Upgrade and Consolidation Before and After

As most of you already know, I have performed a major face lifted moving from Dell host and storage to Cisco Hyperflex. I wanted to show you what we came from to where we are now so you can see how much cleaner and faster the new solution is.

Before

As you are looking at the old environment, this is 5 Dell nodes just running ESXi connecting to Cisco switches to connect to the Dell Equallogic storage via ISCSI connections. We had all network and storage traffic communicating across 1 GB nics for that one cluster that could be running anything from IIS to SQL to file shares. The other two smaller clusters were running the same type of Dell nodes but with local storage. We all knows what this means, no DRS or HA, if something happen to one of the nodes in those clusters we would be going to our backup solution to restore every server that was running on that node and most likely have some type of data lost because we know backups are not running every second of every day to pick up every change being done on a server. The storage on all these nodes had zero deduplication and compression.

After

After we went with the new Cisco Hyperflex nodes, we were able to reduce the amount of ESXi nodes which means less licensing cost with VMWare. We are able to now provide enable HA and DRS which gives up failover if we lose one node in our cluster. Ability to perform maintenance on all our ESXi host without having to shut down virtual servers while we are doing this. We moved to a cleaner and easier configuration with the 40 GB connectivity. I know you are thinking who really pushes 40 GB, but I will tell you that no one can really say there is latency in the network now. Full deduplication and compress where I am now getting 48% Compression and 9% Deduplication.