Need some SAN recommendations

[DanReynolds]

Looking for a new SAN to support primarily a VMware Horizon View environment. Right now at about 50 users plus a few other assorted virtual desktops and a handful of servers. If we ever get back to higher staffing levels would be as high as 80.

Desktops are full-clones, I have about 8 different base images for the different tasks.

Probably want to go iSCSI. Will probably have to go hybrid, don't think we can afford all FLASH or SSD. Price of definite importance. Not really interested in data dedup or other frills. Price, performance are more important. No EMC. Very, very, very bad experience. Don't even want to talk about it. HPE seems to have several options??

I can't do vSan. I was caught in the license shuffle and I would have to upgrade all my licenses (VMware) and that would cost a bunch of money. Plus, I don't need a ton of hosts. And I don't want to add a host JUST to do vSan...

Dan Reynolds, Senior Systems Administrator - BLDD Architects, Decatur, IL

[a_p_]

What's your disk space requirement (usable storage)?

Do you have Fiber-Channel, or 10GBit/s Ethernet for the SAN already in place? Or are you looking at multipath 1 GBit/s storage systems?

In case you are looking at e.g. 10GBit/s, are the hosts already equipped with such NICs?

What type of users do you have, i.e. are they mainly Office users, or do you also have power users (CAD, developers, ...)?

Do you want/need replication (sync/async), and or transparent failover?

Also important, about how much are you roughly willing to spend?

André

[rbadilla]

Dan:

Your question can be complex or very easy (current servers config, budget, timeframe and location can alter the answer)! Since you are talking about VDI atlantiscomputing have a product call ilio (now they called it USX)  which were very recommended on some seminars. Much HPE STO solutions are rebranded from HDS so maybe worth look to them (HDS) directly.

I have not seen any vdi working fine on iSCSI (at least at 1 Gbps).

And most STO vendors have a mantra "think first on speed and realibility; then on RAID Type", so any recommendation about RAID6 or RAID01 will be lost words if you don't know how many IOPS are your vms needing.

Try to arrange an demo config with some of your vms on the STO candidates and then figure out with them the STO config that matches your QoS and budget.

Hope this helps a little.

[alsmk2]

For that number of desktops and the fact that they're full clones, I don't expect you'll have a high IOPS requirement.

If budgets are tight, have a look at the Fujitsu ETURNUS range (something like the dx200). I don't think that would break the bank and they're perfectly capable/ reliable SANs.

Shame you've ruled out EMC, as ScaleIO would be my first recommendation (beats vSan into the ground in every single way).