Minimum hardware & software to achieve redundancy?

[Ed_Flecko]

I've been tasked with virtualizing our existing rack of 6 physical servers. I need to keep costs to a minimum, so I'm trying to determine what the minimum hardware and sofware requirements would be?

I've been told I need to buy 2 "pizza box" (1U) servers and an iSCSI SAN/NAS applicance, and a minimum support contract with vmware so I can get vsphere. Is this accurate? It seems like 1 SAN/NAS applicance has lots of single points of failure though, doesn't it?

We have appx. 100 end users. We're a non-profit organization, so we can buy all Microsoft software (server OSes, etc.) for dirt cheap. We DO run Exchange, so I'm wondering if I should buy 2 Exchange licenses so the servers could be clustered - if one fails, the other would continue. The users are very flexible with a little down time, so 100% uptime is not a necessity and our network load is pretty light. Our primary needs are simple e-mail and file stores.

I'd like to use some of my old servers for something (if possible), but I don't know what. I DO have an old, Dell (it's actually an EMC under the hood) FC SAN device with appx. 2TB capacity. Maybe I could use that for vm backups?

Could someone tell me what you would consider to be the minimum hardware and sofware requirements to achieve redundancy (with perhaps a little, allowable downtime) with vmware?

Thank you,

Ed

P.S. - If you have any suggestions on how YOU would approach this entire P2V project, I would welcome those as well.

[Duncan Epping]

Tough question as it is difficult for us to say what you should be using as that depends on your budget / amount of downtime you can take etc. In general:

- 2 host minimum for HA, but depending on the amount of VMs you are running and probably preferably 3 hosts

- shared storage, could for instance use the vSphere Storage Appliance... this will give you a shared storage solution without the direct costs associated to it. Suggest looking at it now that 5.1 is announced

- vSphere HA --> helps minimizing downtime in the case of a failure!

[hmus]

As per depping reply, VSA is a good option.

There is a blog for VSA which details about the overview, senarios and gives information on pricing too. worth to read this one

http://vmnomad.blogspot.com/2011/07/vsphere-5-virtual-storage-appliance.html

Hope this helps you

[mrksiddiqui]

VSA is nothing new, lots of companies (HP.FALCON,STORLOGIC) have been providing SMB solution. Keep in mind that this solution is licensed seperately from Vsphere and cost around $5000.00. However, this solution is tight integerated with vCenter which makes it a little easier to manage. But if you are going to fork out this much dollar I would recomend looking at other solutions as well. Also VSA is limited to three ESXi Host.

[Duncan Epping]

mrksiddiqui wrote:

VSA is nothing new, lots of companies (HP.FALCON,STORLOGIC) have been providing SMB solution. Keep in mind that this solution is licensed seperately from Vsphere and cost around $5000.00. However, this solution is tight integerated with vCenter which makes it a little easier to manage. But if you are going to fork out this much dollar I would recomend looking at other solutions as well. Also VSA is limited to three ESXi Host.

Not with 5.1 Essentials Plus it is... pricing / packaging changed, hence the reason I mentioned it. And no a VSA is not new, I know that :smileyhappy:

[SantiniStorMagi]

A Storage Virtual Appliance does ssound like a good fit here as it is very cost effective compared to physical solutions. Debby is correct, VSA 5.1 was announced at VMworld along with licensing changes.

I understand that VSA requires a 3rd physical machine to act as a Quorum/ 3rd point of contact, although I understand that the 3rd VSA instance can act as this 3rd point. mrksiddiqui forgot to mention StorMagic, SvSAN gives the user the choice to have mirrored shared storage for HA and for no single point of failure, without the need for this 3rd contact. http://www.stormagic.com/SvSAN_5.php

This is one of the reasons it done so well in multi-Site environments as it mimizes hardware requirements further.

Steve

StorMagic