by I was asked recently to find a low cost setup for a small software development company (about 30 people) for their infrastructure that had growth potential. I came up with the following:
– One server running Open-E DSS software SAN/NAS: This holds 12 1TB disks in a raid 10 mirror and shares out the disks via iscsi, smb, and nfs (I am not using the other protocols available such as AFP, FTP…). It is certified for VMware. They use it for home directories and as an iscsi SAN for ESXi.
– Two servers running ESXi software attached via iscsi to the SAN.
along with a UPS, rack, switch, and firewall.
This setup runs several production virtual machines for subversion, backuppc, jira, smb-ldap directory services, and dnsmasq for dns/dhcp. In addition, they have several virtual machines (most flavors of linux and windows) for software builds, QA, and testing.
The nice thing about this set up is that it is very easy to create an additional machines to replicate a customer site or to save a build machine state when they ship a gold version of their product. The SAN can be expanded by more shelfs and if they overload their ESXi servers, they can purchase another one (at least until they saturate the SAN). Finally, with two ESXi servers if one fails they can run the critical services on the second server. Later on, they can get a second DSS machine and have failover on the SAN/NAS as well.
Total cost was about $18000. Most of the equipment was purchased through SiliconMechanics.