Reddit reviews APC AP7900 Rack PDU/Switched/1U/15A/100/120V Surge Protector

So starting from the ground up.

APC PDUs into two seperate circuits.

The cisco switch is the only device without redundant power. But again, it's only running IPMI which I can't make redudant anyway.

The 4 servers, 2 switches, and qnap are both each plugged into both PDUs.

I set up both Nutanix Clusters (3 node, 1 node). All the VMS on my 3 node are snapshotted and replicated to the 1 node cluster daily for 30 days and monthly for 72 months. Nutanix does not offer a way to export their VMS. No 3-2-1 rule for them.

I shut down a test VM on 3 node cluster and switched to the other 1 node cluster I was doing their data protection on. Hit restore and the vm came right back up on this 1 node cluster. pretty happy with that.

The VMS themselves back up their data daily to the QNAP using emcopy.exe. Qnap has backup software, I just haven't had time to get into it.

These clusters have been up and running for about 2 months. I finally copied all of the old data off the old servers and got them unplugged last night. That was a great feeling.

I am currently running 25 VMs (+3 controller vms). personal, friends, media, mysql, mssql, nginx, mongo, redis, domain controllers, dns, etc all adds up pretty quick. I am a developer by trade, so I have a lot of expermination and code all over the place.

Once pleasant suprise is that since most of my VMs are a clone and I am running the data dedupe, I am getting ~20:1 effeciency. I am only using around 2.5% of my logical data storage.

I refuse to do the exact math, but I am well over $8k into this.

So lets go back to my goals

no single point of failure.

Any cable can pulled and nothing turns off.

If any piece of hardware fails, all my vms continue running.



faster speed.

Nutanix has some voodoo. The VMs disk benchmark is faster than my NVME desktop.

Network copying gets 600mbps+ tends to slow down on transfers of serveral gbs. Needs to investigate more.



some sorta backup.

doing snap shots to secondary cluster.

nutanix allows file level restore from previous snapshots.

data copied to nas daily.

would like actual file level back up to nas eventually.

Since someone will ask. I am running between 4-5 amps on each APC.

Problems I have encountered:

Nutanix does not show the network cards in their web interface. They show up fine in the CLI?

2 Ram sticks were returning ECC errors. Used servers, this is a risk. Monitor your IMPI people!

Watchguard does not technically support Nutanix. So the manager shows a lot of warnings. Support said they are just warnings.

I somehow crashed a nutanix install on the satadom. Was able to get it re installed relatively quickly. requires a live cd to image the disk. I bought a 5th satadom to just have on hand.

No way to monitor the disk SMART info from nutanix that I have found yet.

Hardware List;

2x APC7900

https://www.amazon.com/APC-AP7900-Switched-Surge-Protector/dp/B0000AAAYH

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Cisco SG110-24

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01MDNHKQ4

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2x QUANTA LB6M 24-PORT 10GBE SFP+

https://www.unixplus.com/products/quanta-lb6m-24-port-10gbe-sfp-4x-1gbe-l2-l3-switch

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4x SUPERMICRO 1U X9DRI-LN4F+ SERVER

Dual E5-2650 V2, 128gb Ram (8x16gb)

https://unixsurplus.com/collections/1u-servers/products/supermicro-1u-x9drw-3ln4f-dual-intel-xeon-e5-2670-octo-core-2-6ghz-1u-server

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4x Intel X520-DA2 10Gbps SFP+

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833106044

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8x WD Blue 1tb SSD

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-NAND-1TB-SSD-WDS100T2B0A/dp/B073SBQMCX

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4x 16gb SATADOM

https://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-SSD-DM016-PHI-16GB-SATADOM/dp/B00NGBW5GM/

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6x WD RE 2tb spinny drives (Nutanix 3 node cluster) (pulled from last lab)

2x WD RE 4tb spinny drives (Nutanix 1 node cluster) (pulled from last lab)

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QNAP TS-432XU-RP-2G-US

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DWC85JH/

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4x WD 6tb Red Pro

https://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-Red-Hard-Drive/dp/B07B1HX5KN/

Maybe I missed that in the documentation (my last one was a G5), but how do you remotely reboot a frozen Xserve?

Also, you could always use a networked PDU

Well, $120 is better than $400, so I do appreciate the advice. I may get it.

You want a PDU like this. It allows you to power cycle devices over a network. Just about every modern server room has something similar.