Since we're talking about VDI and thin clients...

I just now got around to hooking up a Raspberry Pi 4 to a 4K monitor. I've had it since July but only been running it headless.

Now I'm running RDP on Remmina and it actually pretty decent. It also works as a semi-fat client running light stuff such as office, watching youtube, news sites etc. Not as fast as an i3 or something with more horsepower but reasonably good.

Right now I have two Firefox windows with a couple of tabs open in each and running a RDP session with 2560x1440 resolution and have a couple of terminal windows open as well, a gimp file and looking at HD video with VLC over the network. Using about 1.5GB of RAM now. I'm running Raspian OS, which is Debian 10 with some tweaks.

It's the 4GB RAM version I have. But looking at the memory usage I think the 2GB RAM version would do fine in most cases as well.

2GB RAM version is $55 if you buy the bulk version. Add a suitable case $10, power supply $8, 8GB memory card $10.
Total cost around $85.

@scottalanmiller said in VM replication vs vSAN on two hosts?:

@Pete-S said in VM replication vs vSAN on two hosts?:

But maybe that's incorrect and vSAN on one host would still have all the data and work regardless of what happened to the second host?

From a VSAN perspective, yes, that's the whole idea of the technology (at least in this kind of implementation.) Pooling VMware into a single cluster is where there is more risks.

OK, so if I understand correctly, vSAN, the real time synchronous replicated storage isn't the problem.

But having VMs failover and automatically recover is what could potentially cause problems?

So it would be an option to use vSAN as shared storage but without having the HA features in play?
And in that case basically end up having the same functionality as Veeam replication but faster?

@DustinB3403 said in VM replication vs vSAN on two hosts?:

vSAN is added complexity, no matter what solution you are using. Replication, is just a complete copy of your VM(s) at a set point in time.

vSAN tries to lose nothing, as the RAM, CPU and DISKS are all migrated immediately should something happen.

Replication may occur as often as every minute, but you could still lose files or changes within that time span that were never copied to the target.

It really depends on what the business needs, if you can be down for a few hours, does that mean losing a few hours of work? Or just the time it takes to get things back up and running so work can pick back up?

Failures are unlikely to happen but if they did happen, reverting back to the last backup would be acceptable. If the backup or replica would be a couple of hours old, that would be acceptable too.

What is not acceptable is to not be able to get back to a working system in a couple of hours time.

HCI is smoother than replication from a usage point but I fear that there can be failure modes that would render both hosts inoperable. Perhaps during times when you do upgrades or configuration changes.

Two hosts with replication between them are however still two completely independent hosts. I imagine it would be almost impossible to have a failure on one host that would make the other one inoperable.

But maybe that's incorrect and vSAN on one host would still have all the data and work regardless of what happened to the second host?

@scottalanmiller said in VM replication vs vSAN on two hosts?:

@Pete-S said in VM replication vs vSAN on two hosts?:

Starwind is not an option in this case (non-technical reasons). It's VMware vSAN or replication. Veeam will be installed in any case.

Then the real fix is finding the organization problem making politics take precedence over business needs.

Given that the results are not the driving factor here but organization emotional needs, I think your real answer then comes down to "what the organization wants" which we can't answer for them.

It's not emotional, it's a support question. HQ says what technology and what options they support and branch get to pick from those options. Enterprise, not SMB unfortunately.

@scottalanmiller said in VM replication vs vSAN on two hosts?:

Also worth noting, Starwind is free (and you can buy support), while 2&3 are not free. And while the cost might be included in something else, it still locks you in to those solutions unnecessarily and into those license levels. It reduces flexibility.

And, SW is platform agnostic so you aren't locked into even the vendors in question, let alone the products and licenses. Whereas both of the others require that you use specific products and vendors for specific pieces of the puzzle.

So while all three are good solutions, two have a lot of "cons" and not as many "pros" as the other.

Starwind is not an option in this case (non-technical reasons). It's VMware vSAN or replication. Veeam will be installed in any case.

Hosts are VMware ESXi. Options are Veeam replication or VMware vSAN.
Both replication and vSAN would be good enough when it comes to availability (a couple of hours downtime is acceptable).

ROBUSTNESS
Would VM replication between two hosts with local storage be more robust than vSAN on the same two hosts?

Robust in the sense that you can get up and running no matter what. Even if something got screwed up when you updated the hypervisor software on one of the hosts or say disc corruption or some other kind of software bug or hardware failure?

PERFORMANCE
Also how much of a IOPs performance loss will you experience on vSAN with only two hosts versus local SSD storage?

@JaredBusch
Looks like this:

@JaredBusch said in How do I install gparted on RHEL 7.7 with GUI?:

@Pete-S yum install epel-release absolutely should work.

If I understand correctly yum install epel-release only works on CentOS, not real RHEL.

It was a fresh install too from rhel-server-7.7-x86_64-dvd.iso

@scottalanmiller said in How do I install gparted on RHEL 7.7 with GUI?:

GParted is not part of RHEL itself. But it is available from the EPEL.

yum install epel-release -y

Then you can install GParted.

yum install gparted -y

It didn't work to install epel-release like that because it couldn't find it. But with the info you gave me I managed to find this which had info on RHEL 7.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL#How_can_I_use_these_extra_packages.3F

So I did:

yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
subscription-manager repos --enable "rhel-7-optional-rpms" --enable "rhel-7-extras-rpms" 

And then I could install the gparted package. Thanks!

Hi Guys!

How do I install gparted on RHEL 7.7 with GUI?

Is it some repository I'm missing?

Thanks!