Virtualization Megathread V2: VMs inside VMs

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Virtualization Megathread V2: VMs inside VMs

CrazyLittle: Sep 11, 2001; Clapping Larry

What's a good setup for 30-40 VMs? (simple webservers, etc)

# ¿ Apr 30, 2012 20:35

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 19, 2024 17:51

CrazyLittle: Sep 11, 2001; Clapping Larry

Moey posted:

Care to be a little less vague?

LmaoTheKid posted:

"etc" jacks the price up to about 75-100k. Without "etc", probably about 100$

Point taken.

I currently have about 21 VMs spread over 3 hosts managed with VM Infrastructure 3.5, and overall it's dogshit slow. Some of the users are complaining about performance on the hosts where there's CPU contention.

There's one ESXi machine that's running a webserver with enough disk access that it consumes all the activity on that host, so it's no better than hard iron beyond the ability to move the VM to another host without having to rebuild the entire OS.

The other 20 VMs are spread over two hosts: dual quad core E5420 (2.5ghz) with 16gb RAM each, both connected to a 15-spindle DAS shelf. Here's the VM layout:

11 linux webserver (vCenter included)
1 MSSQL DB (low impact)
5 Windows RDP
3 Windows web servers

I need to at least double that capacity, preferably while maintaining a similar space/power use. In retrospect the DAS shelf was a poor choice because it limited the number of host connections with redundancy, and I should have pushed for the "essentials plus" package equivalent of the time to get HA and vMotion.

CrazyLittle fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Apr 30, 2012

# ¿ Apr 30, 2012 20:48

CrazyLittle: Sep 11, 2001; Clapping Larry

Corvettefisher posted:

Are you running Iscsi or NFS?

DAS. So it's SAS presenting SCSI LUNs, and the standalone ESXi server just has an extra disk in there for the VM guest.

If I have my way I will be depricating the entire old cluster and replacing it with a completely new cluster that's actually expandable.

# ¿ Apr 30, 2012 21:25

CrazyLittle: Sep 11, 2001; Clapping Larry

Corvettefisher posted:

That is what I am putting together, Do you have a few Gig Switches you can use?

Basically what I was thinking was
x3 R410's with Dual intel X6 Dual Proc's, 32 GB ram, RAID 1 on DAS for ESXi install, 4 intel Gig nics
x2 Dell Powervaults NVX3100 Raid 1 OS 10K disk, Raid 5 15k 10x600 Gig Disks, 4 intel gig nics (you can get eSAS cards for pretty cheap, and pipe your temp backups to your current NAS)
Essitials Plus Kit(or get whatever you need)
=> ~35k

use the other machines for a DR or backup or whatever you want

Thanks for this. I didn't know about the NX3100 storage arrays.

Yeah, if I'm going to be dropping coin on VM storage, hosts, and licensing, I'm pretty sure I can get a couple of switches in there too

# ¿ Apr 30, 2012 22:47

CrazyLittle: Sep 11, 2001; Clapping Larry

Misogynist posted:

What a great idea for disaster recovery in a site that someone is presumably paying thousands of dollars for monthly

Pay a couple hundred of those thousands and get a real server OS.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2012 06:58

CrazyLittle: Sep 11, 2001; Clapping Larry

I should probably swing by the expo and see what's up.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2012 05:31

CrazyLittle: Sep 11, 2001; Clapping Larry

Anything worth seeing at the VMWorld expo?

# ¿ Aug 31, 2012 01:04

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 19, 2024 17:51

CrazyLittle: Sep 11, 2001; Clapping Larry

Yeah, I'm on the ISP / provider side, and we're not really big enough to get into the whole "hosted cloud" market when every bigger player's already stuck in that race to the bottom. I didn't see a whole lot of stuff there that would help me directly other than some of the virtualization focused hardware.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2012 22:34

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Virtualization Megathread V2: VMs inside VMs