The title is a bit misleading, it's not that I don't know the differences, but I'm at a point where I need additional thoughts, and I needed to get your attention...
Anyway, I'm in the planning stages of a production (for my own, not for a client) build, where I need "storage". My criteria (in no particular order) are:
- Highly available. Must survive _______ (Fill in the blank)
- Fast. Not blazingly fast (like @Patrick does with his Optane and what not), but enough to host database(s) among other things.
- Redundant (goes with #1, HA).
I have enough hardware (chassis, motherboards, CPUs memory etc) to put something(s) together, but...the million $$$ question in the end is...actually I'm not even sure. Hear me out.
The primary purpose of this "storage" is to host VMs, database(s) (the OLTP kind), and digital assets (files). Simple enough? My baseline is to saturate at least a 40gb connection, if not more. The main "storage" will be all flash/SSD, with a second tier of spinners, with a third tier of offsite backup/Disaster recovery. The "compute" side of things will probably end up being 6-10 eight core servers that are accessing this storage over 10gbps each.
I can go out and buy a SAN, but...scalability is a bit of an issue with SANs, so is performance, so is redundancy, and so is cost.
After countless hours of analysis/paralysis, I'm leaning towards Starwinds vSAN using Hyper-V as the hypervisor. If Vmware vSAN licensing was not so expensive, or if Storage Spaces Direct did not require a Datacenter license, I'd have considered both of those as well.
I'm not wedded to any particular virtualization environment per se, and can easily pick whatever makes sense.
What would you do?
Anyway, I'm in the planning stages of a production (for my own, not for a client) build, where I need "storage". My criteria (in no particular order) are:
- Highly available. Must survive _______ (Fill in the blank)
- Fast. Not blazingly fast (like @Patrick does with his Optane and what not), but enough to host database(s) among other things.
- Redundant (goes with #1, HA).
I have enough hardware (chassis, motherboards, CPUs memory etc) to put something(s) together, but...the million $$$ question in the end is...actually I'm not even sure. Hear me out.
The primary purpose of this "storage" is to host VMs, database(s) (the OLTP kind), and digital assets (files). Simple enough? My baseline is to saturate at least a 40gb connection, if not more. The main "storage" will be all flash/SSD, with a second tier of spinners, with a third tier of offsite backup/Disaster recovery. The "compute" side of things will probably end up being 6-10 eight core servers that are accessing this storage over 10gbps each.
I can go out and buy a SAN, but...scalability is a bit of an issue with SANs, so is performance, so is redundancy, and so is cost.
After countless hours of analysis/paralysis, I'm leaning towards Starwinds vSAN using Hyper-V as the hypervisor. If Vmware vSAN licensing was not so expensive, or if Storage Spaces Direct did not require a Datacenter license, I'd have considered both of those as well.
I'm not wedded to any particular virtualization environment per se, and can easily pick whatever makes sense.
What would you do?