@scottalanmiller said in New Infrastructure to Replace Scale Cluster:

So if a VM dies, oVirt will provide non-FT failover, yes. And by having failover you might achieve HA. And oVirt is a critical part of making that possible. But it itself isn't HA, nor does it guarantee HA. It's just a failover component that you can use to "do" HA.

It's a component you buy (well, this one is opensource, but still), part of a solution that would cover other potential failure points. The solution in general is also something you can buy, in order to achieve a certain level of HA for those VMs

@dims said in Is the 3-2-1 rule antiquated?:

the majority of the previous cases of implementing such solutions indicates that the most popular would be the one where the data would first be replicated between 2 hosts, on site and one off prem.

Yes, because normally that is insant, you'd not want to wait for the WAN copy before making the local one.

ComputerWeekly talks about how the mainframe (circa 1960) was the first hyperconverged design...

http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Tips-for-buying-hyper-converged-systems

@ChrisL said in SMB, Hyperconvergence and Colocation:

How much do you think the "buzz" around the cloud plays into adoption from an SMB?

It's huge. So many places go to cloud computing and have no idea what they are buying.

@Dashrender said in Ease of the "Cloud", Without the "Cloud":

It surprises me that the costs could be lower. I would expect the economy of scale and lack of local IT support (or MSP/ITSP) requirements I would be allow prices to be driven lower. Of course you didn't say it would be lower, just said "often for much less cost."

Scale is what makes it viable at all. Elastic scalability is an insanely expensive feature to deliver. And neither solution requires a local MSP/ITSP, that's part of the comparison. These are "plug and play" level products. But in reality, using a service like Amazon where the scale is really good you run into a heavy technical barrier to use that HC does not have (normally.) So if anything, cloud makes you have more ITSP requirements compared to HC. Cloud has a lot of hidden costs that HC does not have.

@Dashrender said in Replacing the Dead IPOD, SAN Bit the Dust:

@scottalanmiller said in Replacing the Dead IPOD, SAN Bit the Dust:

Also the needs of a SAN are different than the needs of a LAN. So you likely want different switches. I'd love Netgear Prosafe unmanaged on my SAN but would generally prefer Ubiquiti EdgeSwitches on my LAN.

Any opinion on Unifi Switches yet?

We use one in the lab and it's been great, but we aren't pushing its limits or anything.

@StuartJordan said in Scott Alan Miller: SMB System Architectural Patterns:

I watched your Storage 101 video, that was very good Scott.

Thanks :)

Added: https://mangolassi.it/topic/9796/how-reliable-is-your-server

@Dashrender said:

Most storage devices in this range also lack the support options that enterprise servers do.

This sentence is the third italicized block of text seems odd.

Fixed, thanks.

@Ambarishrh said:

was wondering the same, they could move all the Linux and save quite a lot of cost

They are "all in" on MS technologies. I followed them when they were building the system. Their sponsor is a 100% MS devotee (he's the father of VBA, for that matter) and there is no way that they would consider something based on logic. They were the pioneer user of the .NET MVC system and everything they have done is based on total lock in to MS, which has its advantages. But overall, they are using costly, slow components to do work. I'm sure that it works pretty well, but as good as it could? No way.

We've seen other communities like that make odd technology decisions leaving them locked in to old schemes and costing a fortune to do what is cheap with modern design choices.

@LAH3385 might be good to start a thread and try to determine what your needs are before going down the path of technology. By the time you were asking this question, you were already in pretty deep assuming certain products, product categories and platform HA. We should start with a business needs analysis, use that to set goals and then use the goals to select technology approaches.

@Obsolesce said in Making the Most of Your Inverted Pyramid of Doom:

@scottalanmiller said in Making the Most of Your Inverted Pyramid of Doom:

Peer-reviewed my behind… This post represents a complete and total spew of utter garbage. Really??? Emotional reactions to “the problem”?? “An IPOD”?? Even suggesting (though not “our best option” dumping all your brand new equipment and moving to a single host?? Please focus on removing your introspective nears and pathetic sarcasm to a minimum. You couldn’t smell the manure stink more had you forcefully shoved your head inside an elephants rear end…. Do the world of Actual IT Professionals a favor and take your biased disinformation to a place where no-one else can be poorly and deceitfully guided by it.
Sincerely,
– The World of Truth and Reason

Emotional reactions such as this guys whole post... nothing but emotion, zero rationale.

It sounds like someone wasted a million dollars of company money and is trying discredit reality.

It's called "reverse rationalization" in psychology context. Humans want to believe that we are rational, logical creatures. But most of our decisions are emotionally based and made faster than we can rationalize them. Then, when our decisions are questioned, we go back and our brains try to remember there being logic that we used to make the decision. If there is logic, we recall that logic. When there isn't logic, our brain freaks out and either constructs false logic to make it seem rational, but that often makes it seem even more crazy to outsiders looking at us spouting gibberish. And if our own brains realize the gibberish or this is pointed out, it can actually trigger the fight or flight response when all logic shuts down and we just panic.

@hobbit666 said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

Might be suggesting a 3rd party review of the solution so look out for an E-mail NTG :D

@Minion-Queen waits with baited breath.

Just realized that this topic actually was missing the tags! Ugh, no wonder if rarely comes up in searches. Fixed, finally.

I have three servers, though two would be fine. I don't have what I understand as a "reliable failover system" or anything close to it, but if one server is down I am in a position to provide a degraded or limited service using the other server(s) which is generally enough to keep users happy and the business ticking over. It's in no way automated or anything like high availability, but it gives me options and in a crisis I like to have as many options as I can. The cost isn't anywhere near double, since you're not doubling up on disks or memory or CPU by spreading the load across two boxes.