Time to Replace VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V with Scale HC3
January 19, 2018
Time to Replace VMware ESXi and Microsoft Hyper-V with Scale HC3
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3
Scale Computing HC3 is being used across the whole organization with a cluster at the corporate office configured for full two-way replication with another cluster at a branch office. This provides complete disaster recovery capability for both sites. Performance of both clusters is outstanding. Operational maintenance is almost non-existent. Setting up replication required only providing the name and administrator credentials for the remote cluster -- amazingly simple and automatic.
- Firmware updates are a non-event. They are released about twice a year and when you are ready to apply the update, you just click the button to authorize it. Then it just happens automatically, rolling from one server to the next with no down time. Of course you should verify that you have a full set of backups first and probably will want to do this during a "quieter" time but you could do it in the middle of a work day with only minor performance impact.
- Any agent-based VM backup, like Veeam Backup & Replication, works fine.
- I like that the failure of a disk drive is not a critical-level event. The cluster raises an alarm, automatically ensures that all data is re-duplicated, and a replacement disk is sent to you the next day for hot-swap. During the disk failure event all you have is just a little less disk storage available.
- The HEAT system which automatically migrates active data between fast SSD disks and the usual spinning kind as required to meet your performance priorities, is completely hands off.
- The recent addition of automatic disk data deduplication means better performance and less disk space usage.
- Taking snapshots is almost instant and does not "cost" additional disk space.
- Growth is amazingly simple and easy to do -- just rack another node, add it to the cluster then walk away -- in short time it's a fully functioning member of the cluster sharing the load.
- HC3 Cloud Unity with Google Cloud Platform is an unmatched hybrid cloud solution. Usually hybrid Clouds require lots of very sophisticated networking to tie the local network to the cloud network -- Unity does all of this automatically and transparently -- the Cloud instance looks like it's on your local LAN. A single Scale HC3 web interface can manage your local and remote on-prem instances together with your cloud instance.
- Scheduling of snapshots is fairly flexible but a little restricted when combined with Replication. Looking forward to the next major firmware release where this is scheduled to be improved.
- There is a single-node server available for remote offices but it would be nice to have a two-node version for those small offices to be able to avoid all down time (for updates).
If your company provides services or support on a 24x7 basis you just can't ever be down. Exchange email, SQL Server databases, web servers, ERP App Servers, File & RDSH servers -- nothing can go down because you need it all of the time. There's no time for down time to do maintenance or increase capacity. Scale HC3 gives you all of that. Also, who wants to spend so much time keeping all of that virtualization infrastructure updated -- Scale HC3 remove 90-95% of the maintenance work required to keep a VMware or Hyper-V Cluster with shared storage secure and updated.
- A pending iSCSI Storage array hardware refresh cycle and VMware maintenance update can provide enough funds to replace all of that with a new Scale HC3 Cluster that also drastically reduces on-going support and maintenance costs. The ROI is under one year.
- Your IT staffing costs will decrease as will your outside IT support costs for running virtualized clusters with shared storage.
- Most businesses never actually get around to deploying multi-site replication because it's too expensive and far too hard to do and maintain. Scale HC3 makes all that easy and automatic.
Usually you don't make a platform change until you find something that's ten times better (i.e. An order of magnitude better). Scale HC3 is that platform. The Scale Computing HyperConverged Virtualization platform makes virtualization automatic so that you can move on to spend your time and money doing more interesting and valuable things.