SAN for virutualization VMWare
Is anyone up on the latest when it comes to SANs for VMWare?
Estimates of data store requirements:
File Server 2TB data (currently data set is 500GB), growing 100GB/year currently.
Database (100GB of data, currently 8GB, giving plenty of room for growth. The database is Pervasive)
A couple of domain controllers. A terminal server. Possibly some growth with regards to file sharing such as Microsoft Sharepoint.
The user count is around 65. But maybe 50 will be active at any given point in time. If it helps, on a daily basis only about 1GB of data is changed per day. (This is the size of the incremental backup)
I think 12TB of usable space would be enough for anything conceivable for the next five years.
The servers will mostly be Windows 2012. Possibly some Linux servers in the future.
I would prefer some sort of redundancy on the SAN since I am going to be putting all the eggs in that one basket.
I have seen SANs that replicate to each other while appearing as one device to the VMWare server.
Budget is around 20K. It could possibly go as high as 30K. This probably rules out Netapp and EMC.
I don't need the full 12TB. 5TB or 6TB will suffice for now and may for the near term future as well.
Estimates of data store requirements:
File Server 2TB data (currently data set is 500GB), growing 100GB/year currently.
Database (100GB of data, currently 8GB, giving plenty of room for growth. The database is Pervasive)
A couple of domain controllers. A terminal server. Possibly some growth with regards to file sharing such as Microsoft Sharepoint.
The user count is around 65. But maybe 50 will be active at any given point in time. If it helps, on a daily basis only about 1GB of data is changed per day. (This is the size of the incremental backup)
I think 12TB of usable space would be enough for anything conceivable for the next five years.
The servers will mostly be Windows 2012. Possibly some Linux servers in the future.
I would prefer some sort of redundancy on the SAN since I am going to be putting all the eggs in that one basket.
I have seen SANs that replicate to each other while appearing as one device to the VMWare server.
Budget is around 20K. It could possibly go as high as 30K. This probably rules out Netapp and EMC.
I don't need the full 12TB. 5TB or 6TB will suffice for now and may for the near term future as well.
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IMO something zfs based is the new way to go. 7200 rpm sas drives with intel 3700 ssd as cache will blow away the price/performance of 15k sas drives in iops.
After having snapshots at the storage level I can't go back to old school style nightly backups ever.
After having snapshots at the storage level I can't go back to old school style nightly backups ever.
I'd go for a traditional dual controller entry level SAN, dell MD3200, HP MSA2000 G3 etc. For up to 4 hosts you can use the SAS host connect versions and save on the hosts' HBA costs.
This type of hot standby is far less expensive than an active/active HA setup.
My main pool is 8x3tb drives in raid 10 (stripes of mirrors) for a total of 12tb. With 2 ssd as cache this is fast enough to run file sharing as well as all my virtual machines. Once I move to vmware 5.5 and can put a small ssd in the local esxi box this will reduce the load on my San even more.