#r510

If you haven’t already guessed, I am a fan of VMWare.  I have been using VMWare since 2002 when I used VMWare workstation to create virtual machines for my development servers.  Virtualization has always been a tool that I cannot live without and VMWare makes the best.  They aren’t paying me for this, this is simply my opinion.

I purchased a second Dell R610 from Ebay.com for another $610.00, I put 64 GB of ram into it for $540.00, two more Samsung Pro 850′s and 2 more WD 15K SAS drives ~$2160.00.  This doubled our capacity and made things much more comfortable for me to sleep at night.  Our first MVP was cool.  We could upload images and we had a web based DICOM viewer.  You could manage your profile, upload images, view your gallery.  Everything was asynchronous and we had micro service applications running in the background handling the processing.

About March 2015 I decided that I wanted to pivot with our tech again.  Looking at the types of business that we wanted to conduct, I decided that ASP.net web forms was not an easy development environment for my newest employees, Augustine Walker and Elizabeth Wendling.  Everyone was tripping over each others builds, we were trying to use github with Visual Studio and that was simply a difficult journey for us as a group.

I split everything into its component parts with Liz programming HTML, Javascript and CSS as a single page app.  Augustine and I broke the back out into a kinda RESTful C# webapi IIS application.  I split out everything from SQL into a Redis instance, with the exception of logging and a few other tables.  We still used the C# services with RabbitMQ.

We added a BETA pipeline and added HAProxy load balancers in front of the Nginx webservers and the C# webapi servers.  Quickly consuming the additional processing that I added with the second esxi server.  I knew where I wanted to go and I knew that it would be a much better world for us if I were to build my own budget cloud.  I made the decision to use VMWare as up until this point the hypervisor was about the only thing stable in our organization.  With the wifi problems, switch problems, C# service management, etc, etc I was quickly consumed with managing a tech company.

Money has been tight in our organization, we are pre-money and bootstrapped by an inner circle of investors.  I was able to arm wrestle my partners out of a little bit more cash to finalize the build out of our private cloud.  I purchased 2 more identical Dell R610′s same as the ones previously purchased with Intel X5675′s, they came with 96 GB of ram each for $1100.00.

I debated long and hard on what I wanted to use for a SAN.  I decided on a Dell R510 12 bay server with the same Intel X5675 processors.  This has been an amazing and wonderfully stable box.  I paired it up with FreeNAS 9.3 and 12 Samsung 1 TB SSD’s.  It is like a warm blanket around you on a cold winter morning.  I love this combination, it is fast, it is stable, it is flexible.  I can go on and on.

I put all of the esxi data stores on the R510 on FreeNAS using NFS.  I mapped the NFS drives to each of the hosts.  I load balanced the 4 Nics and we ran for several months on that setup until I started having issues with the Dell 6448 switch.  In its defense it was old and beat up, for some reason it would run fine for random periods of time, then it would go into diagnostic mode and disconnect everything.  Yes even the data stores on the R510.  That was catastrophic in nature and would bring everything down hard.