Recently, I was looking over how much storage space I have, and more specifically, how much SSD storage do I have. That night, I came across someone selling HGST Ultrastar SSD1600MM 0B32124 HUSMM1616ASS200 1600GB 1.6TB 2.5in 12Gbps MLC drives and I thought the perfect time. At the same time, me and my family were meeting over some other things within the homelab.
Currently, we have backups. We have off-site backups. We follow the 3-2-1 theory of backing up. But, what happens if there was a total disaster. Sure, the data is safe offsite, but what about compute? The equipment that actually runs everything. So now we are planning a DR site, though still in the early stages.
Debating between throwing one server, with high core count and speed, and a lot of memory, or using a cluster. Leaning towards a 2-node remote site. Aria Operations to the rescue for some of the capacity planning. Because none of us are rich, we have to be cost conscience. At the same time, do not want to skimp out on some things. But by using Aria Operations, and a few other tools, I was able to determine I could cut each current node’s memory in half to 128GB, and use the free’d up 512GB of ram on the two new servers. That’s one cost we don’t have to worry about.
We’re still in the planning stages. Since I still have a Cisco UCS c240 m4, we’re using that for some testing right now. Have it configured running ESXi of course, but the primary hypervisor just has 2 VMs – 2 more ESXi VMs. Each ESXi VM has 224GB of RAM allocated to it, and even running vSAN (the witness node is running in the current M5 Cluster). Haven’t done anything else other than get the base setup working. Next steps is actually configuring Fault Domains, replication, etc.
We don’t plan to implement this anytime soon, probably after the new year. But doing a lot of planning and testing now. But the deal on the drives was too good to pass up, and I may check with the seller and see if they have any more left.
Currently, have about 6.77TB of vSAN All Flash Space available. This is what my cluster looks like BEFORE adding the 4x 1.6TB drives:
I’m only using 31% of the available space, but there are VMs that have their storage on my external TrueNAS iSCSI shares that I want to move to the faster tier of drives. After adding the new storage, we see our capacity increase to 12.59TB. Almost doubled the available space:
