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Our Current Production Environment

Posted: Thu Jun 20, 2013 5:04 pm
by SirCrowbar
I have decided to share my design for my VMWare production environment.
This took a long time to build and has become a living legacy for me.
I wanted to build a data center on a strict budget, and this is what I came up with:

Storage Servers:
Qty Manufacturer Model Number Description
3 SuperMicro 847E26-RJBOD1 Slave Storage Chassis (45x 3.5x HDD)
3 SuperMicro 847E26-R1400LPB Storage Server Chassis (36x 3.5" HDD)
3 SuperMicro MBD-X8DTH-IF Dual IOH36, Xeon Tylersburg ServerBoard
6 Mellenox MHQH29B-XTR ConnectX-2 VPI InfiniBand Adapter
3 3Ware/LSI 9750-8i SAS RAID Controller (8x Internal, 6GB, 512MB)
3 3Ware/LSI S9750-8e SAS RAID Controller (8x External, 6GB, 512MB)
36 Samsung M393B1K70CH0-CH9 16GB DDR3-1333 DIMM ECC Registered
6 INTEL BX80614L5640 Xeon L5640 6Core+HT/2.26GHz/12M/6.4GT/s

Switches:
Qty Manufacturer Model Number Description
2 Mellenox IS5035 36 Port Non-Blocking InfiniBand Switch
1 Cisco WS-C4510R+E Catalyst Chassis
2 Cisco WS-X45-SUP7-E Sup 7-E 10GE (4x SFP+) - Packet Processing Engine
2 Cisco WS-X4712-SFP+E 12 ports 1G/10G SFP+ (48G shared) - Line Card
2 Cisco WS-X4748-RJ45-E 48-Port Non-Blocking 10/100/1000 (RJ-45) - Line Card

VMWare Nodes:
Qty Manufacturer Model Number Description
2 SuperMicro 6026TT-HIBQF 2U Twin2 SuperServer (4x Dual Xeon HotSwap Nodes)
6 Mellenox MHQH29B-XTR ConnectX-2 VPI InfiniBand Adapter
144 Samsung M393B1K70CH0-CH9 16GB DDR3-1333 DIMM ECC Registered
16 INTEL BX80614L5640 Xeon L5640 6Core+HT/2.26GHz/12M/6.4GT/s

Re: Our Current Production Environment

Posted: Thu Jun 27, 2013 4:09 pm
by Bohdan (staff)
Thank you!

Re: Our Current Production Environment

Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2013 8:01 am
by anton (staff)
Any particular performance numbers to share? :)

Re: Our Current Production Environment

Posted: Fri Jun 28, 2013 11:11 pm
by SirCrowbar
I will once the conversion is complete from our old software, I will be happy to post our real world numbers.

We currently are using NFS, SMB, and iSCSI for a variety of needs.
We have a small Hyper-V cluster as well as our VMWare cluster.
We even have local network shares for various things as well.

We have had StarWind in production for 3 weeks and have only 2 of the 3 servers online currently, and we have already noticed a significant performance increase during vMotion server transfers.
Right now the old server we are migrating from (same hardware - single node - other software) is not experiencing any write delays to the new server (same hardware - two node - StarWind v6).
The transfers are simply limited by the speed of data retrieval from the hard drives themselves.
This was not the case when we moved a server back for testing.

My impression of StarWind after downloading my demo 7 weeks ago is that I simply made a mistake when I went with the other software provider.
Implementation of StarWind in our invironment: 0 calls to support!!
Implementation of Other software: 17 calls...

I am sure I am a unique case in that I did not need assistance with configuration as there is a learning curve, but this software is something that I will be happy to recommend to any one.

Re: Our Current Production Environment

Posted: Sat Jun 29, 2013 9:34 am
by anton (staff)
Very good experience! Thank you for sharing!

If you'd see any points where StarWind could be improved to make it even more usable - we're wide open for conversation. Thank you!

Re: Our Current Production Environment

Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2013 3:43 pm
by 707kevin
Looks pretty good, any updates since posted?

I'm working on a 3 node production setup right now, also, maybe I'll start a new thread of my setup if anyone is interested. It was also on a 'budget' of sorts.

Re: Our Current Production Environment

Posted: Wed Sep 04, 2013 9:47 pm
by anton (staff)
Sure. Please spawn a dedicated thread about your config and numbers. Thanks :)
707kevin wrote:Looks pretty good, any updates since posted?

I'm working on a 3 node production setup right now, also, maybe I'll start a new thread of my setup if anyone is interested. It was also on a 'budget' of sorts.