Hi to all ,

Thanks for the warm welcome ... I see some familiar faces over here ... Scott, Dustin ... always a pleasure .. Special thanks to Dustin, for introducing me to Mangolassi ..

Mangolassi ? I wonder why an IT forum is named after an Indian beverage ? hehehe... never-the-less, I like the drink, and the name ...

I've been in the IT field for a little over 3 years, most of which were spent as tech support (Win desktop, and then server)... Recently, I switched to a small (but growing) company, as their IT admin ... I've been assigned with the task to roll-out Virtualized server enviroment, with redundacy/fail-over...

I look forward to contributing to this community ...

Hi thwr,

Thanks for your response. ... Just to fill you in ...

We currently have 2 physical servers (The configs are not similar, but can be upgraded to be so) - The Primary server is used as DC/DNS/Fileserver + an MIS Application called Shuttleworth + an accounting software + Taxation software ..

The second physical server hosts an application called Apogee Prepress...

Both servers run Windows 2008 R2

Now, I've been assigned the task to switch to a complete Virtualized server environment, with HA (kind of .. We can tolerate a down-time of up 90mins) ; which would have been pretty straightforward, if it wasn't for the dismal budget of $1200 sanctioned for it .. Hence, I'm forced to look @ free options ...

@thwr

Yep, I'm looking for a shared-nothing type solution, cause (a) A NAS enclosure + HDD would be out of budget. (b) Even if we bought a NAS and stored all VM+DATA on it, it would still be a SPOF... no use ...

I did look @ the free Starwind Virtual SAN, but from what I read, I understand that the free version will allow only storage and not compute, on the same host... That's allowed, only in the paid version... ??

I'm not even looking @ running a HA Cluster with live Migration ... the VM replicated to the secondary host would like dormant on the secondary host... If the primary host fails, we don;t mind a few minutes of downtime, while the replicated VMs on the secondary host are manually powered-up...

wow .... errr... have I opened-up a can of worms here ?

Hi,

Sorry, was caught-up with some personal issue ... Anyway, it's sorted, and I'm back ...

Dustin, thanks for the follow-up ... I'm yet to hear from the bosses... so, nothings changed ..

@KOOLER said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

I did look @ the free Starwind Virtual SAN, but from what I read, I understand that the free version will allow only storage and not compute, on the same host... That's allowed, only in the paid version... ??

I've never heard of that limitation. that would be a new and surprising one. I'm quite confident that you can put your storage on your compute nodes.

Checking with @KOOLER @StarWind_Software

I'm making this statement, based on my understanding of the Free vs Paid document, found on https://www.starwindsoftware.com/whitepapers/free-vs-paid.pdf

Please look @ the comparison on the second-last page of this PDF... It says, next to Deployment Scenarios , that Hyperconvergence, is available only for Certain User Statuses (Check Status)

Please ping me off-line and I'll be happy to help with the keys you need

Thanks would be fantastic ... Thanks ...