the amount of customers that are starting phase one consolidation. I am working with more customers that are getting into the logical next step with Virtualizing business critical apps recently, however. Funny, cloud is really the farthest thing from the majority of my customer's minds right now...most are really in the beginning stages, server consol, tier one apps, and Disaster recovery, and of course VDI.
 
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Yeah my R720's have 192GB of RAM as well. They weren't much more. I don't know if his have dual Qlogic 8262's in them like mine do, but I didn't pay much more than he did.
 
The Spyder said:
What CPU? I think I just found my new ESXi boxes.
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Xeon E5-2670 2.6GHz

8oLD9Pj.png
 
Vader said:
I've been installing R720 ESXi hosts like crazy...they are really nice servers for rackmount, love the mirrored SD cards..etc. Dell has really stepped up their game with 12g servers and their blades. I'm working on a huge VDI project right now for a school system that will provide DaaS. They've already invested in Dell M1000e or else I would be pushing UCS-B, but they are a prime candidate to look at the new m420's along with the EqualLogic Blade Arrays (pending what comes out of the Liquidware Labs Stratusphere FIT assessment) . I'm really looking forward to deploying the 420's with the EqualLogic Blade Arrays in the real world:

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I wish my school district would be using one of those lol.
 
We use a large number of HP blade centers, in fact we have very few if any rackmount servers still in action.
 
audiphilth said:
Time for consolidation, out with the old -

The new -

New storage as well, Hitachi HUS 150 -
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How do you like the Hitachi HUS? We're quoting out SAN's at the moment and while I like the features of the 3PAR 7000 the most the HUS had also caught my eye.
 
I wish my school district would be using one of those lol.
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Lol...this is a bit different. We typically don't put these in unless it's a bigger school, thousands of users..etc.

In this specific case i'm working now, there are a total of 6 school districts wrapped up under this umbrella for IT services. All of the schools are independently looking at VDI but have to get approval under the umbrella. At this point we are discussing a DaaS solution which would more than likely leverage their existing investment in Dell Blades or else I would be pushing UCS-B like mad!

UCS-B for the lab is coming in..can't wait..even though we had to cheap out because of budget, had to get one FI, etc..not a big deal..we'll add to it!
 
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Vader said:
Lol...this is a bit different. We typically don't put these in unless it's a bigger school, thousands of users..etc.

In this specific case i'm working now, there are a total of 6 school districts wrapped up under this umbrella for IT services. All of the schools are independently looking at VDI but have to get approval under the umbrella. At this point we are discussing a DaaS solution which would more than likely leverage their existing investment in Dell Blades or else I would be pushing UCS-B like mad!

UCS-B for the lab is coming in..can't wait..even though we had to cheap out because of budget, had to get one FI, etc..not a big deal..we'll add to it!
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We have over 7,000 students for our entire district that has 11 schools in it. Unfortunately we fall under E-rate for most of our stuff so its damn near impossible for me to pitch any type of next level upgrades like that for the district because it would take god knows how long for it to actually show up. Im still new to the district(and dealing with IT in the educational arena as well as E-rate) so its taking some getting used to. Hearing my boss talk about E-rate confuses the shit out of me. They make things way more complicated than they really need to be.

We are gearing up to upgrade all of the network electronics in almost all of our schools except our high school, which isnt funded under E-rate. All of the schools will get new 6506's or 6509's for their MDF's and then 3750's for all of the IDF's.
 
ToX said:
We have over 7,000 students for our entire district that has 11 schools in it. Unfortunately we fall under E-rate for most of our stuff so its damn near impossible for me to pitch any type of next level upgrades like that for the district because it would take god knows how long for it to actually show up. Im still new to the district(and dealing with IT in the educational arena as well as E-rate) so its taking some getting used to. Hearing my boss talk about E-rate confuses the shit out of me. They make things way more complicated than they really need to be.

We are gearing up to upgrade all of the network electronics in almost all of our schools except our high school, which isnt funded under E-rate. All of the schools will get new 6506's or 6509's for their MDF's and then 3750's for all of the IDF's.
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Not really, e-rate is actually pretty easy to understand once you know the difference between Priority 1 and Priority 2 funding.
Considering you're getting anything at all in P2 funding I'm going to assume you're in a district with a free and reduced count of at least 88% or higher. Year14 e-rate (fiscal 2011-2012) only released P2 funding up to 88% or higher, so if you were in an 87% district you got nothing which kinda sucks.

Luckily I'm in a 90% district which is the highest you can get so I always get lots of money for new toys :D

For Year14 we're doing about $2million in upgrades with a plan to follow up in year16 with another million or so. Just make sure you don't violate the 2and5 rule and you can get all the toys you like!

BTW: high schools are most certainly funded in e-rate. Your particular high school might not qualify for this round of upgrades because it would violate the 2and5 rule or some other circumstance.

You're also wasting taxpayer money buying the 6500 series for your MDF's and 3750's for your IDF's. (in my personal opinion)
We are going with the 4500+E chassis's in the MDF's with 2960S layer2 switches in each IDF. Going to re-pull OM3 fiber for 10G upgrades coming in year16, so all we have to do is change the GBIC's and poof, 10G.
There is no reason to fall for Cisco's new Layer3 to the edge nonsense especially in schools where you're most likely running a collapsed core model anyway and you're certainly not doing any failover uplinks because e-rate doesnt pay for anything that is considered redundant.
 
cyr0n_k0r said:
Not really, e-rate is actually pretty easy to understand once you know the difference between Priority 1 and Priority 2 funding.
Considering you're getting anything at all in P2 funding I'm going to assume you're in a district with a free and reduced count of at least 88% or higher. Year14 e-rate (fiscal 2011-2012) only released P2 funding up to 88% or higher, so if you were in an 87% district you got nothing which kinda sucks.

Luckily I'm in a 90% district which is the highest you can get so I always get lots of money for new toys :D

For Year14 we're doing about $2million in upgrades with a plan to follow up in year16 with another million or so. Just make sure you don't violate the 2and5 rule and you can get all the toys you like!

BTW: high schools are most certainly funded in e-rate. Your particular high school might not qualify for this round of upgrades because it would violate the 2and5 rule or some other circumstance.

You're also wasting taxpayer money buying the 6500 series for your MDF's and 3750's for your IDF's. (in my personal opinion)
We are going with the 4500+E chassis's in the MDF's with 2960S layer2 switches in each IDF. Going to re-pull OM3 fiber for 10G upgrades coming in year16, so all we have to do is change the GBIC's and poof, 10G.
There is no reason to fall for Cisco's new Layer3 to the edge nonsense especially in schools where you're most likely running a collapsed core model anyway and you're certainly not doing any failover uplinks because e-rate doesnt pay for anything that is considered redundant.
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Ill have to look into the priority 1 and 2 stuff. I started in the district in August so Im still very new to this whole thing. Our district has a high transient rate as well as a very high rate of free/reduced lunches(which apparently plays into the e-rate deal). For all of the new gear that we are getting, its over $900k. I had no hand in picking the equipment and apparently the specs come down from someone higher in the district or else I would have been able to pick a more expandable setup. We have single mode fiber between all of our schools and I would have loved to get 10G uplinks between them, It's frustrating to me when I know that something can be done but am not able to make it happen.

If you dont mind, Im going to shoot you a PM later and maybe we can discuss some of the finer points of your setup as compared to mine.
 
Yeah..school funding is a bit odd from an outsiders perspective. Just to get back on track this DaaS will provide virtual desktops for almost 15,000 users including administrative workers.etc.

Blades are much better to position in those cases especially since they've already made the investment.

Also, don't rule out blades yourself. Cisco UCS is very reasonable to get into especially when you buy the starter bundle..etc.
 
@Vader

Daas = Desktop as a Service? Is that the same as VDI? What will you be using: VMware or Citrix? Also, what kind of bandwidth will that use?
 
Are people actually using VMware for this yet? I have only seen Citrix in use at the moment.
 
When I worked at the hospital we evaluated it and it was the intention to eventually go to it. Not sure if they actually ended up going with that solution though. It does make lot of sense in certain environments. For the hospital it made perfect sense. Nurses, doctors etc have patients to take care of and they don't have time for a computer that's malfunctioning. No problem, just swap out the hardware device, and reload their instance and they're back in the back exactly as they were. No profile issues to sort out after a new install, etc.

At least provided that the VM environment itself is clean and well configured... But one nice thing is the ability to apply updates and they simply just take effect next time a new fresh VM is spined up for them.
 
renixinq said:
How do you like the Hitachi HUS? We're quoting out SAN's at the moment and while I like the features of the 3PAR 7000 the most the HUS had also caught my eye.
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We actually use the HUS as NAS for file data retrieved through our web apps, we use our SAN strictly for DB's, we chose IBM v7000 with tiered SSD.
 
Vader said:
Are those C460 M2's maxed out? 1TB and 40 cores???!?!?
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Yes, these are currently configured with 1TB Ram, and 4x E7-4870 procs, 80HT cores of computing madness. The boxes actually will hold 2TB of Ram, I have 1 of those as well.
 
@Vader

Daas = Desktop as a Service? Is that the same as VDI? What will you be using: VMware or Citrix? Also, what kind of bandwidth will that use?
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Using View. I call it DaaS because we will be creating a highly available view environment at the primary and dr datacenters and the schools will connect to that over a redundant network topology in essense providing a central location to get access to desktops.

It's not truely cloud based DaaS just yet, just hosted centrally, VMware isn't quite there yet with DaaS in a hosted or private cloud environment. There is much talk about it though. I know Dell has an offering for "DaaS." Not sure how the infrastructure is setup though. I have a briefing about it in the next month.

The bandwidth depends on the user, and how that user is using their current desktop, hence the need for an assessment. Everyone I talk too asks me why I say VDI assessments are about users, because it's not the desktop per say we are assessing, it's how the user is using the desktop, hence the reason why the FIT assessment finalized reporting for VDI "FIT" into the Golden Distribution based on users, not just desktops. You are building your VDI solution for the end user.

You can go here for VMware's PCoIP bandwidth breakdown however, every business is different hence the need for an assessment.

http://pubs.vmware.com/view-51/inde...UID-5DC232B4-778B-4D9C-B995-B8850CF35096.html

Frankly, no one really has a clue as too what is needed for infrastructure for VDI without an assessment unless you have deep pockets and widly overbuild, which is not a good idea. Sure, there are some guys out there that could probably put together a valid solution, these are guys that live and breathe VDI and have done several implementations but even they are skeptical about putting a solution together without an assessment.

Yes, these are currently configured with 1TB Ram, and 4x E7-4870 procs, 80HT cores of computing madness. The boxes actually will hold 2TB of Ram, I have 1 of those as well.
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Are you sure they go to 2TB for memory, I thought the limit was 1TB, still impressive.

Time for a little vCenter Operations Dashboard
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Those are some good numbers there!!
 
That dashboard is within the Custom UI. Advanced or Enterprise licensing for vCOps is required. Our dashboards also pull data from the VNX Storage Connector and Hyperic.
 
Changed my switches around at home-
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Dell Powerconnect 2824, Dell Powerconnect 3448, Cisco Catalyst 2950.
 
Network_Diagram_10_Feb_2013_zps6f4f28b6.png


Our humble little network (physical). I'm hoping to pick up another ESXi box, a NAS, and a v1910 soon. With all the issues I've been having getting iSCSI datastores to work right, a virtual network diagram may never show up.
 
Upgraded the 10gig modules in my Nexus 7010 core switches from M132XP's to M224XP's:

Old M1 modules coming out:

M1.jpg


New M2 modules going in:

M2.jpg
 
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