Configuring My First Rack

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.  :)  

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.

Four 1GB nics in each host that is.   Others will say 6,  but we do four in all our hosts.

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.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I would run Vcenter on it's own dedicated VM.  It is a fairly high demand server even with only 2 hosts, the demand increases as you add hosts.  There is a ton of data that streams to it from the hosts.  This would be in addition to other VM's you plan to run on it.  

Just use the old boxes to access access the VM's.   I mean it runs fast as long as the old boxes can boot.  Replacement is quick only needing a basic O/S load and nothing else, we even disjoined them from the domain completely..   We are replacing them with couple a hundered dollar laptops with cheap USB docks as the old hardware fails.  Repairs have been kiiling us cost wise on our old 5 year old Core 2 Duo, white box workstations.  

Our testing between Win7 Virtual -vs- Physical was done with Win7 x64.   The physical boxes we compared the performance against were Core2 Duo's, not newer generation what would be considered truly fast hardware by todays standards.

With the Win7 VM's?  We did have to get our printers on the lan,  we had a few really odd printing bugs attempting to use printers attached locally to the "Thin Client".   Just a word of caution on it there on it regarding printing.

I was on vacation, but want to chime in a few tips:

1. Get enough NICs; if you opt for an iSCSI shared storage option, you'll need at least 4 NICs (NICports), but probably 6 or more.

It would break down like this:

- 2 NICs for iSCSI

- 2 NICS for LAN access (team)

- recommended: 1 NIC for live migration/heartbeat/vMotion (whatever your virtualization solution opts to call it)

2. VMware's Essentials Plus package offers HA, vMotion, vCenter and some other things. The version 5 package gives you 192GB of vRAM. So, if you don't think you'll need to give more than 192GB of memory to your VMs any time soon, this package is a decent deal (obviously not as good as the free XenServer, but free also means no support (Dell stopped offering XenServer after 5.5, so I think all support on the latest version (5.6) has to be bought (from Citrix)). For a VMware list of the features of the different editions, check www.vmware.com/.../small_business_editions_comparison.html.

The MD3200 does come with a remote install (unless your salesrep actually removes it from the order to try and squeeze it into a certain budget). This is scheduled (week out or so), but usually they end up contacting you to schedule it before you even have the hardware. If you go with VMware, talk to your Dell rep about what it would cost to set up a VMware cluster, vCenter, etc by the same people that can set up your MD3200 for you.

More nics are cool for sure,  but most iSCSI small business implementations I see, only devote two nics to iSCSI.  

Good to know that bout the remote install,  I thought that free remote install was the best deal going for sure when I had mine on the mD3000i.

I guess the 4 nic port card would fit in the R415?   Not much room in there.  I know a dual does.

Don't buy racks or UPS's from them.   Google them...    I mean there are 3KVA decent UPS's out there for like $300,  racks a couple a hundred.

More than I thought it would be but,

On the Hosts?  I think your rep is off his rocker...   It has a dedicated storage slot and a PCIe slot 16x,  but I don't think the basic raid controller even takes up a slot if I remember correctly.  

I was just on the Dell site.    The 3220i prices out lower, the 2.5" drives price lower as well. With 3TB it prices out at under $6K for the single controller model.   The HA (dual controller) model is $3200 more, maybe add the 2nd controller down the road?

I am surprised the rep wasn't able to do better for you.  Was this a "Enterprise" rep?  I hate the Dell reps though,  they can never configure so as to get the customer the most bang for their buck.  

Tell the rep to re-price it using the 3220i and single controller.  

I seem to always have to either find the config that meets my price point, or tell them some other manufacturer is beating their price big time to get them to price something half decent.

I really thought we could get you into an entire system for well under $10K.  Especially if you were to lighten up on the ram some.   It still seems possible with a single controller SAN for now.

The above bay item is $9K but it's also 12TB!!!!   Dual ctrl, ect..ect....   You rep should be able to beat that in my opinion.  

It is easier for us that have experience dealing with them.    To get the pricing on the R415's we got, I had to really beat my rep up over it.   I finally had to tell him exactly how to configure it.   Because he just wasn't smart enough or familure enough with his own line to achieve it.

Single ctrl is not near as good as dual, no doubt.     But, it would still put you into a good position to try to score the 2nd controller down the road.    We purchased some extra controllers for our MD iSCSI arrays on the bay ourselves.