ESXi Datastore advice

[wildest_jjk]

Hi guys,

I need some advice on the best setup for VM/Backup storage.

This is the intended setup:



It consists of the following:

• HP Proliant DL360 G5 - ESXi installed with various VM's.
• Cisco Small Business SG300-20
• Cisco 1921 Router
• POSSIBLY an HP Microserver of some kind - Datastore

The issue I have really is that the DL360 only supports 2.5" hard drives, it's pretty loud and the power consumption is quite high. I will need to power it down every night.

Ideally I would like some form of external storage so that I can use 3.5" drive's instead and leave this running all the time. The best thing I have thought of so far is the microserver. The only problem is I'm not sure what I would need to have installed on it and how it would perform with the DL360/ESXi.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

 

[[Darkend]Viper]

Is this for home or work/business? If home i'd say just use the microserver for an esxi host with 4x2tb drives for storage. Powering up and down server grade hardware daily is asking for trouble IMO.

Other option is to replace the DL360 G5 with either a newer model or similar model from another vendor.

I run a dell poweredge r710 24x7 from home and it's added about £4 a month to electric bill. It's a dual quad core Xeon X5540, 24gb ram, and 5 450gb 15k sas drives.

 

[wildest_jjk]

Is this for home or work/business? If home i'd say just use the microserver for an esxi host with 4x2tb drives for storage. Powering up and down server grade hardware daily is asking for trouble IMO.

Other option is to replace the DL360 G5 with either a newer model or similar model from another vendor.

I run a dell poweredge r710 24x7 from home and it's added about £4 a month to electric bill. It's a dual quad core Xeon X5540, 24gb ram, and 5 450gb 15k sas drives.

Thanks for the response. It's for home and I do see your point. The thing is the DL360 is much more powerful than the microserver and now I have it I want to make use of it. However it does feel like if I am getting the microserver I could just use that instead.

Also I don't want to replace the DL360 as I was given it.


Thanks again

 

[covenantuk]

You could install ESX on the DL360 and just add it as a host in a cluster installed on the Microserver. Migrate the VMs to the DL360 during the day or when you need the CPU power.

To be honest though the only thing the Microserver won't host easily is stuff like 1080p transcoding/streaming.

Server hardware is just a pain to use at home - I can get unlimited DL380s from work when they decommission old hardware at 5 yrs but they're just no good in a home environment unless you can stick them in a garage or outbuilding

 

[ecksmen]

http://www.quadstor.com/ For the Microserver, present out NFS stores with inline dedupe and storage pooling. Wire the MS into the switch, not directly attached to the server so you can present out the NFS to any device on the network and make use of it.

Alternatively, use iSCSI and enjoy the benefits of VAAI support (I can do a full clone of a 50GB vm using VAAI and inline dedupe in less than 1 minute on very crap hardware).

 

[wildest_jjk]

Thanks for the responses.

You could install ESX on the DL360 and just add it as a host in a cluster installed on the Microserver. Migrate the VMs to the DL360 during the day or when you need the CPU power.

To be honest though the only thing the Microserver won't host easily is stuff like 1080p transcoding/streaming.

Server hardware is just a pain to use at home - I can get unlimited DL380s from work when they decommission old hardware at 5 yrs but they're just no good in a home environment unless you can stick them in a garage or outbuilding

How would I migrate the VMs to the DL360 during the day?

I would be interested in streaming which will include 1080p. The rack would be in the garage as well.

http://www.quadstor.com/ For the Microserver, present out NFS stores with inline dedupe and storage pooling. Wire the MS into the switch, not directly attached to the server so you can present out the NFS to any device on the network and make use of it.

Alternatively, use iSCSI and enjoy the benefits of VAAI support (I can do a full clone of a 50GB vm using VAAI and inline dedupe in less than 1 minute on very crap hardware).

I'm not too sure about what you are saying. Would you mind explaining a little bit more?

Both ideas sound good but I don't really understand either!

Thanks again

 

[ecksmen]

Thanks for the responses.



How would I migrate the VMs to the DL360 during the day?

I would be interested in streaming which will include 1080p. The rack would be in the garage as well.



I'm not too sure about what you are saying. Would you mind explaining a little bit more?

Both ideas sound good but I don't really understand either!

Thanks again

Wire the microserver into the switch, not directly attached to the ESX host.

Install Centos and quadstor on the microserver. Its a storage appliance: you an pool disks and present the storage into ESX either as iSCSI with VAAI support or via NFS. Regardless, it supports inline deduplication. VAAI will benefit you when using a single 1Gbps link, as lots of comands are offloaded to the appliance. NFS is more flexible on space especially with dedupe (a deduped VMFS datastore even heavily deduped still has a set size - which can be expanded).

 

[Dogers]

Or don't have any disks in the 360 and just PXE boot ESXi from the MS?