Recommended DELL Hardware ?
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Hello,
I have to buy 2 servers (Dell) for a small use case : 15-30 VMs, 128Gb RAM, not a lot of CPU, not a lot of storage, mainly linux VMs (and one fortinet...)
Is there a compatibility matrix for xcp-ng ?
What do you recommend between Intel or AMD (EPYC 9004) ?Is there some specific point to be aware ? we have used old harware with xcp-ng / orchestra but we need to buy new servers for this use case (need hardware support contract)
Thanks for your help
Johan -
Pretty much anything would work, it would be recommended that you use current hardware. Current being a CPU not older than 5 years.
Ideally using shared storage, either using XCP-ng's VSAN offering or something like a NAS or SAN so you can migrate your VMs as needed.
Intel or AMD doesn't effect the equation, just don't use ancient hardware. If you need an HCL, I'd recommend you take a look at what Citrix has for their HCL and go off of that list, and having installed XCP-ng.
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@DustinB I'd like to step in, from past experience
- avoid Broadcom nics
- my preference goes ton INTEL cpus, saw some threads on poor network perf with AMD (but I could be wrong on this one)
- avoid adaptec HBAs
Storage wise XO STOR would need 3 hosts to be compliant, so you should follow advice of shared storage like a NAS or iSCSI SAN.
Plan accordingly if you need multipathing to shared storage (no NFS) or if you need thin provisionning (no iSCSI - lvmoiscsi is thick)
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@DustinB Thanks. I need to buy new hardware because i want hadware support contract
will look at Citrix in their HCL ! -
@Pilow thanks, don't want XO STOR for this use case, i just need one server in a room and the other in another.
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I second all of @pilow points. We have been running a lot of Dell R630's with Intel CPU, Intel NIC, PERC H730i raid-cards and it has been flawless. Now we're using Dell R660's, but with newer spec's.
Tried Broadcom NIC's once, it worked, but had some weird performance issues from time to time.
Go with shared storage, NFS if possible (thin provisioning) and avoid XOSAN/XOSTOR, I don't think its battle-tested quite yet. -
@giejo said in Recommended DELL Hardware ?:
@Pilow thanks, don't want XO STOR for this use case, i just need one server in a room and the other in another.
Are you planning on performing Continuous Replication job from 1 host to the other? Just trying to gauge what your plan is for the split hosts to make sure you're not missing something.
With local storage on each hosts, you won't be able to live migrate from 1 host to the other. Singular Shared Storage (like a single Synology) creates a single point of failure, that you may want to avoid (but that needs clarification).
Where as two servers, each mirrors of each other with local everything, and just replicating VM's to each other every minute or so might be sufficient for your environment.
Of course you would still need to consider how you're going to patch the pool, since you won't be able to live migrate with shared nothing..
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@DustinB if he has CR, he could stop it, Failover, patch primary host, and eventually failback or reverse CR job
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@Pilow said in Recommended DELL Hardware ?:
@DustinB if he has CR, he could stop it, Failover, patch primary host, and eventually failback or reverse CR job
Yeah that would work, but would force some amount of downtime. Which most people say "we can't afford 5 seconds of downtime in a year" and then in the same breath say they have almost no budget.
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@DustinB said in Recommended DELL Hardware ?:
With local storage on each hosts, you won't be able to live migrate from 1 host to the other.
That's incorrect. The migrations will take significantly longer because the VDI will be migrated along with the VM's memory, but you can live migrate VMs between hosts even if the VDI are stored on local storage.
