@NetworkNerd said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@NetworkNerd said:

Again, we would only do this if business needs require it. But my question is more centered around how people get the gear to fully test out VSAN and do a proof of concept before they deploy it?

Bigger companies that care about testing maintain labs with lots of hardware to test this stuff. That's the price paid for all kinds of necessary testing.

And I am certain their internal IT is much larger than our 4-person team.

With a small team you are stuck leveraging: reviews, logic, anecdotal evidence, vendor reputation and guesswork. Just the nature of being small. Leverage what the big boys do, applying logic as to when what they do matters only at their scale rather than at yours. The way that SMBs compete is by not doing all of the expensive lab work and trusting the work of others. The way that enterprises compete is by doing their own research better than someone else does it and getting a technical advantage.

One is about blazing new ground, the other is about running agile and low cost.

@NetworkNerd said:

@DenisKelley said:

VeeamOne Free is also a really nice utility to look at what's going on in your VMWare environment. Plus, it's pretty friendly.

http://www.veeam.com/virtual-server-management-one-free.html

Are you running it on the same server as your Veeam B & R install or on a different server?

Same server. It's on a VM that also runs Spiceworks, WSUS, and PDQDeploy. Lot's of good graphs. I'm using the "paid" version, but the free looks like it has many of the same features.
Capture.JPG

@scottalanmiller said:

It may not be empty. Depends on the filesystem and what has happened. Just because the pointers to those files are gone doesn't mean that the bits have been erased. You could zero out the empty space.... but be careful or that will expand the VMDK to full size.

That is what I did, but I knew there was enough space for the entire disk to expand out.

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@Dashrender said:

Why should I do it more often than that? Linux boxes have been known to go years without rebooting.

Because it provides for safety and reliability. Just because machines CAN go without rebooting doesn't make it a good idea. And reboots are not to make systems run better, they are to protect against the unability to reboot when things are critical. No amount of "systems can run for years without a reboot" matters because that's not related to why we reboot.

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2011/02/why-we-reboot-servers/

@PackMatt73 said:

@thanksajdotcom GREAT to hear! I'll keep you in the loop if there is more stuff like that

Awesome, thanks!

Ok, I was able to get it. I had to reboot the VM, despite I had just rebooted it, and refresh the page. Oh well...

@JaredBusch
Yeah, when you name your server OS's with the same words - but in a different order, it makes searching quite difficult. SEO nightmare.

@scottalanmiller said in VMware Sued Over Unlicensed Use of Linux Kernel Code:

@thwr said in VMware Sued Over Unlicensed Use of Linux Kernel Code:

It looks a little bit like that. Anyway, we don't have anything like your fines and settlement deals here.

VMware seems pretty unconcerned about having used Linux code and violating the GPL in Germany, though.

Too big to care.

Very cool!

That's awesome that there is more variety and ability to focus more. I agree, DC would be the best in general, Cloud probably the second most general. Network and Desktop seem far more focused and likely to be used in less general career options.

@Reid-Cooper said:

If you do not want your VMware host to reach the Internet or any other subnet, you could also not give it a default gateway thus blocking it from communicating over any router automatically.

It's the computer I didn't want to reach the internet. However, I wanted the VMware to be alble to. I've, since then, achieved that mission.

Awesome!

@NetworkNerd said:

If you want to know more about vSphere 6 or VSAN, there are lots of tasks in CloudCred related to them. Oh yeah, and our team is not very active these days.

Probably because VMware isn't as exciting as it used to be 4-6 months ago. I'm curious what new Hyper-V improvements will be in Windows Server 10 (although apparently it's just going to be called "windows server", no version)

@NetworkNerd the p2v for this is nice... just remember to check off a box if you're looking to use hyper-v on 2012... The downside though is that you might get a bloated VM because you can't move some of the blocks from the end of the vm to the front. Had that happen to me on one drive that was a 160gb vm using only 40gb. used the tool and was left with a 120gb vm... turned out that there were 'unmovable files' at the end of the vm image...

@scottalanmiller said:

vCloud is a product that you buy, it's not a service. VMware has a cloud service, but that isn't it. This is for on premises clouds. Amazon and Rackspace are hosted products only. Rackspace's on premises name would be OpenStack.

I would definitely not choose them. [VMware] Small time. Amazon is the top player for a reason. Rackspace is by far the best for the SMB market. And I mean by far.

The reason to use VMware's public cloud is so that you can transparently move workloads from a local VMware cloud to the public one. Not really a great idea anyway, this means you've not understood cloud and screwed up already.

Thanks, that clears that up.

This is for trading systems. It is not for anything that a normal SMB or even a normal enterprise would face. This is very specialized. Normal workloads need throughput optimization not latency optimization. So this would be the opposite of what you would want.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Understood, but you can grow/shrink partitions in VMWare as well

No partitions here. We are talking about a file, not a partition.

THINKS - aw yes.. you're right - I see my missing logic.

@scottalanmiller said:

Awesome. I really need to join the NYC VMUG. Have not had a chance to get around to that yet.

Yes, you really do need to join VMUG. The content even at just regular meetups is often very valuable. Sometimes they talk about technologies that would not apply to SMBs, but it really is interesting to learn about them. Overall, I find the content very good if you have a good VMUG leadership group.

@art_of_shred said:

@NetworkNerd said:

@ajstringham said:

@NetworkNerd said:

Maybe I could use the HP DL 385 G5 I have with the MSA 70 and run something like FreeNAS on it for another datastore option?

That's one option. Something that would be good for, to be honest, would be your StorageCraft server, if you go with that.

I was thinking use it as a NFS datastore and a place to store the VM files for my current physical machines like was mentioned above. That saves money on a secondary backup solution.

Actually, that would be a tertiary backup solution, as you have Veeam and BE already. The original decision seemed to be "buy hardware or buy another backup solution". It seems that utilizing current hardware like that could avoid both?

I'd get rid of BackupExec with the P2V of the physical boxes and be able to use Veeam. That eliminates cost of software. But, I cannot avoid some investment in increasing backup storage. So this does not completely eliminate a need for more hardware but does decrease the cost of the hardware needed by a large factor.