Xen and Mdadm?
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Citrix makes a lot of things, but none around virtualization
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller does NTG support XenServer even if the client doesn't have support from Citrix?
You would almost never get support from NTG if you had support from Citrix. Not specific support, at least. It is really rare that we would ever say "call the vendor." That's not a normal thing. Especially when we are talking about a product that isn't made by Citrix and is open source. Normally "call the vendor" is what you need to do if there is a license problem. The idea that you call your vendor for support is actually weird and pretty uncommon outside of the SMB space and while I can only imagine it is kind of common there, even in the SMB space I've never seen it as a thing outside of the SW community. The idea that you would call any vendor for support (except for bugs in the product that obviously they had to fix) was completely new to me when I joined SW.
For example, at the big bank that I worked at, we had Red Hat support, but we escalated to them exactly zero times in my decade of experience there. I've never escalated a Windows problem to Microsoft ever. Going to the vendor for support should be pretty uncommon.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Well we support it, for example. LOL.
Does that mean I can build a "white box" XenServer & "contract" support from NTG?
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@scottalanmiller Why would a customer not choose to have a local support specialist that they could call (NTG) to assist if something arose, while avoiding calling the vendor at the same time.
That doesn't seem odd, maybe a bit more costly. But IIRC the support options from Citrix are a few tickets a year. Before additional surcharges are billed by Citrix.
Whereas if I as a client wanted support, but not to use one of those few support tickets from Citrix I would burn an hour with NTG instead.
(or am I just insane when I think like this?)
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@FATeknollogee said:
Does that mean I can build a "white box" XenServer & "contract" support from NTG?
Of course! We've been supporting Xen since before XenServer was even out
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@scottalanmiller said:
Of course! We've been supporting Xen since before XenServer was even out
Well ya got to spread the word
How is pricing structured?
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller Why would a customer not choose to have a local support specialist that they could call (NTG) to assist if something arose, while avoiding calling the vendor at the same time.
That doesn't seem odd, maybe a bit more costly. But IIRC the support options from Citrix are a few tickets a year. Before additional surcharges are billed by Citrix.
Whereas if I as a client wanted support, but not to use one of those few support tickets from Citrix I would burn an hour with NTG instead.
(or am I just insane when I think like this?)
I'm not 100% sure that I follow the question but maybe this will help...
Getting support from a Citrix type vendor means you are getting support "for the scope of their product." It's very technical, but very limited support. No one will likely be able to support XenServer itself as well as Citrix. However, who needs XenServer supported like that? Meaning... who needs to make the vendor modify the code itself? Almost no one. If you need OEM vendor support it means that the product itself was bad and so you have a Catch-22 of that support model.
Getting support from an NTG type vendor means you are getting support "for the scope that you want." Citrix won't get to know your business and won't support the end users or the storage platform or talk to you about whether XenServer is the right choice or support you if you move to another platform. NTG does holistic support of your company and IT needs, not just of one specific product because you realistically will never need support of just one application but at least of the use cases surrounding it and likely far more far reaching.
OEM vendor support is useful when you are talking about hardware warranties like HPE or Dell would provide. But when it comes to software, architecture and general IT you almost exclusively want general IT support. There is no real call for the other.
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@FATeknollogee said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Of course! We've been supporting Xen since before XenServer was even out
Well ya got to spread the word
How is pricing structured?
That's complex because NTG is not a one size fits all company. You can do the simplest thing and just buy blocks of hours to use. Then you can use them for whatever you want. Or you can get into an MSP model with set monthly pricing. Project pricing is available but we always recommend against that as it is a bad way to set up a vendor relationship.
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@scottalanmiller So to summarize what you've said,
If it's a software appliance that you need support on (and you aren't changing the code) get general IT support as it's often far better of a fit for support because the general IT support company understand what the business (customer) is trying / doing.
Correct?
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller So to summarize what you've said,
If it's a software appliance that you need support on (and you aren't changing the code) get general IT support as it's often far better of a fit for support because the general IT support company understand what the business (customer) is trying / doing.
Correct?
Yes. And I'll provide an example...
You get a NAS, let's just say a Synology. Synology will support it (it's even free and included.) But their support extends only to making sure that the Synology itself is working properly - which it should be doing anyway. They know their own product well, but there isn't very much to know. They can't tell you what protocol is best for you to use, how to hook it up. which drives to buy, what RAID level to choose, what IP addressing scheme to pick, if it should be on the LAN or SAN, what network aggregation system to set up, what MTU size to set, can't work with the devices that connect to the device and on and on.
The one support is very, very isolated. The other is inclusive.
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Wow I got a crash course in the finer naming art of Xen. Very cool. BTW, I should have kept my same username name from Spiceworks when I joined here. I recognize both Dustin and SAM from over there.
I'll check out that tut you linked to Dustin. Would I be correct in saying that while Mdadm works just fine it isn't really "supported" in this configuration with Xen? In other words, is this not something you would do on a production machine?
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@biggen said:
Would I be correct in saying that while Mdadm works just fine it isn't really "supported" in this configuration with Xen?
This is where those names get really important.
Xen itself doesn't support or not support anything. It doesn't have the concept of "support" when used in that way.
XenServer does have an "official HCL and supported setups" according to Citrix - who doesn't make the product and that's just a list of ways that they support the use of XenServer.
XenServer itself ships with MD RAID (another naming thing, MD is the RAID, MDADM is the tool to configure it) and it is built in so 100% supported by XenServer itself and every enterprise product to ever ship with Xen has MD RAID support built in.
Xen is available with OEM support from Red Hat, Oracle, Suse, Canonical (Ubuntu) and others - every one of them supports MD RAID.
So MD is very, very much supported. Citrix is alone is not recommending it or officially calling it supported.
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@biggen said:
In other words, is this not something you would do on a production machine?
I would absolutely use it in production. MD RAID is an enterprise ready product with decades of experience in the most demanding environments.
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My only warning is that MD RAID is a bit more "enterprise" than hardware RAID with blind swap so in the SMB market I normally advise that people use hardware RAID because SMBs tend to lack the storage understanding and support infrastructures for software RAID. It's not that software RAID isn't as good or possibly better, it is that SMBs often have false expectations and understandings and hardware RAID caters to that.
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Thanks Scott that is very helpful. I've enjoyed playing around with MD on my Ubuntu Server. Learned a ton. I think moving it to a VM via XenServer sounds like another good learning expierence.
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@scottalanmiller said:
You can do the simplest thing and just buy blocks of hours to use. Then you can use them for whatever you want.
What size are the blocks packaged?
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@FATeknollogee said:
@scottalanmiller said:
You can do the simplest thing and just buy blocks of hours to use. Then you can use them for whatever you want.
What size are the blocks packaged?
All different. A conversation with @Minion-Queen @ataylor14 or @jenuinecase would be best as they could provide real details. But you can buy single hours, but the bigger the blocks the bigger the discounts. I know lots of places buy then at ten hours at a time or a hundred hours at a time.
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Just so I'm clear on that link that Dustin provided (but looks like Scott wrote), I can install XenServer on a USB stick, put my VM's on a RAID 1 SSD datastore and my actual media for my NAS on a separate RAID 1 winchester?
Mdadm can manage both arrays like this?
I know that guide was for RAID 10 but I can adjust it pretty easily for twin RAID 1 arrays.
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Not being familiar with XenServer the last command "xe sr-create" is new to me.
Once XenServer is installed and I create my desired MD RAID devices via the CLI, can I not use a GUI to add them to XenServer as datastores?
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@biggen said:
Just so I'm clear on that link that Dustin provided (but looks like Scott wrote), I can install XenServer on a USB stick, put my VM's on a RAID 1 SSD datastore and my actual media for my NAS on a separate RAID 1 winchester?
Mdadm can manage both arrays like this?
I know that guide was for RAID 10 but I can adjust it pretty easily for twin RAID 1 arrays.
Dustin wrote most of it. I polished it and posted it for him.
