Moving to local storage?
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@Reid-Cooper said:
Didn't ServerMonkey handle refurbished HP? And now that I look at their website, they do.
Yup, they do. They used to be in ML too but @MattKing is not with them anymore (or in IT at all, anymore.)
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@scottalanmiller said:
Check out refurbished parts. Often much cheaper while remaining fully supported and functional. Nearly all of our physical gear is refurbed.
Thanks, I will do that once I have the part numbers from CDW.
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Apropos timing, this got published yesterday but I did not realize until today:
https://www.storagecraft.com/blog/making-the-best-of-your-inverted-pyramid-of-doom/
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Ok, so the plan is to purchase 16 1.2TB drives for the current servers (8 in each), run ESXi from USB drives, and continue to run 2 hosts for failover. This will more than double our current space, decrease our risk, and hopefully improve performance a little. I was able to cut the cost by about 3/4 by scaling it back slightly and using Amazon instead of CDW. Hopefully the parts are legit.....
With that said does anybody have a recommended USB drive for this set up? I read somewhere about this being a good one. http://www.amazon.com/SanDisk-Cruzer-SDCZ33-008G-B3SanDisk-Cruzer-SDCZ33-008G-B35-Flash-Drive5-Flash-Drive/dp/B005FYNSUA
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Mostly we use "whatever is cheap" as far as the USB drive goes. No need for much of anything.
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I got the new drives which are sealed genuine HP drives. Never will I buy HP from the "big" vendors again. I'm planning to tackle this project next week. Here's the plan, please let me know if something doesn't make sense or if you think I'm missing the mark.
I have 2 hosts so I plan to move all of my VM's to one host. I believe I can then export the settings from the VMless host. I will then install ESXi on a USB drive connected to the server and import the settings from the old host. At that point I should be able to format all of the local hard drives and add the local storage as datastores. After that I should be able to move all of the current VM's to the new datastores. Power them on and test them. Then basically do the same thing on the other host but only moving some of the VM's to balance the load.
Any advice or suggestions are appreciated. I can't find a way in vSphere to export the host settings so I assume I have to use command line. One question is should I configure RAID before or after I install ESXi on the flash drive? I'm thinking it may have to be done at the same time? Would it be wise to run any ESXi updates on the current host before I export the settings or should I just run the updates on the new host after I've imported the settings?
Thanks in advance!
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why ESXi?
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Agreed... Time to move to Hyper-V or Xen
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I appreciate that you aren't fans of VMware but that's what we own, what we are licensed for, and what we know. I'm not ruling out a change in the future but now is not the time.
If anyone has comments or suggestions about my plan besides scrapping VMware I would appreciate it.
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@jasonlow Looks good, just make sure you have a good backup before you start. Also I would setup the raid before the install... i don't like changing hardware after I install stuff.
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@brianlittlejohn Thank you!
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Depending on your VMware licensing, you may be able to live-migrate the VMs without any down time (Storage VMotion, I think it what its called).
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@dafyre Yes, I believe you are right but we don't have the Storage vMotion licensing. It's still the same process but without the licensing the VMs have to be powered off before they can be moved.
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I was able to complete the project and the VMs seem to be performing better on the local storage. The only downfall I see is being able to live migrate VMs between hosts, but we don't do that very often anyways. I am looking into licensing Storage vMotion to accomplish this but I'm not sure it will do what I want even if I have it. Maybe they'll give me a trail so I can test it out. Thanks for all the suggestions!
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@jasonlow said:
I was able to complete the project and the VMs seem to be performing better on the local storage. The only downfall I see is being able to live migrate VMs between hosts, but we don't do that very often anyways.
VMware added that somewhere around vSphere 5.1. You should be able to do that. Shared storage is not required.
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@jasonlow said:
I am looking into licensing Storage vMotion to accomplish this but I'm not sure it will do what I want even if I have it. Maybe they'll give me a trail so I can test it out. Thanks for all the suggestions!
That feature is so expensive, consider moving to another platform to get that rather than paying that much for it.
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@scottalanmiller I can do it if I power off the VM but not live. That basically means any maintenance I do on the host will have to be done outside business hours. The downfall is that it takes a decent amount of time to move the VMs since I have to move them to another datastore and host. Host 1 cannot see host 2's local storage. We are on 5.1 but could upgrade if you think it's different in a later version...
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@scottalanmiller said:
@jasonlow said:
I am looking into licensing Storage vMotion to accomplish this but I'm not sure it will do what I want even if I have it. Maybe they'll give me a trail so I can test it out. Thanks for all the suggestions!
That feature is so expensive, consider moving to another platform to get that rather than paying that much for it.
Yeah, that is something I need to look into. Is it an easy transition from VMware to Hyper V?
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@jasonlow said:
@scottalanmiller I can do it if I power off the VM but not live. That basically means any maintenance I do on the host will have to be done outside business hours. The downfall is that it takes a decent amount of time to move the VMs since I have to move them to another datastore and host. Host 1 cannot see host 2's local storage. We are on 5.1 but could upgrade if you think it's different in a later version...
Best practice is not to use live migration for maintenance anyway. I've seen billion dollar banks go down because they thought that they could do that and no one would notice.
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@jasonlow said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@jasonlow said:
I am looking into licensing Storage vMotion to accomplish this but I'm not sure it will do what I want even if I have it. Maybe they'll give me a trail so I can test it out. Thanks for all the suggestions!
That feature is so expensive, consider moving to another platform to get that rather than paying that much for it.
Yeah, that is something I need to look into. Is it an easy transition from VMware to Hyper V?
Relatively, yes. Check out XenServer, too. Both Hyper-V and XS are very good alternatives.
