Currently I have running in my Colo is the “Tom” setup (based on all of his videos) of truenas for storage only and xcp-ng for hypervisor. Have redundancy of compute servers and storage servers.
Planning some hardware upgrades in future and was thinking about going with the TrueNas H10 dual controller, then later some upgrades on the compute servers. However, another idea i had was ditching the storage server and just run compute servers only with XOSTOR. From what i understand you can set it up to have each vm on more than one compute server for redundancy.
For pricing the vates xostor would be $4000+/yr, it is listed as optional but doesn’t give additional costs. This would be a must for support since I have very limited knowledge in virtual san setup. It would take several years to match the upfront cost of the truenas hardware.
I’m wondering what anybody’s thoughts, concerns, ideas are on this setup vs storage servers & compute servers.
Hyper-converged storage solutions are nice because it creates copies of the data across the hosts but that comes at the cost of putting that extra burden on the hosts to maintain that storage which can slow things down more than using a dedicated external storage device such as the TrueNAS.
I do agree with @LTS_Tom on his assessment. However, the true question is what is the purpose of your infrastructure? The role of the compute and the storage does play a factor.
General VM server use can be put on hyper-converged equipment with minimal performance degradation. If you are running a mission critical, high end SQL DB, then dedicated resources may be best for that sole role. Backups should be on standalone storage equipment so as to limit its reliance on other hardware and increase performance.
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Thanks both of you for your responses and info. Currently running general vms but unknown what future will bring. Looks like H10 would be a better option to keep all options avaiable.