New setup seeking last minute advice

[joshu]

I'm almost ready to do some holiday shopping and I want to run my list and setup by my [H] peers

The setup will be at my home with local and remote users. 10-15 production VMs on ESXi 5.1 with ~5 users relying on the system for day-to-day work.
It will also function as a small development/lab environment (only for me at the moment.)
The internet connection has just been upgraded to VDSL 30Mbit/12Mbit.

Here's a list of the most important VMs:

1x AD/DNS/DHCP Windows Server 2012
1x RDS (Terminal Server) Windows Server 2012
1x File & Print Windows Server 2012 <-- not 100% sure on this or alternative
1x Veeam B&R Windows Server 2012 <-- maybe on File & Print don't know yet
1x Zimbra Email Ubuntu Server
1x HylaFAX Ubuntu Server
1x Vyatta Core <--may change for hardware solution
1x vMA
1x vCenter Appliance
1x Monitoring/ logging server <-- not sure what solution​

Bill of Materials

1. Servers

2x Supermicro X9SCM-IIF $183.99

2x Intel E3-1230V2 BX80637E31230V2 $227.99

4x 8GB RAM <-- See my question below.

2x Antec EarthWatts EA-380D Green $44.98

2x Intel Dual Port NICs <-- See my question below.

2x X-Case RM 204 2U $96

2x Sandisk Cruzer Blade USB 2.0 4GB $7
​

2. Shared Storage

1x Synology DS1512+ $768

Disks or SSDs <-- See my question below.
​

3. Networking

1x Ubiquiti Unifi Pro $229

1x HP V1810-24G $225

1x Dovado Tiny 4G Router $75 <-- For WAN Failover

1x MOXA Nport 5110 $139 <-- For Serial Fax Modem​

4. Additional Hardware

All of the following I already have, but will be part of the setup.

HP LaserJet P3015x
Zyxel VDSL Modem
HP Document Scanner + AXIS Document Server
Multitech Modem (FAX)
Thin clients
APC Smart-UPS 1500VA​

Questions

- I'm confused by all the RAM choices in
RootWyrm's BabyDragon Store. Is this the right RAM?

- Each X9SCM-IIF comes with 2 onboard Intel NICs and looking at other users' setups I think I should get an Intel dual port NIC per server.
Chris Wahl lists "Intel 82571EB dual port GbE NIC" on his home lab site. Any recommendations on where I can get these?

- I'm really uncertain about the shared storage. I know that the DS1512+ is extremely popular and I have read several blog posts about different types of drives and configurations.
I can really use the community's help with picking drives, e.g. 5x SATA, 5x SSD or a mix (2x SSD, 3x SATA). What RAID level, 5?

- I've tried to source the components from the cheapest places (superbiiz for most server stuff) as of posting this, but if anyone knows any cheaper vendors please let me know.​

I will be the only one responsible for this environment and the users can tolerate some downtime if shit hits the fan, but losing a complete workday is unacceptable.
I think I've put together a reliable and suitable list of hardware, but I welcome all input/ advice/ help from all of you

Thanks so much!

P.S. I might create a separate thread showing the build from start to finish. I know it's not like Spyder's awesome thread, but if anyone is interested I'll do it to share my progress

 

[joshu]

I'll take any critique from those of you that have viewed my thread

 

[ClariorHincHonos]

1. RAM is correct from what I can tell.

2. Intel NIC prices are usually fairly stable regardless of vendor. You might try Geeks.com though, seems like they have decent prices for refurb gear.

3. This is a bit harder to answer. A quick glance at your VM's and I see some things that can be merged. If you consolidated, you might reduce the load on your storage, which would change the picture. But I would say a mixed SSD/SATA solution would be best.

 

[joshu]

Thanks for your answers ClariorHincHonos!

2. Intel NIC prices are usually fairly stable regardless of vendor. You might try Geeks.com though, seems like they have decent prices for refurb gear.

I guess what I'm after is what model of NIC (with the Intel 82571EB chipset) would be suitable for my listed servers. Something like HP NC360t or Intel EXPI9402PTBLK?

3. This is a bit harder to answer. A quick glance at your VM's and I see some things that can be merged. If you consolidated, you might reduce the load on your storage, which would change the picture. But I would say a mixed SSD/SATA solution would be best.

I'm interested in what you have in mind in terms of consolidation and how you would pick storage media depending on that.

 

[ClariorHincHonos]

Thanks for your answers ClariorHincHonos!
I guess what I'm after is what model of NIC (with the Intel 82571EB chipset) would be suitable for my listed servers. Something like HP NC360t or Intel EXPI9402PTBLK?

I'd hit the ESXi HCL and find models on there. Beyond that, I don't know info pertaining to performance between NIC's and such. But if you grab one off the HCL, you can research that model. I don't think you can go too wrong with an Intel model though, regardless of what it might be.

I'm interested in what you have in mind in terms of consolidation and how you would pick storage media depending on that.

I'd put your file server/print server on the AD/DNS/DHCP server. Might not be the recommended practice, but I think with the small amount of users you could get away with it. All of those are pretty low on the resource scale (all can be run on Server Core if memory serves).

You might also be able to get away with B&R and the monitoring software being on the same box. Backups will only kick off during a certain time period, so I don't think it would be a biggy.

 

[dave99]

veeam can run on windows 7 pro, no point in paying for a server license for that.

 

[Child of Wonder]

snip

4 network ports per host would be better. 2 can be dedicated to Management, VMotion, and VM traffic while the other 2 are for storage (NFS or iSCSI). Make sure you spread each vSwitch across the onboard and add-on NIC for best redundancy.

You can even get a cheap Intel dual port NIC on ebay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pro-1...US_Internal_Network_Cards&hash=item3f201c8842

You may want to consider 24 or 32GB of RAM per host. Ideally you'd like one host to be able to run all your VMs without resource contention and RAM is the first thing you'll run out of. If you need to bring a host down for maintenance or one fails, it's preferable to be able to easily run everything on the remaining host(s) in your cluster.

For disks, it depends on your size needs. If you don't need a ton of space, I'd go with 5x 1TB WD Black or equivalent in RAID 5. You'll only want SSDs if you intend to throw a lot of IOPs at the storage. Rule of thumb a 7.2k SATA drive should give you about 80 IOPs and 5 in RAID 5 you can expect about 400.

The DS1512+ is a great choice or you can put together your own SAN as well. I run a Windows 2012 server at home with 8x 2TB drives in a Storage Pool. Then I carve up mirrored volumes to use as datastores. I use Starwind's free iSCSI target and it works great. Performance is excellent.

Since you're using the vSphere appliance, bear in mind it doesn't come with VMware Update Manager so you'll need to install that on a separate server if you want to use it to update your hosts.

 

[joshu]

4 network ports per host would be better. 2 can be dedicated to Management, VMotion, and VM traffic while the other 2 are for storage (NFS or iSCSI). Make sure you spread each vSwitch across the onboard and add-on NIC for best redundancy.

You can even get a cheap Intel dual port NIC on ebay.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Pro-1...US_Internal_Network_Cards&hash=item3f201c8842

I found this link showing a 4 NIC configuration. I wouldn't have FT or iSCSI (well from what I've read by more knowledgable VMware users NFS should be fine).

In the blog post there are two physical switches. An HP Procurve 24 has more ports than I need, but will I be ok with only one physical switch if you look at the overall redundancy of my setup? As an aside I know that the NAS will be a SPOF.

You may want to consider 24 or 32GB of RAM per host. Ideally you'd like one host to be able to run all your VMs without resource contention and RAM is the first thing you'll run out of. If you need to bring a host down for maintenance or one fails, it's preferable to be able to easily run everything on the remaining host(s) in your cluster.

Good point! I think I will start with 2x8GB in each server and once I have everything up and running, shutdown one host and see how everything runs on 16GB before I add more RAM. (At the moment I have most of these VMs running on a single HP ML110 G6 8GB without issues although the VMs are older XP and Server 2003.)

For disks, it depends on your size needs. If you don't need a ton of space, I'd go with 5x 1TB WD Black or equivalent in RAID 5. You'll only want SSDs if you intend to throw a lot of IOPs at the storage. Rule of thumb a 7.2k SATA drive should give you about 80 IOPs and 5 in RAID 5 you can expect about 400.

The DS1512+ is a great choice or you can put together your own SAN as well. I run a Windows 2012 server at home with 8x 2TB drives in a Storage Pool. Then I carve up mirrored volumes to use as datastores. I use Starwind's free iSCSI target and it works great. Performance is excellent.

In terms of actual user data which is all text based documents (Excel, Word, PDFs) and email it's very small if I had to give an approximation I'd say a < 10 GB. It's the VMs that consume space and the ones I've got on the single host add up to about 200 GB (swaps included) but they are bloated and will be completely redone along with everything else as indicated in my first post.

I have no idea how many IOPs the current VMs are producing, but I assume it's not much. The current storage is local on two 500GB Seagate Constellation SAS 7200 RPM drive in RAID 1 on an HP P212 256MB controller.

Since you're using the vSphere appliance, bear in mind it doesn't come with VMware Update Manager so you'll need to install that on a separate server if you want to use it to update your hosts.

If I don't use the Update Manager I can always update using the vMA, right?

 

[dave99]

You can also update directly from the esxi console via ssh. That's what I do.

 

[Vader]

FYI..the new vCenter Appliance is a memory hog..go with a standalone Win2k8R2 Box if you have the licenses...you'll save yourself some memory usage, and lowering the memory makes it perform horribly.

 

[Child of Wonder]

Just be aware that on vsphere 5.1 Vmware recommends 10gb of RAM for vcenter if it is also running the inventory service and SSO. :-P

You won't be turned away for support but officially you'd be outside best practices if you give it less.

 

[joshu]

Wow 10GB that's massive for vCenter managing two hosts.

I guess from the comments thus far that my hardware/ setup is more or less ok, right?