I wrote a little post about my messing around with the new Ubuntu, containers and OpenVSwitch.
I hope that could be useful to someone!

http://www.francescoprovino.com/2018/04/27/network-management-with-lxd-and-openvswitch-in-ubuntu-18-04/

Yesterday morning, I've gone under 70Kg for the first time in 12 years .

@scottalanmiller said in I moved to Linux!:

@Francesco-Provino said in I moved to Linux!:

@scottalanmiller said in I moved to Linux!:

@Francesco-Provino said in I moved to Linux!:

@stacksofplates I don't think anything you wrote about KVM is true, and it never was true also. I don't think I'm biased towards KVM in any way, I use more vSphere and XS hosts than KVM ones as of today, but… KVM and the standard toolstack has everything. At least, anything apart from some very new and particular GPU or latency-related stuff that only ESXi and customized (AWS!) Xen have. But of course, the basic and advanced stuff are absolutely covered. Every single thing.

He's talking about Boxes, not KVM.

Oh, ok, now it makes sense! Never heard about Boxes… libvirt is really anything you need for KVM. Maybe virt-manager, if you are used to XenCenter-like administration…

Boxes is a VERY nascent KVM front end. I'm playing with it right now, it's neat that it uses KVM with local console redirect. But it needs some polishing, the interface is awkward and missing a lot of basic features.

Why use Boxes when virt-manager and virsh are mature and already in place?

Here we are, 5 years later…

Just an old thread in which I was arguing of KVM being the best thing since sliced bread…
Luckly, I remain of the same idea and continue to experience with KVM till today.

I just want to give credit to @scottalanmiller for have brought me to know the VMware and Xen world, at that time :).

Thank you Scott, your claims have significantly boost my IT career, even if we did not agree at all!

Hello, I'm about to move one of the infrastructure I administer from IPOD (one SAN with 12 spindles) to local PCIe SSD replicated into SAN. I just want to hear some opinion about single PCIe SSD reliability VS a spindles array…

Or, better, should the PCIe card be as reliable as an hardware RAID card? NAND wearing aside, of course.

My desk at home, z240 with some power ups (GTX 950, 32Gb of RAM, samsun 951).
The screen is a 43' 4k from Philips, the keyboard is a Unicomp.
Running OpenSuSe 42.2, of course with Kde 5…

The book is "Modern quantum mechanics" from Sakurai & Napolitano :).

@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

Frankly, I haven't seen anyone say they don't want the product after seeing whet we do and understanding the architecture.

This is a major, and common, sales mistake. You don't see them. Right, of course you don't. Most of us have talked about this at length before... you don't see them because the moment that you don't have pricing info many of them are already gone and you never get their contact info or ever realize that they might have been customers.

I've seen HR do this with new hires - tell people things so bad about a company via anonymous "pre-contact" information that the company never gets metrics on how many people they've turned away that never moved past the anonymous phase because the candidate turns them down for the job before they even have an interview.

Think about the presentation in Chicago. Every single person had the same concern. Only ONE of them put something online to complain, the others... walked away. You just got lucky that someone cared enough to inform you... and only because another vendor asked a question about you. If Nic hadn't wondered if anyone was using Simplivity, this would never have come up in a public channel (we'd already heard complaints in private ones days before this, and live during the presentation there were messages going around about how pricing was being refused) you would never have had this conversation.

So sure, you don't see the people you are turning away. That's how bad the situation is, you aren't even aware that it is happening.

And it's FAR more than you think. Before this thread, at least a dozen market influencers had a private conversation, none of whom had been at the Chicago event, about what a waste of time talking to Simplivity would be because pricing was being held back. You didn't just risk turning away a room full of people that you talked to directly - but that those people were then actively telling other people that there was no pricing info so to avoid you. You have no idea the degree to which you got the word out that you didn't have pricing.

You never see the people who turn your product down immediately. Never use that as a metric.

I completely agree with you, and I'm a CTO based in Italy (so, I suppose, no cultural background involved). I wouldn't even CONSIDER a company that isn't clear in THAT way, in a time where the cloud providers offer bill-explorer tools.

Something very simple:

https://pastebin.com/zSvJCsCR

I see you are using LVM (that's good!), so…

• First, create a new block device in the free space;
• PVadd the new block device to your VG (fedora, I think);
• lvextend your root LV;
• xfs_growfs your root FS, and you'll be done ;).

@scottalanmiller said in Linux OS advice for building a SAM-SD:

@magicmarker said in Linux OS advice for building a SAM-SD:

I've still been researching this topic. After digging deeper, I was curious as to why nobody recommended Proxmox...

We get asked this all the time.

1. It's just a GUI on top of KVM and Open-VZ (and now LXC). It's weird and complex and while a GUI is nice, we have GUIs already that work great and don't require completely third party packages.
2. The ProxMox company are scammers and rotten people. You don't want to deal with them. This isn't a nice project.
3. @StorageNinja can tell you, they actually run a full on spam marketing organization. They are deleted constantly with fake accounts on SW. We've been dealing with them spamming constantly for about five years.
4. It's attempting to solve a problem we don't have.

Your points are all true. The major selling point is that oVirt is too much a hassle to configure and manage, and the last time I tried it I wasn't able to use it in any productive way. Something like XO for KVM could be a deal breaker for the GUI aficionados. As of today I can do anything without a GUI on plain KVM (virsh console is my friend), so I don't really care/need it, but a lot of people want it of course.

@hobbit666 said in Air Gap Backups:

How would people define this?
Just send a backup to the cloud, or only achevied by backing up to tape (or other media) and store somewhere?

We're looking to backup 4-5 VM's on a vmware host. 1TB max.

I have done it with the S3 Vault Lock feature, you can use it in conjunction with Storage Gateway (effectively emulating tapes), or using objects directly.

Once put in compliance mode, there is no way to delete the objects before the compliance period ends. It's also very cheap.

@rjt said in KVM or VMWare:

@francesco-provino Amazon Web Services may have a slight disagreement with you on whether KVM or XEN is suitable for business.

KVM and XEN are suitable for the business case of an hyperscaler of course, but the question of @WLS-ITGuy was literally "We're getting ready for our server refresh and along with that our license is up for renewal for VMWare. I am curious to the benefits of KVM over VMWare." -> so they are a small shop already using VMware.

It totally makes no sense to switch from VMware to KVM or Xen-based solutions in his business case.

@rjt said in KVM or VMWare:

@francesco-provino Amazon Web Services may have a slight disagreement with you on whether KVM or XEN is suitable for business.

LOL

@olivier said in KVM or VMWare:

Maybe you lack the understanding of scale.

Ok, this is definitely the best one

@olivier I know you have to sell it, but it's foolish to propose Xen in 2021.
Xen has been a phasing-out hypervisor (and platform, considering the ecosystem) in the last 5-6 years.

Develop solutions based on Xen does not makes any sense, even big player with huge investments on Xen have abandon it or are actively retiring it.

@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…

The answer is simple, stick with VMware for anything business related. The other arguments are really mental masturbation.
Yes, VMware licensing is worth it and vSphere us not going away. The KVM ecosystem is for builders, not for sysadmin.

Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.

Nice, but why use this when we have the real PowerShell for Linux?

Hi @gjacobse , consider something like a tiered approach to the problem. 1Pb are a lot of data.
Maybe 5-10Tb of fast SSD for caching, 50-100Tb of spinning disks for caching/capacity and the rest will go to the cloud.
For instance, a single AWS Storage Gateway appliance could be the solution if you have good internet uplink.
Another solution could be Azure Stack.
Feel free to contact me if need advices about that kind of setup.

@dave247 you can use storage snapshot for fast and very efficient backups. Your backup software should be connected to the SAN of course… trigger a snapshot after hypervisor quiescence, and then just retrieve the backup data from the snapshot. At the end pf the backup job, the snapshot will just be discarded. That’s what any tier-1 software does today in dense and high-performance environments.

@scottalanmiller you don’t want a GUI on the virtualization host, ever. Just spin a VM with virt-manager and launch it on your local machine with xming or one of the other solutions in the other comments.