PolyServe replacement options

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PolyServe replacement options

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bobfirek Valued Member Points: 55 More actions · Answer 1

Vultar,

Have you converter from Polyserve to Windows 2008 R2 clusters yet? If so how did it go. Have you heard anything more about the end of life for Polyserve? We will be moving our database off of Polyserve to Windows 2008 R2 servers running on vMware. Any lessons learned from your swith over would be appriecated.

Thanks,

Bob

vultar (10/13/2011)
I don't think we'd be able to persuade management to go for another 3rd party clustering solution after the Polyserve fiasco!
We've decided to swap it out for Windows 2008 R2 clusters with a majority node and fileshare config.
Cheers
Vultar

don.boxley SSC Veteran Points: 206 More actions · Answer 2

Bob,

You may want to check out DxConsole. It will allow you to preserve the savings you've gained using PolyServe and it supports VMware nodes.

Here's a recent review of DxConsole from Mike Matchett at the Taneja Group.

http://tanejagroup.com/news/blog/systems-and-technology/dh2i-getting-mission-critical-apps-virtualized

dbox

bobfirek Valued Member Points: 55 More actions · Answer 3

Don,

Thanks for the link. But I'm in the same boat as Vultar. I don't think my director will go for a 3rd party SQL clustering solution after the problems we've had with Polyserve. But I will give it an open-minded read. Have you heard anything about the EOL of Polyserve?

Anyway thanks for the link.

Best Regards,

Bob

don.boxley SSC Veteran Points: 206 More actions · Answer 4

Bob,

PolyServe entered EOL late 2012. It is now in End-of-Life Support status. Support will end late 2013.

Regarding DxConsole...I understand the hesitation. I will say that we have a number current PolyServe users in pilot and they really like the product.

dbox

don.boxley SSC Veteran Points: 206 More actions · Answer 5

don.boxley

SSC Veteran

Points: 206

April 26, 2012 at 9:30 am

#1479836

Sorry PolyServe enter EOL late 2010.

bobfirek Valued Member Points: 55 More actions · Answer 6

Don,

Thanks for the info. It is interesting that we have a support contract with HP Polyserve and we have not been notified by HP that their product had entered EOL two years ago. But maybe that is up to the end user to find out. Shame on me. But in my defense until I ran across this forum it has been hard to get anything other than rumor and guesses from anyone. I find this interesting and distrubing at the same time. Several months ago I was on the phone for support on an issue we were having. I could make the guy I was talking to understand my problem and emails to his supervisor for a change of tech went unanswered. Now I think I know why. In the end he refused to provide support because we didn't have a NIC set up the way he wanted. Said that we had an unsupported configuration which is funny because we set it up exactly as the documentation had stated back in 2007. He couldn't send me a link to the documentation of the "supported" configuration and so now we just live with the problem and hope we can make the switch off of Polyserve very soon.

I will take a look at your product and again thanks for the Polyserve update. I'm going to touch base with my boss man and ask him if in this conversations with HP or our HP vendor if they had mentioned that Polyserve is end of life.

Thanks,

Bob

don.boxley SSC Veteran Points: 206 More actions · Answer 7

Bob,

I know the message went out late 2010, but it seldom reaches the end-user.

http://www.dh2i.com/index.php/products/dx-console-for-sql-server/dxconsole-polyserve-comparison

dbox

vultar Hall of Fame Points: 3271 More actions · Answer 8

bobfirek (4/26/2012)
Vultar,
Have you converter from Polyserve to Windows 2008 R2 clusters yet? If so how did it go. Have you heard anything more about the end of life for Polyserve? We will be moving our database off of Polyserve to Windows 2008 R2 servers running on vMware. Any lessons learned from your swith over would be appriecated.
Thanks,
Bob

[/quote]

Hello Bob,

I feel your pain with this. We've not quite finished the migrations, but we're very close.

Only advice really is to be thorough with the testing of your new windows cluster and work through as many possible disaster scenarios as you can. This was something that I should have spent more time on when implementing Polyserve. The other piece of advice is to work through any migrations in a test environment first, that way you can find any connection strings / port no.s that need to be changed.. all very standard!

A major plus point of Windows clustering for me is, that if I find an error I can google it and get some good answers! 🙂

Cheers

Vultar

dale53 Valued Member Points: 59 More actions · Answer 9

Hi,

We're still currently using Polyserve and have been looking at implementing SANBolic Melio and Windows clustering, however after a lot of testing (that hasn't gone very well) we're looking for some other way of managing storage. Has anyone successfully moved from Polyserve to a Windows cluster?

We've got quite a few instances so will hit the drive letter limit (I know you can use mount points but when they failover so does the drive letter, meaning a few instances have to move at the same time which isn't what we want).

SANBolic neatly got round the drive letter problem as you can set the same drive letter on each server. The only other product I can find that does something similar is IBM GPFS.

Any help or ideas would be appreciated.

don.boxley SSC Veteran Points: 206 More actions · Answer 10

Dale53,

You should checkout DxConsole from DH2i (www.dh2i.com). It is the plug replacement for PolyServe. We have many PolyServe customers who have migrated to DxConsole. If you like the way PolyServe enables you to manage SQL Server, by virtualizing at the instance-level, you'll love DxConsole. It has all the features you've always wanted in PolyServe but never got.

dbox

carl.berglund SSC Enthusiast Points: 112 More actions · Answer 11

Anyone looking for a PolyServe replacement should look to DH2i.com and DxConsole.

It is everything PolyServe used to be and so much more. (Full disclosure, I am an ex-PolyServe employee and now head up sales at DH2i).

Quick overview of features:

Full instance mobility, and HA monitoring

Define an SLA to an instance, then guarantee it through full QOS to that instance (proc, memory, network, storage IO)

VSS integration

support of SQL 2005 and up, any edition and any mix of versions simultaneous.

Supports 64 bit version of Windows 2008, r2 or 2012 simultaneous in one cluster.

Manage SQL instances across both physical and VM hosts simultaneously (hyper V, VmWare, etc)

Vastly simplified patching

Essentially unlimited cluster size

stretch cluster capability

auto load balancing

a very easy migration tool, Dxtransfer.

It is worth looking into.

regards,

Carl Berglund

vedamaker Valued Member Points: 73 More actions · Answer 12

We are also considering Sanbolic. Can you elaborate on why Sanbolic has not worked well?

Thanks

Tammy Lawson SSC Enthusiast Points: 180 More actions · Answer 13

Does anyone have any input on the HP Database Consolidation Appliance for SQL Server?

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/enterprise/us/en/partners/microsoft-database-consolidation-solution.html

(By copy to DH2i, DxConsole will be on the short list. Just doing preliminary research now.)

chris webster SSCommitted Points: 1974 More actions · Answer 14

vedamaker (6/12/2013)
We are also considering Sanbolic. Can you elaborate on why Sanbolic has not worked well?
Thanks

Hi Vedamaker,

I am leading this project, and can say with some relief that we are about to start migrating 61 instances from our Polyserve cluster to our new SANBolic cluster. We have suffered a large number of delays to the project mainly due to issues with the product (some with our lack of understanding too) but I have to say that the support we have been given during this process has been excellent. We have been given dedicated support contacts and a constant stream of beta releases to fix issues we have been raising. Certainly much better HP!

I know this may scare a number of people away but one thing I would say is - 'Do a more intensive PoC than we did!' Ensure that you have a full suite of tests prepared beforehand and really kick the tyres before making your decision. Hopefully with the work we have done with SANBolic it will pass with flying colours.

I will try to update this forum when we hit milestones.

Cheers

carl.berglund SSC Enthusiast Points: 112 More actions · Answer 15

Hello all,

Just wanted to draw a couple comparisons. First and foremost we at DH2i are very much Sanbolic Melio fans. We supply all of Melio FS and volume manager with our product (everything but applcluster). That said DH2i is more akin to the PolyServe SQL server solution pack and provides InstanceMobility® and QoS are at the instance level. All aspects of SLA management, mobility, patching, provisioning is at the instance level. We also provide a very easy to use migration tool call dxtransfer.

Sanbolic appcluster is all done at the db level and leverages detach attach in order to achieve DB mobility.

So what does this mean and what are the implications? Well for one you have to keep a very close eye to all dependencies at the DB level, logins need to be consistent, you need to ensure jobs won’t fail if you move it, how about encryption and keys? replication jobs?

All the issues that come with traditional attach detach.

Imagine a physical host with say 6 instances on it and 50-100 DB's per instance? If that host fails how complex is that on a failover scenario?

BTW DH2i's DxConsole installs ontop of Melio in about a 10 second install per node.

Happy to address any questions.

Regards and happy computing!

Carl Berglund

Director Sales DH2i