We're trying to decide if we should move our FreeNAS machines to a HA Starwinds VSAN.
This is a bit of uncharted territory for us as we've historically been a 100% Linux/BSD shop all the way and as our direction now is to have HA for our main cluster, we've been struggling to find a Linux equivalent (software only).
While Starwinds has a converged model on Linux/ESXi, it doesn't work for us as our VM nodes are all built on Xen/XCP, plus we're not really looking to go HC right now.
Eventual setup would be a 16TB, all-flash, HA cluster for storage pushed over 40GBe to a cluster of about 16 VM nodes over 10GBe each.
So this is what we're considering now. We had a trial setup but haven't had much time (ironically given the lockdown) to really tinker with it, but i'm wondering if i'm missing out on any other alternatives.
We're only considering software options at this time - so that puts TrueNAS and other hardware-first solutions out of the ballpark. The significant factors are cost at the end of the day, and we have enough hardware sitting around to pretty much cobble up whatever we really need.
VSAN will run ~10k for our 2 nodes. That's pretty much all I can get approval for budgets right now given that we've been running with 0 software costs for the past 8 years with Xen Standalone - then FreeNAS. But with that all considered, I think a HA SAN solution is what we really need going forward, but i'm just not sure - or perhaps not 100% comfortable with a Wintel platform for a SAN. Probably just need some convincing?
This is a bit of uncharted territory for us as we've historically been a 100% Linux/BSD shop all the way and as our direction now is to have HA for our main cluster, we've been struggling to find a Linux equivalent (software only).
While Starwinds has a converged model on Linux/ESXi, it doesn't work for us as our VM nodes are all built on Xen/XCP, plus we're not really looking to go HC right now.
Eventual setup would be a 16TB, all-flash, HA cluster for storage pushed over 40GBe to a cluster of about 16 VM nodes over 10GBe each.
So this is what we're considering now. We had a trial setup but haven't had much time (ironically given the lockdown) to really tinker with it, but i'm wondering if i'm missing out on any other alternatives.
We're only considering software options at this time - so that puts TrueNAS and other hardware-first solutions out of the ballpark. The significant factors are cost at the end of the day, and we have enough hardware sitting around to pretty much cobble up whatever we really need.
VSAN will run ~10k for our 2 nodes. That's pretty much all I can get approval for budgets right now given that we've been running with 0 software costs for the past 8 years with Xen Standalone - then FreeNAS. But with that all considered, I think a HA SAN solution is what we really need going forward, but i'm just not sure - or perhaps not 100% comfortable with a Wintel platform for a SAN. Probably just need some convincing?