• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Virtualization and small business

D

dave99

2[H]4U
Joined
Jan 20, 2011
Messages
2,129
So I have a few clients with old single box SBS 2003 installs that are coming up for replacement, or more accurately, past due for replacement (dell 2900s & 1900s). These are all pretty small firms, 10-25 people generally, and in the architecture & engineering industries. Pretty basic stuff, email, printers and file sharing (lots of large files, generally between 400GB & 750GB for their data). They all have linux based spam filters and another windows based virtual server that runs in vmware server on top of sbs. Yes, I know that sucks and isn't ideal, but funds weren't available for anything else. At least it's been surprisingly reliable.

Now that is it getting to be upgrade time, I'm trying to figure out the best solutions for them. Funds & space are always limited, so I need to come up with a single server solution. Redundant servers and a SAN would certainly be nice & cool, but just isn't going to happen, it's going to be 1 server with local storage. I'm looking for something that has decent performance, obviously, and probably the key thing (since this is a single box and a giant single point of failure), is easy restoration if the hardware blows up.

What's going to run on this server:
1x SBS 2011 (16GB RAM)
1x Windows 2008 for accounting software & veeam (4GB)
1x Centos Linux - spam filter (1GB)
1x pfsense firewall (1GB)

What I've come up with so far:
Dell T420 or T620 with E5 cpu (either 1 6 core, or dual 4 cores depending on pricing)
32GB RAM
Perc H710 with 1GB cache & BBU
2x 600 GB 15K SAS drives raid1.
4x 1TB 7.2k near line SAS. raid 5 or 10 - not sure yet.
Vsphere 5 essentials (can't use free with veeam, but essentials is cheap enough).

For backup:
Veeam backup & replication
Synology/Qnap NAS with 2-3TB raid space

The veeam software would probably have to run on the secondary windows 2008 vm. All the VM's would reside on the 15k SAS drives, and the project data folders would be the only thing on the slower 7.2k array. Using veeam would allow me to create image backups, ready to run VM's on the synology NAS, so if the server crapped out, I'd bring in my lab server, import the vm's and go. The project data folders are replicated offsite each night to my archive server, and would also be robocopied to a USB drive hooked to the synology.

Not counting additional users licenses, that should run about 8k or so.

So any ideas, opinions, criticisms etc?
 
Have you considered any offsite "cloud" backup as well or setting up a copy of the most important VMs to a USB drive monthly? You have 2 copies of the customers data on site but if something were to happen to the building, server/nas stolen, fire etc they lose everything.
 
The project data gets replicated offsite every night to my archive server at my office. I need to play with veeam a bit more, and see if it's reasonably possible to replicate the backup images (since they are deduped & compressed) over cable/dsl as well. I suppose those could be copied manually to a USB drive every couple of weeks also.
 
Few points:

1. Dual CPU or Single - Consider also that veeam license is per CPU, and from what you wrote you will run, one cpu can handle it pretty fine, usually the problem is memory for those kind of VMs, I never encountered CPU problems with todays hardware.
2. Without going into too much details, consider running ZFS and not raid5, and consider ZFS raidz2 (equivelant of raid6, but don't use raid) - basically raid is good in case of driver failure, but when you have bad sectors from my experience, the raid might not know about it or fix it, ZFS does the checksum for every read and also a crc for the checksum so data integrity is much better.
3. For someone with really low budget but HA in mind, I setup instead of one expensive server, 3 cheap desktop (cheap compared to a server hardware) grades, one with the disks as storage with openindiana ZFS and napp-it and two esxi hosts, for the hosts you don't really need server grade, its usually for hardware reliability, but if you have two machines which can backup each other (resource wise) you have more HA and flexibility.
An upgrade on that will be to have just the two esxi hosts with each having a storage VMs on it, you can even replicate that storage.
3. Just a small tip - For mail relay, I use the free mailcleaner distribution which has awesome features out of the box.
4. pfSense, love it :) especially the OpenVPN, consider adding free OTP authentication to the VPN using the very nice and free MOTP-AS distribution, very easy to manage accounts on it, and has clients for most smartphones.
5. For doing the mail sync with MS activesync to the SBS and not exposing your IIS to the world, I've also setup a squid reverse proxy.
 
New update.... veeam just release the veeam backup free version which does most of the backups you probably need for vmware, without support for replicas, I don't know if its supported for the free ESXI version.
 
sevet said:
New update.... veeam just release the veeam backup free version which does most of the backups you probably need for vmware, without support for replicas, I don't know if its supported for the free ESXI version.
Click to expand...

Thanks I di dnot know they came out with this. It will make a great addition to what I already use for backups.
 
I've thought about using ZFS (that's what my offsite archive server is), but I don't like running it in a vm, and multiple cheap machines just won't work. At least the offsite data has the benefits of zfs, plus the multiple snapshots, which are nice to retrieve files that were overwritten a long time ago. I'll have to look at veeam free, I'm wondering if they have taken out the important stuff like scheduling though.
 
dave99 said:
I've thought about using ZFS (that's what my offsite archive server is), but I don't like running it in a vm, and multiple cheap machines just won't work. At least the offsite data has the benefits of zfs, plus the multiple snapshots, which are nice to retrieve files that were overwritten a long time ago. I'll have to look at veeam free, I'm wondering if they have taken out the important stuff like scheduling though.
Click to expand...

Veeam free vs paid http://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_and_replication-free_vs_full_ds.pdf

And yes of course scheduling is gone. Like I said it is going to be in addition to what we already do for our backups.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top