--Major ESXI Server Build--

[OVerLoRDI]

P.S. don't be scared away by the web pricing. Get in touch with a dell sales rep. they are pretty good about giving discounts.

Or me... 😉

 

[mnewsham]

Bahh...

The more I get into the details of the whole system the more i waver. I go back and forth.. I am going to dig into dell hp and such... Screw you all and your logical arguments for going with a branded setup 🙂

remember, speaking to a sales rep. is going to usually get you a fairly decent discount, so don't rely on web pricing.

 

[mfenn]

Depending on the vendor, almost all major SAN Providers today can utilitize SSDs as a read cache. If your workload is write heavy, then you can use the SSDs in this regard as long as the Storage Vendor is using a robust tiered storage system. Netapp, for instance, is great about this, in the fact that you can have their configuration of a half shelf or full shelf (DS4243 or 4246, for 12 or 24 drives total), of 100GB SSDs, then a second shelf with 900GB 15K drives, and then a third shelf with 2TB 7.2k drives. These shelves can all be setup as a virtual storage pool that will constantly shift read and write operations to maximize throughput of the total storage pool.

I looked up prices on NetApps, and it looks like even a low-end FAS would be out of the OP's price range. Unless I am missing something.

 

[mfenn]

Also have you considered backup plans yet? EMC Avamar is available as a VMWare virtual machine and can be fantastic at de-duping and backing up VMWare systems at both the image level and the guest level. Data Domain's (now part of EMC) De-duplication algorithms are pretty much the best in the industry (and I say that as a NetApp fanboy). The first backup will be network intensive but after that, Avamar should leave a fairly light load on your network footprint for backup to your SAN depending on how homogenous the data is.

$25K is a decent budget, but it's not unlimited. I think the prudent thing to go with here is VMWare's vSphere Data Protection (already included in license).

 

[thecoolnessrune]

I looked up prices on NetApps, and it looks like even a low-end FAS would be out of the OP's price range. Unless I am missing something.

Yep, I was only giving what I was familiar with (The company I work with is a NetApp partner)

EMC VNX storage appliances allow for auto-tiered storage via their FAST VP license as does Dell's Compellant Storage Systems (not sure what license is needed though or if they are limited to whole shelves, controllers, or pools when it comes to matching up storage types) 🙂