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1st sucessfully VMware "live" cluster deployed
Deathmage
Banned Posts: 2,496
I kind of was a bit nervous but I knew what needed to be done just followed my instincts and game-plan but I just spent the whole day deployed a 3 server (Dell R720's) cluster with a Equalogic 6100 SAN.
All of the fabric for iSCSI and vMotion was build on dual HP Procurve 2910al switches with a 10 Gbit interconnect in the rear with two vlans. Management/iDRAC and Production vlans were on the dual HP Procurve 2910al 48 port PoE+ (VOIP phones 'QOS', Wireless, Printers, normal LAN traffic) switches also with a 10gbit interconnect. Each server has two nics per VMkernal group, basically reduandacy on everything. The SAN has two controllers and two connections of each controller went to the other switch in the storage network for redundancy with jumbo frames set to 9214 MTU on all devices in storage fabric.
Once the fabric was built which took about oo 45 minutes with configration and then cabling/labeling I moved onto the P2V conversion, which consisted of back-to-back conversion which once I got it down to a science took roughly 35 minutes per server to convert directly to two hosts split down to 2 per server (16 GB of RAM per server). I had to do 4 physical servers, it's basically a 3 server cluster design with 1 ESXi host in a standby mode 24/7 in the event one of the servers fails.
All in all took me most of the day. While I was doing the VMware stuff one of the other engineers was doing the Acronis, and Domain/DNS preparation stuff, and also helped with the VMware from time to time, lots of story telling too... you know IT horror stories, and here I thought these things just happened to me. it was really overkill for two engineers to be on-site but it was good company and we both learned a bit and from each other. He's done a number of deployments before himself, this was my 'proving ground' deployment for the new job..
I learned quite a bit and it was fun, the whole project from unboxing to live environment took me about 9 hours. I started at 6 am this morning and finished just after 3:30.
I think I'm pretty much set or overstudying at this point for the VCP5-DCV since I really didn't have many major hurdles with the deployment at all, even with configuring the switches or SAN. I will contest I know HP Procurves like the back-of-my-hand compared to Cisco switches but still I really didn't have many headaches and the deployment I pretty much winged it from start to finish...
All of the fabric for iSCSI and vMotion was build on dual HP Procurve 2910al switches with a 10 Gbit interconnect in the rear with two vlans. Management/iDRAC and Production vlans were on the dual HP Procurve 2910al 48 port PoE+ (VOIP phones 'QOS', Wireless, Printers, normal LAN traffic) switches also with a 10gbit interconnect. Each server has two nics per VMkernal group, basically reduandacy on everything. The SAN has two controllers and two connections of each controller went to the other switch in the storage network for redundancy with jumbo frames set to 9214 MTU on all devices in storage fabric.
Once the fabric was built which took about oo 45 minutes with configration and then cabling/labeling I moved onto the P2V conversion, which consisted of back-to-back conversion which once I got it down to a science took roughly 35 minutes per server to convert directly to two hosts split down to 2 per server (16 GB of RAM per server). I had to do 4 physical servers, it's basically a 3 server cluster design with 1 ESXi host in a standby mode 24/7 in the event one of the servers fails.
All in all took me most of the day. While I was doing the VMware stuff one of the other engineers was doing the Acronis, and Domain/DNS preparation stuff, and also helped with the VMware from time to time, lots of story telling too... you know IT horror stories, and here I thought these things just happened to me. it was really overkill for two engineers to be on-site but it was good company and we both learned a bit and from each other. He's done a number of deployments before himself, this was my 'proving ground' deployment for the new job..
I learned quite a bit and it was fun, the whole project from unboxing to live environment took me about 9 hours. I started at 6 am this morning and finished just after 3:30.
I think I'm pretty much set or overstudying at this point for the VCP5-DCV since I really didn't have many major hurdles with the deployment at all, even with configuring the switches or SAN. I will contest I know HP Procurves like the back-of-my-hand compared to Cisco switches but still I really didn't have many headaches and the deployment I pretty much winged it from start to finish...