Re: A server consolidation scenario

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 3:27 PM, Jeff Crosby <jlcrosby@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

IXS and iSCSI solutions and found that external rack mounted will be much
more affordable.

And faster, and more flexible, and and an. I'm no fan of the IXA/iSCSI stuff.

1) We're going to virtualize 2 W2008 Servers, each having a core server that
hosts 2 virtualized server instances. The only thing the core server will
do is host the virtualized servers. All other work will be in one of the
virtualized instances. Each is powerful enough that if there is a hardware
issue on one of the servers, it's virtualized instances could be deployed on
the other without problems, save for a little performance degradation,
obviously. Anyone used Hyper-V yet?

I'm using Hyper-V in our production environment since January (yep,
that was when WS08 wasn't out yet).

We've had zero issues virtualizing WS03 and WS08, but virtualizing
other operating systems can be a bit tricky.

Pay very much importance to the applications you want to virtualize.
EVERY vendor is EXTREMELY picky about what they support in virtualized
Environments. What do you want to run on those WS08 Servers?

ESXi is also available for free, which might more sense if you want to
do more with your virtualization later on. Hyper-V is very good for
small and medium companies, but VMware has offers for bigger
Enterprises that Microsoft can't match right now (though those
features are extremely expensive, which is why they're uninteresting
for smaller companies).

2) I'm getting quotes on both Dell and IBM 2U rack servers. The Dell quote
is in (from the consultant who will be implementing it along with me, no
matter what hardware I get) and is very intriguing to me in it's setup. He
has configured 6 hard drives in it: (2) 146gb drives that will be a mirror
set, having ONLY the core server instance of W2008 Server on them, and (4)
300gb drives that will be a RAID 10(*) set. This is supposed to be better
performance-wise than RAID 5. It is new to me, so I cannot vouch for that.
Anyone have experience with RAID 10? Is this overkill?

RAID10 is much better for write intensive workloads than RAID5. The
disk setup you describe looks generally okay, but wheter it is
sufficient or not heavily depends on what applications you want to
run. I would go with RAID10 over RAID5 if the budget allows it. With
such low arm counts, the price difference is negligible, the
performance difference however is not.

In general, i can very highly recommend IBMs System x3650 servers,
which are ideal for virtualization applications. Make sure you get the
RSA adapter and the redundant Fan & Power. Also, make sure to get a
quadcore CPU, even if you currently don't have the need for it.
Another thing to think about is going with 2.5" disks - they are not
available in 300GB variants right now, but the 2.5" 147GB 10kRPM disks
are roughly aequivalent to the 3.5" 147GB 15kRPM disks in terms of
performance. The x3650 can house 8 2.5" disks, which would allow you
to have a hot spare disk.

I've written about the x3650 a few months back:

http://projectdream.org/wordpress/2007/04/03/ibm-system-x3650/

the existing IXS we have for that purpose. Since the existing IXS then
basically has no purpose in life, why not use it to store backup images of
each of the virtualized servers? Does this sound doable or reasonable?
What's bad about this idea?

My suggestion would be to purchase a new tapedrive. LTO3 tapedrives
are pretty cheap nowadays. Get a decent backup application like
Symantec's BackupExec (which fully supports backing up Hyper-V
machines using VSS Snapshots).

I'll be glad to rant more if you tell me which applications you intend to run ;)