Dell R510 Setup Suggestions

storm121 · Fri Feb 20, 2015 7:47 pm

I have two Dell R510 servers with the same following sepcs.

2 x 2.66 6 core
32GB ram
H700 SAS RAID Controller with 1GB Non-volatile RAM
2 x Broadcom on-board 1GB nics
1 x Intel 4-port nic

R510-1 has 6 x 600GB 15k SAS drives. Used the H700 Controller to setup a RAID 10 array, which gives me 1.64 TB of usable space.
R510-2 has 4 x 600GB 15k SAS drives. Used the H700 Controller to setup a RAID 10 array, which gives me 1.09 TB of usable space. I plan on adding 2 more 600 gig drives at some point.

Both servers are running esxi 5.5 from 16GB USB thumb drives.

I will install Server 2012 R2, one on each esxi host.

My questions are;

Best way to setup each Server 2012 R2 VM...CPU, memory, drive space?

Best way to setup the networking with the dual on-board nics and the quad port nics.

I do have a 48 port Dell 6248 switch as well.

Thanks for your time.

thefinkster · Mon Feb 23, 2015 7:27 pm

I haven't done a hyper-converged setup yet; as my VMWare hosts are separate from the StarWind systems so I'll be generic.

I'd follow the VMWare guide on configuring network as their guides are fairly decent. And then you would follow the StarWind guide for sync and heartbeat and VM access (their VMWare Hyper-converged guide). Be sure to place each "segment' on it's own subnet/VLAN. (Sync1 between Starwinds would be 172.16.0.0/30; Sync2 would be 172.16.0.4/30; heartbeat would be 172.16.0.8/30; iSCSI-Path1 would be 172.16.0.12/30; iSCSI-Path2 would be 172.16.0.16/30, etc.)

As to CPU/RAM/etc: CPU would be as much as possible; as with any virtualization technology the CPU is managed decently by the hypervisor. If you have to over-provision CPU; then just make sure to reserve enough CPU for StarWind. It can get pretty CPU intensive with enough activity. RAM will be decided by how much L1 cache you assign to your images. I usually do up to 1GB per 1TB; but StarWind has revised their recommendations here so right now I think it can be up to 3GB/1TB on L1; but who knows the current "best method". 1GB/1TB works great for us on our production (15k drives; 40gb sync; 10gb host network) and lab (7200/10k drives and 1gb network).

Drive space: Well; you'll probably just want to create one datastore on VMWare; then create an OS partition VMDK of sufficient size (100GB or something); and create your Data VMDK (iSCSI Target). This will be your second volume in Windows; and will be where you place your StarWind images that will then be accessed via iSCSI for the rest of your VMWare infrastructure. Layers on layers; but it works great.

I haven't seen anything (I haven't been looking) for comparing vSAN (VMWare) against StarWind; so not sure if one has benefits over the other. With Hyper-V/Microsoft; there are obvious benefits to doing hyper-converged setups.

Hope I gave you a good start to your thinking.

Wed Feb 25, 2015 8:13 pm

@finkster, as usual, thank you a lot for making perfect answers!

@storm121, please let us know if there anything else that we may be useful in.

storm121 · Wed Feb 25, 2015 9:22 pm

Thanks for the info...its helpful.

Could someone clarify this 128GB limit, what exactly does that limit me on?

I plan on using the free version of 2 host, but I want to be able to use the full usable space on each host local storage.

Is this not possibly with the free version?

I created two Server 2012 R2 Servers with a single 40GB OS drive on each host...from the local storage available form each host.

So basically I have two host running esxi from USB drives.

Inside each esxi host, I created a single datastore from the available local storage. This is where I built my virtual machines from.

So back to this 128GB limit...where does that come into play?

Sat Feb 28, 2015 11:22 am

We have the free license with unlimited capacity for VMware users and for Microsoft professionals. Are you one of them please?

storm121 · Sat Feb 28, 2015 11:51 am

I am a vmug member, but not a MCP.

Tue Mar 03, 2015 5:15 pm

oh, so you are running VMware. That should do the job.
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwin ... san-vmware

Tue Mar 03, 2015 5:15 pm

oh, so you are running VMware. That should do the job.
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwin ... san-vmware

storm121 · Thu Mar 12, 2015 5:55 pm

I'm familiar with that link already.

I'm just trying to figure out this 128 gig limitation, what exactly is that?

Say I have two Dell r510 servers running esxi 5.5 from bootable USB drives.

Each server has the following storage available.

6 x 600gig 15k SAS drives. Both are setup as Raid 10 using the Dell h700 raid controller.

So each server has a usable storage space of 1676.38gig.

Am I able to use the free version still?

Sat Mar 14, 2015 2:24 pm

There is no 128 GB limitation. StarWind free versions do **UNLIMITED** served capacity. Where did you take this information from?

storm121 wrote:I'm familiar with that link already.

I'm just trying to figure out this 128 gig limitation, what exactly is that?

Say I have two Dell r510 servers running esxi 5.5 from bootable USB drives.

Each server has the following storage available.

6 x 600gig 15k SAS drives. Both are setup as Raid 10 using the Dell h700 raid controller.

So each server has a usable storage space of 1676.38gig.

Am I able to use the free version still?