I don't know how Starwind vSAN can be run but if it's on a hypervisor it's severely limited by I/O congestion through the kernel. NVMe drives is causing problems that was of no concern whatsoever with spinners. Both KVM and Xen has made a lot of work to limit their I/O latency and use polling techniques now but it's still a problem. That's why you really need SR-IOV on NVMe drives so any VM can bypass the hypervisor and just have it's own kernel to slow things down. Anton: There are no problems with polling these days You normally spawn a SPDK-enabled VM (Linux is unbeatable here as most of the new gen I/O development happens there) and pass thru RDMA-capable network hardware (virtual function with SR-IOV or whole card with PCIe pass-thru, this is really irrelevant...) and NMVe drives and... magic starts happening This is how our NVMe-oF target works on ESXi & Hyper-V (KVM & Xen have no benefits here architecturally, this is where you're either wrong or I failed to get your arguments). It's possible to port SPDK into Windows user-mode but lack of NVMe and NIC polling drivers takes away all the fun: to move the same amount of data we normally use ~4x more CPU horsepower on "Pure Windows" Vs. "Linux-SPDK-VM-on-Windows" models. Microsoft is trying to bring SPDK to Windows kernel (so does VMware from what I know), but it needs a lot of work from NIC and NVMe engineers and... nobody wants to contribute. Really. Just my $0.02

@scottalanmiller said in Dell MD1220 RAID 5 Rebuild Question: @Jimmy9008 said in Dell MD1220 RAID 5 Rebuild Question: @scottalanmiller said in Dell MD1220 RAID 5 Rebuild Question: @travisdh1 said in Dell MD1220 RAID 5 Rebuild Question: That makes a little more sense. They've negotiated a deal with Microsoft from the sounds of it. No, way, way more likely they just figured out how hard it is to get caught. I totally doubt anything like that is going on here. I have been told our annual budget for licensing which we pay is in the region of £600,000. Either way, not my problem Wow. But, sounds like only that high because they don't know what they are using, lol. The only way to get licensing truly down is to know what you use. Someone is both ignoring what is used, but also encouraging unlimited use. Both things set MS up to just keep making it more and more expensive. It's a trick, sounds easy, but makes one lazy licensing person encourage not keeping licensing lean - basically giving Microsoft the power to charge anything that they want down the road. Yeah, not your problem, but definitely a symptom of management issues and a lack of clear thinking. If they are truly paying their bills, my guess is a licensing "specialist" who has created their own job and knows if MS isn't used heavily, their job would go away, so is doing stuff to encourage you to lock in MS so that that specialist can't be eliminated. Basically creating their own job. Yeah, I don't disagree with anything you said. It's just not my issue. I still get to buy shiny new toys

@jblaze said in Latency with VDI in VMware View 7 environment: I'm new to VDIs so not entirely sure if I'm asking the right questions. The server is hosted externally by our MSP and they're trying to determine what the cause is. That it is external alone is almost certainly the problem. VDI can work remotely, but is often relatively painful. Also, be aware, while there is some extreme edge cases where you can do hosted VDI, this has traditionally not been allowed and unless your MSP has figured out some extremely new and rare licensing with Microsoft, those VDIs aren't legal.

@carnival-boy said in MSP or VAR or just avoid: For an MSP to be truly agnostic it would either have to massive (to be able to employ both Oracle and SQL Server experts), or it is full of generalists who can support both but lack expertise in either. That's part of the goal, or typical goals, of moving to the MSP model. They bring more scale and with scale comes agnosticism (the move towards it, but obtaining it as you pointed out.) You might not have expertise or experience with every OS out there, but even a moderately small MSP like NTG regularly supports and works with many databases. Not Oracle, which isn't a big deal as it has essentially no place in any intentional deployment, but MS SQL Server, MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, REDIS, MongoDB, SQLite, etc. all regularly supported. MSPs are way more likely to have the desire and ability to grow support skill sets, although this can happen internally as well. But internal skill growth is costly and risky to maintain. For an MSP, skill growth increases potential customer support options. So MSPs have more incentive to consider things they've not done specifically before than internal IT departments do. Nothing is perfect, but MSPs make agnosticism easier and more likely.

@aaronstuder said in Storage and Data Locality: @stacksofplates Wow, rsnapshot looks good. It's a very good.

Have you installed CMC? It should find it by scanning the subnet.

@Breffni-Potter said in HPE SANs Not Designed for Reliability in the Australian Tax Office: Listening to any vendor consulting will lead to a p*** poor system but for the vendors profit. Yeah, they brought in the wrong people here. Fundamental business flaws. Listening to the sales people instead of hiring someone whose job it is to know what is needed.

@JaredBusch said in OpenSSL CSR with Subject Alternative Name: @EddieJennings said in OpenSSL CSR with Subject Alternative Name: @JaredBusch Correct. The "ye olde way" is how I've typically made a CSR and private key. The link I included talks about making a configuration file, which allows you to include SAN in your CSR. Ah, did not read the link. Yes, using a config file is the only method to get any SAN on a cert with OpenSSL. And after re-reading my post, I realized how terrible it was :(. I was hoping to find a one liner kind of thing, but alas. That particular article made it clear how to do it.

As long as you don't delete all my datas because my online account has issues!

@scottalanmiller said in FreeNAS Gets Hit by the Jurassic Park Effect: HCL Yes, agreed!

@jt1001001 said in New StarWind Virtual SAN Free - All restrictions removed!: In case you didn't see, the webinar is now up on their site: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free-all-restrictions-removed THanks

@Reid-Cooper said in HPE Acquires Nimble: This will really lower competition in the SAN space. Only a few viable vendors left. Nimble was one of the few major players. I disagree. What about Tintri, Kaminario, or Tegile? There are still plenty of vendors out there in Nimble's competitive tier. I mean they don't compare to HDS or IBM but again, Nimble is a completely different use case. Honestly I think it would have made more sense for HPE to acquire Tintri for their portfolio at a reasonable price. Nimble is awesome for its own use case, but the acquisition seemed to be just one of appeasement to shareholders. Unless they are shifting gears and trying to get more competitive in small-medium markets as an all around vendor (aside from adding Nimble, thinking of them purchasing Aruba a couple years ago as well).

@Danp said in XenServer 6.2 servers down. I have no Xen skill. Most likely networking? Help!: @Dashrender said in XenServer 6.2 servers down. I have no Xen skill. Most likely networking? Help!: The only cost here would be the drive. Clonezilla is free, the use of the PC is free (of course that user is not ideal, so I guess there is cost there ) The owner is currently out of the country... use his desktop! If AD works. Lol

@scottalanmiller And Starwind ships their ready nodes armed with RAID https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance so i think they still keep doing RAID and i am sure it is for a reason some of them I've mentioned above.

@scottalanmiller said in SAN Products Short List: @BBigford and @zuphzuph were asking about this and I figured we should talk about it here. If you are shopping for a SAN, what is your vendor short list? How does PureStorage fit into all of this?

@travisdh1 said in iSCSI port w/Windows iSCSI initiator dropping: @art_of_shred said in iSCSI port w/Windows iSCSI initiator dropping: Is Free-NAS ever a good idea? I've only ever heard nasty things said about it. Only if you know nothing about building and managing storage is it going to serve a purpose. BSD or Solaris without the added bits would be the preferred route to use ZFS. And if you don't know those bits, you should not be running a SAN.

@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.

@JaredBusch said in Scott Alan Miller: Storage 101: @scottalanmiller said in Scott Alan Miller: Storage 101: @s.hackleman said in Scott Alan Miller: Storage 101: I didn't get to make it up, but I have been watching the sessions and burning up my data plan. Thanks for posting these. I also wanted to take a minute to call out the guy sitting front and center to just surf the internet the entire time SAM is talking. I didn't even notice that, I'm going to look for it now. In the red? That is @DustinB3403 Ha no it is not!

It goes to 11, so it must be better than the ones that only go to 10. . . . . . . Sorry, can't help myself sometimes.

@Romo said in Installing a Starwind SAN on Windows Server 2012 R2: @FATeknollogee said in Installing a Starwind SAN on Windows Server 2012 R2: Paging @KOOLER Will the performance of the appliances be as good or better than the native windows install? It must be at least as good, why release an inferior product. Nissan has GT-R cracking 0-100 in sub 3 seconds but it doesn't mean Nissan Altima doing same 0-100 in low 10s suck Every product has own target niche.

@thwr said in iscsi target Path configuration: @scottalanmiller said in iscsi target Path configuration: Last system I checked LVM and mapper were equal symlinks pointing to the same thing. I checked it because I was documenting on CentOS. Still interesting. Device mapper is just that, a mapper pointing to LVM (and LUKS) devices for example. So your mapper and LVM are both pointing to something "physical" like md devices or sd*? Both pointing to the dm device, which is another layer of mapping.

@dafyre said in Linux: The Role of DRBD: @scottalanmiller said in Linux: The Role of DRBD: I added a header into the main topic list for that. But it is going to be later in the Advanced Topics, section. Oddly, I know of pretty much no standard Linux Administration tomes that cover DRBD. It's so core, very odd that it so often gets missed. Could it be that most Linux Admin's don't know about it until they go searching for it? ...That's how I found out about it. You would hope that the people writing the books would know, though!

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

I think describing the heads as moving in and out is more appropriate since they're mounted on an armature, like a record player, and not forward or backward. I often use record players as a description for clients when they ask how drives work. In my writing, I try to avoid use 'but' and things like it (however, etc.). Replace the word 'but' with 'and' as an exercise to see how it changes your readers' perception. You've got a couple sentences that are like Yoda. Eg, by doing this, and it's unnecessary. Similary, the logical volume... You missed a comma. The same occurs in drive impressions, the stack. A good article, and a great way to open discussion on SANs and how volumes, drives and RAID presentations can be partitioned or utilized efficiently.