What would you charge for this?

[angry_geek]

Originally Posted by YeOldeStonecat

Morning AG!!! I actually slept in....well, I was up at 4..but didn't crack laptop open and been watching TV up until wife brought me coffee 'n laptop in bed. Late start this morning!

Good morning sir! I took the wife to breakfast this morning. What a beautiful Autumn day!

Back to business: I'm a bit confused with one or two things.

------Why three different backup devices? Is the Barracuda for mail archiving? If so, they do a great job; keep it. Why the LaCie unit AND a separate NAS device?

------Are these servers going to be set up as a fail-over cluster? If so, I'm a little unsure about the Standard licensing. I could be wrong, but I thought this was only supported under Enterprise and Datacenter; at least that's the only way I've set up clusters.

As for custom building: We used to do a lot of custom builds, even for servers. Now, the only time we do them is for ourselves or special customer requests, and we never do custom servers anymore for customers. Here's just one reason: Let's assume you build them a kick-ass server. It's a rock star, performs beautifully, highly reliable. Then, 6 months from now, you get hit by lightning or your parachute fails to open, etc. Point is, you're toast, in the ground. Then the controller fails on the server you built them. What do they do? Sure they can call another tech. He'll come in, look everything over. Maybe you gave them all the registered warranty information on all the parts from the various manufacturers. He finally finds the one they need. They'll have to send the part to the manufacturer and go through the RMA process; could be weeks till they get the part back . . . if they get the service approved at all. Now let's look at another scenario: You sell them a PowerEdge T620. Cost over custom is about $500, depending on how you configure it. It comes with a 3-year NBD warranty. Everything is already registered for the customer with Dell because you ordered it with your reseller account or set them up with Dell Business. You could be dead, on vacation, anything. Part fails, Dell is called, part (and tech, if needed) is dispatched the next day, server is back up.

There are other reasons to go this route, but I don't want to start a debate.

On to other things (if you still choose to go the build route): Drive controller. Never trust on-board. Go with a high-quality SAS controller that supports multiple arrays and port multiplying. Your chassis should come with a high-capacity drive caddy with a good backplane. In any VM environment, your biggest bottle-neck is your spindles, especially if you're virtualizing DBs. You want to keep your DBs on their own spindles. Ideally, you should load these machines with 15k SAS drives and high-capacity near-line drives for basic storage and maybe your host OS. The only thing installed on your host should be your hypervisor; be it Hyper-V or ESXI. Since you're not too familiar with virtualization, I recommend Hyper-V. It's extremely easy to use; just watch your networking.

I'll come back with more later.

[ElementalWindX]

Originally Posted by angry_geek

Good morning sir! I took the wife to breakfast this morning. What a beautiful Autumn day!

Back to business: I'm a bit confused with one or two things.

------Why three different backup devices? Is the Barracuda for mail archiving? If so, they do a great job; keep it. Why the LaCie unit AND a separate NAS device?

------Are these servers going to be set up as a fail-over cluster? If so, I'm a little unsure about the Standard licensing. I could be wrong, but I thought this was only supported under Enterprise and Datacenter; at least that's the only way I've set up clusters.

As for custom building: We used to do a lot of custom builds, even for servers. Now, the only time we do them is for ourselves or special customer requests, and we never do custom servers anymore for customers. Here's just one reason: Let's assume you build them a kick-ass server. It's a rock star, performs beautifully, highly reliable. Then, 6 months from now, you get hit by lightning or your parachute fails to open, etc. Point is, you're toast, in the ground. Then the controller fails on the server you built them. What do they do? Sure they can call another tech. He'll come in, look everything over. Maybe you gave them all the registered warranty information on all the parts from the various manufacturers. He finally finds the one they need. They'll have to send the part to the manufacturer and go through the RMA process; could be weeks till they get the part back . . . if they get the service approved at all. Now let's look at another scenario: You sell them a PowerEdge T620. Cost over custom is about $500, depending on how you configure it. It comes with a 3-year NBD warranty. Everything is already registered for the customer with Dell because you ordered it with your reseller account or set them up with Dell Business. You could be dead, on vacation, anything. Part fails, Dell is called, part (and tech, if needed) is dispatched the next day, server is back up.

There are other reasons to go this route, but I don't want to start a debate.

On to other things (if you still choose to go the build route): Drive controller. Never trust on-board. Go with a high-quality SAS controller that supports multiple arrays and port multiplying. Your chassis should come with a high-capacity drive caddy with a good backplane. In any VM environment, your biggest bottle-neck is your spindles, especially if you're virtualizing DBs. You want to keep your DBs on their own spindles. Ideally, you should load these machines with 15k SAS drives and high-capacity near-line drives for basic storage and maybe your host OS. The only thing installed on your host should be your hypervisor; be it Hyper-V or ESXI. Since you're not too familiar with virtualization, I recommend Hyper-V. It's extremely easy to use; just watch your networking.

I'll come back with more later.

The barracuda and lacies they already own, so why not have redundant backups if you already own the equipment? That is about the only equipment I am using from the old system.

Yes I will need enterprise, thanks for helping me clarify that. But how many licenses of enterprise, 2, or 4?


I am aiming to do a failover cluster in 2008. I have yet to play with the cluster options in 2008, but I have been reading for days. The last clusters I did were back in the 2003 enterprise days.

The raid controller I'm using is an lsi megaraid 8i.


enterprise licensing source: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...=ws.10%29.aspx

[Xander]

Originally Posted by ElementalWindX

$5k is just labor, not including the price for parts. I'm just wondering how much labor should I charge.

You don't have an idea of how long this will take but you've already decided how much you're going to charge him? Sounds like you're trying to make money from a customer without giving regard to the customer's best interests, just your pocketbook. Did your eyes bug out and your pupils change to dollar signs when you talked to him?

[ElementalWindX]

Originally Posted by Xander

You don't have an idea of how long this will take but you've already decided how much you're going to charge him? Sounds like you're trying to make money from a customer without giving regard to the customer's best interests, just your pocketbook. Did your eyes bug out and your pupils change to dollar signs when you talked to him?

no. I've made well over 100k off this guy. I'm not trying to rape him. I'm trying to be fair to both of us.

[YeOldeStonecat]

Originally Posted by angry_geek

Good morning sir! I took the wife to breakfast this morning. What a beautiful Autumn day!

A gorgeous one it was! Spend the day re-doing the roof over the gazebo by the pool..while the daughter spent the day in the pool with a friend over. Had to turn on the heater for the pool....it was down to 72..got it up to 80 for 'em. (next months 'lectric bill gonna suck!)

Time to honker down and convert a terminal server into a new Hyper-V box. Exciting evening...lol!