@dbeato said in Goodbye hardware monitoring on HPE Gen10 and newer equipment running ESXi:

@dashrender However centrally managed doesn't mean site to site VPN. I don't get MSP that have site to site VPNs to their customers. It is not feasible to maintain, it is a high risk and very old school.

of course it doesn't.

using a tool like ScreenConnect - having all customer machines in a single account - means SC's hacked, then ever client is hacked...

@Dashrender said in Best practice security updates linux servers?:

saying Well - Johnny is just better employee than you, so I choose to pay him more, that isn't going to make people happy, it will likely make them less happy...

You are looking at it from the employer's perspective. Of course it doesn't help the employer. It helps the employee when they can see what X work is worth. If employee 1 makes X for a job, and employee 2 wants to know their own value, they have something to go on. If you don't know what others are paid you have almost nothing to go on.

Remember on Spiceworks when loads of people would claim that $65K was the IT industry cap? Imagine if people (and companies) were able to repeat that without anyone speaking up! People would surmise that if $65K is the top for a CIO, that a system admin must cap out at $50K and a helpdesk tech at $9/hr!

But in the real world, we know that CIOs make well into the seven figure range, admins can get well into the multiple six figures. Even good help desk leads can hit six figures. If we didn't have others to compare against, it's easy to see people misunderstanding the scope of the industry by an order of magnitude.

From her past posts, I'm assuming it's going to be something aligning with open compute and taking things like how Facebook designed their racks/servers into account.

Like here:

https://twitter.com/jessfraz/status/1106336080956018689?lang=en

@pmoncho said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:

Your more than welcome to dive into https://issurvivor.com/ and search his archives

His only mention of MSP is from Nov, 2000 when he discovered the term. And he talks about ASPs as well. I had started my first of both, over a hear before he heard the terms 🙂

https://issurvivor.com/2000/11/20/trend-overload-first-appeared-in-infoworld/

It really was a new term at the time. But he acts like the concept was new. It was very tried and true in the 1990s. It's an ancient article, just funny that in late 2000 he was thinking that MSPs were some hot, new thing, lol.

@wrx7m said in IOPS for SSD?:

@travisdh1 said in IOPS for SSD?:

@wrx7m said in IOPS for SSD?:

@Pete-S They dropped the price to 1061.24 since I posted. lol Interesting. Yes, but that is a max of 12 nvme. I may have misunderstood that option with 8 SAS/SATA. I am guessing that the max of 12 would allow for more SAS/SATA, although it doesn't mention it. My issue was also with the available drive capacities and cost per TB for spinning disks in the 2.5" spec.

Yeah, especially direct from the OEM. Have you thought about buying the storage from xByte instead?

Are their drives brand new? I did price out a server with specs as similar to Dell's as possible and it was only off by a couple grand.

IMHO, I consider their drives are 99.9% brand new as its possible an OEM install was done on the drive or something like that. Plus testing of the drive by the OEM and xByte.

Their hardware is manufacturer refurbished, not used. Big difference.

If you can get a Dell ProSupport (w/w-out) Plus 7 year warranty on the server with the drives from xByte, it doesn't really matter if they are new or not. They are under warranty for 7 years and you have no worries.

@Dashrender said in Planning for New ESXi Hosts - Which CPU Metrics Should I Use?:

@Pete-S said in Planning for New ESXi Hosts - Which CPU Metrics Should I Use?:

@wrx7m said in Planning for New ESXi Hosts - Which CPU Metrics Should I Use?:

@Pete-S said in Planning for New ESXi Hosts - Which CPU Metrics Should I Use?:

@wrx7m said in Planning for New ESXi Hosts - Which CPU Metrics Should I Use?:

@Pete-S They list both the 61xx and 62xx as options for the R740XD.

Good!

What CPUs do you have in the R720 today? 1 or 2 CPUs?

Do you want the new ones to be faster or just capable of running more VMs?

I have 2 x E5-2609 CPUs in each server. I would like faster, but more VMs would be the priority.

The E5-2609 CPUs are at the low end of what was available at the time so no problem there.

Actually, are you looking to keep the old servers around for testing and such?
In that case you could just drop in refurbished CPUs that are faster and/or has more cores for very little money. If the server can take E5-2600 V2 you can get up to 12 core CPUs.

yeah, but Windows licensing is an issue, assuming multiple CPUs... for a test server, not likely worth going over the 16 cores. Not to mention the test server might require licensing (if needed beyond the 90 day test period for something).

Two 8-cores would be an option. For instance two E5-2690. They are 2.9 GHz base frequency and have 8 cores. About $100 each when buying refurbished.

About 50% faster per core (2609 have no turbo) and about 3 times faster multicore performance. Has more cache and faster memory transfer speed. Was a very high end CPU at the time. Was listed at $2000 while the E5-2609 was $300.

The fastest 8-core E5-2600 V2 CPU is the E5-2667 V2. 8 cores and base frequency of 3.3 GHz. It will likely also be an option for the R720XD. V2 uses 22nm technology so uses less power with the same clock speed and can fit more cores or run higher frequencies.

@travisdh1 said in Underwater Servers in Your Future?:

@coliver said in Underwater Servers in Your Future?:

@travisdh1 said in Underwater Servers in Your Future?:

@coliver said in Underwater Servers in Your Future?:

@travisdh1 said in Underwater Servers in Your Future?:

@coliver said in Underwater Servers in Your Future?:

@Dashrender said in Underwater Servers in Your Future?:

@coliver said in Underwater Servers in Your Future?:

@SanWIN said in Underwater Servers in Your Future?:

@Dashrender Direct water cooling looks like more effective, taking into account that you have to burn (generate heat) something to produce an electricity to cool the hardware with the traditional air conditioning. But I do agree that it still could affect the nature.

Especially if you can couple this with offshore wind, solar, wave, or current generation systems.

This might be crazy thinking - But I wonder how much we are affecting our physical world by tapping energy directly out of it - i.e. taking heat energy from the planet, pulling energy from wind, from wave, etc. In writing that - I'm wondering if there might just be less thermal bleedoff? I know the planet gets a ton of energy from the sun, I'm pretty sure it's what powers most of our weather, so maybe it's a non issue?

It's mostly a non-issue. We're affecting it more with CO2 and other gases then we are through wind, solar, and geothermal.

CO2 is not the boogieman it's made out to be. There are lots of other reasons to prefer moving things to have less impact on the environment. I think it's that most people aren't capable of understanding those other reasons that a boogieman like CO2 is used, most people think they understand less=good more=bad.

There are whole bodies of research on why excessive amounts of CO2 and other greenhouse gases are bad for the environment and people living in those environments. It's not a new thing and knowledge of it has been around for decades...

The key word is excessive. Take a look at the historic CO2 values to get the idea.

Huh? Even past concentration didn't really hit the point where we are today. IIRC the highest (and climatically volatile period) was only ever ~300PPM CO2 at least from the measurements of ice cores. We're well into the 400PPM CO2... So I'm not sure what you mean by look historically.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/04/dr-vincent-gray-on-historical-carbon-dioxide-levels/

HAHAHAHAAAHAH

In New Zealand, he was the first Director of Building Research and later, Chief Chemist of the Coal Research Association.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_R._Gray

@scottalanmiller said in First Time Server Buy . . . Build. . .:

@wrcombs said in First Time Server Buy . . . Build. . .:

@scottalanmiller said in First Time Server Buy . . . Build. . .:

@wrcombs said in First Time Server Buy . . . Build. . .:

@tonyknobel said in First Time Server Buy . . . Build. . .:

@wrcombs Physical space -- how big do you want it?

Small enough to fit on my desk

No real server is going to fit there

Well around as small as possible.

A real server is the size of a desk and sounds like a jet engine.

Sounds wonderful.. Glad I have a basement! lol

Both of my R710s and my DL380 have 8 cores. The R710s were under $200 and the DL380 was like $230

Some folks are having a bad day. A real bad day.

@DustinB3403 said in CP - Dell vs HP server quotes:

I've received two quotes for new server hardware - one from our local reseller and one directly from Dell. As far as I can tell, the two quotes are identical spec-wise but the local reseller is almost $12k more expensive. Here are the two quotes:

Quote from Dell:
2x Dell PowerEdge R430 servers $6,665.60

2x Xeon E5-2630 v3 CPUs 2x 32 GB RDIMM Diskless configuration
1x Dell SCv2020 iSCSI SAN $10,303.26 14x Dell 1.2 TB SAS 12GB, 10k, 2.5" HD
1x Dell N2048 gigabit switch $1,693.49

TOTAL: $18,662.35

HP Quote from local reseller:
2x HP ProLiant DL360 servers $7,266.00

2x Xeon E5-2630 v3 CPUs 64 GB RAM (unknown configuration) Diskless configuration
1x HP MSA 2040 SAN $20,932.00 14x HP MSA 1.2 TB 10K SAS 2.5in drives includes $5,850 in labor so actual price
is only $15,082
1x Cisco Catalyst 2960-X gigabit switch $2,320.00

TOTAL: $30,518.00

Difference: $11,855.65

Is there any reason why I should choose the HP solution over the Dell solution? I will be running vSphere 6 on these servers. I'm not familiar with managing either server line so either way I'll be learning new management tools. When it comes to support I think I trust my local reseller more than Dell but $12k extra is hard to stomach just for that.

[Edit: CP Code M.]

Unless that OP is restricted to 1U hosts, I would go with the quote from Xbyte for Dell 730xd with same specs as in quotes is
0_1477764464719_upload-e7876862-aaf2-4c7d-9461-089a8141fab5

Multiply by 2, add Starwind's vSAN and a couple 10Gb NICs and he's done. Especially if only 2 hosts. Same(ish) price, way more reliability, better performance all around. I'd post that reco on SW but would likely get banned lol.

The one thing not mentioned is if there are other hosts connecting to the SAN.

@KOOLER said in The SMB Two Server Dilema, What to Do:

@whizzard said in The SMB Two Server Dilema, What to Do:

In scenarios such as these what would be the recommended backup approach: DAS, NAS, Backup Appliance, lower end server, removable disk storage, tapes (intentionally left out cloud)?

Should be separate (physically!) entity non-related to your production cluster. Cheap NAS is OK.

For the average scenario (and I really just mean average) it's Synology or ReadyNAS that I recommend. Easy, supported, cost effective, desktop or rackmount options, well known, good brands, nice features.

Getting lots of eyes on this thread today. Very interesting.

CloudAtCost has completely revoked their "free for life" products that people have already paid for in full and is now simply charging for them - even ones that customers already own. Customers are now being extorted to pay annually for something they were sold specifically so that they would not have to pay for in this way. The service is no longer a scam on the technical level, it is now a full scam on the billing and marketing level as well.

https://mangolassi.it/topic/14009/cloudatcost-turning-to-extortion

The R820 is a very cool unit. So many cores and so much memory. Perfect for massive Linux and FreeBSD systems.