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ryarrow
Contributor
Contributor

Need design input for next steps on expanding my VM environment

I have some budget and breathing room to expand my VM environment but am struggling to understand all the available products as well as the best next step.

Budget is 10-20K.


Current Environment:


  • I have 3 licensed ESXi 5 hosts running my 30+ Linux hosts using vSphere 5 Essentials.   
  • All my VMs use local storage on each host for their datastore.  I use Veeam to make backups of my mission critical VMs
  • 3-4 of these VMs are mission critical. They use the most CPU and RAM.   The other VMs are not as critical, use minimal CPU/RAM, but are still important as they run customer accounts.
  • I also have 10 old physical servers that I'm going to virtualize and put on 1 new host.
  • Everything uses 1Gb Fortinet router
  • All hosts are ESX 5.1

Current Disaster Fears:

  • If a physical machine dies and cannot be replaced
    • I can recreate/move customer data needed to other hosts.  This will be a manual and time consuming process but survivable
    • My mission critical VMs are backed up with Veeam.  I'm assuming I could quickly restore them to another host, but still a manual process.  Naturally, I've never done a restore so finger crossed it would work as expected.
    • My recovery is only as recent as my last backup

Goal:

  • Get rid of my 10 old physical servers by virtualizing them onto a new host
  • MOST IMPORANTLY --- Get my mission critical VMs into a safe configuration -- high availability, better redundancy, shared storage, whatever

Questions:

  • What should my next step be?  Shared storage?  A higher level of licensing?  What product should I be focusing on?
  • If I add more hosts, I'm assuming I need to buy another round of vSphere Essential licenses?
  • Should I move all my VMs to shared storage instead of local storage?
    • Do I move just mission critical VMs or all of them?
    • Is there a recommended shared storage device most use?  (I have Synology NAS used via NFS in all my guests for shared data.)
  • Should I upgrade to 5.5 or 6?

That's kind of it for now to start the discussion but any input is super appreciated. Thanks!

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4 Replies
iiToby
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi Ryarrow,

Some input

Licensing

  • More than 3 servers will break you out the Essentials package it will then be VMware Standard
  • You can create another VMware Environment with a whole new Essentials package you cannot combine Essentials Kits

You may want to look are more powerful hosts to keep the number of hosts at 3, to keep you in the Essentials tier, however I would strongly look at Essentials Plus

Shared Storage

  • Yes
  • Shared Storage is going to add a lot of benefits to your environment over standalone storage. One those benefits if going to be VMware HA which will help with any kind of event that takes out a host.
  • 1GBs is sufficient but its probably going to be a bottle neck in the long run, consider 10G when you can.
  • Price of Storage is always going to be high, however there are number of smaller storage vendors out there you can contact and see what they would like to sell you. I think your price range might be just under what a lot of them are looking for. But I don't want to make assumptions.
  • Windows 2012 Storage Server / Storage Spaces, I have a number of smaller environments have success with Windows 2012 Storage Server / Storage Spaces, you can either get a OEM storage server from a vendor put some SSD in there and some HDD and you have a SAN, you can serve this out with NFS or iSCSI from Windows 2012 Storage Server / Storage Spaces.
  • The most recent purchase by a friend of mine supporting a SMB was a Buffalo Tera Station, they have a Rackmount version for $3,299 or a 6 Bay Desktop version for $2,999 which runs Windows 2012 R2 Storage Server. You may want to get at least 2 SSDs and replace the HDD

-- Resources

Windows Server 2012 as a Storage Device for vSphere Home Lab | theITHollow

Better Hosts

  • I don't know what hosts you are running at the moment, but depending on your workload and keeping with the VMware Licensing you can buy some simple dell servers and run more powerful servers.
  • Dell Power Edge R520 - $3700
    • 2 x 4C CPUs + Hyper Threading 16 Logical Processors
    • 128GB of memory
    • No HDD
    • 2 x 1Gbs NICs
  • I would also look at Huawei for cheap compute

Backups

Personally I love Veeam as backup tool, but you must start to do restore tests. The best way to make yourself indispensable in a company is to make a career out of the stuff people avoid doing, I find in IT people avoid testing backups and documentation.

vSphere 5 or vSphere 6

If you regularly keep your VMware environment up to date and follow each version, then go to vSphere 5.5. If you only really upgrade once a project gets funded to do so, I would recommend jumping as far as you can. Have a look at a number of blogs regaring peoples upgrade to vSphere 6 there should be few out there.

-- Resources

http://www.derekseaman.com/2015/02/vsphere-6-0-install-pt-1-introduction.html

Protected VMs

With vSphere Essentials Plus you have VMware HA which will protect them from a host failure and reboot them on the remaining hosts.

With vSphere Essentials Plus you will have vSphere Replication, which you can use to replicate your VMs to other storage perhaps local storage to give you another copy of the VMs.

vCloud Air

You may want to consider looking at services like vCloud Air and see if they will help you.


*Summary

  • 3 x Dell Hosts ($11,100 Approx.)
  • 1 x Buffalo NAS ($3299 Approx.)
  • 1 x VMware Essentail Plus Kit ($6000 Approx.)
  • Total $20,399 Approx.

(Please be aware all this pricing came from Google while responding to this post, please go to the Vendors and get proper pricing)

You can make a number of savings with the hosts if they don't meet you needs.

Hope that helps

Cheers

@iiToby

ryarrow
Contributor
Contributor

@iiToby -- Thank you!  I will review and see if I have other basic questions, but this is all very helpful in getting me started.

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williambishop
Expert
Expert

That's a toughie. It's not a lot of money. My professional answer would be as follows:

Buy newer stronger servers, put a 10 gig switch in place, buy a low end storage array (storwize or vnx) and do shared storage(you can do this part even on free esxi).

My, "Get it done at minimal cost" hat, says you can go one of two ways:

Either move away from VMware, or

Get used gear, servers and switches at around 1k apiece or lower. Get enough that you don't need support on it. Buy MULTIPLE essentials packs, point each set of 3 servers to the same storage array.

Most environments, the physical hardware isn't the biggest expense anyway...it's almost always software. Between Microsoft and VMware licensing, I pay 2x more than the hardware it sits on anyway.

The way you are doing it isn't exactly horrible. It's not optimal, but it's not horrible. You need to test, test, and retest your backup and restore (a backup is worthless if you can't restore it). If you focus on a HA design, where you understand the risks associated with a server dying and losing the vm's...but have set up a VERY good backup routine (even replication is possible, where you can have as little as a few minutes of loss), then you can get by.

A lot of it depends on how much the budget truly is, and where you put your money.

The 3 host vmware essentials is enough if you get really BEEFY hosts, Ton's of ram, and a small storage appliance. But if you need more than that kind of scale...

--"Non Temetis Messor."
ryarrow
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks to both of you for your input.  It helped a lot in setting me on the path.  I really want shared storage, but the cost of doing it right (10Gbps, a good storage array, and VMWare licensing) are cost prohibitive for the moment. Currently, I'm going to get more hosts, another essentials license, and then develop a better DR plan.  I'll also have cold standbys of my critical systems on another host so that i can fail over manually as needed until I get fancier with the technology.  This will hopefully get me to a good point for a while and then the next step would be shared storage.

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