I have some budget and breathing room to expand my VM environment but am struggling to understand all the available products as well as the best next step.
Budget is 10-20K.
Current Environment:
Current Disaster Fears:
Goal:
Questions:
That's kind of it for now to start the discussion but any input is super appreciated. Thanks!
Hi Ryarrow,
Some input
Licensing
You may want to look are more powerful hosts to keep the number of hosts at 3, to keep you in the Essentials tier, however I would strongly look at Essentials Plus
Shared Storage
-- Resources
Windows Server 2012 as a Storage Device for vSphere Home Lab | theITHollow
Better Hosts
Backups
Personally I love Veeam as backup tool, but you must start to do restore tests. The best way to make yourself indispensable in a company is to make a career out of the stuff people avoid doing, I find in IT people avoid testing backups and documentation.
vSphere 5 or vSphere 6
If you regularly keep your VMware environment up to date and follow each version, then go to vSphere 5.5. If you only really upgrade once a project gets funded to do so, I would recommend jumping as far as you can. Have a look at a number of blogs regaring peoples upgrade to vSphere 6 there should be few out there.
-- Resources
http://www.derekseaman.com/2015/02/vsphere-6-0-install-pt-1-introduction.html
Protected VMs
With vSphere Essentials Plus you have VMware HA which will protect them from a host failure and reboot them on the remaining hosts.
With vSphere Essentials Plus you will have vSphere Replication, which you can use to replicate your VMs to other storage perhaps local storage to give you another copy of the VMs.
vCloud Air
You may want to consider looking at services like vCloud Air and see if they will help you.
*Summary
(Please be aware all this pricing came from Google while responding to this post, please go to the Vendors and get proper pricing)
You can make a number of savings with the hosts if they don't meet you needs.
Hope that helps
Cheers
@iiToby
@iiToby -- Thank you! I will review and see if I have other basic questions, but this is all very helpful in getting me started.
That's a toughie. It's not a lot of money. My professional answer would be as follows:
Buy newer stronger servers, put a 10 gig switch in place, buy a low end storage array (storwize or vnx) and do shared storage(you can do this part even on free esxi).
My, "Get it done at minimal cost" hat, says you can go one of two ways:
Either move away from VMware, or
Get used gear, servers and switches at around 1k apiece or lower. Get enough that you don't need support on it. Buy MULTIPLE essentials packs, point each set of 3 servers to the same storage array.
Most environments, the physical hardware isn't the biggest expense anyway...it's almost always software. Between Microsoft and VMware licensing, I pay 2x more than the hardware it sits on anyway.
The way you are doing it isn't exactly horrible. It's not optimal, but it's not horrible. You need to test, test, and retest your backup and restore (a backup is worthless if you can't restore it). If you focus on a HA design, where you understand the risks associated with a server dying and losing the vm's...but have set up a VERY good backup routine (even replication is possible, where you can have as little as a few minutes of loss), then you can get by.
A lot of it depends on how much the budget truly is, and where you put your money.
The 3 host vmware essentials is enough if you get really BEEFY hosts, Ton's of ram, and a small storage appliance. But if you need more than that kind of scale...
Thanks to both of you for your input. It helped a lot in setting me on the path. I really want shared storage, but the cost of doing it right (10Gbps, a good storage array, and VMWare licensing) are cost prohibitive for the moment. Currently, I'm going to get more hosts, another essentials license, and then develop a better DR plan. I'll also have cold standbys of my critical systems on another host so that i can fail over manually as needed until I get fancier with the technology. This will hopefully get me to a good point for a while and then the next step would be shared storage.