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Ok a little background about our environment. We currently have a mix of 8 poweredge r710/r810/r820 servers in a stretched cluster in two different facilities across our campus, each with 256GB RAM and two dual port 10Gb broadcom nics mated to eight Force10 S4810 10Gb switches, two for the LAN and two for the storage network at each datacenter. The 4810's are linked with 10Gb MM fiber. Storage is a FAS3240 fabric metrocluster.
We currently are running at ~250 powered on VM's for this cluster, mix of server VM's and Win7 VDI desktops running on View 5.3. Approximitely 150 of the VM's are VDI machines. Currently they are persistent dedicated pools for each user but we are planning on migrating the majority of them to nonpersistent linked clones with view persona management for the profiles, redirecting that user data to a cifs share on the netapp.
There is discussion about moving 40-50 of our users with a possibility of more later on (aka most likely) to new office space about a mile away from our main campus with a 30Mb WAN link back to the main campus. These user's would be executives, accounting and other task/knowledge workers. We're not looking to drop serious coin again on a new netapp HA pair as the majority of the VM's on this site will just be VDI sans a domain controller, print server and an app server or two. I'm also weary of going with a lower end single controller array like a FAS2500 because of scalability issues just like any other array that requires a headswap once the controller becomes overloaded. I know there's new players out there that excel at VDI like nimble, etc but those also cost a pretty penny too.
We'd like to start running cisco at our shop so I've been looking at the C240 smartplay bundles. For ~45k we can get four C240 servers with 128GB ram, dual E5 Xeons, VIC1225 adapter and Nexus 2K fabric extenders. For this greenfield deployment I think we would just need to add a pair of Nexus 5k's to link up to and then some access switches for the endpoints and that would take care of the switching infrastructure. Then add some SSD and disks to our C240's and get the VSAN cluster set up.
Given this scenario would you guys go the same route? I know I can run on just 3 hosts for VSAN but the smartplay bundle price is attractive and I hear its best practice to run VSAN on a minimum of 4 nodes. I'm also open to possibly going nutanix/simplivity but i think the price point would be a bit higher then the build your own route im leaning towards.
We currently are running at ~250 powered on VM's for this cluster, mix of server VM's and Win7 VDI desktops running on View 5.3. Approximitely 150 of the VM's are VDI machines. Currently they are persistent dedicated pools for each user but we are planning on migrating the majority of them to nonpersistent linked clones with view persona management for the profiles, redirecting that user data to a cifs share on the netapp.
There is discussion about moving 40-50 of our users with a possibility of more later on (aka most likely) to new office space about a mile away from our main campus with a 30Mb WAN link back to the main campus. These user's would be executives, accounting and other task/knowledge workers. We're not looking to drop serious coin again on a new netapp HA pair as the majority of the VM's on this site will just be VDI sans a domain controller, print server and an app server or two. I'm also weary of going with a lower end single controller array like a FAS2500 because of scalability issues just like any other array that requires a headswap once the controller becomes overloaded. I know there's new players out there that excel at VDI like nimble, etc but those also cost a pretty penny too.
We'd like to start running cisco at our shop so I've been looking at the C240 smartplay bundles. For ~45k we can get four C240 servers with 128GB ram, dual E5 Xeons, VIC1225 adapter and Nexus 2K fabric extenders. For this greenfield deployment I think we would just need to add a pair of Nexus 5k's to link up to and then some access switches for the endpoints and that would take care of the switching infrastructure. Then add some SSD and disks to our C240's and get the VSAN cluster set up.
Given this scenario would you guys go the same route? I know I can run on just 3 hosts for VSAN but the smartplay bundle price is attractive and I hear its best practice to run VSAN on a minimum of 4 nodes. I'm also open to possibly going nutanix/simplivity but i think the price point would be a bit higher then the build your own route im leaning towards.
