How Complete is XenServer Really
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In my case I'm a SMB/Non-Profit, so as much as I would love to go SSD for the server, its a harder pitch for me when I'm barely able to get the drives I need (at least 10k) already. I've learned to not go splurge on new servers at all and to trust vendors who do refurbished with warranty and extended warranties so it helps to keep cost down. That alone helps me out tremendously.
Spending time with Dell and HP and explaining our use case has been helpful too. I have some awesome program I hope will help us lead to lower purchase cost for Dell servers but it was only available through Tech Soup and I haven't placed an order yet. If that pans out well, then yea I cna probably afford ssd's.
Case and point, I still manage our fleet of workstations individually. I'm JUST NOW able to an affordable imaging solution like Smart Deploy for the first time.
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I will say this, it's not been easy, having to plan and replan for this year, and the next possible 3-5 years along with the political climate (because if the government shuts down, hell we sometimes don't know if we are allowed to operate), its very very hard to mak e decisions sometimes without some harsh consequences. Sure, fear can be involved. If I get the wrong hardware, software, service, vendor etc, then that weakens "what appears" to be my leadership for the program even though it shouldn't get to that point. Sometimes I'm the last person to know ANYTHING and/or disconnected from other business units sometimes intentionally.
Sometimes the lesser of my two evils works out for my benefit, sometimes it doesn't.
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@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
In my case I'm a SMB/Non-Profit, so as much as I would love to go SSD for the server, its a harder pitch for me when I'm barely able to get the drives I need (at least 10k) already. I've learned to not go splurge on new servers at all and to trust vendors who do refurbished with warranty and extended warranties so it helps to keep cost down. That alone helps me out tremendously.
But you mentioned buying 15K HDDs. Price wise, the fewer SSDs will probably cost around the same total price as you'd need for the 15K in RAID 10.
@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
e expensive 15K drives and just go all SSD. You can drop RAID 10 and go RAID 5 at that size with SSD.
RAID5 and me won't ever be friends anymore. I had one RAID5 fail on me, its my current job. LoL. When I worked in Enterprise and our backup team had a RAID5 fail it took I believe close to a week to rebuild. Nah i'll pass
What size was your array on that RAID 5? @scottalanmiller has presented the math that shows that a single drive failure means a near 100% failure of the entire array at something around 12 TB. It's not until you get to around 3 TB that it maybe makes sense considering the failure domain.
With SSDs though, you don't suffer the same failure potential as with HDD, plus the performance improvements in SSD significantly reduce the resilver window, bringing RAID 5 back into the fold, but only for SSDs. -
Spending time with Dell and HP and explaining our use case has been helpful too. I have some awesome program I hope will help us lead to lower purchase cost for Dell servers but it was only available through Tech Soup and I haven't placed an order yet. If that pans out well, then yea I cna probably afford ssd's.
I can't believe that @scottalanmiller hasn't chime in on this one yet. This is classic letting your vendor (sales) person sell you stuff. You haven't bought anything yet, so that's good.
One thing these forums would love to see is people like yourself come here first.. post what your goals are and get the community to make suggests.
The other thing this community would like to see if you have faster needs is for you to HIRE an IT pro (consulting company) who doesn't sell anything and what you're paying them for is their opinion on what you should buy for your situation. This person/company should sit down with you and find out what your goals are and really lead you in what they consider is the best direction, with no names toward specific hardware/software purchase (where possible). Once you have an understanding of where you want to go and why it's good, then you can start looking at purchases that work toward that goal.It's amazing to see so many posts on SW where someone says - I just bought this server, it has 6 drives - how should I set them up? RAID 5/6/10, etc. The answer to this is - how did you determine you needed 6 drives and not 8? Why are you buying anything unless you already know exactly how you're going to set it up?
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@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
Case and point, I still manage our fleet of workstations individually. I'm JUST NOW able to an affordable imaging solution like Smart Deploy for the first time.
Imaging solution? I use the free Clonezilla. Deployed 110 Windows 10 machines in 3 weeks with it.
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@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
Case and point, I still manage our fleet of workstations individually. I'm JUST NOW able to an affordable imaging solution like Smart Deploy for the first time.
Imaging solution? I use the free Clonezilla. Deployed 110 Windows 10 machines in 3 weeks with it.
WDS or Fog are both free and could have been used as well.
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Of course with any imaging solution you need to be properly licensed if you're deploying Windows systems.
MAK keys provide you the right to do this.
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@coliver said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
Case and point, I still manage our fleet of workstations individually. I'm JUST NOW able to an affordable imaging solution like Smart Deploy for the first time.
Imaging solution? I use the free Clonezilla. Deployed 110 Windows 10 machines in 3 weeks with it.
WDS or Fog are both free and could have been used as well.
MDT is also around, our Desktop Admin is starting to play with that now. I think the overhead may be a bit much for someone with just a few dozen machines though.
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@DustinB3403 said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
MAK keys provide you the right to do this.
What?
Having a Volume License agreement for one copy of the OS that's being imaged grants you the rights to do this, MAK, KMS license keys are just a by-product of that.
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@Dashrender You can purchase a single key, and get VL, which includes the MAK key.
So by having a MAK key, you have VL'ing.
Simply put, purchase a MAK key, and you're good.
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At the time, using the native reinstaller / imaging tools was better than dealing with FOG for 20 different machine types. Don't get me wrong I have seen the power. After being shown Smart Deploy @ Spiceworld, I'm more in favor of their solution. Lot of my issues stem around political issues inside the office along with just people ignoring best practices, to do it their own way usually excluding IT.
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@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
From Spiceworks, I have had numerous people tell me to kinda back away from RAID1/10 with my consumer/prosumer SSD drives. Only because IT WILL wear those drives out faster.
That's totally false. I mean 100% made up. Why would someone make that up? That's so totally and completely made up, there isn't per drive write expansion on mirrored RAID.
The evil Spiceworks "make up lies to hurt people" culture rears its ugly head again. That's someone that is out to get you.
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@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
In my case I'm a SMB/Non-Profit, so as much as I would love to go SSD for the server, its a harder pitch for me when I'm barely able to get the drives I need (at least 10k) already. I've learned to not go splurge on new servers at all and to trust vendors who do refurbished with warranty and extended warranties so it helps to keep cost down. That alone helps me out tremendously.
Spending time with Dell and HP and explaining our use case has been helpful too. I have some awesome program I hope will help us lead to lower purchase cost for Dell servers but it was only available through Tech Soup and I haven't placed an order yet. If that pans out well, then yea I cna probably afford ssd's.
Case and point, I still manage our fleet of workstations individually. I'm JUST NOW able to an affordable imaging solution like Smart Deploy for the first time.
15K are generally too expensive, though. What storage need do you have that is driving you past NL-SAS (e.g. 7200RPM SAS) drives?
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@Dashrender said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
It's amazing to see so many posts on SW where someone says - I just bought this server, it has 6 drives - how should I set them up? RAID 5/6/10, etc. The answer to this is - how did you determine you needed 6 drives and not 8? Why are you buying anything unless you already know exactly how you're going to set it up?
I'm rubbing off!
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@DustinB3403 said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
Of course with any imaging solution you need to be properly licensed if you're deploying Windows systems.
MAK keys provide you the right to do this.
You only need one VL license to be covered.
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@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
At the time, using the native reinstaller / imaging tools was better than dealing with FOG for 20 different machine types. Don't get me wrong I have seen the power. After being shown Smart Deploy @ Spiceworld, I'm more in favor of their solution. Lot of my issues stem around political issues inside the office along with just people ignoring best practices, to do it their own way usually excluding IT.
Smart Deploy is a good product.
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Yea, I mean even today, as I was tasked with getting some new systems (got overridden for donation from local school) I still preach that whether your the owner or a manager, you shouldn't be purchasing things on your own especially software/hardware. They don't know what to look for other than what sales or their gut tells them. If you try to sit and explain things like requirements and processes then your told its too technical lol.
I'm sitting here enjoying my evening taking apart a craptacular 10 year old laptop to be told it needs to go in production...really, the price we about to pay for refurbing it cost more than me just outright buying a refurbished modern laptop.....politics
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@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
Yea, I mean even today, as I was tasked with getting some new systems (got overridden for donation from local school) I still preach that whether your the owner or a manager, you shouldn't be purchasing things on your own especially software/hardware. They don't know what to look for other than what sales or their gut tells them. If you try to sit and explain things like requirements and processes then your told its too technical lol.
I'm sitting here enjoying my evening taking apart a craptacular 10 year old laptop to be told it needs to go in production...really, the price we about to pay for refurbing it cost more than me just outright buying a refurbished modern laptop.....politics
Plus, you might get better performance out of the $300 walmart special.
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@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
If you try to sit and explain things like requirements and processes then your told its too technical lol.
Then don't you think it's even more important that I be involved if it's that technical?
Seriously, why do you have a job if it's not to steer the company in the best financial direction possible with regards to technology?
I hope you find another job soon, then on your exit interview you tell them that they should not have an IT person at all. They can save money by hiring consultants only when they need something because clearly they aren't using the IT resources they are paying for.
I'm also curious what your pay range at the company is? Perhaps you're not really the IT person, but instead you are a bench tech person. It definitely sounds more like they are treating you like a bench tech.
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@dafyre said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
@krisleslie said in How Complete is XenServer Really:
Yea, I mean even today, as I was tasked with getting some new systems (got overridden for donation from local school) I still preach that whether your the owner or a manager, you shouldn't be purchasing things on your own especially software/hardware. They don't know what to look for other than what sales or their gut tells them. If you try to sit and explain things like requirements and processes then your told its too technical lol.
I'm sitting here enjoying my evening taking apart a craptacular 10 year old laptop to be told it needs to go in production...really, the price we about to pay for refurbing it cost more than me just outright buying a refurbished modern laptop.....politics
Plus, you might get better performance out of the $300 walmart special.
If you don't need AD integration, those $300 Walmart specials might just be perfect!
