Should I upgrade?

[ltickett]

I have 2 identical "green" supermicro boxes (only one powered at any one time) running ESXi 5.

I have a handful of virtual machines: Router, Web Server, SQL Server, Application Server etc and consider these to be "production" servers. Although nobody's getting sued if they go down, I will be loosing money spending time getting them back up again.

The supermicro boxes connect to shared storage using NFS running on a HP Microserver with WHS 2011. This fileserver also serves my PVRs, HTPCs, SONOS, laptops/desktops etc

#1- This is extremely efficient (power wise).

#2- This is "unsupported". From a VMWare point of view, and I do get failures from time to time (the datastores appear offline and things start to fail- eventually i have to reboot ESXi with various levels of success/corruption).

Now for some time I have been considering a few options:

a- Move to Windows Server / HyperV. Based on the prospect that this should be supported?

b- Purchase a supported "NAS" such as a Synology offering a lot of people rave about. Based on this being supported with my existing ESXi infrastructure.

c- Use local storage in the ESXi hosts. This should instantly resolve any issues with datastores but presumably would mean having to physically move the disks if i wanted to power up the other host. And my fileserver would still be running regardless.

What would your suggestions be? Or should I stick with my current "fairly decent" solution? How easily can I transition?

My top priorities are probably: Stability, Running Cost (Power Consumption?), Performance, Scalibility

 

[ltickett]

Just stumbled across VSA VMWare Storage Appliance, it looks like it could be my point (c) above. Allowing me to ditch the fileserver and instead have both of the ESXi boxes running all of the time. This would provide the additional benefit of HA / FT. Hmm...

 

[ltickett]

no-one?

 

[bmh.01]

Or ditch WHS on the microserver?

 

[ltickett]

and opt for ? instead

 

[ltickett]

Just priced up synology nas solution:

Synology RS812+ 4 Bay 1u Rack NAS- £812.56
Synology RX410 Hard drive array 4 bays rack-mountable- £472.54
4x OCZ 512GB Vertex 4 SSD- £1279.97
4x Hitachi 4TB Touro DX3 Desktop Hard Drive- £519.94

Comes in just over £3k. Through work i'd get the VAT back bringing it down to £2,500

My intention would be to run two "pools" or "luns" or whatever they're called... both RAID 10.

From the synology site, it appears the power consumption would be a little higher than that of my existing hp microserver BUT i'd have additional redundancy, performance and a certified datastore for my vms

 

[ltickett]

In the interest of lower power consumption i ended up bringing things down a notch (and an additional bonus of reduced cost too).

I have opted for the Synology Ds1812+ 8 Bay Desktop Nas w/ 4x 3TB WD Green disks, and just 2x OCZ Vertex 4 256GB SSD.

My theory being that the virtual machines already perform well from spinning disks so no need to move them to solid state- instead i will reserve the solid state disks purely for SQL server database/logs.

Total came in about £1,500

 

[bmh.01]

and opt for ? instead

FreeNAS or any of the other open source easy to use and good distros. FreeNAS will happily boot of a USB stick in the internal port in the microserver.

 

[ltickett]

I used to run FreeNAS back in the day but had a few gripes with it.

My Synology DS1812+ arrived today and i have to say i'm really impressed. Shame the disks are on back order so i'm just testing it with a 3TB i have kicking around for now.

 

[vr.]

NFS is included in Windows 2008 R2 and you can serve ESXi hosts with no issues.

 

[ltickett]

I used to have intermittent issues which were impossible to diagnose and running that setup is unsupported.

So far, so good with the new synology solution. I will no doubt do a blog entry about it at some point.