@scottalanmiller said in Any suggestions for a good and free SNMP server similar to the Spiceworks Network Monitor?:

@dave247 said in Any suggestions for a good and free SNMP server similar to the Spiceworks Network Monitor?:

@scottalanmiller said in Any suggestions for a good and free SNMP server similar to the Spiceworks Network Monitor?:

@dave247 said in Any suggestions for a good and free SNMP server similar to the Spiceworks Network Monitor?:

I did just find out about Spiceworks Network Monitor, so I'll give that a try..

Requires a Windows Server license and a lot of horsepower.

Yes, I know about that. I totally plan on uninstalling once I find something better. Really the only thing I am impressed with on the Spiceworks Network Monitor is the real-time feed of resource info on the servers and switches, which I now realize is the main thing I am after. I was able to quickly see that I had a server consuming tons of memory (something was hung up with AV I think) and so I took care of it right away. Here's the UI:

I mean, with this, I know what I'm actually looking at. It's not a bunch of little boxes that are hard to figure out wtf is going on.. So is there any product out there that can display real-time stats this clearly?

Oh, if you are looking for info on servers, rather than network devices, then SodiumSuite will do that for you.

I'm interested in monitoring my servers and my switches primarily so that I can monitor for any crazy issues..

@scottalanmiller said in Any suggestions for a good and free SNMP server similar to the Spiceworks Network Monitor?:

@dave247 said in Any suggestions for a good and free SNMP server similar to the Spiceworks Network Monitor?:

I did just find out about Spiceworks Network Monitor, so I'll give that a try..

Requires a Windows Server license and a lot of horsepower.

Yes, I know about that. I totally plan on uninstalling once I find something better. Really the only thing I am impressed with on the Spiceworks Network Monitor is the real-time feed of resource info on the servers and switches, which I now realize is the main thing I am after. I was able to quickly see that I had a server consuming tons of memory (something was hung up with AV I think) and so I took care of it right away. Here's the UI:

I mean, with this, I know what I'm actually looking at. It's not a bunch of little boxes that are hard to figure out wtf is going on.. So is there any product out there that can display real-time stats this clearly?

I did just find out about Spiceworks Network Monitor, so I'll give that a try..

I've been meaning to set up an SNMP server for a while now because I'm trying to improve visibility into my network so I can better know wtf is going on.

I have come across lots of tools but never really looked too far into them, as I would often get put off by something such as the user interface or how the presentation of the info was. For example, I just looked at Nagios Core (live demo) and it looks good, but it's kind of hard to look at.. maybe I'm just an idiot though.

I just gave Spicework's Network Monitor a try and it looks pretty good. I was able to easily add a bunch of servers and switches within a few minutes and already I have identified a few issues. I'm pretty amazed at how quick that was to get going and make sense of, which is what I've been looking for. That being said, I kind of hate Spiceworks. You have to log in with your account and then there are adds and things. Plus, this network monitor tool keeps crashing..

I'm basically coming here to ask you guys if there are any good and free SNMP servers that are similar to Spiceworks Network Monitor, in layout/visibility and simplicity to setup and configure. Our environment is pretty small but we still have enough devices and things that I need something to help keep my sanity.

@dbeato said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

But you can also use the installer and install it directly on Server 2012.

Yeah I tried that and failed.

@dbeato said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@networknerd said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@scottalanmiller said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dustinb3403 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

I'm confused why your UTM device would even know or care what hypervisor it may or may not be on.

Have you tried using it, on your ESXi 6.5 system?

The appliance is downloadable in OVF which is for VMware. It is not compatible on 6.5 and displays errors, which is why I called support and that's when they told me it only works on up to 6.

Oh, is this an older UTM that they aren't supporting any longer? Do they have a current version?

hahaha.. No. They (SonicWall) said 6.5 will eventually be supported.

That's insane. vSphere 6.5 has been out for over a year, and they can't support it yet? This kind of stuff bothers me about vendors.

I was talking with someone the other day who had moved a bunch of VMs from a vSphere 5.0 cluster host to a fresh vSphere 6.5U1 cluster. There were some Linux VMs that were not supported on 6.5 per the 3rd party vendor and would have required a tremendous effort to update the 3rd party software running in the Linux VMs. So they ended up being left on the 5.0 cluster for now. It's not exactly the same as your situation here, but it was equally frustrating to hear.

ok turns out I'm a fkn idiot and their most recent version of GMS Analyzer works on 6.5. I just got a strange error the first time I tried to deploy the OFV, researched the error, then found a work around that said to install the previous version first, which does not work with 6.5. Calling support, they told me that previous version wouldn't work on 6.5 but failed to tell me to try the newest version. The second time I called support, the tech I got told me that the newest version does work with 6.5 and I gave it a THIRD try and of course it worked find.

I have no idea how and why I never cease to be an idiot.

I was going to say I have that on Hyperv, Vmware and Xenserver and has not been an issue but again we all learn something new everyday. Doesn't mean we are idiots.

How did you get it on Hyper-V? After I failed to get it on ESXi, I went down a huge rabbit hole trying to get it to work on Hyper-V 2012 R2... I extracted the .vmdx from the .ova and tried to convert it to a .vhdk with Powershell, but I couldn't get it to work..

@dbeato said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@networknerd said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@scottalanmiller said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dustinb3403 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

I'm confused why your UTM device would even know or care what hypervisor it may or may not be on.

Have you tried using it, on your ESXi 6.5 system?

The appliance is downloadable in OVF which is for VMware. It is not compatible on 6.5 and displays errors, which is why I called support and that's when they told me it only works on up to 6.

Oh, is this an older UTM that they aren't supporting any longer? Do they have a current version?

hahaha.. No. They (SonicWall) said 6.5 will eventually be supported.

That's insane. vSphere 6.5 has been out for over a year, and they can't support it yet? This kind of stuff bothers me about vendors.

I was talking with someone the other day who had moved a bunch of VMs from a vSphere 5.0 cluster host to a fresh vSphere 6.5U1 cluster. There were some Linux VMs that were not supported on 6.5 per the 3rd party vendor and would have required a tremendous effort to update the 3rd party software running in the Linux VMs. So they ended up being left on the 5.0 cluster for now. It's not exactly the same as your situation here, but it was equally frustrating to hear.

ok turns out I'm a fkn idiot and their most recent version of GMS Analyzer works on 6.5. I just got a strange error the first time I tried to deploy the OFV, researched the error, then found a work around that said to install the previous version first, which does not work with 6.5. Calling support, they told me that previous version wouldn't work on 6.5 but failed to tell me to try the newest version. The second time I called support, the tech I got told me that the newest version does work with 6.5 and I gave it a THIRD try and of course it worked find.

I have no idea how and why I never cease to be an idiot.

I was going to say I have that on Hyperv, Vmware and Xenserver and has not been an issue but again we all learn something new everyday. Doesn't mean we are idiots.

haha thanks.

@networknerd said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@scottalanmiller said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dustinb3403 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

I'm confused why your UTM device would even know or care what hypervisor it may or may not be on.

Have you tried using it, on your ESXi 6.5 system?

The appliance is downloadable in OVF which is for VMware. It is not compatible on 6.5 and displays errors, which is why I called support and that's when they told me it only works on up to 6.

Oh, is this an older UTM that they aren't supporting any longer? Do they have a current version?

hahaha.. No. They (SonicWall) said 6.5 will eventually be supported.

That's insane. vSphere 6.5 has been out for over a year, and they can't support it yet? This kind of stuff bothers me about vendors.

I was talking with someone the other day who had moved a bunch of VMs from a vSphere 5.0 cluster host to a fresh vSphere 6.5U1 cluster. There were some Linux VMs that were not supported on 6.5 per the 3rd party vendor and would have required a tremendous effort to update the 3rd party software running in the Linux VMs. So they ended up being left on the 5.0 cluster for now. It's not exactly the same as your situation here, but it was equally frustrating to hear.

ok turns out I'm a fkn idiot and their most recent version of GMS Analyzer works on 6.5. I just got a strange error the first time I tried to deploy the OFV, researched the error, then found a work around that said to install the previous version first, which does not work with 6.5. Calling support, they told me that previous version wouldn't work on 6.5 but failed to tell me to try the newest version. The second time I called support, the tech I got told me that the newest version does work with 6.5 and I gave it a THIRD try and of course it worked find.

I have no idea how and why I never cease to be an idiot.

@scottalanmiller said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@bnrstnr said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@scottalanmiller said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

Oh, is this an older UTM that they aren't supporting any longer? Do they have a current version?

Looks like this is an appliance that does logging/reporting for the physical UTM?

Yeah, it receives all the firewall logs and allows custom reports and whatnot.

So like their version of Splunk?

Nowhere near that nice. It does reports on data usage, intrusions, attacks, etc. I currently have it set up on a Windows server that I want to get rid of and I figured if they have an appliance, I may as well use that instead.

@momurda said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

You can do this with powershell
https://oitibs.com/convert-ova-to-vhdx-for-hyper-v/
There are many blogs/guides, here is one.

oooh nice thanks!

@bnrstnr said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@scottalanmiller said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

Oh, is this an older UTM that they aren't supporting any longer? Do they have a current version?

Looks like this is an appliance that does logging/reporting for the physical UTM?

Yeah, it receives all the firewall logs and allows custom reports and whatnot.

@scottalanmiller said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dustinb3403 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

I'm confused why your UTM device would even know or care what hypervisor it may or may not be on.

Have you tried using it, on your ESXi 6.5 system?

The appliance is downloadable in OVF which is for VMware. It is not compatible on 6.5 and displays errors, which is why I called support and that's when they told me it only works on up to 6.

Oh, is this an older UTM that they aren't supporting any longer? Do they have a current version?

hahaha.. No. They (SonicWall) said 6.5 will eventually be supported.

@tim_g said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@tim_g said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

Your path is incorrect. You need to specify a real location to put it. \\nameOfServer\shareName

Or D:\path\to\storage

Or you can use the admin share on your hyper-v server: \\serverName\d$\Hyper-V

ok I got to the next screen using "\hv-2012-01\Users\Public\Documents\Hyper-V\Virtual Hard Disks"

However now it wants to connect to an ESXi server but I have this OVF file on my local system. I get the impression that this is trying to convert a running system or something. I just want to convert a static file from one format to another, then import to Hyper-V from there. Maybe I have the wrong assumption on all this though..

It's been a long time since I've used that tool. I don't remember what the options are.

Can you show screenshots?

There's that:

and going back a few pages:

So yeah, I guess it's just for converting machines that are already installed/running..

I need to simply convert a .OVF to .VMDK

@dustinb3403 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

I'm confused why your UTM device would even know or care what hypervisor it may or may not be on.

Have you tried using it, on your ESXi 6.5 system?

The appliance is downloadable in OVF which is for VMware. It is not compatible on 6.5 and displays errors, which is why I called support and that's when they told me it only works on up to 6.

@tim_g said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

Your path is incorrect. You need to specify a real location to put it. \\nameOfServer\shareName

Or D:\path\to\storage

Or you can use the admin share on your hyper-v server: \\serverName\d$\Hyper-V

ok I got to the next screen using "\hv-2012-01\Users\Public\Documents\Hyper-V\Virtual Hard Disks"

However now it wants to connect to an ESXi server but I have this OVF file on my local system. I get the impression that this is trying to convert a running system or something. I just want to convert a static file from one format to another, then import to Hyper-V from there. Maybe I have the wrong assumption on all this though..

My UTM device offers an analyzer appliance, downloadable as only an OVF. We have vSphere 6.5 running but support told me the appliance only works on ESXi 6. However, Hyper-V 2012 R2 is also supported, which I do have one of those I just set up. I'm pretty new to Hyper-V and I've gone down a rabbit hole and now I'm a little unclear on what to do.

I first tried to import an OVF into Hyper-V only to quickly realize you can't do that. So I found out about the Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 3.0 and installed that. Now I'm running MVMC and I'm stuck on this screen:

I don't appear to have any shares on \hv-2012-01. I mean, I know how to create a share on a Windows system, but I don't really know the "right" way to go about setting up Hyper-V storage and/or shares in this situation.

I haven't configured anything else on my Hyper-V server beyond the basic install and remote management and network settings.

@scottalanmiller said in Download more RAM:

Do any of you remember when products like this were actually sold?

No? LOL

@guyinpv said in What is cheapest way to get a house phone?:

@irj said in What is cheapest way to get a house phone?:

@guyinpv said in What is cheapest way to get a house phone?:

They are old school bosses, they lead by "better to fear me than love me" thing. Black marks, performance meetings, threaten my job when they don't like something, etc.

But, long story short, small town, few tech jobs, low wages.

Sounds like they don't have a choice of many techs either well at least at what they are offering to pay.

Ya. Basically population is around 40k in the city. Best jobs are all government/city/town, and colleges. But even then they'll max out around $60k-$70k for city government IT.

Then all the tech shops are mom-n-pop. If they hire employees at all, they'll be $10-$18/hr.

So I work for an ecommerce/manufacturer company doing their tech stuff, which includes some IT but it's not pure IT. I do some programming, social media, web development, SEO/marketing, and all the office tech chores. Jack of all trades. Still only about a sub-$40k income and I had to beg to even get there after 5 years.

Bottom line, you have to own a business out here to make a good living in tech. And I'm moving into web dev over IT (remote work). Every other tech out here who can't find a job starts a computer repair company. I see their cars all over the place. "Bob's Nerd Shop", "Hire a Geek", "Mobile Nerds PC Repair", "Cool Geeks PC Services". The names get worse every year.
The couple of people who manage to have a physical computer store either hire their own kids, or get part time helpers on commission.

It is what it is. I would have a hard time finding another job, but my boss would also have a hard time finding someone who knows all the things and willing to work for $15/hr. So I'm not sure which of us has the upper hand here.

Ugh... I used to make $15/hour working as middle management in retail. I finally got fed up and put the pedal to the metal and landed an IT admin job making over double what I used to. It's a very small town but luckily I work at decent place.

@tim_g said in Hyper-V Network card setup?:

@dave247 said in Hyper-V Network card setup?:

Thanks. And this isn't for testing. I actually want to use this server for some production servers.

Sorry, didn't know. I mistakenly assumed testing and lab because of the time frame.

But you can't go wrong with doing it that way.

If you have no need for an extra NIC you could do a 3-NIC team. If you are fine with no management NIC, do a 4-port team and share it with your management OS if for some reason you need that many NICs in a team. Though you probably don't.

Yeah well it is for some low-risk servers, so, kinda almost testing, but not really, if that makes sense. lol

@dashrender said in Hyper-V Network card setup?:

@dave247 said in Hyper-V Network card setup?:

@jaredbusch said in Hyper-V Network card setup?:

@tim_g said in Hyper-V Network card setup?:

I leave 1 NIC (sometimes teamed) dedicated for host management and replication and such.

Then a team of 2-3 NICs for all VMs to use (not shared with the host OS).

In your case, for testing, I'd do the following:

NIC1 = Management, replication, migration (this is the one that gets a DNS entry, turn off DNS registration on the others)

NIC2 & NIC3 = Teamed - Not shared with the "management OS" (uncheck that box in Hyper-V later after team is set up)

NIC4 = Other testing as you see fit (iSCSI, DMZ, different subnet/network, failover for another network, etc)

What is the point of a management NIC let alone a team? You have everything on the same subnet in a SMB anyway.

Management networks are all fine when you have a large infrastructure and multiple subnets.

Yeah I don't have a management network set up. Though we do have a lot of servers and appliances, so it might be nice to set one up anyway. But that's another project for another day.

But do you have enough (reasons) to warrant splitting out the management network from the main network?

Sure, I think so. I have a bunch of iDRACs for our Dell servers (like 25ish) as well as 10 switches and a few rack appliances. I'd say maybe 50ish systems. I could see having a nice little /26 management subnet.