Failover Cluster running Hyper V Server?

james73

james73

james73

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Ok. I'm a bit of a noob to Server virtualisation. I'd like a set-up as shown below - two physically identical boxes, running Hyper V Server, with a SAN storage attached.

My question is, can I run my entire network (less than 20 users) on a set-up like this? I'd be looking at around 4, 5 maybe 6 virtual servers on the Cluster boxes. It'd be one Domain Controller (running AD, File Server, etc) and the other servers smaller tasks (email server; back-up schedule; whatever else; etc).

We've not a big network but we generate a lot of data, hence the SAN.

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All suggestions welcome!
 
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Although there are a thousand and one caveats to any question like this - yes you should be fine - Look at your IOP requirements and engage with SAN VARs to get the best deal you can.
 
Look at the compellent range (sc4000?), it offers a lot of good features. If you have a lot of data, might be worthwhile.

Just moved from equalogic to compellent myself, it's much, much better! and a lot less faffing about from the windows side.
 
TheOracle said:
Look at the compellent range (sc4000?), it offers a lot of good features. If you have a lot of data, might be worthwhile.

Just moved from equalogic to compellent myself, it's much, much better! and a lot less faffing about from the windows side.
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Is the Compellent SAS drives or SATA? I think (off the top of my head) one of the reasons the boss wanted shot of the old Equalogic SAN was the cost of the drives.

Any opinions on a Synology Rackstation NAS?
 
james73 said:
It's not just how much data we create, it's about how long we have to hold it and make it available.
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Ideally you want a tiering san then. Flash storage for vms, 10k for current data and 7k for aged data. The san takes care of all this for you.

In regards to cost, tricky as every system is different depending on requirements. IIRC, our compellent chassis with 25tb 50/50 mix of SSD and 10k was 40k? then we added on an expansion shelf with an additional 25tb of 10k drives for 25k

so that's 50tb of data, but we can actually fit 100tb on due to 2:1 dedupe

Yours will be much less as you could probably get away with a few ssds and then a load of 7k. That said, it may be overkill for your requirements.

Knowing what I know now, I'd never buy another equalogic san
 
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You have a single point of failure with the switch configuration. Maybe consider running dual NIC connections and either stacking the switches (Depending on what switches they are) or keeping them standalone, but having them both on a central backbone. This will greatly increase your resilience to the Clients and SAN at no extra hardware cost. Just configure VLANS for the SAN connections to keep them away from any production traffic. With a setup your size sharing switch infrastructure won't be an issue.

If you're looking for long term backup storage consider NL-SAS disks (Nearline) rather than the 7k SAS drives. There not as fast, but there a LOT cheaper and ideal for archive storage.
 
Si. said:
You have a single point of failure with the switch configuration. Maybe consider running dual NIC connections and either stacking the switches (Depending on what switches they are) or keeping them standalone, but having them both on a central backbone. This will greatly increase your resilience to the Clients and SAN at no extra hardware cost. Just configure VLANS for the SAN connections to keep them away from any production traffic. With a setup your size sharing switch infrastructure won't be an issue.

If you're looking for long term backup storage consider NL-SAS disks (Nearline) rather than the 7k SAS drives. There not as fast, but there a LOT cheaper and ideal for archive storage.
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Good suggestion. We've plenty of switches right now so we should be able to reuse what we have. A separate switch for each Server connecting to the SAN/NAS, yes? Also, do you mean run two cables to each switch each with it's own IP address to connect to the SAS/NAS? Would that not show (in the Servers) twice as much SAS/NAS space as really exists? :confused:

On the subject of software, we have at least 3 copies of Server 2012 and at least 4 copies of Server 2008 R2. Can we use these at no additional cost given they all have valid licences?
 
james73 said:
On the subject of software, we have at least 3 copies of Server 2012 and at least 4 copies of Server 2008 R2. Can we use these at no additional cost given they all have valid licences?
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2008R2 is going end-of-life in January 2020, I wouldn't be putting that out on any new production server.

Whether you can use them depends on what kind of licence you have, if they're OEM then they died with the server they were first installed on. If you're using them as a VM, you do get 2 VMs per licence which means 3 2012 licences covers your needs. Again, I'd be reluctant to install non-R2 though, mainly because it's a crap operating system.
 
Thanks. I reckon a Server 2008 R2 VM or two should be fine if we're using it to simply run a scheduled backup via Robocopy or something like that. Plus, we have a Server 2000 box running some sort of ancient software that's tied to that particular server OS due to it's licence. Or so I've been told. Also, I assume the 2 VMs per licence means we could install a Windows 10 VM i.e. it's not limited to a server OS?

^Just googled that last bit. No, you can't.
 
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