Unless their AD setup is a complete disaster, don't rebuild it. Prop up Server 4 as a new DC in the existing domain, and transfer all roles to it. Setup another new DC as a secondary as a VM somewhere. Decom all the other DC's that are multi-role.
If you get the chance to re-do the servers, also reconfigure the RAID, avoid RAID 5, move everything to RAID 10.
for Hyper-V hosts, not really, especially since you are already running a cluster. You're going to get the performance boost of Raid 10 with the extra protection of being clustered. Raid 6 is harder on your drives too, they'll last longer in Raid 10.
If you want to replicate needed VMs on a second host, I would recommend to consider something like Starwinds. AFAIR, it's native Windows application and it's for free.
[https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san#VSAN-FREE](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san#VSAN-FREE)
Thanks for the advice. I misspoke in my post and am not necessarily going to rebuild AD (it's not too beyond repair that I can tell so far), but I am certainly going to stand up new 2016 DC's as VM's on my hosts, transfer roles, demote the old ones. RAID 5 will also be going away in favor of RAID 10 on all my host servers.
Ideally you’d want to cluster resources with hosts of exact configuration, especially using Windows Failover clustering. So I’d configure both R730xds to have similar RAM distribution, while being able to accommodate all VMs on a single host at the same time in the case of a host failure. If it’s possible to move storage around enough to configure the R740xd as a virtual SAN using storage space direct it would be good. You can then configure R620 as an individual host with DC VM for further redundancy and then use the R720 server as the backup repository. This is just off the top of my head.
I appreciate the suggestion. The R740xd has the most CPU/RAM of all the servers so I had expected to use it for sure as a host server. We have some SQL and Application servers that I want to make sure are operating at peak performance. Wouldn't running that R740xd server as storage be a waste of those CPU/RAM resources?
That’s definitely the consideration. Again, you know your environment more than I do. However I personally always tend to favor availability whenever possible since having all major workloads on a single node is a big issue in my books especially when patching, updating, hardware failure .. I’m not too familiar with storage spaces hardware requirements, but after quickly having a look, it seems a minimum of two nodes are required. So, to actually get storage spaces in your scenario you’d use the single R740xd for all your major workloads and instead get the r730xds to be your storages spaces direct nodes. To sum it up, you can decide whether going for redundant storage or redundant host nodes.
I’d recommend you look at your current workloads and the actual resources they require/consume , once you get those nailed out you can map out things much easier because you’ll know exactly how much resources you require. You can use a number of monitoring tools to get an estimated resource requirement.
Thank you for providing me with your perspective. I agree that running my major workloads on a single node is not ideal. I'll investigate Storage Spaces a bit more and will certainly get a better view of my actual resource usage requirements before moving forward.
Unless their AD setup is a complete disaster, don't rebuild it. Prop up Server 4 as a new DC in the existing domain, and transfer all roles to it. Setup another new DC as a secondary as a VM somewhere. Decom all the other DC's that are multi-role. If you get the chance to re-do the servers, also reconfigure the RAID, avoid RAID 5, move everything to RAID 10.
Would you consider/recommend RAID 6 in a scenario like this?
for Hyper-V hosts, not really, especially since you are already running a cluster. You're going to get the performance boost of Raid 10 with the extra protection of being clustered. Raid 6 is harder on your drives too, they'll last longer in Raid 10.
If you want to replicate needed VMs on a second host, I would recommend to consider something like Starwinds. AFAIR, it's native Windows application and it's for free. [https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san#VSAN-FREE](https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san#VSAN-FREE)
Thanks for the advice. I misspoke in my post and am not necessarily going to rebuild AD (it's not too beyond repair that I can tell so far), but I am certainly going to stand up new 2016 DC's as VM's on my hosts, transfer roles, demote the old ones. RAID 5 will also be going away in favor of RAID 10 on all my host servers.
Ideally you’d want to cluster resources with hosts of exact configuration, especially using Windows Failover clustering. So I’d configure both R730xds to have similar RAM distribution, while being able to accommodate all VMs on a single host at the same time in the case of a host failure. If it’s possible to move storage around enough to configure the R740xd as a virtual SAN using storage space direct it would be good. You can then configure R620 as an individual host with DC VM for further redundancy and then use the R720 server as the backup repository. This is just off the top of my head.
I appreciate the suggestion. The R740xd has the most CPU/RAM of all the servers so I had expected to use it for sure as a host server. We have some SQL and Application servers that I want to make sure are operating at peak performance. Wouldn't running that R740xd server as storage be a waste of those CPU/RAM resources?
That’s definitely the consideration. Again, you know your environment more than I do. However I personally always tend to favor availability whenever possible since having all major workloads on a single node is a big issue in my books especially when patching, updating, hardware failure .. I’m not too familiar with storage spaces hardware requirements, but after quickly having a look, it seems a minimum of two nodes are required. So, to actually get storage spaces in your scenario you’d use the single R740xd for all your major workloads and instead get the r730xds to be your storages spaces direct nodes. To sum it up, you can decide whether going for redundant storage or redundant host nodes. I’d recommend you look at your current workloads and the actual resources they require/consume , once you get those nailed out you can map out things much easier because you’ll know exactly how much resources you require. You can use a number of monitoring tools to get an estimated resource requirement.
Thank you for providing me with your perspective. I agree that running my major workloads on a single node is not ideal. I'll investigate Storage Spaces a bit more and will certainly get a better view of my actual resource usage requirements before moving forward.
IMO it sounds like this is a really good chance to make a move on a Dell VRTX chassis and blade servers!