Never Let the Vendor Set Up a Server
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@MattSpeller said:
When was the last time you installed a bare metal OS? The updates alone, good grief. Granted you can do other stuff while it grinds, but.... ughh wasted time.
Long time, since that's a no no. Why are you installing a bare metal OS? I think this is one of those "one lack of best practice cascades to another" situations. Fix the bare metal install, suddenly the best practice of never let someone outside IT set up the server makes sense. Best practices in a vacuum rarely make sense.
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@MattSpeller said:
Several hours of company time that could be better used for surfing the web and chatting on ML
But if it taking over fifteen minutes, maybe fixing that process would be best
Even a bare metal OS deploy should be pretty fast. I do OS deploys to VMs all of the time. Install itself takes seconds and the setup of it is a single script. I can do my entire portion from soup to nuts in about two to three minutes. Including setting up authentication, all patches, updates, security configuration, adding the system to monitoring and a final reboot.
Is your vendor doing that kind of stuff? If not, it seems like you are optimizing processes in different places. Put that all together and you might find that whole portions of your process need not exist at all.
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For those who let vendors do basic setups....
- How and when is RAID selection made?
- Is the BIOS being updated?
- Is the firmware of the RAID controller being patched?
- Is the OOB being setup so that it just works when you plug it in?
- Are RAID cache balances being set?
- Is someone considering block and stripe sizes?
- For vendors like LSI (PERC, Dell, etc.) how do you deal with the RAID 100 configurations as they don't allow you to specify this?
- How are OS partitions, filesystems, and other install time settings being determined?
- Is networking set up for the OS, OOB, HV, etc. before it arrives?
- Who is dealing with making copies of physical boot media like SDs and USB?
- Is someone setting simple stuff in the BIOS like ID fields?
- Who is setting up things like authentication?
- How are custom packages being applied (GPO, script, etc.?)
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@scottalanmiller said:
Even a bare metal OS deploy should be pretty fast.
Should be, but isn't - go grab yourself a DVD and have at it lol
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?? I don't have ready to go OS images? No, no I don't because managing a small server fleet where I believe we have only 2? of the same model makes that slightly impractical
Yeah, maybe I could spend some time and make hardware agnostic sexy little deploys pre-loaded with updates and software and all the good stuff. Doubt it'd be a good use of the company's time, though I'd enjoy learning more about it.Again, for your scale, I completely agree with you - it'd be pretty stupid not to do your own from the ground up. For SMB (emphasis on S I suppose) it makes a ton of sense and saves quite a bit of time to have them do the brain-dead basics for me. It's been a while since I did one but I recall it taking more than half a day between raw install, drivers & downloading / installing updates.
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@MattSpeller said:
No, no I don't because managing a small server fleet where I believe we have only 2?
Again, only because you are installing physically. Once you install to a hypervisor, the abstraction layer means that you install the same OS, repeatably, every time. Best practices are best practices for a reason. Often the big benefits are in areas we never talk about because they are such clear wins that no one talks about those key benefits anymore.
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@MattSpeller said:
Yeah, maybe I could spend some time and make hardware agnostic sexy little deploys pre-loaded with updates and software and all the good stuff. Doubt it'd be a good use of the company's time, though I'd enjoy learning more about it.
How could it be a waste of time? It must save time by the second deployment at the kind of time that it is taking for you to do deploys. It might actually save time on the very first deployment, although that is unlikely.
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@MattSpeller said:
Again, for your scale, I completely agree with you....
Again, I do all sizes. I would do this 100% of the time for a company of a single machine or even for home use. I don't see scale as being a factor. Good practices cost less to implement in small environments. The impact of little mistakes is often magnified, though. It's trivial at scale to move workloads around to fix hardware configuration errors. Not so much in the SMB. And if you are putting OSes on bare metal, magnified many times again.
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@MattSpeller said:
For SMB (emphasis on S I suppose) it makes a ton of sense and saves quite a bit of time to have them do the brain-dead basics for me. It's been a while since I did one but I recall it taking more than half a day between raw install, drivers & downloading / installing updates.
But if you don't create the need for time savings, you can save time and get the protection.
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Why the hell would he waste timeless bing how to script a server install he is going to do twice? The next time he installs a server it will be a different OS and he would have to take all the time to update the script for negligible benefit. There is also the poor here that as you need to know your hardware is configure right, you also need to know how to setup ye IS correctly manually before you can correctly write a script. That cuts into the savings even more.
You are completely missing the point on that Scott.
It has nothing to do with being bare metal or virtual. It ha to do with quantity.
I do happen to agree that you should always configure the bare metal yourself though. That is a different subject than scripting the server installs.
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@JaredBusch said:
Why the hell would he waste timeless bing how to script a server install he is going to do twice?
He shouldn't, but how is he getting the vendor to do this if he isn't providing that script (human instruction list) to them? If there is time to be saved, you can save it in either place.
And my scripting was definitely easy enough that it was worth it for two boxes. Any additional ones or rebuilds.... those are freebies.
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@JaredBusch said:
There is also the poor here that as you need to know your hardware is configure right, you also need to know how to setup ye IS correctly manually before you can correctly write a script. That cuts into the savings even more.
That's fine, but you need that before telling the vendor what to do, right? And you need to know that stuff for documentation, decision making, being prepared, etc.
My point here is not that everything should be scripted, I'm offering that as a way to fix issues that he seems to be having that he feels is making him have to have someone else do manual work that only takes a few minutes of manual effort (even updates take no human time, just lots of download time and mostly only if things like WSUS are not set up) but that having the vendor do these things is not reliably safe or effective. The scripting is ancillary.
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@JaredBusch said:
It has nothing to do with being bare metal or virtual. It ha to do with quantity.
It should not. If I'm doing an install of one server or a million, I still want virtualization for reliability and safety, portability, stability and speed of installs, changes, etc. And the more that I rely completely on a single piece of hardware, the more that I need to be concerned that the hardware and HV/OS are set up correctly, right? Because the smaller that your environment is, the bigger the impact of a problem like that.
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@JaredBusch said:
I do happen to agree that you should always configure the bare metal yourself though. That is a different subject than scripting the server installs.
Absolutely, completely different things. He was having additional issues that were leading him to feel he could not afford to do an install that, even as a one off, should be trivial effort. I was trying to fix that for what felt like a large scale problem.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't see why just because a company also sells hardware as well as services, they have to be a reseller.
Because that's what the word means. This is just basic English and has nothing to do with IT or the industry or vendor relationships. The word reseller is simply the term for someone who resells stuff.
O rly? I'll bow down before your greater knowledge of "basic English" then. Pretty much all companies are resellers then because most service providers (I guess NTG is the exception to the rule) will at some point sell some kind of product to go with their services. My company doesn't call itself a reseller but we sell a small amount of ducting to go with the heaters we manufacture and install.
Anyway, let me clear then, I outsource some of my IT work to my reseller. I assume you are ok with this?
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This has generated a lot of replies which has been interesting to read.
@Carnival-Boy - Let me explain a conversation between you and a reseller versus a consultancy company.
CB: Hi I'm looking to buy a new server
Reseller: Well we'd recommend the Dell FI"(SJK, fantastic performance, brilliant features.
CB: Hmm, well, I was thinking of something from HP?
Reseller: Oh no no no, you don't want HP, Dell is the best because reasons.
CB: Will it do everything I need?
Reseller: Certainly!CB: Hi, I'm looking to buy a new server
Consultant: Great, what do you need it for?
CB: File storage, email, active directory
Consultant: Ok let's talk about that and then we'll find you the right solution.Now this is a bit blunt, but this is how the conversation plays out most of the time. The key factor to look at with a consultant is, are they offering to "supply" you the server, or are they researching and helping you choose from another supplier?
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And you do have a fair bit of choice in the UK for non resellers, we're a minority bunch but we are out there. It's just so much easier to make a margin on desktops, servers, switches, anything really that many businesses set themselves up around that idea as a profit centre.
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@Breffni-Potter, OK, but according to @scottalanmiller the consultant is also a reseller if he sells the server as well the service. What do you do? Do you sell any product?
Let me explain the actual conversation between me and the "reseller"
CB: Hi I want a Proliant DL380, 1TB storage in RAID10. Give me a few options regarding disk size and type, processor etc and I'll pick the bundle I want. I need the server racking up, the RAID array configuring and ESXi 5.5 installing. Please quote for supply of server plus engineering time for the install.
Reseller: OK, here you go.
CB: OK, I've a few technical queries and I'm not quite sure which SAS Expander Card I need as the HP Quickspecs aren't too clear.
Reseller: OK, I've forwarded those queries to HP and this is what they've come back with.
CB: OK, here's the order.The reseller has no idea what I need this server for. The reseller does sell Dell, but I've been buying HP exclusively for about 15 years now, so I'm not going to consider anything else.
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I generally prefer to get the services and the hardware from the same place because otherwise if you get the service company on-site and it transpires that the hardware is faulty you could end-up paying twice to get the service company back in after replacement hardware has arrived. I like to know that whatever goes wrong there is only one company to blame and one company involved in fixing it.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Breffni-Potter, OK, but according to @scottalanmiller the consultant is also a reseller if he sells the server as well the service. What do you do? Do you sell any product?
We'll help you research and choose the product, and give you a list of vendors who are good vendors Or we will have the conversation when ordering from a vendor, we'll act as your agent, the vendor invoices you directly.
Do you want us to be your supplier so you have one company to deal with? Yes we can do that but it's not free when purchasing product, it's a service you pay for.
@Carnival-Boy said:
I like to know that whatever goes wrong there is only one company to blame and one company involved in fixing it.
Yes...But that is also a problem. Lumping all your eggs in one basket. Might be better for another topic.
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@Breffni-Potter said:
It's just so much easier to make a margin on desktops, servers, switches, anything really that many businesses set themselves up around that idea as a profit centre.
Really? I'm surprised. I didn't think there was much margin at all on hardware these days. I buy most of my hardware from Softcat or Misco and my IT services guy often claims that I'm getting stuff at a lower price than he can buy trade (though I'll accept that he may be bullshitting me :))
Having said that, I once got a quote for HP workstations from my Autodesk guy and the prices were obscene, so I guess he may have customers out there who are happy to buy at his enormous mark-up.
