New to VMWare. Need suggestions

[sabarirjpm]

Hi all

Glad to be part of this community. I am new to VMWare and kindly bear with me for the following questions which may be entirely wrong or stupid.

We, from our company have gotten a license for VMWare VCenter Standard with VSAN for virtualization of our Data Center. This is a brand new setup and just as a background, this is a startup primarily into trading related activities with close to 15 physical servers running production critical works(Mixture of Windows and Linux) and close to 40 other physical servers are used by our developers, quants (Mostly Linux and few Windows). There is no domain controller/ active directory setup currently. We want to setup and configure this the right way. Regarding the hardware that we have purchased, it is a 3 node cluster with Intel X6254*2 CPUs, 768GB RAM, 1*1.92TB of SSD, 12*2.4TB HDD, 4* 40G NIC, 4 * 10G NIC, 4 * 1G NIC  in each of the nodes

Now the questions

1. Since the company has no AD, DC setup, do you think that setting that will be a cleaner way for managing things

2. The license that we purchased is for 6.x and as the upgrade is possible, do you recommend the fresh installation of VSphere 6.7 or VSphere 7 directly?

3. Can the AD/ DC can reside on one of the ESXi hosts or is it advisable to have it outside the ESXi hosts as we can enable the ESXi authentication can be enabled for AD Users

4. We were planning to use the 1G NIC available on board just for the management of the ESXi hosts, 10G network for the VSAN, VMotion and other HA traffic. Can you let us know if that is a good start. Was reading through some documentation and may be I misread that the management interface is the one responsible for the VMotion and other HA, FT traffic.

5. Is it advisable to run the production on one of the three hosts, development/ quant related tasks on the other hosts and still be good in terms of managing the resources and provide HA

6. Is it advisable to use the same cluster and get Horizon license and have VDI on one of the ESXi hosts without affecting the others

Regards

Sabari

[scott28tt]

As you’re going to be running production critical workloads, I would seriously recommend engaging a services partner to help you - draw on their expertise with having done successful deployments of a similar nature.

[sabarirjpm]

Thanks for your response scott28tt​. This is going to be a phased and careful migration and the production comes in the last phase after testing

[IRIX201110141]

1. vSphere have no Windows AD/DC requirements. For sure Windows AD can live easier when you have to deal with Windows Server and Clients. vSphere needs DNS of course!

2. When your Backup already supports 7.0 i suggest to start with 7.0

3. It doesnt matter where your DC run on.  In our case the DCs runs as VMs on top of vSphere. We have normaly only one vSphere Cluster around

4. Use the 4x10G (you have 40Gbit also?) and leave the 1G away.  The FT, vMotion runs on these VMKs which you have tagged for this job. The VMNICs which are used by these VMKs have to deliver the bandwidth. You have total control how about the packets flowing

5. As always.... it depends   If you have the budget for a test enviroment than use extra Hardware, licenses and go

6. As always... it depends. If you only have a need for a few Horizon clients you can run them on the same HW as your Production VMs. But there is a reason why extra license bundles exists. A VDI workload is something complete compared to normal and also management is different.  If the VDI runs on top than the VDI controls some part of your vSphere and when speaking of vSphere Upgrade you have to upgrade VDI first and than vSphere.

The HW looks something special and i never seen a vSAN ReadyNode like this. With only one SSD you can only create one Diskgroup which hold 7 of your 12 HDDs. The rest is useless. The 4x40G ware real? If so for what?

Regards,
Joerg

[sabarirjpm]

Hi IRIX201110141​. Thanks for your response. The config that I have mentioned is per host and so we can create 3 disk groups I believe. Correct me if I am wrong.

Also as far as the 40G interfaces go, we are looking to use them for the live market data for our trading infrastructure.

The development/ testing environment I had asked is within the three node cluster. Prod running on ESX1, Dev/ Quant running in ESX2 and the VDI running on ESX3.

[scott28tt]

From a support perspective, have you checked the systems and IO devices on the vSphere HCL and ensured they are also supported for vSAN?

[sabarirjpm]

Hi Scott

These are HP servers and suggested by the vendor after getting a confirmation from both HP and from VMWare that these are in the HCL of both VSphere and VSAN

[IRIX201110141]

You have listet

1x SSD

12x HDD

A vSAN Diskgroup have a maximum of 1x SSD + 7 HDD. So you have  5 unused HDD per Host!  Get a 2nd SSD to create another Diskgroup and assign 6 Disks each.

The 1.92 sounds more like a ReadIntensive SSD. Check the Model if its a vSAN certified Cache disk!

Nobody knows your workload. 45 VMs is not not that much on high spec servers like yours but with 1/3 of HA reserve its 23 per Host. Next time go with lower spec and get more nodes.

Normally a Admin let the system spread all VMs over all Hosts and not assigning Prod VMs to Host1, Dev to Host 2 and VDI to Host 3 but you can do it if you like or must.

I cant see how to fill 4x 40G pipes. For sure your Hybrid vSAN have not enough spindles.

Regards,

Joerg

[nachogonzalez]

Hey hope you are doing fine

1. Since the company has no AD, DC setup, do you think that setting that will be a cleaner way for managing things

vSphere has no AD requirements.

2. The license that we purchased is for 6.x and as the upgrade is possible, do you recommend the fresh installation of VSphere 6.7 or VSphere 7 directly?

Technically I would go for vSphere 6.7 (latest upgrade available) since it has some time in the market, it has been tested and it has it's compatibility tested

vSphere 7 has been released last month and as everything there might be some bug that was skipped during the testing products

Personally speaking and assuming you don't have any VMware experience:
I would go for vSphere 7 since they have reengineered all the vSphere stack and thing work a little bit different now.

3. Can the AD/ DC can reside on one of the ESXi hosts or is it advisable to have it outside the ESXi hosts as we can enable the ESXi authentication can be enabled for AD Users

Yes, ADDC can be Virtual machines (please use windows 2012 r2 or later as they are VM aware and don't take snapshots)

for ESXi authentication, yes you can  VMware Knowledge Base
You will need a vCenter

4. We were planning to use the 1G NIC available on board just for the management of the ESXi hosts, 10G network for the VSAN, VMotion and other HA traffic. Can you let us know if that is a good start. Was reading through some documentation and may be I misread that the management interface is the one responsible for the VMotion and other HA, FT traffic.

Do you have 10/40GBe uplink switches?

Also keep in mind that when you are using vSAN the HA traffic goes trough the vSAN interace.

Depending on the size of  virtual machines and the amount of virutal machines I would say to use 1Gbe for management and 10Gbe for vMotion

Keeping that in mind

10 Gbe Uplink 0 and 2 - vSAN

10 Gbe Uplink 1 and 3 - vMotion
1 Gbe Uplink 0 and 2 - MGMT
1 Gbe Uplink 1 and 3  - FT

5. Is it advisable to run the production on one of the three hosts, development/ quant related tasks on the other hosts and still be good in terms of managing the resources and provide HA

Please consider the following:

In the provided scenario all the workloads (PROD/DEV/QUANT) would be sharing the same resources, which in case of a DEV Screwup would not be nice.
Keep in mind that in virtual environments all vms share their resources and (sadly) customers tend to overallocate resources causing issues.

Personally I would say no, but it depends on the situation of our company

I can give you the following approaches in case you have to consolidate all the resources in the same cluster

- Separate workloads into resource pools
- Make sure you have a 25% overhead
- Create Affinity Rules for prod vms (IE: the most critical vm should not be with the biggest dev vm)
- Create VM overrides: in case the cluster goes down priorize your Sev 1, sev 2, sev 3, VMs.

6. Is it advisable to use the same cluster and get Horizon license and have VDI on one of the ESXi hosts without affecting the others?

No, i would get a new cluster (add resources) with a separate vCenter so you isolate VDI to a separate fault domain on the vSphere side.