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74549
September 21st, 2011 12:00
Configuring My First Rack
I work for a small business of less than 20 employees. We currently have an old SBS2003 Dell server we've had for years that's past it's prime. We're definitely upgrading and I'm leaning towards a rack solution.
I want at least two identical servers to replace the single SBS server - one acting as a backup for the other in case of server failure. My current plan is to buy them without the OS and install Citrix XenServer (free edition) on both and installing a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM to act as our main AD/file server.
So my first question is - what am I missing?
1) The rack (the 24U is the smallest, it seems)
2) Two Dell R710's - identical hardware configuration
3) Rack mounted Dell UPS - would 1,000 watt be sufficient for short outages?
4) Managed switch? PowerConnect 3524?
Second question - the rack will NOT be located in the same area as the primary GB switch that powers the outlets for our office location. It will most likely be sitting behind me in my office. Is that a problem? Is there an issue having the the switch in the rack behind the main building switch?
Last question - will the rack stand alone or does it HAVE to be bolted into the floor, or wall, or something?
Did I forget anything, or is there a problem with this plan? Is there a better way to do this?
Any help would be appreciated, thanks!
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JOHNADCO
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
Hmmmm.. It looks like they charge $495 for the remote install now on the MD3200i. It used to be free I swear. Still the deal is the deal once a rep gets involved. Go lower on the ram if it helps get the san for sure. :)
JOHNADCO
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
I'll only add??? These Hypvisor clusters are amazing. I mean you can deliver a true Zero downtime system for not to much more money than a single decent stand alone server.
JOHNADCO
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
Four 1GB nics in each host that is. Others will say 6, but we do four in all our hosts.
JOHNADCO
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
Pretty sure it is offered with all Powervault iSCSI sans. Talk to your new rep about it. Its been so long since we purchased our first hosts / san that I don't remember exactly what equipment qualified me for it. But man was it nice. I have not got it in a long time, because I feel I am better than their techs now with it all.
Chromag
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
I'll have to do some research on finding some SAN's like that with complete redundancy. Having to manually fire up a VM on the healthy host is a perfectly good solution for us. I'm guessing since they're both connected to the same SAN the VM would start right back up in the same shape it was in when it failed.
Apparently you get HA and vMotion with the Essentials Plus package. If anything I could always start out with the free version and think about upgrading. Thanks again!
Chromag
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
"these VM moves between hosts were all done live and in production with no downtime"
Wow that rules. It would be nice because I'm assuming I could run VMware on both machines and if one of the hosts fails due to some hardware fault it would automatically switch over to the other host?
Chromag
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
Thanks for all your help - you've been a great source of information! Was there any equipment I missed that I'll need? Obviously I need to order a bunch of Cat6 cables to get everything wired properly. Anything else?
JOHNADCO
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
I know the reps are a PITA, but you will do soooo much better price wise with the dedicated reps. Pssst.. Tell them you are also bidding it out on HP hardware for absolute best pricing.
On the san? You just get a dual controller san. These have two Power supplies, two controllers, and redundant disk configurations, more commonly known as HA (High Availability) they really just don’t go down. They can take multiple failures before the go “down”.
HA from Vmware costs some bank, what you can do with two hosts even with free ESXi, is manually fire the VM's back up on the host that still runs. Might come with essentials plus, but I am not sure. We are on Enterprise Vmware these days. HA is available on it. The manual intervention HA works really well as we used it for years. You still get Vmotion, so you can move VM's around on your hosts while they are live. I would of suggested free ESXi for you if they hadn't changed the to it being so vRAM limited. Essentials gives you like 96GB for the three node cluster, and you will have that much vRAM available to use for your two hosts.
JOHNADCO
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
OK I lied.. One more thing? With Dell? They offer free remote install for all this. Take them up on it. They basically teach you how to setup VMware with an iSCSI san. Good stuff for free for sure.
JOHNADCO
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
PS: You should make sure you have at least four 1gb nics. One for LAN / MGT, two for iSCSI, and one for Vmotion.
Once again with two hosts even the Vmotion net can be a direct connect Cat 6 bewteen the two hosts.
Chromag
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
Thanks for the info! I'll price it out and see. I don't think we even have a rep anymore! We used to, I think he left the company and someone else took over - since then I've just been ordering our Dell equipment through the website.
So what's your suggestion on the SAN setup? I'd assume you'd buy two - one of them for failover? Or would i just hope the RAID worked as a drive failover and the hardware in the SAN itself doesn't fail?
Chromag
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September 21st, 2011 14:00
"They offer free remote install for all this. Take them up on it. They basically teach you how to setup VMware with an iSCSI san. Good stuff for free for sure."
Woah really? There a link on their site that talks about this option?
Chromag
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September 21st, 2011 15:00
I'm guessing that 4 x 1GB nics is an option for a rep to add? Or did you buy those and add them after you received the servers?
JOHNADCO
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September 21st, 2011 15:00
It's one additional dual port nic card. They are not very much at all.. We had them already when we ordered our R415's, the R415 come with two. Vmware is also cool is that if everything is on their compatibility list? No drivers to install.
We had drives already too. We just used some cheapo SATA we had around, but we did have to buy the right carriers.
Beware too, that Essnetials / Essentials Plus comes with Vcenter, which requires one basic Windows 2008 x64 server license. These days the cheapest OEM 2008 server comes with virtual keys and can be installed as x64 or x32.
I tried to sell you on ram because our Win7 workstations run so much faster on the Virtualized severs that we run them all in the cloud so to speak these days. So they all have the same High Availability as our servers.
JOHNADCO
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September 21st, 2011 15:00
I'm glad to help with this. I read your post and I thought, man is that guy us a few years ago. If I would have had somebody lay it all on the line with me it would have helped me so much.
Virtualization was a leap of faith for me, I was it's biggest skeptic, but man has it paid off. I mean I got a life back, I was working 70 to 100 hour weeks when we were on physical servers. Now? more like 40 to 50 hours per week and I sleep much better at night knowing how much redundancy is built into the system.