• 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.

Would You Virtualize This

R

rosco

Gawd
Joined
Jun 22, 2000
Messages
722
I am working with a company that has about 50 computers. There is one server onsite but it is for their line of business app and that is all. It is managed by that software company's staff.

So, until recently, if they wanted to share files, they would just setup peer to peer shares and call it a day.

However, it's now gotten to the point where managing those different shares and making sure all of them are backing up is getting to be too much.

So, I'm planning on putting in a Windows server to manage the users/shares.

My question is, since it's really only basic domain management, file/printer sharing, etc, would you bother to go the virtual route? I realize some of the benefits of going that way but would like to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for the input.
 
Yes, virtualize it.

By moving it to a virtual format you gain a bit of portability when hardware refreshes are required. Since the virtual hardware will not be changing a lot of the migration process between 2 machines will not be an issue.
 
Yes, virtualize it.

Easy backups and much more flexible if you need to expand storage and/or processing power sometime in the future.
 
OK, seems like virtualizing it is the way to go.

Next question, how specifically would you do it?

I have one production VMware ESXv4 on a Dell 2950 running a few low use virtual machines. That is the extent of my experience with virtual machines other than some additional playing around with vmware workstation.

So, VMWare or Hyper-V?

What hardware would you use for this?

I'm thinking local storage and backup the virtual machines to a NAS.
 
rosco said:
OK, seems like virtualizing it is the way to go.

Next question, how specifically would you do it?

I have one production VMware ESXv4 on a Dell 2950 running a few low use virtual machines. That is the extent of my experience with virtual machines other than some additional playing around with vmware workstation.

So, VMWare or Hyper-V?

What hardware would you use for this?

I'm thinking local storage and backup the virtual machines to a NAS.
Click to expand...

VMWare esxi5 is what i would use. You don't have to get vsphere, but if it is in the budget, i would go for it. If you go the vsphere route i would look into upgrading the ESX4 server too, it will make management of both servers much easier.

Also, for backup look into veeam, especially if you just go with the "free" version of esxi5.

Hardware, get the most processing power and RAM that is in your budget, but remember, ESXi free only supports 2 physical processors a 32GB ram.

As far as storage space, take what you think you need and add 30%. That's my general rule. Run raid 5 with a hot spare for redundancy.
 
For the local storage setup, if I'm only using the server for the basics like file, printer sharing do you think I would be OK with SATA drives?

I've got a $4000 budget for the server and for a NAS to back it up to. So, SAS drives are going to eat up the budget quick. I was thinking I would go RAID10 if I did virtual but if I can do RAID5, that will help the amount of storage for the money.
 
You can pull it off depending on the IO/throughput load of the fileserver. SATA disks are nice for the high capacity, but too few spindles can pull your esx to its knees if you decide to continue down the virtual road and add VM's.
 
Sata discs in Raid 10 will give you plenty of IO for that number of people. Just make sure you use a real raid card with a BBU. Don't use a on board fake raid card.
Might also look at Hyper-V. Install Server 2008 R2 on the box, and add the Hyper-V role and you are all set.
 
Virtualizing a single server isn't really worth it unless you can do it for free (which you really can't because it will at the very least cost payroll). If you do it for free you usually don't get the management interface and all the cool stuff that makes virtualization awesome.

So no, looking at it rationally it doesn't make any sense to virtualize and deal with the added overhead without getting most of the benefits. Being hardware independent isn't as big as people make it out to be since for decades it worked just fine being hardware dependent.

Virtualization shines when you can consolidate and with a single server there is nothing to consolidate. Why create more work, makes no sense at all.
 
Absolutely it make sense. You just have to understand the benefits and liabilities. And realize that running your single production server is a VM isn't necessarily a magic bullet for reliability, it's just another method. Virtualization is as much about recovery and flexibility as it is consolidation. If you have the talent and training, then I'd do it. If you already have a Win2k8R2 license then you are already licensed to run a single instance of that license as a VM via Hyper-V. Backups from Hyper-V tend to be slightly easier as well. They utilize the native Windows VSS clients to quiesce the VM and copy it's VHD. One of my favorites has been Hyperoo.net. Cheap, easy and built in replication.
 
I'll chime in here with my 2 cents.

I'm going to assume your planing on using iscsi.

If you choose the VMware path make sure you use the physical layer and pass the mounted disk to the VM.

If you choose to use Hyper-V you should consider moving to Hyper-V 2012 ASAP. As the implementation is far better. Again you should pass the disk from the host OS to the guest OS. Do not use an emulated nic adapter to connect to an iscsi target. This will drive CPU use up and performance way down.


I've done a virtulization project for work where I got rid of two 3 year old HP ML330s with 8 cores and 4 gig each and replaced them with a Dell 210 II with 4 cores VT, 32GB RAM, (2x300GB 10k mirrored HD). I run everything that we ran previously on those two servers faster on my hyper-V enviroment. I also have a couple of test servers on there too.

I got back 5U of rack and a HUGE drop in power usage and room temp.

I'm currently running Server 2008 R2 as the host. But have Server 2012 core running in one of my VM as a test environment.

As soon as I am ready, I 'll fire off a full backup, install Server 2012 Core on one of the two old server, live migrate the running VMs over to the new temp server. Make sure that runs correctly for a day or two...then reinstall on my Dell 210 II with Server 2012 Core and live migrate back to the original hardware. All without taking my (2) servers offline.



Currently our File server is running in our hosts Virtual Cluster....and frankly it sucks.

It sucks for multiple reasons:
  • Its underpowered (2Ghz 2GB RAM 1GbE running both iscsi and normal traffic.....Our bean counters don't want to spend more.
  • Its in a shared environment, sometimes the cluster is bandwidth constrained
  • Our equalogic SAN has only one port enabled (it has 3 + 1 for management

So I was given a fairly decently equipped Dell Poweredge 2950, which we upgraded to have 16GB of Ram.

So our new fileserver will be:
8 core 2.6Ghz 16GB RAM, 1GBe x 4, (two of those will be dedicated to iscsi with Toe and jumbo frames enabled), One will connnect to our network, One will connect directly to the backup network.
We will use MPIO
The equalogic SAN will have 2 + 1 ports enabled

The old fileserver will be migrated to our in house virtual environment where it will be reconfigured and shut down. (it will become our backup file server)

This is to bring our file server up to our high performance expectations for our 200+ users accessing approx 4TB of data.
 
Sorry for the story hyjack:

If I had $4k and wanted to do what you are doing....

I would buy a Dell R210 II and stick at least 16GB of RAM in it, and a add on Intel nic..

Buy a QNAP TS-469U-RP 4-bay 1U Turbo NAS add (4) WD RED drives either 2TB or 3TB.

Make sure you have someplace to backup to for DR and backups.

That should do fine for 50 users.
 
Are you suggesting iscsi and the QNAP to future proof things? Otherwise, for my simple project wouldn't local storage work just as well?
 
This is a two part answer:

I'm recommending a small 1U server that can be used to get into virtulization now (your file server) and in the future possibly add more VMs.

The QNAP box gives you vertical and horrizonal drive RAID expansion....(Vertical RAID expansion is a BIG bonus when you have limited funds) without the proprietary overhead and speeds approaching what you will see when using local storage... AND you can relocate it later if you want.

QNAP boxes are awesome given their price point....but I would still endorse you to have a backup somewhere.. RAID is not backup and QNAP boxes are not infallible. They're just better than most of their competitors. They are Hyper-V, VMware certified and can integrate well with active directory. They have a TON of features, just keep in mind that some of those features require CPU and RAM resources. But using a QNAP box you have options.
 
Its all about reliability, availability, and convenience.

There are a lot of less things that can go wrong with a linux based QNAP box then a local storage server. There's also the idea that 6+ years from now when someone does go wrong you can buy ANY QNAP box that has an equal number of drives and move your storage right in and get back up online and running. 9 out of 10 times your local storage is not going to work that way. Since the QNAP is also running a standard linux software RAID, there are many pay tools available on the market to recover the data in the case of a disaster. Linux software RAID is quite good and does not even compare to a windows based software RAID. The model I recommended is capable of maxing out a gigabit eithernet line in most RAID configurations on large file transfers, so it isn't slow by any meaning.

The windows file server front end is all about management and convenience. You can forget the server and use the QNAP has a NAS directly....its just going to be more difficult to manage permissions for both you can your users. Personally I would add a file server front end and connect the QNAP as a SAN via iscsi. The R210 II is a economy server. Many guys here would bulk at me even referring to that unit as a "Server". But your budget sets the limits of what you can do, and my suggested setup follows good practices. The only remaining issues would be DR and backup of your data.
 
@Mackintire - That all makes sense. You obviously have a lot more knowledge than I do.

One concern I have is at least with the Dell server, I have NBD onsite warranty. What would I do if the motherboard failed in my QNAP?

Any way I could get to 32GB in my host server without breaking my budget? Upgrading to 16GB is reasonable but upgrading to 32GB in the R210 II is not. It looks like upgrading to the R310 has a cheaper upgrade to 32GB. Although, I pay more for the base unit. Which processor? Would I need any internal storage or just run ESXi from a thumb drive?
 
Last edited:
RiDDLeRThC said:
Virtualize everything :)
Click to expand...

That's what we've started doing. Someone needs a server? Give them their own. Don't let them screw with a solid production server.

Resource availability varies, though. So, there should be good reason.
 
With the QNAP box, you have only two options to fix the unit locally:

Buy a warranty and expect downtime while QNAP fixes your....under 96 hours. Or plan on purchasing another QNAP (ANY model) with equal number of drives, if when you have an emergency.

This is why QNAP is recommended for SOHO and SMB. The upper end models have dual power supplies and the top models have dual OS's and controllers.

The upper end models also have longer warranties.

Still, they are far better than a Drobo in almost every way.

If you don't mind you can syncronize your QNAP box to Amazon S3 and or many other backup services. In a jam you could log in and restore that backup to any box.

After a review recently for business critical storage on the cheap, I woud use a 4 bay unit with 3TB WD red drives in RAID 10. Buy an extra drive and keep it handy. $3.5k and you have 6TB of storage.... not bad at all. If you want more get an 8 bay unit and go RAID 10 with a hot spare or RAID 6 depending on usage. If you want more....start looking at HP storage servers or a small dell equalogic unit. But at this point you're over $6-8k and are moving into enterprise data storage.
 
I'm just wondering if considering my limited budget of $4000, I'm better of with local storage for now and a low end QNAP nas to backup to.

Then, if I need to add storage later I could purchase a higher end QNAP, or at least one that does iscsi and go from there.
 
Personally, I have multiple sites fully vitualized running ESXi 4.1 and 5.0 and I love it.

However for your situation and budget, I believe it would be silly to virtual at this point without any real tangible plans to continue virtualizing other servers down the road with. What your adding here (IMHO) is unnecessary complexity and overhead to a simple requirement, IE a file store.

None of the recommendations so far have actually touched on exactly how to back up your ESXi server and I personally believe there are sever limitations with the free version of ESXi and accomplishing this with a good DR plan.

IMO unless you plan on hosting multiple servers at some point AND have intentions to at some point take advantage of high availability and all it has to offer with the full version of vSphere, I don't see any reason why you would want to go anything other than a local file server and then dedicate some of that $4,000.00 to a good backup solution. Humbly, I can't even say going with a SAN is a good solution for a backup either because likely you may have intentions to kept the SAN onsite and if the building burns down, your data is as good as gone.

The only real advantage in your case scenario that I see in terms of using VMware is portability and in my mind with a single server, if either your SAN or your one server goes down your still SOL so where is the gain with that portability?

Everyone has different valid views on what they would be comfortable with based on a given solution and requirement and for me I personally could sleep at night if I had my domain controller on one physical box and my file server/backup DC on another. I would however have a REAL hard time getting sleeping having my file server, domain controller, exchange server all on one physical server and SAN without any redundancy (HA) built in and without being able to push out my restores in the event of disaster quickly IE - Veeam Backup NFS mounting. There a reason we people have a saying "don't put all your egg's in one basket", this is a prime example of where that saying came from.
 
Last edited:
I never endorsed VMware exclusively.

You should ALWAYS have a disaster recovery plan, and make sure management know and understands and signs off on what is involved to get them back up and running in the event of a catastrophe.
 
Mackintire said:
Sorry for the story hyjack:

If I had $4k and wanted to do what you are doing....

I would buy a Dell R210 II and stick at least 16GB of RAM in it, and a add on Intel nic..

Buy a QNAP TS-469U-RP 4-bay 1U Turbo NAS add (4) WD RED drives either 2TB or 3TB.

Make sure you have someplace to backup to for DR and backups.

That should do fine for 50 users.
Click to expand...

I have read that for small installs local storage on your host is adequate. I would assume local storage may be faster? Bastille have one point f failure but I'd say a dell server is better on warranty then qnap or similar??

When use a item like the nas vs local storage? Can those NAS use SAS drives?
 
For smaller installs I have always used 3/6gb SAS. No speed issues. And it scales well in a small environment.
 
Well yeah I have been spec out 4 drive raid 10 setup with 15k sas. Want to make sure I'm spin this right. Most installs are for like 20-30 user either SBS or Exchange running in a guest
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top