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Posted: 8/25/2017 3:00:36 PM EDT
I have a need for additional storage for my 2012r2 Hyper-V cluster. I understand my backup software (AppAssure/RapidRecovery)
cannot back up NAS shares, so I don't think a 'normal' NAS will work. I expect a solution that can provide iSCSI connections is needed.

We currently have an Equalogic ps6210xv3.5, but I am not locked into the idea of expanding the SAN. This SAN cost $37k three years ago... I'd rather not entertain that level of spend again, particularly since I hope to retire it in 3 more years. 
 
We have a redundant 10g network for cluster storage, so I’d prefer any answer to have 2 10g ports.
This is business critical storage, so racked, dual power supplies, etc are all very attractive qualities. 
Speed is not a critical requirement, so I'm OK with 7.2k spinners. 

What options come to mind that will provide another 5-10TB of storage to us? 
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 5:42:45 AM EDT
[#1]
So the storage is for backup data or actual vm workload?

Assuming it's workload there are a number of software solutions like nexenta that run on whitebox hardware, grow or shrink based on provisioned space.  Basically it's a virtual array.  
There are solutions like cohesity and rubrick that combine compute, tier2 storage, and cloud front end into a box.  Both are capable of exporting iscsi luns as well as other useful tasks.

I left out the traditional solutions available from vendors like netapp etc.
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 7:59:24 AM EDT
[#2]
Backup is covered. This is to add data storage to my active VMs. 

So far I've had suggestions from local storage on the Hyper-V hosts + Starwind to getting another Equalogic box and expanding my existing storage.
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 8:27:51 AM EDT
[#3]
FreeNas is what you seek.  Your choice of hardware.

ETA: FreeNas does ISCSI, I use it quite a bit.
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 9:56:08 AM EDT
[#4]
Probably cost prohibitive for you, but our organization is slowly becoming a Nutanix shop.
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 12:05:01 PM EDT
[#5]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:
FreeNas is what you seek. Your choice of hardware.

ETA: FreeNas does ISCSI, I use it quite a bit.
View Quote
Can you get 24x7 business critical response on FreeNAS?

I'm seriously uncomfortable with the idea of putting Linux with a custom UI into a critical infrastructure position when we have no linux qualifed staff. 
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 12:11:43 PM EDT
[#6]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:
Probably cost prohibitive for you, but our organization is slowly becoming a Nutanix shop.
View Quote
Likely so. 

There are two primary challenges I have with going HCI.
- 2 more years of full 24x7 Enterprise support on my existing Hyper-V cluster & replica
- My VMs are passthrough licensed via 2012r2 Datacenter OEM that is tied to my existing cluster & replica hardware. 

Money to replace systems that are supported, sufficient and 'ain't broke' is just not going to be forthcoming. Heck - you should have seen me trying to get a memory expansion approved so I could both bring more security VMs online and still be able to fail a cluster host. I think the best I'm going to get here is a conventional expansion of my storage. 
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 12:16:02 PM EDT
[#7]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:
FreeNas is what you seek.  Your choice of hardware.

ETA: FreeNas does ISCSI, I use it quite a bit.
View Quote
No no no no no.  Do NOT run FreeNAS in a production environment for VMware.  I've cleaned up this exact mess so many times it's not even funny.
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 3:15:09 PM EDT
[#8]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:


No no no no no.  Do NOT run FreeNAS in a production environment for VMware.  I've cleaned up this exact mess so many times it's not even funny.
View Quote
What exactly have you had to clean up?  I've seen this combination work perfectly with no problems.
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 3:16:00 PM EDT
[#9]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:
Can you get 24x7 business critical response on FreeNAS?

I'm seriously uncomfortable with the idea of putting Linux with a custom UI into a critical infrastructure position when we have no linux qualifed staff. 
View Quote
iXsystems handles enterprise support for FreeNAS.
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 3:52:09 PM EDT
[#10]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:

No no no no no. Do NOT run FreeNAS in a production environment for VMware. I've cleaned up this exact mess so many times it's not even funny.
View Quote
Please share... particularly if any of the gory details overlap with Hyper-V clusters.
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 7:09:20 PM EDT
[#11]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:
Please share... particularly if any of the gory details overlap with Hyper-V clusters.
View Quote
First one was white box FreeNAS that was hand rolled, acting as iSCSI targets for a ESXi host.  Client installed the OwnCloud plugin, whole thing went to complete shit.  Disks staying up, going down, coming back up, web interface wasn't available, physical console was just a white screen.  Rebooting it made it even worse, nothing would come up.  Web interface was up, but you couldn't change anything, console was responsive.  It took 3 engineers 60+ hours to unfuck it enough to get the data off of it, and wound up costing them a hair under $40,000 to get that thing unfucked and migrated to a Equalogic

Another FreeNAS box, white box hand rolled.  Used as a backup target for Veeam, as well as SMB shares for a bunch of mapped drives.  One day, it just stopped responding.  No response to pings, no web interface, console showed all was happy and good.  Could ping out, could see the shares could see the data.  It just....stopped.  Dumped it all to S3 bucket mounted the mapped drives with tntdrive and never looked back.

I had another one that would randomly revert changes after they were applied.

If you want to roll your own SAN, NexentaStor with a paid support license, or StarWind is a much much more reliable solution.
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 8:57:55 PM EDT
[#12]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:


First one was white box FreeNAS that was hand rolled, acting as iSCSI targets for a ESXi host.  Client installed the OwnCloud plugin, whole thing went to complete shit.  Disks staying up, going down, coming back up, web interface wasn't available, physical console was just a white screen.  Rebooting it made it even worse, nothing would come up.  Web interface was up, but you couldn't change anything, console was responsive.  It took 3 engineers 60+ hours to unfuck it enough to get the data off of it, and wound up costing them a hair under $40,000 to get that thing unfucked and migrated to a Equalogic

Another FreeNAS box, white box hand rolled.  Used as a backup target for Veeam, as well as SMB shares for a bunch of mapped drives.  One day, it just stopped responding.  No response to pings, no web interface, console showed all was happy and good.  Could ping out, could see the shares could see the data.  It just....stopped.  Dumped it all to S3 bucket mounted the mapped drives with tntdrive and never looked back.

I had another one that would randomly revert changes after they were applied.

If you want to roll your own SAN, NexentaStor with a paid support license, or StarWind is a much much more reliable solution.
View Quote
That's interesting.  I've had the exact opposite experience, but in those cases the hardware was from iXsystems.  Boxes were booted up and have been running for years with the exceptions of updates.
Link Posted: 8/28/2017 9:25:46 PM EDT
[#13]
Discussion ForumsJump to Quoted PostQuote History
Quoted:


That's interesting.  I've had the exact opposite experience, but in those cases the hardware was from iXsystems.  Boxes were booted up and have been running for years with the exceptions of updates.
View Quote
Oh had they been iX supplied on certified hardware I'm sure they would have worked fine. It's these yahoos trying to save a few bucks that wind up costing a lot more.
Link Posted: 9/1/2017 12:40:10 PM EDT
[#14]
How much space do you have right now?  Is adding 5-10TB doubling your existing capacity?  is it adding 10%?  I'd estimate at a $37k purchase on a equalogic it's not double, but it probably isn't short of that.

Unfortunately I don't have many recommendations that aren't going to be cost prohibitive.  i wouldn't put anything not vendor supported with an EA into your environment unless you're very sure of how it works and are ready to troulbeshoot it yourself.  

I'm not opposed to Equallogics but there are some good competing products out there.  it's also coming up on EOY for many vendors so aggressive pricing is probably available for you.  My advice would at least be to get some RFPs out to vendors to see what's out there.  

Also, if your switches are >3 years old now, you ought to consider replacing them as well, unless you have extended mainetnance on them.  Same story with your hosts.  Technology refresh cycles are important, which I'm sure you're aware of.  Unfortunately, in order to keep up, it requires some dollars.

You've done a good job limiting the amount of money you have to spend to bring them where you're at (Hyper-V Vs Spend for Vmware), iSCSI vs Fiber (although now they're getting pretty close).   How converged are you on VM's?  100% of processor count?  200% ?  What type of workloads are you running?  

Honestly, I think there is a solution out there for you somewhere with a iSCSI attached SAN, especially considering your current investment into Appassure.  

Just my opinions
Link Posted: 9/1/2017 1:52:38 PM EDT
[#15]
My current Equalogic has 10T usable. Of that, I have about 9T allocated to an iSCSI share. Of that shared cluster volume, a little over 1TB is unused. Of the VHD/VHDx for my main file server, I'm fighting to keep the number of Gigs available in double digits.  (all very rough numbers) I've read enough about leaving 10% of your storage unused that I'm not eager to finish filling up what I have.

Host wise, I'm not stressing my CPU. I do need to add memory. Disk is my most pressing limit.

I'm sure the current price of another SAN like I have now is nowhere near what we paid three years ago. I'm just including that price as a scare point to reduce down from in expansion conversations. 

My Dell rep pointed out that they are now joined at the hip with EMC. It will be interesting to see what they have to offer. 
Link Posted: 9/1/2017 11:31:57 PM EDT
[#16]
Have you looked at Nimble's offerings?  Can be on the pricey side, but you get your money's worth.  Their support and monitoring are pretty awesome.  Last place I worked we ran one of their boxes and then added a shelf for additional storage a year or so later.  They would notify us of potential problems before we would find them.  No idea how things have gone for them after the HPE buyout, though.
Link Posted: 9/13/2017 10:32:06 AM EDT
[#17]
We sell a lot of the HP 1040 and 2040 MSA SANs, usually in a 2-4 node Hyper-V cluster. For ease of configuration I like going with direct attached 12Gb SAS connectivity, but since you said you already have 10GbE hardware, you can get either model with 10GbE ports, 2 per controller. Each SAN has 2 controllers for redundancy, and dual power supplies. 

Since you mention running 7.2k drives, the 1040 would work well in your environment. The 2040 adds some additional horsepower and advanced features, the one we see the most value in is the automated tiering between 7.2k, SAS, and SSD drives. For the 1040, with roughly 10TB of usable 7.2k storage, you're probably in the $11,000 range. I just configured one through Ingram Micro and our cost for the base unit, 6x 2TB 7.2k drives, and a 5 year NBD warranty comes out to $10,300.

I know there are lots of other cheaper solutions out there, some of which have already been mentioned, but these have been rock solid for us, and obviously have the backing of a large company like HP. The few times we've needed support, they've been great.
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