3 x HP DL320e - is it a good setup for vSAN?

[qhash]

Hi guys,

In our small company we do have three HP DL320e (Xeon E3-1220v2, 8GB ram ECC, 2 x 1TB 7200rpm, 2 x 1Gpbs) from which only two are powered on. The third one is a spare.  Those HP servers are heavily underused and there is a plan of two new services that will require two servers or two virtual hosts. They are also not demaning.

At the beggining the plan was to add iSCSI NAS and use two servers as ESXi hosts, keep the third server as a spare host. The iSCSI NAS costs money and is a single point of failure.

I thought that maybe we create a vSAN cluster from these three servers and the result would be a better failover response and data integrity (no old system, recent data base from backup problem while moving image to a spare sever). The problem is we will not get any money for it, so we have to go for free solution with an option to migrate to paid license the moment the requirements will increase.

I am planning to buy:

3 x 8GB ECC RAM

3 x 240GB SSD

3 x 4-port 1Gbps Ethernet cards

and install vSAN and vSphere on that three upgraded server. My questions are:

1. Is it this going to work for really not so resource demanding environment  some in-depth reading and I have my asnwer

2. Is it going to be 1 server failproof? ( can we make it 2 server failproof actually ?) as above

3. Is the data going to be secure? We will do additional backups - what would be the best option for that? I mean the most automated ? can some vSAN module do that to external storage?

4. Can we do it using only free VMWare licenses?

Regards to the community,

Peter

[zdickinson]

In general, your setup sounds like a test environment even if the usage will be low.

What do you mean by will the data be secure?  If you mean encryption, then I don't believe vSAN offers anything natively.  If you mean backup, like your next few statements suggest, I would say that vSAN does not address backups in any way.  It addresses performance with the SSD layer, and availability  with host failures to tolerate.  Backups will be dependent on you backup technology.

vSAN is licensed per proc.  We got ours for about $2500/proc with one year of support, but your mileage may vary.

One thing I did not see you ask about is the controller for the disks.  This is very important and you should check the HCL to make sure the controller is compatible.  Also, remember that just because it is on the HCL, does not mean that it is suitable for all uses.  In general, the higher the queue depth, the better.

To be honest, it seems like most vSAN horror stories start off like yours.  I don't believe vSAN should be put into production on hardware you just have laying around a shoe string budget.

[qhash · Accepted solution]

Thank you very much for your post.

It definitely clarifies some things to me. I am leaning towards iSCSI implementation for our VMs then.