Hi Tom,
Just watched your video on NAS Storage Design and was curious what you are generally recommending these days for virtualization infrastructure for enterprise.
Are you still favoring a separate Hypervisor + NAS/SAN topology, or do you see growing justification for hyperconverged offerings.
Not sure this rises to video request level, but either way would love to hear your opinion.
All the best.
Enterprise grade hyperconverged infrastructure solutions that I’ve worked with are VMware VSAN, Cisco Hyperflex and Redhat Hyperconverged Infrastructure (RHHI).
Cost for these is pretty high when compared to a converged architecture, but it depends on the business requirements such as HA/DR and security features.
The cheapest of the three is Redhat and it’s by a pretty good margin from my experience.
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure Red Hat Customer Portal - Access to 24x7 support and knowledge
It isn’t a well known solution, but Redhat has great documentation and support if needed. I would review the HCL for RHHI and VSAN as well to determine what hardware you might want to use.
Thre first question I always ask is “Do you really need hyper converged?” It adds complexity and sacrifices speed as it has to sync data across all the nodes.
I use XCP-NG and I have a video here explaining what you can do with their system
Once their new XOSTOR V2 HCI system comes out I will do a video on it, but as I said above, how needed is it?
Depending on price, XOStor could be a very nice option. Have you worked with the Beta yet? I’ve requested access but never got any info on testing it.
The question of “do I need it”? All I can say is I don’t know enough to answer that yet. I’d like to try it out and see for myself what the pros and cons might be for my specific system. My system currently doesn’t move a lot of data to/from the NFS share after everything gets loaded, so for me it might work fine.
If you are running HA then there might be a lot more data moving over the cluster, and then it might not be a great way of doing things unless you have fast storage, spinning rust might not be good enough.