Hard Drive Upgrade Questions

[Mando]

7 minutes ago, farmeunit said:

I'd recommend ESXi and P2V as @Mando mentioned.  At that point, it's mostly hardware agnostic and you can move between ESXi instances easily.  Updating the OS, as well.  Then you can resize and do whatever else is needed.   You can find pretty decent, cheap hosts on eBay if you look around.

 

Limited in RAM department, but has drives:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-R510-Xeon-E5640-8GB-2-500GB-4-300GB-2-1TB-2-750w/182808106029?hash=item2a9036542d:g:fU0AAOSwhKZZ1cvK

 

This is if you can't afford something better for now.  

 

For a little more you get quite a bit of RAM and 4x1TB hard drives.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-R510-2x-X5640-2-67GHz-64GB-8x8GB-4x1TB-Server/192304948676?_trkparms=aid%3D555017%26algo%3DPL.CASSINI%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D20170810093926%26meid%3Dbcc72e8394444a5fa4073f7db221e548%26pid%3D100854%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D1%26&_trksid=p2349526.c100854.m4779

 

I also just used an old desktop with 2x4TB hard drives with FreeNAS on it.   We have a ReadyNAS for primary backup and FreeNAS for offsite.

 

For local NAS file shares I have one Windows 2012 server and a second for a separate deparment.  Both are VMs on two separate hosts.

 

Lots of options depending on budget.

 

 

 

 

TBH i went 2x X Series Lenovo hosts, a V3700 dual controller SAN and esxi 6 HA all for under £30k and that services 23 VMs and 200 endpoints on a 2k12 domain (couldnt go newer at the time) a bargain!

 

heck cut the SAN out and fill up the X series with SAAS drives fo rthe space they need, then backup using Veam or V-ranger offsite to the cloud. £15k max 

[DevTech]

1 hour ago, Mando said:

TBH i went 2x X Series Lenovo hosts, a V3700 dual controller SAN and esxi 6 HA all for under £30k and that services 23 VMs and 200 endpoints on a 2k12 domain (couldnt go newer at the time) a bargain!

 

heck cut the SAN out and fill up the X series with SAAS drives fo rthe space they need, then backup using Veam or V-ranger offsite to the cloud. £15k max 

Everyone has latched onto NAS here perhaps because it is a favorite subject.

 

"Suitability to task" is still very uncertain there, including:

 

- can he setup whatever firewall is in place?

 

- can he map the NAS into Server 2003 in a manner that SQL Server will have zero issues moving the main production Database there?

 

- did Server 2003 have support for that config? Is there recovery? What happens on a DB Write Error that might be different

 

- any Latency issues?

 

- etc

 

 

[Mando]

29 minutes ago, DevTech said:

Everyone has latched onto NAS here perhaps because it is a favorite subject.

 

"Suitability to task" is still very uncertain there, including:

 

- can he setup whatever firewall is in place?

 

- can he map the NAS into Server 2003 in a manner that SQL Server will have zero issues moving the main production Database there?

 

- did Server 2003 have support for that config? Is there recovery? What happens on a DB Write Error that might be different

 

- any Latency issues?

 

- etc

 

 

agreed, a NAS aint the solution.

 

From memory re: mapping the drive as local storage on a phys 2k3, dont think so, been that long since i did such things i cant recall 100%, not something id be considering tbvh. 

 

Ive got server 2003 boxes virtualised running our ERP including a SQL stack of that era, not officially supported in esxi from Vendor, but after 4yr running we have not hit an issue yet. Ideally i wouldnt, but site wont extract finger out of bum hole to replace it yet, finally in talks with supplier.

 

More i think of it  Hyper-V or VMware is the only feasible solution to it all, then sure you can map LUNS/NFS vols as local via the host to the VMS. It also removes the antique hardware from the equation.

 

Yep, more i think of it, its the only "no brainer" solution to this conundrum.

 

 

[M_Lyons10]

Thank you everyone for all of your suggestions and help.  I have actually reread this discusion a few times, and really appreciate all of the suggestions and ideas.

 

I'm not sure what our budget would be for a new machine, and it's something I would like to consider for this year (I agree that it is well overdue).  What does everyone think a reasonable budget would be?  Our demands really aren't that great to be fair, this machine is still able to meet our needs with really no issue (aside from the storage issue).  I would like to upgrade to a newer version of Windows Server and SQL Server, which would presumably have greater system requirements.  I would like to have a good bit of available storage so that I have room for the documents and things that we store (but even then, we're not talking about a ton of files either)...  We would be hoping to find something that would work for an extended period of time I would expect.  When I have priced servers in the past, I have had difficulty finding something that isn't overkill for our needs, and that has been my biggest stumbling block.  Upgrading the server though is what I would ultimately like to do (and feel we need to do).

I want to also clarify that we do have a backup system in place.  It isn't as seamless or simple as cloud backup would be, but we do perform regular backups, which are stored offsite.

For now I am looking for a solution that will buy me the time between now and the server upgrade (which would not be something that would happen quickly unfortunately).  I very much appreciate the warning about changing the partitions with Windows Server 2003, I will heed your advice and not go this route.  It's a shame because two of the partitions are very poorly sized for our present needs (the C drive would not be impacted).  It appears that NAS may not be the solution for this problem?  I'm a bit confused by the back and forth on that one though.  I am looking in to Azure as well, and may consider that in place of the new server if it works better.  I'm just trying to figure out what the cost actually would be (The pricing model seems a bit complex).  Does software have to be updated to support the data being in Azure, or is that all handled through the network connection?  We may have an issue with that, as some of the software we use we do not have control over.

Thanks again,