Posts made by Jimmy9008

@JasGot said in New IT Position UK, any advice/feedback?:

@Jimmy9008 said in New IT Position UK, any advice/feedback?:

• Monitoring, maintaining and improving IT Infrastructure, network, security, storage, virtualized environments, servers, network devices & productivity tools

Is there budget to support these tasks? Nothing worse than saying you want to improve a firewall, and being told there is no money.

I agree that this is REALLY broad and after reading the description, I can say you will likely not find someone with appreciable skills in all areas.

I wouldn't answer this ad because I don't feel I could provide enough value to my employer in every area. I think you should clarify that you are okay with novice skills in some areas if they are offset with advanced skills in other areas.

Yep, budget is available. I guess I need to change the language slightly in the descriptions. They are items I would like the person to have an understanding of, and maybe some very basic time using, but not an expert.

@IRJ said in New IT Position UK, any advice/feedback?:

ture

Its entry level. They would be junior on the infrastructure side, but should know the basics. I guess that does not come over in the text, ill review. Any complex items would either go to a higher up tech, or they would work side by side for knowledge.

@Pete-S said in New IT Position UK, any advice/feedback?:

@Jimmy9008

I don't know Jim, but it does sound like you want to find one IT support guy that somehow has the skill of five specialists.

I am trying to set somebody with mostly IT Support with some Entry Level Infrastructure, I understand I wont get everything on the job spec, nobody ever does... and those more expert skills are some they would build whilst working here with courses we pay for, but to start with some knowledge would help...

What do you think it should change to?

Hi folks,

I'll be hiring in the UK. I have drawn up a rough job spec, can you see anything that should change here? The profile covers roughly what I am looking for and is quite broad, but I think is fair. What feedback would you give on this? Its not up on any database yet as its in draft form. This role is around a 60%/40% split towards support.

Role: IT Support/Entry Level Infrastructure

Reporting to the IT Lead EMEA/APAC you will have influence of our global environment. This role will provide you with a variety of tasks and challenges and combines a range of IT support work with IT/infrastructure project work. You will be able to balance responding to technical support requests with projects, and have the ability to work both independently and collaboratively with our global IT team.

Performance Objectives:
• Support of all business critical IT services
• Monitoring, maintaining and improving IT Infrastructure, network, security, storage, virtualized environments, servers, network devices & productivity tools
• Proactively identifying and dealing with performance and security issues
• Acting as a technical resource to fellow team members
• Maintenance of IT policies, reports and documentation

Qualifications:
• You are a self-starter
• You enjoy technical challenges
• You are keen to always roll up your sleeves and dig in, whilst having the ability to look at the bigger picture
• You can connect and engage with all levels of the organization

Education:
• Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) – an asset
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent education/IT experience in the computer science field

Competencies:
• Minimum eight (5) years’ experience within Information Technology
• Cloud based/hosted services environments (including infrastructure networks, hardware, software and telecommunications)
• Security relating to cloud based infrastructure, internal systems any hybrid infrastructures
• Support and troubleshoot SQL and Oracle servers
• Champion the adoption of Office 365 services as appropriate for our business
• Assist with the creation of policies around the proper use of Office 365 services and support
• Knowledge of Office 365 Teams/Groups/Video/Power BI
• Supporting Skype for Business and troubleshooting call quality issues
• Experience managing directory sync into Azure AD
• Strong virtualization experience using Hyper-V, Citrix XenApp and NetScaler
• SAN and NAS storage devices (with a variety of connection methods)
• Managing a variety of network switches, routers and Wi-Fi access points
• Cisco networking and Dell networking

Best,
Jim

@coliver said in Starwind/Server Limitations:

@scottalanmiller said in Starwind/Server Limitations:

@Jimmy9008 in your design, your normal Starwind nodes have one point of failure, no dependencies. But on the "other" nodes, without their own storage, they depend on the SAN, the switches, and themselves. Three points of failure, instead of one.

Why not put the drives directly in the nodes and avoid that? What's the reason to put their drives remotely?

Licensing from the sounds of it.

Correct, by adding to the existing vSAN, that storage side is under the Starwind SLA/Support.

So, the cluster storage is mirrored between vSAN host 1 and vSAN host 2, and is then attached to the cluster. Plus, redundant switch. So in this case, no IPOD design as we can lose 1x of anything and stay up.

@scottalanmiller said in Starwind/Server Limitations:

@Jimmy9008 said in Starwind/Server Limitations:

With the vSAN, having the second set of drives in the chassis as the storage for the second cluster, would we expect to see a bottleneck on the hosts at all? I am running Live Optics to see what they are currently doing...

Oh yes, I didn't notice all the details. The new hosts that don't have their own storage will just be using a SAN. Actually using a SAN in the "don't do that" kind of way that we always say. Will it work? Yes. But it's just a SAN. Not a vSAN, a SAN.

Correct. Its a SAN. Not a vSAN. But in this case, as the storage presented to the cluster over the network from Starwind and is redundant, its better than 1 x SAN. I just want to somehow be sure that the hosts having the additional I/O of the new cluster wont cause any performance issues to the existing cluster that sit upon them.

@scottalanmiller said in Starwind/Server Limitations:

@Jimmy9008 said in Starwind/Server Limitations:

The thing is though, this storage will not be used by the Failover Cluster on the existing hosts. I am looking to purchase additional hosts, add them to the iSCSI network, and build a new cluster using the vSAN storage on the existing nodes.

Here is the big question.... why?

Why, which part?

@scottalanmiller said in Starwind/Server Limitations:

@Jimmy9008 said in Starwind/Server Limitations:

My worry is that as the existing hosts are already running VMs, Starwind and hold the data, could they be a bottleneck.

The bottleneck scaling up is your switch. Just make sure you don't exhaust the backplane.

I'll take a look. Traffic is quite light, but will see what metrics I can get.

With the vSAN, having the second set of drives in the chassis as the storage for the second cluster, would we expect to see a bottleneck on the hosts at all? I am running Live Optics to see what they are currently doing...

As vSAN could be running on three dedicated hosts, with compute connecting over iSCSI anyway, this wont be much of an issue?

Hi folks,

I have a three node Starwind vSAN made up of 3 x R740XD servers each with 14 SAS SSD drives. The Starwind storage is presented to a Windows Failover Cluster, which also runs on these three nodes.

As Starwind can scale up, I am looking to populate 10 x spare slots in each server with more SSD and create additional Cluster Storage.

The thing is though, this storage will not be used by the Failover Cluster on the existing hosts. I am looking to purchase additional hosts, add them to the iSCSI network, and build a new cluster using the vSAN storage on the existing nodes.

Would we potentially see any performance issues here? The iSCSI network is 10 GbE and I figure the new servers would be seeing the same performance as if they were connected to a physical SAN. But in this case, its just virtual. My worry is that as the existing hosts are already running VMs, Starwind and hold the data, could they be a bottleneck.

I plan to run Live Optics to see the current performance, anything I should look out for?

Best,
Jim

@DustinB3403 said in Dell R740XD SSD Compatibility:

If you needed relatively low cost SSDs with higher capacity I might look at the Samsung Evo line or something like this which is marketed as a business drive.

Are these known to work on R740XD? This is for QA work, so I don't particularly mind if we lose things like wear levels within iDRAC...

@notverypunny said in Dell R740XD SSD Compatibility:

We're running normal consumer SSDs in a bunch of 720XD units. Wouldn't be appropriate for all workloads but they're "good enough" for our use case.

Which models if you dont mind me asking?

Or, even: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/768tb-samsung-pm1643-25-inch-enterprise-ssd-sas-3-12gb-s-2100mb-s-read-2000mb-s-write-400k-70k-iops

Hi folks,

I have a Dell R740XD with 10 slots available. I am looking to add some more SSDs and am wondering on drive compatibility.
I am seeing 3.8TB SSDs from Dell coming in at over £3k right now, which is really high.

Would other non Dell drives ever be an option such as this 3.8TB Intel drive?

They are around £1k which is 2/3 less cost.

Best,
Jim

Take the new job for sure. You'll have a target on your back if you stay at the old place. Do the new job for a year, get the bonus, then move again for another 20% increase!

That makes sense, would a drop from 1GB/s to 100MB/s be expected? Seems huge...

Hi folks,

I have storage which is being presented to several Windows Server 2019 hosts over iSCSI. From each host, I can write to the storage at 1 GB/s actual over the storage network. I have tested this by copying an 14GB ISO file.

I then add the storage to Failover Cluster storage as CSV. When I try to put the same ISO on the CSV, its running at 80 - 100 MB/s only.

What is happening at a lower level that causes the rate to drop so much? I remove the CSV and can then write at 1 GB/s from any host again to the iSCSI target.

Best,
Jim

Would the engineer they send out generally restore my backup config to the replacement too? Ive not done that before...

Its under support until July 2020. Just trying to make sure I have done all I can before Cisco call back. Would I be right to say the SSD light should be solid green?