New Lab Rack, Setup Reccomendations

[bheusmann]

Hi All,

I've got a new lab rack with some decent hardware that I'm setting up. I'd like some reccomendations on your thoughts. The purpose of this rack is to service an active directory domain, exchange, file and print, web services, and various other applications like SMS or SCOM. The hardware:

1 DL360 G4 Server

2 DL380 G4 Servers

1 DL385 G1 Server

1 DL580 G2 server

1 MSA1000 (dual controllers, Active/Passive, dual 2/8 SAN Switches, 7x300GB, 7x146GB drives)

1 MS30 Shelf (14x146 GB drives)

2 Seagate BlackAmor 1TB NAS

1 Cisco 3750G

The firewall will be a Microsoft ISA 2006 / Threat Management Gateway server

Preliminary Info that would be helpful would include, how best to carve up the SAN storage. I'm thinking the DL380's will be populated with 2 36.4 GB or 72GB  drives for ESX and 4 146GB drives for a data store, and setup access to the SAN for virtual machine hosting. Additionally, I would like to use a portion of the SAN for file & print storage, however, I'm weighing this because I have the two BlackArmour NAS's that could suffice as network storage. Unfortunately I can't combine these into one NAS, they are independent devices. So I may not include a F&P server in the mix and just use the NAS's. If I were, would adding space from the SAN to a VM be sufficient enough for performance sakes, or would connecting say the MS30 directly to the vSphere host server benefit performance. I would loose total capacity in the SAN, but this may be a worthwile tradeoff.

If any additional information is needed, I'd be happy to provide this. I can also change firmware to Active/Active if this would be beneficial. I'm planning on using vSphere 4.1 as well as Windows 2008 R2 on the DL385 and Windows 2008 32-bit / Windows 2003 on the DL380's. I haven't decided if I'm going to install vSphere or Windows on the DL580, I'm moving towards vSphere utilizing 32-bit guests.

Thanks for any info you can provie. Again, I'm just looking for some ideas, I've setup vSphere labs and environments before, but I haven't gotten a lot of side advice, so I'd like to see your thoughts. Thanks for any input.

Regards,

Bryan

[DSTAVERT]

I don't think you are going to be able to run any 64bit OSs on this at all. You will probably be limited to ESX(i) 3.5 on the Intel hardware and while the 365 will probably be able to run 4.1 you probably won't get 64bit guests.

[bheusmann]

All the DL380's can run vSphere 4.1 but can only host 32-bit operating systems, which I'm fin with. That's why I'm using 2008 W32. The DL385 is an AMD Opteron and can run vSphere 4.x as well as host 64-bit guests...AMD was ahead of the game before intel with 64-bit architecture. This has been tested and works, it may be unsupported, but I know it works.

The old workhorse, the DL580, that can only run ESX 3.5 and host 32-bit guests. These are old 1.9GHz Xeon MP chips, unsupporting of 64-bit technology, so I'm not sure what this will be purposed for, maybe web services such as DotNetNuke and other application servers.

-Bryan

[DSTAVERT]

Familair with HP hardware. Not all processors in the G4 line work for 4.x so if it works for you great.

[bheusmann]

Oh Sorry, I didn't mean to infer you weren't familiar. All of the servers were bought right around the time the G4 line switched to G5, maybe that's why I've had such good luck

[DSTAVERT]

No offence taken at all. Certainly your good fortune.

[bheusmann]

So do you have any advice, maybe how to carve up the SAN...should I make multiple arrays with single logical drives or just a few arrays with multiple logical drives for each server?

I'm new to setting up vSphere on a SAN backend. I've done a lot of host virtual machines, using a NFS share for VM's etc. so this is my first adventure with SAN storage.

Also, I'm not sure if an Active/Passive or Active/Active configuration would benefit me more? Currently it's in Active/Passive, and I have one fibre connection from each HBA port (dual qlogic HBA's) to each of the SAN switces in the MSA1000. I'm assuming that this is in the event of a link failure, it would pickup the second link on the other port??? But as I said, this is a new venture for me. Any info that I could review for this would be helpful as well.

Thanks for any imput.