I would still at least look into the VSA. You have a single point of failure in your SAN. If you look at the two VSA's I mentioned either can be stretched, which if your physical site allows it makes for some pretty funky resilience.
vMotion is very nice, my only concern is that quite often SAN vendors, surprisingly, tell you that you need a SAN. A SAN needs (ideally) dedicated switches. To have redundancy you need two switches. That costs money and adds complexity. Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-SAN, but there are so many options when you're going virtualised that before spending the thick end of $200k I think it only right that you're told about them. If all your kit is going in a single rack you could just go buy a shared SAS enclosure and you've got shared storage without the physical and financial complexity that a SAN brings. ________________________________ From: David Mazzaccaro [[email protected]] Sent: 17 July 2012 4:50 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: moving to virtual Vmotion. And things like John Cook mentioned…being able to update hosts during business hours, host outage won’t affect users. From: Paul Hutchings [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, July 17, 2012 10:28 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: moving to virtual There’s nothing here that suggests SAN. You could run it all on a single box using DAS. Two boxes gives some redundancy. If you want to be able to vMotion and move hosts whilst you maintenance then sure, you need shared storage, but you have less than 1tb of VM’s – even allowing for expansion I would think very strongly about something like the VMware or HP VSA – it’ll actually give you better redundancy than a single box from Equallogic or Netapp or any other non-clustered SAN/NAS would. From: David Mazzaccaro [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 17 July 2012 14:30 To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: moving to virtual Dell actually ran this thing called DPACK and provided a nice report of drive space, RAM, IOPS, throughput, etc. Used storage capacity is 822GB. Total RAM is 30GB, used is 20GB Total throughput: 94 IOPS: 2222 at 95%, 2500 at 99%, 2868 at peak. (This includes nightly backups. Looking at each individual server, throughout the work day is MUCH less) most servers rarely go over 200 during the day. From: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> [mailto:[email protected]]<mailto:[mailto:[email protected]]> On Behalf Of ken schaefer Sent: Monday, July 16, 2012 7:15 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: moving to virtual In my experience, disk I/O is your biggest bottleneck. You start needing gobs of RAM to cater for underspecced disk subsystem. Otherwise, 6 core is fine. Run some perfmon or MAP tool to get some idea of your CPU usage today. But I suspect you'll find it quite low. Even with RAM for 8 VMs on 3 hosts, I think 64GB is possibly overkill, though it depends on your user base. We've got 1000+ VMs, and density of up to 20:1 on DL380s with 192GB RAM. 6 core CPUs, though moving to 8 core with the G8 series Sent from my Windows Phone ________________________________ From: Kurt Buff Sent: 17/7/2012 9:00 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: moving to virtual Can't. Essentials Plus package specifies max RAM per host of 64gb. Kurt On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 2:03 PM, Andrew S. Baker <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Not enough. Go with 96+GB at 6-cores across only 2 hosts. You'll be happier for longer. ASB http://XeeMe.com/AndrewBaker Harnessing the Advantages of Technology for the SMB market… On Mon, Jul 16, 2012 at 4:31 PM, David Mazzaccaro <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Yes, 64GB per server. From: Kramer, Jack [mailto:[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>] Sent: Monday, July 16, 2012 3:45 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: moving to virtual I think you'll be fine with 6-core processors. Make sure you have as much RAM as your licensing permits in your hosts—you'll use RAM a lot faster than CPU. ---- Jack Kramer Manager of Information Technology Communications and Brand Strategy Michigan State University w: 517-884-1231<tel:517-884-1231> / c: 248-635-4955<tel:248-635-4955> From: David Mazzaccaro <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Reply-To: NT System Admin Issues <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Monday, July 16, 2012 3:36 PM To: NT System Admin Issues <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: moving to virtual Greetings, Getting very close to moving into the VM world,andhave acouple of questions… 1)I am trying to figure out if Ishould go with 8 core or 6 core processors in my3 hosts for myupcoming VMware environment. The price is about double. And I’m not sure I need 8 cores. The layoutthat has been quoted is as follows: 3 hosts connected to a PS4100XV SAN running VMware Essentials Plus Kit. Thehost serversI am looking at are either: HPDL360 G82x Intel® Xeon® E5-2640 (6 core, 2.50 GHz, 15MB, 95W) $5356 each HPDL360 G82x Intel® Xeon® E5-2690 (8 core, 2.90 GHz, 20MB, 135W) $10,061 each I currentlyhave8 physical servers(Win2003, E2003, Citrix 4.0)that we will be P2V’d. After I P2Vthe servers, the plan is to begincreating new Windows 2008 R2 VMs andmigrating each server’s role(2008R2 domain, Exchange 2010, and Citrix XenApp 6.5). I wantenough power to be able to run my existing8 servers in a virtual environmentand migratethem to AD2008/E2010/XenApp as well as leave some room for testingand growth. 2of the vendors said 6 core is fine, another vendor is quoting 8 core processors. 2) The quotes I have for the“services” part of this are: $40,000 ($12k for AD/Exch, $8k for XenApp 20k for VMware) $38,000 (not itemized) $28,000 ($11k for AD/Ex,$6k XenApp, $11k for VM) Do these sound legit? I have ~190 users if that helps. I really think 28k iseither too aggressive or simply not realistic. This is the same vendor who quoted me(3) singleprocessorservers, so I have to go back to them and tell them I want dual proc. 3) For the SAN, I have 2 options: PS4100XV (12 600GB 15k SAS) $23,000 NetApp FAS2240 (12 600GB 10k SAS) $22,000 I have 2 vendors pushing the PS4100XV, and the other pushingthe NetApp. >From what I have been told, I’llget better IOPS w/ the 15k drives in the >Equalogic. And fuller feature set. Any one w/ experiences w/either of these models want to add their $.02? 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