Fourteen Physical Servers for an SMB
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I did a double take when I originally read that but I assumed he actually meant 14 virtual servers.
He mentioned physical and that they were running a mix of Hyper-V and VMware ESXi. So I am relatively confident that he did not mean VMs.
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A lot of these problems would be solved if only the world started excepting "IT Generalist" as a valid job title.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Easy test: have you ever seen one of your servers in person? Good chance you aren't a full time SA
True we have people for that they rack them and replace HW. I have seen mine but it's rare. Same thing for the Datacenter UPS and HVAC we have people for that.
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I forked the career and title discussion into its own thread.
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In the SMB environment most hiring managers don't know the difference between IT Generalist and IT Admin. I'd be willing to bet the assumption would be
IT Generalist = someone who can support desktops
IT Admin = someone who can support serversIn the enterprise, sure they might, would probably know the difference, but SMB? you really think they do?
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Two posts while I was forking. Sadly it doesn't let me port those over after the fork is made.
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A big part of why there are 14 servers is due in part to mindset. Before I came on board, the person running this coach was a big physical server advocate. Virtualization was inferior to dedicated hardware, especially for SQL. When the need for a new process came up, a box was procured and racked up. Some of these were 16gb ram 1TB array setups. (This was not my thinking)
It has taken me a little while to prove the benefits of virtualization.
After moving some of the server roles from p2v and getting them on a bigger host, it was decided that maybe we should have some sort of redundancy, so a replica server seemed the easiest way to go.
A big problem now is sprawl and how a couple of these boxes are running independent domains for different applications. My initial goal was to consolidate the in house vms and use remaining hardware for a possible SOFS storage build. Part of what keeps me from digging in is having to put out fires with clients or other areas.
Also, 2 of these hosts are mostly dedicated to virtual desktops for a client, which is why the total number of guests is at 84.
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What kind of company are you, if you don't mind me asking?
MSP? Consultant? Service provider, etc?
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So you have no budget to make changes, What's the goal here?
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@Dashrender said:
So you have no budget to make changes, What's the goal here?
His goal was career growth and experience. I brought the SAN or storage consolidation up as a means to improve the environment, shake up the status quo and get experience in a totally new area through potentially improving the environment.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So you have no budget to make changes, What's the goal here?
His goal was career growth and experience. I brought the SAN or storage consolidation up as a means to improve the environment, shake up the status quo and get experience in a totally new area through potentially improving the environment.
Awww yes, that's right. Considering there is no budget according to Mfd, I'm not really sure what can be done.
Mfd - Perhaps you can have @NTG or Dell run a DPack for you so you can get a good idea of where you stand today. Perhaps you can do some consolidation now within your current confines.
