(David9169) 1

Hi Everyone!

I have been an observer for quite some time and this is my first post in the Spiceworks Community.

I am working on specs for a new Hyper-V server and I need some help picking out the best hardware configuration, it’s been a while.

Here is the usage for the environment currently:

-Total VM’s: 9

-Total Memory Used: 60GB

-Total Storage Used: 3TB

The main hogs are two SQL servers, a web server and one File Server. There are a total of 23 users in the environment.

I am looking at the PowerEdge R730 but like I mentioned, it’s been a while since I’ve scoped out a new server configuration so I want to make sure that I’m picking the best possible option.

  1. My biggest concern is picking the correct harddrive configuration (SSD, HDD, etc?). The goal is to purchase two of these servers and have Hyper-V replica running between them (one at the HQ and one in our colo).

  2. The VM’s are currently running Windows Server 2012 R2. Should I move to 2016 and if so, what type of licensing configuration should I be looking at?

I look forward to hearing your responses.

Thank you!

-David

@Dell_Technologies

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  1. SSD

  2. Don’t start behind, migrate to 2016 if your budget allows. Datacenter would be your friend here because you would end up paying less per VM than you would to license individually.

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Hi there David, first off congrats on your first post! Now I know you’re really looking for your fellow SpiceHead’s knowledge here, and I’m sure you will get some great advice from many different first hand experiences. I just wanted to quickly hop in to see if you had considered looking in to any @HPE options for this? If you are open to it we certainly do have a variety of easily scalable,cost-effective options for servers and other hardware components that are built specifically for companies of any size!

Now, I don’t know all of your requirements but based off of what you mentioned, our ProLiant DL Servers might be worth checking out. And if you are interested in looking into any of our options I also wanted to let you know about the HPE SMB Marketplace . It is our platform tailored specifically for small to medium sized set ups and there you can quickly and easily compare and contrast different HPE options based on your unique requirements like capacity, compatibility , etc. to see what could be the best fit and the best bang for your buck!

Additionally, as you look into the Windows Server 2016 decision, I did also want to let you know that we have some resources on the topic from our prospective. If you think this could be useful we discuss it more in depth in a recent blog post which also links to a Microsoft Hybrid Cloud blog post that could be helpful too!

If you ever have any questions feel free to reach out anytime, I would be happy to help! Otherwise, wishing you the best of luck on this project, I know your fellow SpiceHeads will be able to help you through any snags you hit along the way :slight_smile:

4

Agree with Carl, SSDs and 2016. If you wanted to go latest, the R740’s are out but the R730’s are still a strong pick. I’m actually ready to pull the trigger on another one for our ever growing VMware environment. The other take away I have is Over Spec on CPU, RAM, and storage space. You want to leave room for growth and not immediately corner yourself into a box that won’t handle the growth. That said, you can always re-config and add more RAM and storage but it’s nice to have it already there.

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Any reason as to why Hyper-V over VMware Essentials Plus ?

I would suggest 2x Dell R640

  • 8x 2.5" slots
  • Single Intel Xeon Gold 5120 (14 cores)
    • You may save by using Single CPU with more cores as other licensing like Veeam and some agent-less AV charges by “per CPU”
  • (128GB) 4x 32GB RAM
  • RAID 1 SD cards (For VMware ESXi only)
  • RAID 5. 3x 1,92TB Read Intensive SSDs
    • Hot plug enabled
    • 800GB Mix use SSD : $800 each, 960GB Read intensive SSD : $733, 1.96TB Read intensive SSD : $997
  • iDRAC express with dedicated NIC port
  • Dual PSU
  • 8x performance fans

Then separately add : Veeam Backup and Replication for VMware/Hyper-V for your servers and 1x NAS for backup storage.

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How quickly do you expect to grow? You want to keep total cores at 16 or less. Keeping it at a single socketnis also a good idea for socket based licensing. I have run 50 VMs for a 1000 person company including Exchange, SQL, file servers, etc. on R710 with 6-7 year old, mid-range at the time quad core processors. You don’t need massive CPU for most workloads.

96 or 128 GB RAM using 32 GB DIMMS is good. More if you think you will quickly grow, or it’s really hard to get to the co-lo.

Use SSD for your VMs. RAID 5 is good. If the performance of the file server isn’t critical, you could conceivably use some HDD in RAID 1, or RAID 10 if you need some more performance than what two 7.2K drives can deliver.

You may want to look at the Dell 730xd or 740xd because they have way more drive slots. That way you can have enough SSD and HDD capacity, with slots to spare.

I always get the iDRAC Enterprise for the full IP KVM with remote media, even for servers that are in the office. It makes it much easier to fix things from home. Absolutely essential for remote servers.

Getting Windows Server Datacenter will be slightly more expensive than using 5 copies of Windows Server Standard at each site, but each additional Windows Server VM will be “free”, so there’s a lot of upside to going Datacenter for licensing.

Plan to buy new CALs for Windows 2016.

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Welcome to Spiceworks! One thing I’ll add to these responses (from my own experience running Hyper-V in our environment) is that you will want to get a server with three storage arrays:

  • One RAID 1 pair of 120 GB SSDs for Hyper-V (run the free Hyper-V Server 2016 if you are comfortable with PowerShell, and use the Hyper-V manager on your desktop to configure VMs)

  • An array of SSDs for the VMs (spec out enough space for your SQL on this too).

  • An array of HDDs for data that you don’t require high speeds on (business documents and other small files that won’t make much of a difference being on disk storage).

Another thing I’ll say is that Dell is a good route to go. The issue with the Proliant servers that the HP reps won’t tell you is that in order to download certain updates such as BIOS updates, you are required to have an active paid support license with them (either with the one included with your server purchase or an extension you buy after it expires). Otherwise, you will not be able to download those files once you are out of support. To my knowledge, HP is the only server vendor that does this as other vendors including Dell and Lenovo provide all their updates free regardless of whether you still have support on the servers. Just yesterday actually, I downloaded the latest BIOS update for a 4-year old ThinkServer that is out of support now. I cannot do the same thing with the ProLiant ML110 G6 tower I have at home. This is something to keep in mind if you are in a situation where you’re trying to save money.

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I wouldn’t install Hyper-V on dedicated SSD when there is other local storage available. Install Hyper-V on a partition of one of the other arrays.

9

I thought it was not good practice to install Hyper-V on the same disks as the VMs?

10

What made you think that? standard good practice is OBR. If you have multiple tiers of disks, such as SSD and 7.2K disk, then one OBR (One Big Raid) for each kind of storage. Having multiple storage pools of the same class of storage strands capacity and IOPS, and increases your storage media costs.

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I may have misinterpreted it, but the best practices documentation on TechNet is what led me to believe that Hyper-V should have it’s own disk ( 6 Best Practices for Physical Servers Hosting Hyper-V Roles | Microsoft Learn ). The second to the last point says,

Avoid Storing System Files on Drives Used for Hyper-V Storage
Do not store any system files (Pagefile.sys) on drives dedicated to storing virtual machine data.

This makes me think that it’s best to isolate the hypervisor onto its own storage and put VMs on separate storage.

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Your article is from 2008, when Microsoft didn’t use OBR concepts in their documentation. I still don’t know if they do. They certainly were not thinking about SSD. Windows 2008 didn’t even support TRIM, so people were afraid of burning out their SSDs.

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Well, that’s good to know. I believe though that I’ve also read articles on Altaro recommending keeping Hyper-V on separate storage, but maybe they are referencing outdated info as well.

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Separate partition and separate physical storage are two very different things. Given that the parent partition should generally generate very little IO other than when it is patching, why would you waste $$ on giving it dedicated storage?

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I would not go for any Dell servers more than 8 slots as OP needs approx 3TB (RAID 5, 3x 1.96TB RI SSD would suffice). The base Dell R7xxx are way more costly than the R4xx or R6xxx.

Then a single host is a very bad idea as he would then not have any contingency plan like vMotion VMs to another host if he needs to reboot the host, especially for MS Hyper-V (and update Tuesdays).

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I do agree with Kevin…

But also note that sometimes MS, Oracle, VMware etc do not have their technical people to write papers or the technical people pass write ups to writers or editors who may not fully understand the IT terms. They do rather loosely mix around with terms like partition, disk, drive, spindle and storage. Furthermore, they tend to lean towards not to use the same IT terms as their competitors or even predecessors. Other times, they just “improve” on older works.

With the introduction of SSDs, it broke a lot of rule books as they costs a lot more and are so much faster than spinning HDD.

So sometimes when reading articles, we may want to use a little logic and common sense, not fully disagreeing with articles, but maybe take a step back and look at solutions as a whole.