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shannonadams
Contributor
Contributor

Advice for physical server and storage to use for traveling road shows

We setup a network and two ESX hosts at six road shows per year.  I use two Dell T610 servers.  The servers are not in a secure area - they typically sit under tables on a trade show floor.  The production server runs just one VM (CentOS 5.x) that only requires about 20 GB of storage.  Both servers use internal storage in a RAID 10 setup.  I use Veeam Backup & Replication to keep the two servers in sync as close to real time as possible, but not close enough.  Even though there is redundancy within each server (RAID 10, 4 NICS, 2 PS), we would lose up to an hour of data in the event of a major server crash.  Also, HA is not configured as it requires shared storage.

There are several problems with the current setup.  First, both servers are large, heavy, and bulky to ship and setup around the country.  Also, I would like to go with external, shared storage for the redundancy and speed improvements. 

I am looking for advice on a good, redundant setup for this application that won't cost an arm and a leg or weigh a ton.  I was thinking of possibly two smaller Dell servers with redundant power supplies for server redundancy and an entry level Clariion AX4 with a few solid state drives.  Or possibly, a small (mobile?) cab that would hold two small 1 U servers and a disk array that would be fairly protected from spills, etc.  But, I'm open to suggestions.  Thanks for any guidance.

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Kahonu84
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Aloha,

Is what you're showing ESX related, or is ESX just a tool you use?

bc

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Have you considered a VSA (Virtual storage appliance) solution to have a shared storage and HA and vMotion on it?

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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shannonadams
Contributor
Contributor

Andre, I am not familiar with VSA (Virtual storage appliance).  It sounds intriguing.  Can you provide me a quick synopsis on it and some suggestions on ones you have used?  Thanks.

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Are just storage implemented in software and can convert local storage to shared storage.

See on: http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/cat/6693

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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shannonadams
Contributor
Contributor

Just to make sure I understand this.  I can install one of these appliances to allow my primary ESX server to have shared storage.  Then, my DR ESX server and vcenter server can see the storage to allow me to use vMotion and HA.  If this is the case, don't I still have a single point of failure in the primary server?  I.e., if someone spilled a Coke over the server, I am still in trouble since all the data in on the drives in that server.  Correct?

Also, where does the VSA appliance get installed?  On the server that I want to share the storage on?  Since these are Dell servers with internal SCSI drives setup in a RAID 10 config, does it matter what appliance I get?

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AndreTheGiant
Immortal
Immortal

Most of VSA can have a replication feature.

So you deploy two VSA, one on each host and setup the replica.

Andre

Andrew | http://about.me/amauro | http://vinfrastructure.it/ | @Andrea_Mauro
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