I want to virtualise my servers but...

RangeR · 26-06-2013 2:29pm #1

Guys,

Looking for opinions. I want to virtualise my servers. Currently we have one DC, one FS [hosts files and shares only, no apps], one SQL Server and one financial server. Our data foot print is relatively minimal, I'd say <=500GB.

We were quoted in the region of €40k for a two server VMWare HA bundle. We're a small company [<50 users]. There is no way I can justify that amount of money. I was thinking in the region of €10k to €15k max.

Am I crazy or is €40k the going rate these days?

n0brain3r · 26-06-2013 3:17pm

Wow looks massively over spec'd. You certainly could pay €40k with HA and a SAN but I suspect you could live with a couple of hours down time and get it done for 20 if not 15k easily! It's hard without knowing your business and requirements but if you want a realistic quote PM me.

RangeR · 26-06-2013 3:54pm

Well, to be honest, we don't have HA at the moment so it's not a definite requirement. Hardware wise, I'm figuring ...

Rack mount 1 or 2 U server
24GB to 32GB RAM
6 to 12 cores spread over multiple CPU's
1TB of useable storage spread over multi disk raid 5 [or raid 10] etc [SAN need not apply]

For HA, get two servers with above spec but it really isn't needed. Yup, I think I will go back to our supplier and ask for another, more realistic quote. Thanks.

n0brain3r · 26-06-2013 4:59pm

You should ditch VMWare and look at Server 2012 Hyper-V.

For what you describe I would spec the following

A HP DL380Gen8 single CPU, 32 GB RAM, 2x 300GB SAS 15k (146GB 10k if saving cost) Mirror for O/s, 6x 500GB SAS 15K(300GB 10K to keep price down at the cost of performance) 1x additional PSU

2x Server 2012 OEM youy can stack them and this allows 4 VMs running any Server version(2 per server 2012 license).

Veeam B&R to dump VM images to a NAS or similiar.

To add a very economical HA

A second server matching with similar specs to the above but typically with less RAM, slow disks no extra PSU etc. 2x Server 2012 OEM and configure Veeam to replicate your existing VM's every 5 minutes then should the primary go down you can spin up the second.

My only concern would be your SQL server you may need pass through disks for performance but 50 users cant be hitting it that hard!

You save here big time by not buying vSphere licensing (All the same features better and more are included with the Server 2012 license the you have to buy anyway). No SAN which are big bucks to buy, setup and maintain.

From a server perspective you also have no single point of failure as you have no shared storage.

Mr. Fancypants · 26-06-2013 7:57pm

Has the supplier got any reports to back up what they are suggesting? Generally we would use VMware capacity planner or Microsoft's MAPs tool which is run on site for a while before spitting out reports with a recommend specification for servers/storage.

I have put in a good few Vmware and hyper-v environments and Vmware is still the better product but you can't argue with the price of Hyper-v. If you decide you don't need HA you can get by with a single server and use Veeam as suggested above to replicate to another server or even use Hyper-V replica which is included for free. Don't forget to do backups and get them offsite, just using Veeam to a NAS that's sitting in the same building with no offsite is asking for trouble.

Another option rather than buying the second server would be to use something like a Datto SIRIS which is a backup appliance which will allow you to power up your backups as virtual machines on the appliance and will replicate those virtual machines out to Datto's datacentres with the ability to power them up there if it all goes pear shaped.

Tomtata · 04-07-2013 8:38pm

Hi RangeR,

Here is an option that would come in under budget,

Servers & Software
2x DELL PowerEdge R520 - €2,500 each
Spec,
3x 300GB 15K SAS (RAID 5)
2x Intel Xeon E5-2407 Procs
48GB RAM
2x PSU

Citrix XenServer Hypervisor (Totally Free and a very solid product)
PHD Virtual Backup €1000 per server

Backups
1x Dell Optiplex 3010 with 2TB storage - €450 (NFS server for daily backups - With 2 TB and PHD you could store months of backups)
2x 1TB 2.5" USB Disks - €75 each (For taking backups offsite if required)
There also an option of syncing your backups to the cloud. Roughly €40 per month for 500GB

Total €7,600 Ex VAT and you have a great set-up.

You would have daily backups to your backup machine & USB and/or cloud for offsite.
You also have fully replicated VM's from your Primary XenServer to the secondary in case of DR scenario.

I completed are similar/larger setup for a client a few months back and its working out great. They are running XenServer for 4 years!
If pricing is key then you could run with 1 server (Saving €2,500) with a 4hr response warranty if you could afford the potential downtime in a disaster.

Dont get me wrong VMware VSphere is an amazing product and I use it in very large environments on a daily basis but the cost is hard to justify in this case.
XenServer will do everything you want and alot more plus you always have the option of purchasing official support if needed.

PM me if you have any questions.

Rgs, Tomtata

sgealbhain · 01-08-2013 7:05pm

Definite agree with using Hyper-V Server 2012 instead of VMWARE. There's also Hyper-V Replica in Server 2012 which allows you to do HA. It's build into the OS so no additional software needed

RangeR · 10-10-2013 4:47pm

Right so. I've got agreement in principle to go Virtual. I reckon I'll have a budget of between €10k and €20k.

I want to get a tighter idea on how much things will cost so I can report that back and proceed. At this stage, it's likely that nothing will happen until early to February 14 as we will have a change freeze for the Christmas rush.

n0brain3r, I like your idea and would like to subscribe to your newsletter. My ideal would be to have three virtual servers. Two onsite in HA and one offsite in warm standby. We already have 4 x Win2008 STD licenses we can use in addition to the 4 x Win2012 mentioed.

Onsite Server 1 would be speced as below. Maybe a reduced spec for onsite Server 2. The warm standby off site wouldn't need to be as high spec as it's function is just to survive three or four days until we can relocate all processes to a new building [DR ish].

However, we would like to have a lot of HDD capacity in the offsite location. I would like to use this extra capacity to get rid of my tape backups. This is just a "nice to have" and not an absolute requirement. I'm always looking to get rid of my tapes. We are currently using 500GB per day [full backup] but I intend to turn on per session De-Dupe sometime this week to see what that comes down to. It won't be my much. If we move to HDD daily backup, I'll also be more at ease turning on incremental backups. So maybe full backup once a week and incremental for the other four. Currently, we are FIFO rotating 11 tapes. 10 for daily for two weeks and a monthly rotation.

I reckon somewhere in the region of 8TB to 10TB would be enough. If I have to, I'll get a cheap PC and throw in a few 3TB or 4TB HDD's.

Doesn't have to be high grade, best of breed, HDDs either. Connectivity between sites will have to be checked but I reckon we can get a minimum of 50:20Mb on both locations.

We already have CA ArcServe Backup [r15.0 SP1 installed but licensed to latest, I believe] with enough backup agents licenses to handle SQL Server, Exchange [now hosted on Office365], File Server, Open Files, HA to off site realtime file and DB replication.

Will ArcServe function as you intend Veeam B&R to function?

As part of this project, we will be decommissioning about 10 servers. We may be able to re-use some of these in the project. Maybe the best one for the Offsite warm standby

n0brain3r wrote: »

You should ditch VMWare and look at Server 2012 Hyper-V.

For what you describe I would spec the following

A HP DL380Gen8 single CPU, 32 GB RAM, 2x 300GB SAS 15k (146GB 10k if saving cost) Mirror for O/s, 6x 500GB SAS 15K(300GB 10K to keep price down at the cost of performance) 1x additional PSU

2x Server 2012 OEM youy can stack them and this allows 4 VMs running any Server version(2 per server 2012 license).

Veeam B&R to dump VM images to a NAS or similiar.

To add a very economical HA

A second server matching with similar specs to the above but typically with less RAM, slow disks no extra PSU etc. 2x Server 2012 OEM and configure Veeam to replicate your existing VM's every 5 minutes then should the primary go down you can spin up the second.

My only concern would be your SQL server you may need pass through disks for performance but 50 users cant be hitting it that hard!

You save here big time by not buying vSphere licensing (All the same features better and more are included with the Server 2012 license the you have to buy anyway). No SAN which are big bucks to buy, setup and maintain.

From a server perspective you also have no single point of failure as you have no shared storage.

Mr. Fancypants · 10-10-2013 7:18pm

Can't stress enough how important it is to do an assessment before you start purchasing servers. You will need to make sure what you are buying will the do the job. You do not want to be going back cap in hand after spending your budget looking for more because the SQL server is running too slow.

Veeam is a far superior product to Arcserve for virtual environments. It is extremely flexible, lets you power up machines directly from a backup, power up a test lab, replicate and it now supports tape if you really need it. You could set it up to have local backups held for a week or two for quick restores and have the backups replicated to your offsite location using WAN Acceleration. Well worth looking up if you havent already. It is licensed per socket for hosts that have vms that are being backed up/replicated. It's one weakness is that it only supports virtual environments so if you arent 100% virtual you either need two products or a different product to do it all.

n0brain3r · 13-10-2013 9:44pm

Mbroaders is right you need to get an idea of the requirements of your SQL install and the financial server you mentioned is it running an app or hosting
data?

You've a bit of time between now and Feburary so take a look at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd537570.aspx?

Also make sure the software guys support running on a virtualized host I've had a few virtualization projects stopped as the support guys insisted on running directly on the metal.

I've only ever uninstalled Arcserve so I don't know but if its current get onto support and see what they advise it might save you if the current product does everything you need.

RangeR · 14-10-2013 8:46am

mbroaders wrote: »

Can't stress enough how important it is to do an assessment before you start purchasing servers. You will need to make sure what you are buying will the do the job. You do not want to be going back cap in hand after spending your budget looking for more because the SQL server is running too slow.

Veeam is a far superior product to Arcserve for virtual environments. It is extremely flexible, lets you power up machines directly from a backup, power up a test lab, replicate and it now supports tape if you really need it. You could set it up to have local backups held for a week or two for quick restores and have the backups replicated to your offsite location using WAN Acceleration. Well worth looking up if you havent already. It is licensed per socket for hosts that have vms that are being backed up/replicated. It's one weakness is that it only supports virtual environments so if you arent 100% virtual you either need two products or a different product to do it all.

n0brain3r wrote: »

Mbroaders is right you need to get an idea of the requirements of your SQL install and the financial server you mentioned is it running an app or hosting
data?

You've a bit of time between now and Feburary so take a look at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd537570.aspx?

Also make sure the software guys support running on a virtualized host I've had a few virtualization projects stopped as the support guys insisted on running directly on the metal.

I've only ever uninstalled Arcserve so I don't know but if its current get onto support and see what they advise it might save you if the current product does everything you need.

Cheers, both of you. I'll check out MAPS soon. SQL will definitely need native disks. I don't think a virtual disk will be up to the task. Other than that, it does consume it's total 6GB RAM [as SQL does] and barely scratches 20% of it's 4 core CPU.

Financials is a bad implementation of Client-Server. It's RAM/CPU is minimal. I'll check with their support techs about virtual migration.

As for Veeam vs Arcserv, I don't need best of breed. There is some virtualisation support built into AS. I'll research that to see how good it is. I'll get onto their techs for info, too.

Thanks again guys.

Ctrl Alt Del · 14-10-2013 10:17pm

Hi,

Just closed a from 6 servers migration to one server,due to company downsizing massively.
Used HyperV as the end user had Volume Licensing agreement in place.

What i've used kind of extra from all above is:

-hardware RAID with 512M cache in RAID1
-used SSDs rather than SATA HDDS:
-2 x 512G SSDs for OSes
-2 x 512GB SSDs for databases (CRM and EXchange)
-2 x 1Tb SATA for shared data
-dedicated NIC 1Gb for each Virtual Machine to increase the bandwidth

All ok so far,i haven't got paid yet but looking forward to it...

Bladeserver · 22-11-2013 11:42am

RangeR wrote: »

We already have CA ArcServe Backup [r15.0 SP1 installed but licensed to latest, I believe] with enough backup agents licenses to handle SQL Server, Exchange [now hosted on Office365], File Server, Open Files, HA to off site realtime file and DB replication.

Will ArcServe function as you intend Veeam B&R to function?

With this you can do a prior version upgrade of Arcserve to the current version which is 16.5. Take a look at their per socket licensing. It works in both virtual and physical enviroments and costs a lot less than Veeam and has tonnes more features. We have moved fully from Symantec to Arcserve in recent months as we have had loads of issues with Symantec. Most enviroments we cater for still have physical servers so Veeam is a one trick pony in that case. If you were to buy Veeam for the virtual backups and some other product for the physical you are heading into expensive territory.

Sposs · 22-11-2013 2:00pm

Far cheaper and easier to simply outsource and remove the cost and hassle of managing your own physical hardware.

RangeR · 22-11-2013 2:20pm

Sposs wrote: »

Far cheaper and easier to simply outsource and remove the cost and hassle of managing your own physical hardware.

Ah Jayses. I don't want to put me out of a job, either

Bladeserver · 22-11-2013 2:23pm

I was just going to say!!!!!

Have you decided on a hardware solution yet?

Sposs · 22-11-2013 2:28pm

RangeR wrote: »

Ah Jayses. I don't want to put me out of a job, either

Lol course not, but admin is more than hardware, and just seems an unnecessary expense, when you can focus on your core admin functions rather than having to sort the rest.

RangeR · 22-11-2013 3:08pm

Bladeserver wrote: »

I was just going to say!!!!!

Have you decided on a hardware solution yet?

Not yet. Project is probably going to be around the June timeframe. Heavily toying around basing the equipment on this thread. Hoping to get 2 virtual hosts on site in HA [ish] and one off site as a quasi DR. That's the dream anyway. Loads of planning to do.

Haven't involved out solutions/IT partner yet [the one that quoted 40k+]. Will do that over the next month or so.

pyroger101 · 07-04-2014 4:25pm

Hey interesting thread! how did it work out in the end? Still on going?

The folks above seem spot on.

Hyper-V is really taking on very well and some good additional features with Windows Server 2012 r2 to sweeten the deal (vApps etc.)

Remember you get two free VM's with windows Server 2012 r2, a lot of people don't seem to know that!

Have you looked at Azure at all for back up/ DR?

I want to virtualise my servers but...

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