Server Virtualisation

Take a look at the Dell VRTX series for your environment:

http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/shared-infrastructure-vrtx

one box can house 2-4 compute blades and 24 disks.

Size the compute blades with enough RAM for 16GB per VM

Size your disk space for RAID 10 with 60GB per OS and Data VHD's per your requirements.

For the virtual platform and licensing - one Server 2012 license can run the 2012R2 Hyper V platform (which the Azure cloud runs on) and gives you two instances of Server 2012R2 VM's. so 4 licenses will give you 8 VM's.  MS Documentation as well as Dell Documentation will give you a complete roadmap for a system build.

For your SBS, I would take a serious look at Office365 for business to replace these services.  It replaces everything SBS does and allows your users to run Office2013 on five different devices of their choice - iPads, iPhones, Android, Windows phone, all tablets, and any windows device.

@Greg Dell VRTX - if you want the biggest doorstop available!

Massive problems with these, at present with the "shared storage" controller! big performance issues, and failures, resulting in lots of downtime!

We would not recommend, after the issues we've seen with them first hand.

and Dell have even re-retracted the statement of "Datacenter in a box!"

Yeah, it's funny that LSI has had their Synchro product (HA DAS in a Box) working with shared cache so no parity performance hits whereas Dell cannot get their SPERC to do the same in the VRTX.

It's a shame because we were looking to VRTX for a number of clients.

We went HA via Asymmetric cluster with a pair of 2U dual SAS HBA R series and an MD1220 JBOD. It's a great starting point with Storage Spaces providing the disk arbitration.

Thanks for the insight Andrew.

I think they hit the right concept for SMB's, Dell is pretty good about fixing issues in next versions....will prly be similar to the PE19xx and 29xx version upgrades to III.

I found this thread on the VRTX:

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/t/19587459?pi239031352=3

looks like Dell has got Active/Passive failover for the Perc8 cards.  they are working on Active/Active.  maybe they can get their Equalogic folks to implement that solution.

The folks using RAID10 are getting the best performance.  I'm really surprised builders would still be using Parity RAID in a virtual environment...that's just asking for trouble.

@Greg,

In standalone we use RAID 6 exclusively.

We had a RAID 10 setup where a disk failed. After a hot swap about three minutes later it's pair failed. We lost the host. RAID 6 we would still have the host. RAID 10 is still in effect a single disk loss for resilience.

My experience with parity raid is reduced performance during rebuilds ( large sizes = days of rebuild).  During the rebuild time is when other disks have failed due to the intensive rewrite of all the data across the array.

My experience with RAID10 has been nothing but positive.  were you using 7.2k consumer drives?

@Greg,

15K SAS in the setup that failed. In the end, RAID 10 is an odds game as we painfully discovered. It's a game we won't play again either. We don't deploy servers with SATA anything with the exception of cluster host RAID 1 Intel SSDs.

We've done extensive testing. RAID 6 across eight 10K 2.5" SAS drives gives us around 800MB/Second sustained write speeds with around 250 to 400 IOPS per disk depending on format structure and data types. When we get into 16 or more spindles parity writes is a moot point.