@scottalanmiller said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:

Youtube Video

Thanks for doing another video in response to one of my posts! Very cool of you and what a wealth of information.

I lost it at 0:41 with the pause/eye-roll

I had been getting the feeling that the term "SAN" was being used incorrectly becuase as you stated, it refers to a "storage area network" which would be the storage network portion, not the storage controller itself.

I get what you mean now about a single storage controller unit not being redundant. And in our case, ours is not as we only have the one. You probably know this by now about my setup, that we have the "inverted pyramid of doom" going on.

And thanks for the additional clarification. Very good stuff.

I have 4 monitors set up 2x2 vertical because I'm 1 out of 2 IT guys at my company. 1 screen for email and the other 3 for all other insanity.

@scottalanmiller said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:

@dave247 said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:

I can't think of anything else right now, but the point is, I don't really see the use case for snapshots at the storage controller level, unless it's a situation where I've lost all backups and some or all VM's have been corrupted and my only option is to restore the volume from a snapshot - such as in a ransomware situation.

You are seeing the underlying fallacies that also make SAN in general not make as much sense as it seems at first glance. How silly it is to take a snapshot of an entire storage infrastructure, blindly, is just one of many reasons why SAN rarely makes any sense. It has its place, as do SAN snapshots, but they are rare and almost never where people think that they should be used and possibly least of all in a virtual infrastructure - that's nearly the worst place for a SAN or SAN snaps.

I mean, I get VM snapshots - if you somehow muck up a server you can quickly roll back from snap vs restore from backups. That is much more granular. If you muck up an entire datastore/volume on your SAN, you can restore from snap too, but that's going to be a much larger disruption and you probably shouldn't be allowed to touch the storage controller..

I know in the past, you've recommended vSAN but what would another solution be besides that? The only thing I can think of is having multiple storage servers connected to the compute hosts via iSCSI - basically taking the place of the SAN. I don't plan to replace our storage controller anytime soon, I just wanted some food for thought.

@DustinB3403 said in I don't really get the point of SAN snapshots:

Snapshots at the volume level don't make sense with how you are using your SAN. I agree.

They could maybe make sense if you had multiple SANs and that any given SAN was a master for a pool of SANs so if you lost 1 SAN the others would be able to be restored from that snapshot.

But in this case, it makes no sense.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions.

Does anyone else have a SAN and use snapshots? We have a 24TB SAN with a single 10TB volume which is simply storage space for our virtual servers in our VMware environment. I have snapshots enabled on that one volume and they run once a night at 12AM. I understand that snapshots are not backups and I get that they are a form of data protection at the SAN level. However, I can't see any reason for them, at least not in our situation.

Reasons:

1. If I restored a volume from snapshots, ALL virtual machines would be reverted to a 12 hour-previous state and that would cause so many problems. I would rather restore machines from backup as needed as our backups run incrementally every 4 hours.

2. If I increase the frequency of snapshots, that would create much more storage overhead.

3. Storage snapshots of the volume are stored on that volume (I think?) or at least the SAN unit itself. This eats up space and snapshots would be no good if the volume were somehow deleted.

4. I would rather take snapshots at the VM level

I can't think of anything else right now, but the point is, I don't really see the use case for snapshots at the storage controller level, unless it's a situation where I've lost all backups and some or all VM's have been corrupted and my only option is to restore the volume from a snapshot - such as in a ransomware situation.

@scottalanmiller said in Windows 7 End of Support Countdown:

@dave247 said in Windows 7 End of Support Countdown:

Man, I just finished upgrading us to Windows 7 64 bit. Got the last XP machine removed last week...

Did you really target Windows 7 as the "go to" target, or was it simply that the last XP was removed finally and now Windows 7 is the "old stuff" left around?

nah I was just gaffin. I've upgraded all our stuff to Windows 10 1809 baby

Man, I just finished upgrading us to Windows 7 64 bit. Got the last XP machine removed last week...

@scottalanmiller said in Any good DRaaS suggestions?:

@dave247 said in Any good DRaaS suggestions?:

Yeah honestly I've considered this as we have a building like a mile down the road where I could replicate and host servers if needed. We are just trying to think a little bigger, like if a tornado swept through or something...

Down the road is often bad. Both because local DCs are normally expensive and crappy (just the "law of local") but also because they are close and often hit by similar risks as the main site.

Well it's the next best alternative if we end up not being able to spend money on an actual cloud solution.

@scottalanmiller said in Any good DRaaS suggestions?:

@wrx7m said in Any good DRaaS suggestions?:

You could even maintain your own backup DC using the replication feature of Veeam.
https://www.veeam.com/vm-advanced-replication.html

This is what a lot of DR companies do.

Yeah honestly I've considered this as we have a building like a mile down the road where I could replicate and host servers if needed. We are just trying to think a little bigger, like if a tornado swept through or something...

@PhlipElder said in Any good DRaaS suggestions?:

@scottalanmiller said in Any good DRaaS suggestions?:

@PhlipElder said in Any good DRaaS suggestions?:

A quick "hack" way to do it would be to sync a copy of the SP files to a repository and have that repository hooked into BackBlaze. They would then be sync'd up to BB. Cost wise, it would be cheap, cheap, cheap.

That's good for the backup portion. But for full DR you have to handle the recovery, hosting, networking failover and those parts. That's where "putting it all together" comes in.

SPX supports instant-on via file convert to VHDX/VMDK. Having those files sent to a DR site that is set up to fire the VMs up on short order would work well.

And on the StorageCraft side of things, we've been a partner since the v3.x days. Their product was second to none for the longest time. We pulled off some spectacular recoveries because the product was just that good. It still is to some degree, it is just that managing in-guest backups for more than six or eight VMs gets to be a bear after a while. Dedupe and Compression in Veeam has saved us gobs of storage.

As far as StorageCraft goes, it became noticeable that things were going awry when their Partner mailers were promoting third party webinars and "grow your MSP" type stuff. In the v3.x, v4.x, and v5.x days the product was king with in-person training being awesome and costly but worth it.

The fact that Veeam secured $500M in investments recently points to where all the action is today. All backup vendors whose products don't work well, and believe me there are a lot of them which is really sad, are put on notice and I, IMNSHO, am very happy about that.

Thanks for the input. I am still strongly considering Veeam as an option.

@scottalanmiller said in Any good DRaaS suggestions?:

@dave247 said in Any good DRaaS suggestions?:

I basically just want to replicate our local backups of 5-10 servers to a cloud service for warm storage and the ability to stand up and run systems in the cloud via VPN connection in the event of a DR scenario.

Just to be clear, you want an entire solution as a service for this? Because you can definitely get this in a boxed way, or you can build yourself from components.

I guess I'm not sure. I'm still trying to work out the best path for a solution. I haven't really done anything with cloud stuff in my IT career yet.

Boxed might be good if it makes sense, otherwise how would I "assemble from components"?

I basically just want to replicate our local backups of 5-10 servers to a cloud service for warm storage and the ability to stand up and run systems in the cloud via VPN connection in the event of a DR scenario.

Our current backup product is StorageCraft's ShadowProtect SPX with ImageManager, so naturally I've been looking into their Cloud Services offerings. I've been having a ton of trouble getting much our of them and now it looks like the company may be falling apart from the inside so I'm moving on from them. I've also been looking into Veeam but that also requires me having to pick out a cloud vendor as well. It's not off the table yet but I want to see if there are any better options.

I'm just looking for a reliable and simple solution that won't cost an arm and a leg (if such a thing exists).

@scottalanmiller said in Are we still separating application roles out on different servers?:

@dave247 oh, had you thought that that was me linking a previously made video? Nope, just for this thread

Yeah, just because you've linked your videos in the past where appropriate.

@scottalanmiller said in Are we still separating application roles out on different servers?:

@dave247 that's how I roll.

Thanks Scott. You the MVP!

@scottalanmiller said in Are we still separating application roles out on different servers?:

Youtube Video

Wow you made a video for/because of me! Nice!

And yeah, I see your points. That all makes sense. I guess I shouldn't have used to words "best practice". I just meant like, the thing that a lot of people commonly do because it's the current trend or whatever.. but yeah its good to question everything and use your brain. I just wanted good input/insight, which I got.

@scottalanmiller said in Are we still separating application roles out on different servers?:

@dave247 said in Are we still separating application roles out on different servers?:

@scottalanmiller said in Are we still separating application roles out on different servers?:

@dave247 said in Are we still separating application roles out on different servers?:

For example, if I have an application with a web front-end and an SQL database back-end - in the past, it used to be best practice to separate those two roles and have one server for the webserver and another server for the SQL database server.

That was never a best practice. Generally separating is good, but not always, it's a specific evaluation. And the one that you describe is actually where you rarely do it, both today and historically.

ok, can you provide some sort of info to support that? Not trying to be combative, I honestly want to evaluate it. I will watch your video next chance I get.

The big reason is performance and cost. Keeping the two together tends to cost less (especially if doing cloud) and makes it easy to maintain (one VM to backup and deal with.) Now if you do modern things like pure DevOps, automation of builds, backup only non-static DB data, then separate is often better. But if you are more normal and going to backup using Veeam or something, having a contained VM that has everything in one reliable package is a lot easier to protect and restore.

Local DB (inside the VM) means better performance under normal scaling. Lower latency.

Good points Scott, thanks

@scottalanmiller said in Are we still separating application roles out on different servers?:

@dave247 said in Are we still separating application roles out on different servers?:

For example, if I have an application with a web front-end and an SQL database back-end - in the past, it used to be best practice to separate those two roles and have one server for the webserver and another server for the SQL database server.

That was never a best practice. Generally separating is good, but not always, it's a specific evaluation. And the one that you describe is actually where you rarely do it, both today and historically.

ok, can you provide some sort of info to support that? Not trying to be combative, I honestly want to evaluate it. I will watch your video next chance I get.

For example, if I have an application with a web front-end and an SQL database back-end - in the past, it used to be best practice to separate those two roles and have one server for the webserver and another server for the SQL database server. Is this still common practice?

@Dashrender said in Most of my Windows 10 1803 computers upgraded to 1809 despite it not being approved in WSUS / Dual Scan is a thing:

@dave247 said in Most of my Windows 10 1803 computers upgraded to 1809 despite it not being approved in WSUS / Dual Scan is a thing:

@dbeato said in Most of my Windows 10 1803 computers upgraded to 1809 despite it not being approved in WSUS / Dual Scan is a thing:

@dave247 said in Most of my Windows 10 1803 computers upgraded to 1809 despite it not being approved in WSUS / Dual Scan is a thing:

e systems was a consumer version of Windows 10 which the previous tech installed - no idea where he got it.

Probably came pre-installed on the Dell Computer and not imaged.

Actually it had Windows 7 installed on it but then the co-worker put his version of Windows 10 that I think he got from college on it, and a few other systems. So idk.

Windows 10 is free for download... the license is another story. The machines might have come with win 7 pre loaded but the built in license might have been win 10, or it could have gotten the free upgrades

Not the case here.

@scottalanmiller said in Most of my Windows 10 1803 computers upgraded to 1809 despite it not being approved in WSUS / Dual Scan is a thing:

@dave247 said in Most of my Windows 10 1803 computers upgraded to 1809 despite it not being approved in WSUS / Dual Scan is a thing:

@dbeato said in Most of my Windows 10 1803 computers upgraded to 1809 despite it not being approved in WSUS / Dual Scan is a thing:

@dave247 said in Most of my Windows 10 1803 computers upgraded to 1809 despite it not being approved in WSUS / Dual Scan is a thing:

e systems was a consumer version of Windows 10 which the previous tech installed - no idea where he got it.

Probably came pre-installed on the Dell Computer and not imaged.

Actually it had Windows 7 installed on it but then the co-worker put his version of Windows 10 that I think he got from college on it, and a few other systems. So idk.

Windows 10 will activate on a Windows 7 license. So should be all set from that perspective.

I don't think so.. and it was a fresh install, or at least I know he used the Windows 10 key that he had been provided. That key was also used on about 5 other systems at the time.