Recommended DELL Hardware ?
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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.
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@Danp said in Recommended DELL Hardware ?:
@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.
Sorry, I'm probably using a lazy definition of live migration. I know the VM and its memory can move.
Doesn't using non-shared storage ultimately cause the VM to be started on the other host?
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@DustinB said in Recommended DELL Hardware ?:
Doesn't using non-shared storage ultimately cause the VM to be started on the other host?
No. Live migration can occur between hosts even if:
- the VDI are located on non-shared storage
- the hosts are in completely different pools
For the cross pool migration to succeed, both pools need to support a common instruction set. Otherwise, use the Warm Migration feature that does reboot the VM so that it is running the correct instruction set on the destination host.
