Small Business Solutions

[marktbreaux]

I am looking for some help. I realize that there are a lot of forum discussions out there but most are fragmented and old. I would have to piece together all of the "solutions" and also try to find the equivalent technology of a 2006 SAN or backup solution.

Here is my story. I work for a small bank out in Leavenworth Kansas. We currently employ the one application, one server methodology. We have 3 branches. The home branch has 8 servers (2 currently virtualized with ESXi 3.5 u4 on DAS) The other two branches have one server each. I believe I have come to the conclusion that I will get vSphere 4 essentials plus. From my understanding that gives me 3 server licenses. I will have two servers at the home office and one at a branch location for DR. My budget of course as a small business is not huge and so having two sans is almost out of the question. I don't even know if a SAN is the way to go but for a growth perspective, I can't see how to do it any other way. I also need a good backup solution for MS SQL and Exchange. and then replicating though replication seems like an easy choice depending on whether or not I get two SANS or I get one SAN and a NAS for the branch.

Anyways, my question is how have other small businesses done this? What do you solutions look like and are you happy with them? These deal more with the method of implementation. I figure that its really not a HUGE difference whether or not I go IBM, hitachi, equallogic/dell, emc, netapp ,etc. This will be a huge help for me to understand how things work and how they are implemented in real life scenarios. Thank you for any information provided about your current setups!

Mark Breaux

Edit: 8 servers are all windows 2003 but upgrading during this process to 2008. They include exchange/sql/dc/antivirus/websense/loan processing software. Thanks!

[jayctd]

I was actually formulating a response

Though I am hoping to maybe get a little more clear smaller answers otherwise I am going to have a 10 page paper on all the little implementation details so any more specific questions you have during discussion let me know Ill bring up some general concerns.

Storage

At this stage I would evaluate ISCSI or NFS for storage at your primary site. The cost is lower then FC and using a shared storage at your main site with 2 hosts allows you to implement HA or DRS. This will allow greater reliability and uptime as well as better performance (With DRS)

My experience is in ISCSI and I am still partial to it (though we are seriously looking into NFS because of some of the advanced storage features) We use equallogic and I am therefore partial to it right now, I would recomend using it for SMB though for true enterprise class it does not scale (We are seeing more and more issues around the 100TB mark) They also very competitively price "Demo" units which would be all you would need here (it is a full unit just cheep priced ... to sucker you in)

Network

With an ISCSI or NFS you will want to physical seperate your front end from storage networks for security and performance. On the back end with the number of hosts we are looking at any switch that supports Jumbo and Flow control is recomended (both are recomended on a large majority of SAN products).

Configuration of ESX vary's on best practices depending on which you implement but with vsphere4 supporting MPIO for ISCSI I would evaluate using ISCSI with everything stored in VMDK

This architecture allows cheep addition of seperate physical servers into this shared network at a low cost per port.

Also with this is separating out your Vmotion traffic and FT traffic if you implement those features, we choose to use a seperate network for both of those for performance and security reasons. We segregate between the two with VLANs.

Hosts

We personally for our load have went for the Dell 2970 and X805 series as our standard platform, we get about 20 virtual's per host in our environment (32 GB of ram and 8 Core Opterons) Mileage vary's depending on load, and type (Eg. We crank up the density on DC clusters and down for our primary clusters)

As we rental licence the number of hosts is not as big of deal so it may be different in your cases.

Hope that answers some very very general questions please feel free to ask specifics and i will try to address all of them that I can. Also note some of these are opinion choices and there is always more than one way to skin a cat

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[marktbreaux]

Thank you for the general information. Most of that I kinda knew from reading the pdfs and from vendors and such. I currently have two HP DL360 G5s. I will be upgrading the ram on both to 16GB but right now I have one with 4GB and one with 8GB. They have Dual Xeon 3.0ghz processors and 3 72.8 GB SAS drives in a RAID 5 configuration. I think it should be good enough for the vSphere 4 OS. I will be implementing an iSCSI SAN. Its hard to remember all the information to put into the first post.I believe I will go with a Procurve 2910al-24G and a 48G for my switches. I will stack them for server to client connections. I believe I will need another switch for just server to storage connections. I think the iSCSI san with be an IBM DS3300 or DELL MD3000i. They seem to be the low price point. I won't be able to spend over 12k for a SAN but this puts me at a disadvantage already. I have a feeling that number will grow to $15k before I am done.

My biggest concern in all of this is not even performance. I feel like the support from vmware, these forums, and the storage support will get me through those jumps. My biggest concern is backup and replication. Do you have any thoughts on that in a smb enviroment? I can't stand the thought of 12k to 15k just sitting at a DR site so I am thinking a NAS solution. Any thoughts are helpful.

Thanks!

[mjsvirt]

Have you though about virtualized ISCSI san appliances?

Left hand, FalconStor, Datacore and a few others have them.

The advantage for small environments is that you can utilize high speed internal server drives and turn those into a virtualized ISCSI SAN rather than buying much more expensive physical sans.

There are capabilities such as replication, data deduplication, wan optimization for replication and other features built in that can help in the virtualized SAN.

Also, several have writthen plugins for SRM so you could utilize SRM with these also.

Take a look at a few if you haven't already, they may or may not be a good fit depending on your requirements.

[jayctd]

Ahh well it sounds like your hardware will support what you need to do with it

Currently we use SAN level replication to fulfill our DR requirements as we do not need a hot site... we will be moving that direction but as of right now data integrity is our primary focus of DR (As such we are also replicating the LUN's on which the Virtual's reside so in case of a failure we can maintain the systems themselfs along with the data)

As such we do not use some of the options available to you such as Site Recovery manager, which would provide the toolset for maintaining a hot or a cold live site for DR failover. I am not sure of the featureset for migrating between dissimilar hardware.

It all depends on how you want to employ this ... simply moving the data to another site there are many many ways of doing so with different softwares ... maintaining a truly replicated cold or hot site requires some software/scripting to maintian ... i have seen it done but it will be significantly more work

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[jayctd]

Good points, we have never been of the size to really employ some of these technologies but there are smaller appliences and software based targets that can get you the featuresets needed. For basic ISCSI anyways.

Some of them even include software initiators so you are able to automate replication to a remote target of dissimilar type.

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[marktbreaux]

Are you talking about for the branch office for the virtual iSCSI? That would be a good idea if they can accept replication from a SAN and replicate the data that is there at the branch to the home office. That is another part of a solution will be how do I backup my branches without tape? Do I keep my current solution and just rotate drives between them? Symantec Backup Exec System Restore has not run well in ESXi 3.5 but that could be my storage but I am using DAS so I know something is not right because I should be getting great performance off 72.8 GB SAS in a RAID 5 config.

[jayctd · Accepted solution]

Yeah I was reffering to the branch office, it will take some work to determine if the storage at your primary will be able to replicate to a genaric ISCSI target. Some SAN technoligies use propriatary replication technology that wont work between other hardware but some do have that featureset and you may be able to.

For backup you have several options for a replacement for backup exec in long term storage

1) Data Protection manager from Vmware, the new release has some nice features that include incrementals deduplication, this may be sufficent for your data protection needs at the size you are

2) Use a backup to disk product (Such as asigra and robobak ) These provide a more comprehensive backup to disk technologies that will do incremental forever and deduplication, these are ment for long term disk based storage and have the feature sets such as autonomic healing and archival and data replication. These can be used for your data in and out of ESX ... it can also be combined with number 1 (for example imaging the server and using these products to store the images long term)

3) Continue to use backup exec ... with capable storage it should preform fine in a virtual envyronment

We did number 3 for years now we are moving away from it to a combination of number 1 and 2 for long term data retention (for us data retention is 7 years)

Hope that answers some of your questions

As for your DAS what is the number of disks? Number of virtuals?

The reason I ask is that if the spindle count is down and with it being RAID5 instead of some of the better performing RAID configurations (Like 50 and 10) it COULD just be that it does not have the sheer IOPS nessisary for the task.

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[marktbreaux]

Sweet Thanks for the backup solutions. Asigra doesn't have a ton of information so I will need to get with my account rep and see what he can get but Robobak looks awesome with the data compression, replication, and agentless backup. It also can backup my SQL server and Exchange server. Do you have any prices for those two? I know you are an enterprise user but just curious on a ball park.

As for my current setup, I am running 2 production machines on a HP DL360 G5 with 8GB of ram with 3 x 72.8 GB SAS drives in RAID 5.

That just brought up another question. Will ESX/vSphere 4 have any performance degradation if I run the 72.8GB SAS drives in a RAID 1? It would save me buying another hard drive but if its not worth it then I will just buy it.

Thanks!

[jayctd]

The performance in a RAID 1 configuration should be a bit worse on reads and a bit better on writes then your RAID 5 setup

As for robobak I would look but be cautious, we are working with them and they have a great price and one designed for remote backup and a fairly full featureset, we have had issues deploying it enterprise class. They work real hard and are responsive but the code is buggy when you get the size of servers we regularly deploy.

Do some real in depth R&D there are many other backup to disk products some of which we did not evaluate as we were looking for a MSP offering which may not be a featureset you need to buy into

And looking at your current setup you should be able to beat IOPS wise your current DAS storage by far with just about any SAN technologies ... your IOPS for a 3 disk RAID5 cant be more then 500 or 600 on Random small writes ... with even SATA you will be seeing in the 900 - 1500 IOPS range off of disk (assuming not RAID 5)

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[marktbreaux]

I am thinking 12 500GB SATA in a RAID 10.

So Far I have narrowed my iSCSI SAN choices down to IBM DS3300 and DELL MD3000i. both are around 10 or 11k

I am getting pricing on Asigra. I spoke to soon regarding their data on the website. they have tons of pdfs explaining how things work. Do most of these places give you free trials? One of the backup solutions i was looking into prior to this thread was esXpress by phd virtual. They will let me try it for 90 days but the problem is getting a test enviroment up and running. You need to have testing i think more in a SMB enviroment and yet the resources aren't there to test it. I will keep looking and doing some R&D like you said.

Thanks!

[jayctd]

We did a 90 day trial ... it is tight from time to time but yes we were able to work with an sales channel and test all features and get extended licensure for testing.

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[dennes]

You might want to check out the SUN 7110 Storage device. It's in the same price range and offers everything you'd want (iSCSI/NFS/SMB/Replication/Snapshots/Thin Provisioning). They have an offer where you can try them completely free for 60 days. You might even fit 2 in your budget, so they can replicate.

[marktbreaux]

I looked into them. It starts at 11k for 2TB RAW (RAID 10 = 1TB) I would need 4TB RAW. That would be around 16k. It looks like another great solution (along with Equallogic) for those looking at EMC or NetApp. Thank you for the suggestion dennes.

The ones I have found in my price range are the DELL MD300i , IBM DS3300 (on special), Promise Technologies (buy your own hard drives), QNAP (iSCSI NAS), Infortrend, and Openfiler (Free Linux Based SAN software).

As for backup solutions and replication, Vizioncore, PHD Virtual, Asigra, Robobak, and Veeam. They look like my best choices though I don't have pricing on Robobak or Asigra.

[dennes]

Well.. We're also in the SMB market, so we're doing similar setups for clients. The Sun is really a lot of bang for your buck. It just has everything standard.

For cheap(er) iSCSI SAN's (artound 7k) with decent performance, you might also want to add the hp MSA 2012i to your list. Though the replication license will cost you dearly.

If you can only afford one SAN, you could use Veeam to replicate to an offsite ESX server (SATA, either DAS or cheap NFS NAS). It will do incrementals, so depending on the bandwidth and changed data, after seeding it works great for us. This will probably keep you well within the budget,.

Dennes

[marktbreaux]

Yea I don't believe I can afford a second SAN but I was thinking about going with this QNAP appliance. It does iSCSI connectivity and so I was thinking of using one of those backup programs I listed up top to replicate from my SAN to the iSCSI NAS at my branch location. Its good to here that Veeam works for you. I just downloaded the trial for it to see how it works on my ESXi. I am hoping Asigra pricing isn't too bad because it does what they call cloud backups. It doesn't matter if it is a vm or physical box, it can backup anything on the network and replicate it. It also does de-duplication and will granularly backup Exchange and SQL. I will need this for my 3rd branch as it is a physical server and not a virtual machine.

If you don't mind, how is Veeam priced and how does it work with Exchange and SQL?

[dennes]

Veeam is priced per physical socket (about $500,-), so keep that in mind with multiple dual/quad socketed hosts, this adds up quickly

Veeam does backups of the VM's on the ESX host(s), It does quiescing through the VMware Tools on each of the backupped guests, so it effectively integrated with VSS aware applications (SQL 2005 and up, Exchange 2003 and up).

It also has a file level restore option that works great and allows you to restore individual files from the guests, instead of having to do a full restore of the entire VM.

Cheap iSCSI capable (but i'd prefer NFS in this case) SATA boxes for DR sites/backup are also the new Iomega 2 and 4 bay NASes. Don't know about the QNAp's

[marktbreaux]

Thanks for the pricing. I have Dual Proc Dual core servers. It will be about 3 grand for all 3 of my servers. Not horrible.

Ok so Veeam can restore an individual message or mailbox for a user in Exchange?

As for the Iomega's, I don't like them because they are 1TB drives to get the storage I need. www.qnap.com offers all of that and replication software plus has 8 bays. They are not on the Vmware HCL though where as the iomega is for 3.0

Here are the hw specs between the two. I would give the edge to QNAP especially when the price (2.2k - 2.5k) is pretty much the same on the linux versions. (Iomega with Windows Storage Server is about 4.5k)

QNAP Hardware Spec.

CPU Intel Processor Core 2 Duo 2.8 GHz

DRAM 2GB DDRII RAM

Flash Memory 128MB DOM

HDD 8 x 3.5" SATA I/II HDD (the standard package is shipped without HDD)

HDD Tray 8 x hot-swappable and lockable tray

LAN Port 2 x Gigabit RJ-45 Ethernet port

Protocol: iSCSI

Warranty: 1 year

Iomega Hardware Spec:

Type Hot-swap - 3.5" x 1/3H

Capacity 4 x 1 TB

Interface Type Serial ATA-300

Data Transfer Rate 300 MBps

Spindle Speed 7200 rpm

Buffer Size 8 MB

Processors Installed 1 x Intel Celeron D 352 3.2 GHz

Max Supported Qty 1

RAM Installed DRAM 512 MB

Interfaces 1 x Ethernet 10Base-T/100Base-TX/1000Base-T - RJ-45 ¦ 3 x Hi-Speed USB - 4 pin USB Type A

Warranty: 3 year

[dennes]

Hmm. I'll remember to check them out.

Veeam does not perform brick level restore of Exchange. Don't think any of them do. You can however restore the full Information Store to an RSG and restore individual messages from that. Takes a little longer, but does the job.

Dennes

[marktbreaux]

What is RSG?