Here is one cheap way to tackle this: Buy 3 servers from eBay. I recently bought several Dell PowerEdge R710's loaded with 2 6C CPU's, 48GB of RAM, and 6 1TB disks for ~1k/each.
Buy VMWare Essentials licensing for ~500. This does NOT give you HA/vMotion/VSA/etc, but it does give you the ability to run a centralized vSphere server, support, and unlocks the backup API which is required by most backup platforms for native VM backups. Essentials allows you to run up to three hosts with (2) sockets each. You can either run the vSphere server as a VM on one of the hosts, or you can run it on a separate physical server. For backups, you can either purchase software (ie, Veeam) or roll your own solution using GhettoVCB. GhettoVCB essentially takes a live snapshot of a VM. I typically just use GhettoVCB in small environments. I would install a NAS (or more likely just a Linux server), export a filesystem via NFS, mount that filesystem as a NFS datastore on each ESXi host, and then schedule regular backups of all VM's to the datastore. It's a free simple solution if you feel comfortable enough to support it. If you lose a host, you can quickly restore the backups to another host. Some people are fine with this level of redundancy, some are not. I wouldn't mess with shared storage or VMWare HA/vMotion for something as small as you are describing. Local disk is cheaper and faster than most entry level SAN platforms in most cases. You may also want to look into Hyper-V 2012 as well. I believe it may be free now, but I'm not certain. Josh On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 9:59 PM, TJ Trout via Af <[email protected]> wrote: > Fail tolerance in terms or being able to recover from a disaster and not > loose everything > > On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 7:57 PM, TJ Trout via Af <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Could this be done with reliability and fault tolerance using vsphere >> with only 1 machine? and a NAS for backups? Worst case if a failure occurs >> I can scrouge up some old desktop or something and install vsphere? Do i >> really need a main and backup server, vcenter server, etc? >> >> On Wed, Oct 22, 2014 at 5:57 PM, George Skorup (Cyber Broadcasting) via >> Af <[email protected]> wrote: >> >>> I wanted VSA, which was reasonable for a small cluster. Then they >>> replaced it with vSAN and the licensing cost went to 5x more per node. >>> There's no way I'm giving VMware any money at all after this, I will find >>> another way. >>> >>> >>> On 10/22/2014 7:03 AM, Mike Hammett via Af wrote: >>> >>> Did you look at VMWare's partner program? >>> >>> >>> >>> ----- >>> Mike Hammett >>> Intelligent Computing Solutions >>> http://www.ics-il.com >>> >>> <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL> >>> <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb> >>> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions> >>> <https://twitter.com/ICSIL> >>> >>> ------------------------------ >>> *From: *"George Skorup (Cyber Broadcasting) via Af" <[email protected]> >>> <[email protected]> >>> *To: *[email protected] >>> *Sent: *Wednesday, October 22, 2014 12:53:04 AM >>> *Subject: *Re: [AFMUG] Plat hardware? Any simple solutions? >>> >>> I've been going down this road for months trying to convince the boss >>> that we need to do something different. Most of the problem is, the WISP >>> software packages don't fit our overall business. So I'm still shopping, >>> and there's nothing that all of us in the management group agree on, but >>> we're gonna do something.. soon.. because. >>> >>> On the hardware front, I was pricing out VMware licensing for the >>> configuration I want, and there was just no way that was gonna happen. >>> The hardware came out to only about 1/4 of the overall cost.. that tells >>> you how much the VMware licensing would be. But there's plenty of >>> open-source virtualization projects out there like Proxmox, *stack this, >>> *cloud that, none of which do what I want. So I've settled on getting a >>> demo setup of oVirt running on a couple CentOS boxes and see where it >>> takes me. >>> >>> On 10/21/2014 10:02 PM, TJ Trout via Af wrote: >>> > So I'm embarrassed to say that after over 5 years I still don't have a >>> > automated billing system and with the recent data breaches the labor >>> > to keep updating customers cards is finally pushing me to do >>> > something, I've been leaning towards Plat for a long time because of >>> > the cost and popularity and the fact that my mikrotik core router can >>> > easily integrate.... The problem is I'm a server N00B and have no clue >>> > where to start on that, I was thinking that someone might have a >>> > simple but reliable/redundant solution. I was looking at a single >>> > vsphere host running windows for plat and linux for radius & cpanel >>> > for the web module but I need to hire a consultant to get that done >>> > right, then the reliability concerns/backup etc come in and by the >>> > time the consultant was done planning my system we went from 1 box to >>> > 4, 1 main server with all of the above services + 1 dns, a second >>> > "backup" box that would have all of the guests from box #1 backed up >>> > for a almost instant fail over should box #1 die, then a 3rd box for >>> > vCenter and lastly a NAS to backup everything to, at another site on >>> > the network in case of fire/theft,etc. This sounds like a totally >>> > awesome setup but will end up costing me 10k by the time I get some >>> > decent hardware, software licenses, hypervisor consulting and Plat >>> > setup consulting... I wish they had a simple hosted solution... Arg. >>> > >>> > Anyone have some other idea on how I can get up and running without >>> > spending a fortune but still have some type of disaster recovery >>> > should the box melt down? >>> > >>> > I really hate to spend the high monthly $ on something like Visp, >>> > swift fox, etc >>> > >>> > Any guidance is greatly appreciated >>> > >>> > TJ >>> >>> >>> >>> >> >
