ML
    • Recent
    • Categories
    • Tags
    • Popular
    • Users
    • Groups
    • Register
    • Login
    1. Topics
    2. dave247
    3. Posts
    • Profile
    • Following 0
    • Followers 0
    • Topics 89
    • Posts 974
    • Groups 0

    Posts

    Recent Best Controversial
    • RE: Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment

      @scottalanmiller said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:

      @dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:

      @wrx7m said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:

      What type of Windows licensing do you have? Replication can be affected by that.

      We have Microsoft Volume Licensing and I haven't looked into weather or not we'd have to purchase "double" or not.. I'm not sure but I thought a backup environment doesn't quite count as production.

      You need the second site licensed if it is hot, meaning turned on. You do not need anything if it is cold, meaning powered off. Powered off, it's just a backup that's extremely "ready to go".

      ok that's good to know. I don't doubt you, but do you know where this info is explicitly stated by MS? I'd like to have it on hand. I may just have to dig through the licensing ToS or something.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment

      @IRJ said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:

      @dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:

      We have a few locations that are all relatively close by

      That is probably the craziest thing about going through all this hassle and being in the same geographic region. I would seriously consider a colo outside of the area. I mean you do all that work and put in all these expenses and you have an area wide disaster and its potentially gone.
      Colocation costs are not much more than hosting at your own facility.

      yeah that would be preferred but we likely won't be able to get our company owners to spend that much money. Setting up a minimal warm site in our other building would be much cheaper/easier.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment

      I think I might go ahead and use Veeam's VM replication for a warm site setup.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment

      @wrx7m said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:

      @dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:

      @wrx7m said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:

      What type of Windows licensing do you have? Replication can be affected by that.

      We have Microsoft Volume Licensing and I haven't looked into weather or not we'd have to purchase "double" or not.. I'm not sure but I thought a backup environment doesn't quite count as production.

      I would say "Hot"=Active.

      hot/warm/standby environment is more what I'm talking about. I do plan to look into the licensing requirements involved. We have Datacenter for the vmware environment.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment

      @wrx7m said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:

      What type of Windows licensing do you have? Replication can be affected by that.

      We have Microsoft Volume Licensing and I haven't looked into weather or not we'd have to purchase "double" or not.. I'm not sure but I thought a backup environment doesn't quite count as production.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment

      @wrx7m said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:

      @dave247 said in Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment:

      Dell SCv2020

      Do you really need dedicated storage instead of local storage?

      Thanks but I'm not getting into that argument.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • Looking for some insight/input for setting up a "hot site"/fail-over environment

      I have my company's primary site and we have backups running both local and in cloud storage. I am working on devising a new plan for a local "hot site" at one of our other buildings because I believe that having to restore from backups only is less than desirable since it will take time and effort to manually restore everything.

      Here's our general setup:

      Primary Site:

      • VMware vSphere Essentials 6.5 Plus Environment:

        • Storage Controller: Dell SCv2020 (Compellent/Mirage)
        • Compute: 2x Dell PowerEdge Servers (ESXi)
        • Networking: 1Gbps for both iSCSI & VM Network
      • Physical Servers: ~5 x Windows 2016 servers

      • Everything sits in a cage with dedicated network switches to feed the rest of the environment

      • Backups are Veeam Backup & Restore Standard for both virtual and physical environment

      Options for replicating live systems for a "hot site":

      • Could replicate data at the storage controller level:The SCv2020 does have embedded REPL ports specifically for replicating to another SCv2020 via iSCSI - this requires more additional licensing which is fine

      • I think the SCv2020 is EoL so I'm not sure if I would buy a new one or upgrade/buy double or if the SCv2020 can replicate to anything else

      • Could replicate virtual machines at the VMware level but we will need a new vSphere license, setup may be more complex (also fine)

      • Options for restoring backups:
        • I am already replicating Veeam backups to secondary site
        • the only issue is that there is a less than desirable RTO/RPO vs having a hot site that is ready to go

      I am leaning towards replicating machines at the VMware level since it might be the most hardware/environment agnostic. Replicating at the storage controller level may be easier but lead to difficulty down the road. The only other thing I need to worry about is how to replicate/ready the physical servers.

      I'm just wondering if anyone here has any knowledge/experience with setting up a hot site and how you might suggest approaching this. I'm trying to figure out the best way to replicate system states in order to have things on "stand-by" in the event of a DR situation. And I do know that DR can be quite extensive rabbit hole but right now I am thinking in terms of if our building were to burn down. We have a few locations that are all relatively close by so I really want to utilize one of those for our hot site. And as mentioned, we do have a cloud service provider but we'd likely only really utilize them if we had no other options for local restore.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      @notverypunny said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      We've just starting using JitBit. They took the full on prem with access to source so one of the programmers has been tweaking things. I'm not a huge fan but it seems to be working.

      I can't say anything bad about GLPI but it might be more than what the OP is looking for.

      Request Tracker provides a massive framework to play with for ticketing and such, I'm 90% sure that one of my former gigs was using it with some minor rebranding but it is really one of those situations where the sky's the limit on what it seems to be able to do.

      You guys started using JitBit on-premises? What don't you like about it? I've only been evaluating it for a few hours but it seems pretty simple and might do the job for us since we really only need something basic for multi-departmental help desk tickets.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      @scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      @dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      I am trialing ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus

      My biggest issues are mostly around it being slow and clunky. Very hard to use.

      It actually seems pretty easy but the UI is a bit clunky for the technicians and I've run into several stupid forms issues. I will probably not go with them.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      @scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      @bnrstnr said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      Looks like Zammad does both SSO and Groups (Departments). I don't use it though, so no experience there...

      Zammad is my guess for best option. Not perfect, but probably will do the job.

      I'm def going to check it out!

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      @scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      @dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      @Obsolesce said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      Curious about the on-prem requirement? Seems lime an odd requirement?

      On-prem because we have a lot of PII information that gets put into our help desks, plus we just like having some control over things. Not everything has to be cloud hosted.

      No, but not everything needs to be internally hosted, either. ALL decisions should be based on logic and needs evaluation.

      PII doesn't make hosted not an option, it actually makes it more important. Because a self hosted tool won't have the security resources of a hosted one. "Like having some control" is the same as saying "we don't think like a business". Nothing wrong with having control, but that's an emotional description. How does "having control", and what does that mean in this case, help the business?

      "Liking" approaches is something no business should act on. The moment you feel that you "like" hosted, or on premises, virtual or physical, it should set off a red flag that something is wrong. It's a term people use to express when they are knowingly making a bad decision, but haven't stopped themselves from doing so yet. It's trying to justify a business decision (that must be logical) in terms of consumerism (buying what we like regardless of value.)

      None of this is to berate you or to say you can't do it this way. It's the same kind of problem that @WrCombs had and it's best explained this way....

      We all have to deal with the emotional whims and non-business illogic of people above us in an organization. What we are required to do is often out of our control. What we do control is repeating false logic as reasons. In this case, stating that you have PII, security, or control concerns aren't valid reasons to chose on premises - they are excuses to cover for someone being emotional. Instead of repeating them, identify that they are false and just say "someone who isn't concerned with business needs above me in the organization demands it be done in this way".

      If you say it is a requirement that is out of your control, someone might still point out that it is likely a bad idea, but that's it. If you repeat the false logic, it essentially requires that we point out that the logic is wrong because otherwise we must either act as though we have accepted something false and/or ignore that giving bad advice is not in your interest. We can't honestly try to help while not pointing out when a decision is made on false logic.

      yeah I mean its one of the reasons. We have a lot of hosted services but we want to keep the help desk in house and manage it ourselves, among other things we have going on.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      @Obsolesce said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      @bnrstnr said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      Self hosted (one of his requirements)

      Have fun with that!

      Yeah because self hosted = bad! Seems like a pointless comment and a foolish attitude.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      @coliver said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      @bnrstnr said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      Looks like Zammad does both SSO and Groups (Departments). I don't use it though, so no experience there...

      I have this deployed locally. It can be multi-department, but it is, obviously, geared toward IT more then anything else. It can do LDAP and SAML auth and have the ability to integrate with pretty much anything.

      It's also stupid easy to install. The big complaint I have at the moment is that some of the customization that I wanted to do needed to be done in the backend.

      That product looks really good and the only reason I'm hesitant is because I don't have a ton of Linux admin experience. I have worked with Linux a bit at school, homes labs and at work and I know my way around (to some small degree) but the one problem I've always had with Linux is that something eventually/always breaks when some application or module or script gets updated. PHP and Apache are working fine today but come in on Tuesday and suddenly nothing is working anymore.

      That being said, I will give it a try!

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      @Obsolesce said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      Curious about the on-prem requirement? Seems lime an odd requirement?

      On-prem because we have a lot of PII information that gets put into our help desks, plus we just like having some control over things. Not everything has to be cloud hosted.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      RIP thread.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      @scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      @dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      @black3dynamite said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      We use FreshService that's supports SSO but that's about all I know since I don't manage it.

      Looks like its I/T focused (not multi-department) and hosted. Those go against my requirements.

      Pretty much all good helpdesks are IT focused.

      Right and I have trouble determining if they can also be multi-departmental or not.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      @black3dynamite said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      We use FreshService that's supports SSO but that's about all I know since I don't manage it.

      Looks like its I/T focused (not multi-department), hosted and the price per agent is pretty high for the lowest package. Those go against my requirements. Thanks for the input though.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      @black3dynamite said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      @dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      Wow that looks really nice. Please tell me it has integration with Active Directory for single sign-on authentication. I forgot to mention that in my requirements...

      Nope. Its been two years since it was requested.
      https://github.com/opensupports/opensupports/issues/69

      Darn.

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • RE: Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application

      @scottalanmiller said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      @dave247 said in Trying to find a good, on-premises, multi-department help desk application:

      Wow that looks really nice. Please tell me it has integration with Active Directory for single sign-on authentication. I forgot to mention that in my requirements...

      Dont' see it listed...

      https://www.opensupports.com/features/

      Neither did I 😞

      posted in IT Discussion
      dave247D
      dave247
    • 1 / 1