Server UP

[Rogean]

Originally Posted by radditsu [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

As a person who knows what you are talking about
... jesus. I have never had a storage nightmare like that since before vmware was a thing. But I spend taxpayer money...

Yea It's a shitload easier when you have multiple hosts with the same hardware and SAN storage with multiple controllers, iscsi switches, etc. We have nowhere near any of that. Just a few hosts with local storage and free unlicensed esxi (God I wish I had an esxi license.. it would save me a LOT of headaches moving stuff around if I had vcenter).

Atleast this new array has a hot swap this time, yay.

[Ulwyn]

hot swap for the win!

[Bantam 1]

Originally Posted by Rogean [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Yea It's a shitload easier when you have multiple hosts with the same hardware and SAN storage with multiple controllers, iscsi switches, etc. We have nowhere near any of that. Just a few hosts with local storage and free unlicensed esxi (God I wish I had an esxi license.. it would save me a LOT of headaches moving stuff around if I had vcenter).

Atleast this new array has a hot swap this time, yay.

How much is that?

[Rogean]

Originally Posted by Bantam 1 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

How much is that?

An esxi license? Depends on the version, but either way typically not justifiable for a project like ours. (I think Essentials is around $500 and Essentials Plus over $4k. There are a lot of other things more beneficial to spend money like that on.).

It's possible someone might even have one laying around, if they work for a large corporation that has some they never used... one could hope >_>

[Yamamushi]

Originally Posted by Bantam 1 [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

How much is that?

It depends on what features you're looking for and how large of a deployment you intend on doing. It can cost a LOT or just a few hundred dollars depending on what you want to do:

http://www.vmware.com/products/datac...e/pricing.html
http://www.vmware.com/vmwarestore/

[radditsu]

Originally Posted by Rogean [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Yea It's a shitload easier when you have multiple hosts with the same hardware and SAN storage with multiple controllers, iscsi switches, etc. We have nowhere near any of that. Just a few hosts with local storage and free unlicensed esxi (God I wish I had an esxi license.. it would save me a LOT of headaches moving stuff around if I had vcenter).

Atleast this new array has a hot swap this time, yay.

I love my dedicated 10gb multiple host tunnels. The only thing they wont let me get this year is real fiber channel network switches that integrates with vcenter to change my vlan assignments on the fly. I have to swap ports manually on any emergency change over as it is. ....they wanted to spend money on a phone system....who needs phones!?


But I just realized I love my job. Or I will until I get a phone call about a freaking password reset.

[Calabee]

are we there yet?

[spoils]

Originally Posted by Rogean [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Yea It's a shitload easier when you have multiple hosts with the same hardware and SAN storage with multiple controllers, iscsi switches, etc. We have nowhere near any of that. Just a few hosts with local storage and free unlicensed esxi (God I wish I had an esxi license.. it would save me a LOT of headaches moving stuff around if I had vcenter).

Atleast this new array has a hot swap this time, yay.

god...you are so hot when you talk dirty.

[mdadm]

Originally Posted by Rogean [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Atleast this new array has a hot swap this time, yay.

I've been watching this thread for some time but I've not seen anyone point this out, so I'm taking the opportunity. If this ain't news to you, then, excuse the noise. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Drives are usually rated with an MTTF (mean time to failure), which gives an estimate of how many hours the drives will last before they fail. Usually, the variance associated with an MTTF is not very large. So now consider if you buy 6 drives, from the exact same batch (where the real times to failure are much likely to be closer together than the variance the manufacturer might claim with their MTTF), and put them in the same server at the same time. Now these drives each have the same number of hours on them... so even though you have your nice RAID5 so you can lose a drive without losing data, suddenly, 3 years in, you get multiple drives failing within a week of each other.

I suspect that's what's happened here, but knowing very little about the actual setup, I can't realistically make assumptions. Anyway, this kind of situation actually happens quite commonly; I've heard numerous horror stories.

Hope this is helpful information; if not to Rogean, then to someone else. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[dhoushi]

Originally Posted by mdadm [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I've been watching this thread for some time but I've not seen anyone point this out, so I'm taking the opportunity. If this ain't news to you, then, excuse the noise. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Drives are usually rated with an MTTF (mean time to failure), which gives an estimate of how many hours the drives will last before they fail. Usually, the variance associated with an MTTF is not very large. So now consider if you buy 6 drives, from the exact same batch (where the real times to failure are much likely to be closer together than the variance the manufacturer might claim with their MTTF), and put them in the same server at the same time. Now these drives each have the same number of hours on them... so even though you have your nice RAID5 so you can lose a drive without losing data, suddenly, 3 years in, you get multiple drives failing within a week of each other.

I suspect that's what's happened here, but knowing very little about the actual setup, I can't realistically make assumptions. Anyway, this kind of situation actually happens quite commonly; I've heard numerous horror stories.

Hope this is helpful information; if not to Rogean, then to someone else. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Sounds like to me greater stability is then formed by spreading the MTTF around. If that is the case, the way to go is to upgrade a drive in 6 months to a year on a continuing basis (a drive here, a drive there, obviously not the same one), which will progressively create better variance in the MTTF and reduce the strength of the failures when they occur.

The obvious downside to this method is the additional costs this method would require in the initial steps of the upgrade, (I might make an educated guess it might be possible to use the older replaced drives later in rotations, if the MTTF still has a good lifespan, to continue variance and save money) long term this would even out as failures become weakened in strength (replacing one drive instead of 2 or more).