storage suggestions?

[guessmyn4me]

howdy,

we have currently around ~70 VMs sharing a RAID6 array of regular SATA disks, and it's getting slow

I'm thinking of going to an all-SSD solution; we'd need around ~10-12TB space.

I see 3 options:
1, get IBM/NetApp/whatever bigbrand - $$$$
2, buy synology/qnap (we need rack mounted)
3, get a 16/24 bay case and put in SSDs (Intel DC S3500s), install linux and run software raid 10/6 and export it via NFS/iSCSI over 10g

the number of VMs will likely continue to grow, what's why I'm thinking about going all SSD.

thoughts?

 

[Thuleman]

You don't mention what your budget is, or how many hosts you have.

Whatever budget you have will likely be the determining factor as to what solution you can buy.

All SSD doesn't seem reasonable as you probably have a bunch of VMs which don't require SSD performance.

Nimble (flash hybrid) has been pretty aggressive when it comes to pricing and you could probably get one of their arrays at the capacity you need around 40k.

My personal favorite is Jetstor since you can just populate the array with whatever combination of disks you want and freely assign physical disks to raid groups where each raid group has their own raid properties. So you could buy a 16 disk unit, put in 12 SAS disks and 4 SSDs, and have one raid group for the SSDs (i.e. Raid 10), and then split the 12 SAS into two raid groups of 6 physical disks running Raid 6 or whatever.

For the price of on Nimble you can get two Jetstor units, both with dual controllers, and life will be good.

 

[guessmyn4me]

3-4 physical hosts; I don't want to spend 40k. for that, I could buy IBM/NetApp. Let's say I'd be okay with spending around 20k.

 

[_Gea]

You can either buy one highend storage that is not allowed to fail
with a redundant high speed network

or you can use several smaller systems to avoid single point of
failures for load balancing where only a few VMs are affected on problems.

In extreme, you can use All-In-Ones where you add a virtual SAN storage to
each ESXi server with highspeed internal connectivity in software. Each All-In-One
acts completely independent. A Vmotion must be paired with a storage motion in such a case
to move VMs.

I would look at redundancy and backups.
For 20k, you can also afford two or three dedicated SAN storage boxes with an additional backup box
when using standard server hardware from SuperMicro (my choice) or Dell.

On the software side, you should look at ZFS where you get netapp comparable storage features
paired with OpenSource options. You can use ZFS on BSD, Linux and Solaris.
It was originally developped for Solaris and this is already my preferred platform with commercial
Oracle Solaris and OpenSource options from OpenIndiana (developper state) and OmniOS (stable).

You can also use ZFS as a storage appliance (BSD with Freenas or Solarish with my Napp-it and Nexenta).
For All-In-One I offer a preconfigured webbased ZFS storage appliance for ESXi 5.5/5.1 (free to use even commercially)

 

[guessmyn4me]

Nexenta is total crap (no updates in a year?!), Illumos is, well, less-than-alpha, ZFS-over-fuse is meh; the only solution is to either buy Solaris or to use FreeBSD, it seems. (for ZFS).

 

[_Gea]

Nexenta is total crap (no updates in a year?!), Illumos is, well, less-than-alpha, ZFS-over-fuse is meh; the only solution is to either buy Solaris or to use FreeBSD, it seems. (for ZFS).

On Linux you use Zol, not fuse. Illumos is not a distribution but the base and kernel
development of ZFS and the free Solaris fork. Every free ZFS (Solarish but also ZoL and BSD) use this as upstream.

On Solaris, you must decide between the incompatible closed Oracle ZFS and the free fork
development line with OmniOS as the stable and most up to date option
(free but with commercoal support option). Nexenta is on the transition to an Illumos base with Nexenta4 as well (sooner or later).

 

[NetJunkie]

3-4 physical hosts; I don't want to spend 40k. for that, I could buy IBM/NetApp. Let's say I'd be okay with spending around 20k.

Not for all SSD you can't for $40K with IBM/NetApp.

What's your uptime requirement? If you build and it breaks how long can you be down? I'd be looking at a good hybrid solution like a Tintri or Nimble. People that build their own production storage learn some very hard lessons.

 

[Child of Wonder]

Nimble is fast, cheap, and so, so stupid easy to learn.

Nimble gets my vote.

 

[Thuleman]

Another option is the vSAN that comes with vSphere 5.5, depending on how many disks you can load into your current hosts that may be a viable option. It appears to be all around significantly better than the total crap that the VSA is/was.

Tintri is just way to expensive for small environments, last I checked they don't even start till the 70k range.

 

[NetJunkie]

VSAN is really a 4-node minimum..which is a lot for 70 VMs.

 

[ND40oz]

Nimble (flash hybrid) has been pretty aggressive when it comes to pricing and you could probably get one of their arrays at the capacity you need around 40k.

Which Nimble's are you getting for 40k? A CS260 with 3 years of support was 100k+ last time I priced them. I guess you may swing a CS220 with warranty for that?

 

[RESTfulADI]

Another vote for Nimble. Been managing two of them for over a year and the only trouble was one dead 10Gb port, replacement controller arrived two days later.

 

[geiger]

Another vote for Nimble. You can get a CS220 for somewhere in the 25-35K range, I'm not sure of the CS210 pricing.

We went with Nimble over a year ago. Our CS220 massively outperforms the equallogic and EMC VNX units that were already in the environment.

 

[Thuleman]

Which Nimble's are you getting for 40k? A CS260 with 3 years of support was 100k+ last time I priced them. I guess you may swing a CS220 with warranty for that?

Yup, it was a C220, which came in at like 38k last time I casually priced it which was in August. To me that seemed like quite a substantial drop from the previous time I had priced it in early 2013.