Good morning all, this is my first post here, and I'm hoping to seek a bit of guidance on my design.
I have, in my data center right now
4: HP DL370G7 hosts with two X5660's, 60gb of RAM and 12 NICS (8 being IntelVT)
1: FAS2040 loaded with 450gb 15k SAS disks (Windows software bundle if I remember correctly)
1: FAS2020 loaded with 2TB SATA disks (Everything needed to be a Snap* target)
4: Cisco 3750G switches
1: VMWare Enterprise licensing for the lot of it
My intention is to turn the above into what should essentially be a reference VMWare\NetApp infrastructure, with redundant everything.
For the network, I’ll be using 2 of the switches stacked for production\management traffic, and two stacked, set to jumbo frames, and used as an isolated storage network. I’ve drafted a design for the storage network based on the “VMWare on NetApp storage Best Practices***” guide, and thankfully I have some actual CC** types that are going to handle the config of those.
Three of the hosts will reside at our HQ, along with those switches and the FAS2040. One host and the FAS2020 will be at a remote office and will be used as a backup\DR infrastructure. I plan to establish it as a Snapmirror target, and replicate pretty much everything to it (it does have 24TB raw).
I know that’s a really brief description with a lot of detail left out, but it brings me to my questions. I’ve managed and been on the deployment of a few older FAS270 and R200 devices (~5-6 years ago), and I have a decent understanding of the concepts and admin of NetApp storage (when everything but filerview seemed to be CLI), but I haven’t actually set up or administered any modern NetApp device.
I would LOVE to set this infrastructure up myself, and I’m hoping that between the community and documentation on the NOW site I can do so. Everyone I’m talking to insists that you need to drop 10-20k on consulting to bring a few NetApp FAS' up, I’m hoping that isn’t the case.
What I want to configure on the 2040 is this:
2 Disks set to RAID4 to be used as the System Aggregate
10 Remaining disks set to RAID-DP as the Production-Storage Aggregate (all NFS FlexVOLs Deduped)
Out of this Prod-Storage Aggregate I would like to create the following:
NFS FlexVol for Production VM Datastore
NFS FlexVol for Development VM Datastore
NFS FlexVol for VM Pagefiles (No Snapshots)
NFS FlexVol for VSWAP files (No Snapshots)
CIFS FlexVol for File shares
iSCSI LUN for SQL DBs
So, am I insane for attempting to create the above myself? Or has everything on the newer FAS' really become wizard and menu driven enough that I should be able to tackle it with a bit of guidance? The attached sketch is a bit simplistic but it gives a rough idea of how everything will be connected.
Sorry for the uber long winded post as my first, and thanks in advance for any feedback.
Peace
