Posts made by PSX_Defector

@travisdh1 said in SQL Administration Woes:

Breaking them down per drive is what I've done for a long time and what is considered best practice even now. And given that I would never put backups on any of my SSD tiers, why the hell wouldn't I split off that?

Because the backup isn't the local file created, it's what goes to the normal backup client. The local file is only because most backup software can't handle creating backups of active databases.

Da fuq?

Even NT Backup can handle SQL backups. Any modern VSS aware backup product can handle SQL backups.

Which doesn't even touch the fact that you are filling up the drive with junk that can easily be put off the machine, and really should be because WTF?

Unless of course you don't care about tiering, better disk management, and so forth.

This is all handled at the hypervisor level. If you really need tiering, just setup a different virtual disks for the VM with different priority levels.

But you just put everything onto one VHD. There is no management, you have to put it in the fastest tier because of SQL binaries and the MDF/LDF files.

@travisdh1 said in SQL Administration Woes:

1. No. Splitting the disks like that is a historical oddity once you're virtualized. OBR (One Big RAID) is the way to go on the host, and then everything else is transparent to the hosted machines.

Da fuq?

TempDB grows too fast, fills up the C:\ drive, boom, you f***ed. Logs fill up the drive, need to perform a clean up by running a backup, can't because C:\ is full. Everything is on C:\ but you need to extend the drive, oops you fucked that up now you are toast. Then of course we forget about the absolute stupidity of putting all the binaries on the C:\ drive. Hope you never need to cluster.

Breaking them down per drive is what I've done for a long time and what is considered best practice even now. And given that I would never put backups on any of my SSD tiers, why the hell wouldn't I split off that? Letting TempDB grow on their own volume would prevent it from taking down the OS.

Unless of course you don't care about tiering, better disk management, and so forth.

@Dashrender said in Two ISP Fail over Internally vs Externally Fail over:

what does it do that the ER-L doesn't? I know someone else (the guy at SW who swears more than JB) recommended the Peplink to me years ago... but I think the ER-L can do many of the same things now.

Much like Tivo and generic DVRs, they function the same, but the actual execution is more refined.

Outbound load balance has been a feature for many different devices for a while now. I've got an ER-L right now, yeah it does the load balance between the two circuits. But since they are very different speeds, they don't balance as evenly as Peplink can do it. They also don't offer bonded VPN and their interface is easy as fuck to deal with.

Yeah, I can buy a TWC DVR, but my Tivo does more.

We use PURE storage for 90% of our VMs and Dell Compellent for cheap and deep and the rest. I believe we are on the SC9000, but I would actually have to look. Needless to say, it's got lots of storage, and we got lots of them.

Currently sitting on ~6000VMs throughout all our datacenters. Not counting the 200+ we have internal to us.

https://www.purestorage.com/products/flash-array-m/m10.html
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/storage-sc9000/pd

@scottalanmiller said in Public Cloud vs. Hosted Hyperconvergence Costing Project:

Result... break even on a five year cycle. Almost exactly the same cost. Except for a few things....

Yeah, you forgot the pipe to get shit out. There's $60K right there. Double it if you want redundancy, like what you would get in a hosted solution.

the hyperconverged solution is high availability while the hosted cloud option is not.

Da f***? You lose one node, you are hurting. I lose 10 nodes in a rack and wouldn't even have to get up to answer the call. And we are a small time provider. Someone like Verizon has 20 or so 32 node clusters in ONE datacenter for one customer line.

And the hyperconverged solution includes backups, the hosted cloud solution does not.

Da f***? What the hell have you been looking at? What kind of hosted provider doesn't provide backups? I just spent a cool half mil on just hardware to supply backups for folks. Verizon has 42U tape libraries backing up stuff all day long using Commvault. Not to mention the cloud backup processes if someone really didn't want all their stuff in one spot.

I think you are going in on this half baked. Yeah, you can get some stuff locally cheaper. But don't compare hosted versus local on price alone. You capped your shit out local, you are stuck until you buy more and have to sink that cost for the next cycle. I can scale your machines up with more processors on a whim and drop you back down because Boxing Day is your biggest sale day. You getting DDoS'd by China locally, you basically have to figure it out. I have massive WAFs to block that shit. You get a pimply faced youth for $12 an hour to run your shit, something blows up and he has no clue what to do. I have people with 20+ years of experience just in our support team ready to assist your dumbass who ran rm -r /.

@scottalanmiller said in Cost Study: 4 Node Scale vs. 4 Node VMware IPOD:

A cost difference of $67,594 is pretty significant for any SMB.

Because you picked something I would buy, well, not me because I would run out of space first on it, not an SMB. Dell still sells Compellent storage. An SCv2020, same amount of disks, with support, is $30K on Fibre Channel. Why not quote PURE SANs while we are at it, stacked to the gills with the fastest SSDs we can find?

Cherry picking storage is always gonna make hyperconvergence look good. You need to review your workload to determine if that's gonna be the right path. Most SMBs workload only needs cheap and deep storage because they are all digital packrats and very little compute. Most SMBs workload would be better ran in cloud services. So really, it's not about cost study for local servers, it's about if it's better to host outside and get a giant NAS for those local files which people can't seem to get rid of.

@DustinB3403 said in Trump appoints Kalanick and Musk to committee:

You wouldn't have to worry about a creepy driver either in this case.

http://www.thermocow.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/robot1.jpg

@scottalanmiller said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:

@Dashrender said in Protecting companies from hourly employees:

long answer, management believes they could be held liable for people who are checking their email hourly, let's say, at night. those employees could claim that their checking is work and they should be paid for it. So preventing them, prevents the argument. Of course and HR policy stating that they are not allowed to check their email after, say, 6 PM and before 7 AM, should prevent that in a court case, but we've all seen/heard of ridiculous court cases before.

My point is, it does NOT prevent the argument. The employees can still claim that attempting to check emails, even if it doesn't work, is billable work as well.

What is the fear, that an employee will call the DoL and claim to have been falsifying their own work records? I'm confused as to how the DoL would get involved if it is the employee doing something wrong and not the company.

Then there is an easy answer.

Pay for the "overtime" then promptly shit can them.

At-Will employment, and OT milking is not a protected act.

@Dashrender said in Suggestion on Domino to office 365 Migration:

I know NTG can handle migrations from Exchange to O365 (and from Rackspace). Don't know if they have any experience with Domino to O365.

Hopefully @Minion-Queen doesn't look at my resume and see all the Domino experience.....

Here's something cool to use.

http://www.newtek.com/products/tricaster-mini.html

Live broadcast to the individual TVs, just set them to HDMI and setup your cameras. Record the sermon and then distribute later on.

There are cheaper mixers, but I would stick with ease of use and get something turn on and go. I've setup similar stuff in churches before.

Really? Webcams and shit IP cameras? Do you want the old people at church to get a seizure from the 10fps and heart attacks from the configuration of the software? It's like none of you ever worked in AV.

Simplicity is needed here. Turn it on, point and shoot.

https://www.epiphan.com/products/pearl/

Throw in a nice Canon camera, run some quick VGA and/or HDMI cables and you are good to go.

Yeah, ain't as cheap as the other solutions, but do you really want the word of God to look like shit?

You are looking at the wrong number. Your fault is a 0xC00005. Corrupted system file.

Run setup and it should fix it. And quit loading warez.

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@PSX_Defector said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

I can manage the hardware as the datacenter admin, I don't need console access to the blades nor the network/storage gear.

But can you grant access to the console to the system admins and to the switching to the network admins and give them control of the physical components of their domains without giving access to other stuff? At least on the HPE blades at the era that we had them, HPE said that you could not and made us move from switched to pass through networking to get around it.

Of course.

Big Red V, by extension Digix, had been doing that since G3 era blades. Most of it was API driven, but even if you cracked down into the interface, each blade is limited towards your permissions.

We also are talking about hosting, our guys could do anything while the customer couldn't tell what they were on. If you are talking about SOX stuff, it's just easier to split the environment. If you are talking about individual production teams, that's done via role delegation.

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

how do you do that without comingling responsibilities?

Remember what I said, the interface is still old school for the actual function.

I can manage the hardware as the datacenter admin, I don't need console access to the blades nor the network/storage gear.

I can manage the hypervisor from the ESX level without ever seeing the hardware.

I can manage the switching without ever seeing ESX.

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@PSX_Defector said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

And blades do not necessarily mix them together. We use exclusively software defined networking, from our switching to our firewalls. Would be the same thing without blades.

That is a port problem, you need so many ports to handle that, it kills one of the major selling points of the blades.

I only need four uplinks per chassis for the network, another four for fibre channel.. If I had 42 1U units, I would need a 48 port switch to just handle the networking, let alone the fibre channel.

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@PSX_Defector said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

One major problem is that when you get big enough to have blades have sensible density, you normally have separate system, networking and storage teams. But Blades mix those together.

So? One guy to rule them all is not a viable solution once you move from SMB.

Yes, and that was one of the reasons that blades got ruled out. They were designed to be "one guy to rule them all." Everything was comingled in one interface and the security between teams could not exist.

Geez, lazy folk.

Considering you can narrow down everything in a blade chassis, it sounds more like folks didn't understand the management rather than blades didn't offer all that could be done.

Which is really the biggest reason about anything. Folks don't understand, they go "bad!!!!" and that's the end of it.

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

One major problem is that when you get big enough to have blades have sensible density, you normally have separate system, networking and storage teams. But Blades mix those together.

So? One guy to rule them all is not a viable solution once you move from SMB.

And blades do not necessarily mix them together. We use exclusively software defined networking, from our switching to our firewalls. Would be the same thing without blades.

The only thing a blade brings one place to view it physically. The switch gear you plug in, it's managed the same old ways. Otherwise, it's pretty much the same equipment.

We separate out our teams to play to our strengths. I'm the Microsoft expert, we have a Linux expert, storage expert, networking experts and so on. We all can do some other job, but we focus on our strengths to keep things going.

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@PSX_Defector True, but the SMB doesn't worry about processor density in a rack, either. Per rack processor density is only enterprise space and even there, not that common. It's more hosting provider space.

In all the Fortune 500 companies I been around, yeah, density is pretty important. A certain agro-cult in Illinois had some serious density because it saved them cash on the environment. Big red V used blades all over. So did the Death Star, who practically pioneered density by changing switching gear for decades.

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@PSX_Defector said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

Because I'm the perfect candidate for blade systems. High density computing in a small footprint.

At the few giant environments that I've been in, blades couldn't get higher density than we could get with traditional servers. They sold them on density, but the resulting density was decent, but not quite as good. There is a reason why Google and Facebook go for higher density in other ways as well.

In a 42U standard cabinet, you can have:

64 two socket x86 blades with 2U to spare with Dell/HP for 128 processors. Plus the 2U can be used for networking gear.
42 two socket x86 1U servers for 86 processors. With no spare space for networking gear.

Right now, there are no real quad socket x86 1U servers. There was a few in the past, but expensive as shit. And they have been overtaken by the higher density core per socket processors for a while now.

This is just the x86 world. The ASIC style device is not general purpose, which is what Google and Facebook use. Yeah, I can get more density of "servers" by using ARM for one and done kind of workloads, but that's not general purpose. I would be surprised if anyone in SMB does anything like that. Specialty workloads can get more and more and more into a single U of space, but when your application is SQL Server 2016 with a Sharepoint frontend, you don't need fancy shit.

Most folks will never see that level of complexity.

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

@PSX_Defector said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

Speak for yourself. It would be very welcomed in my environment.

Because..... you are willing to use blades, already have invested in that so for better or worse this fits your environment even if blades may not be ideal for you and you already own the storage.

Because I'm the perfect candidate for blade systems. High density computing in a small footprint.

If I went with even 1U units, I wouldn't have near the amount of processing power that the blade system would provide. A chassis is 10U. With a 1U unit all I could hope for is 10 to 20 sockets. With a blade chassis, I get 16 blades, 16 to 32 processors fully stacked. Not to mention the single management interface for networking, storage, and so forth. Fully racked and stacked cabinet, I get 64 blades. With 1U units, I get 42 at best. If I go IBM, I can get even more with a mix and match of i, z, and x86 all in one chassis. For HP, I can get x86 and Itanium blades. Cisco UCS, only 56 blades on a 42U cabinet total but with some integrated networking. All with a single storage fabric and super easy deployment.

Blades are inappropriate for lots of folks, especially the ones who have just one system right now. For service providers, like us, we need heavy density because cabinet space costs money. Power, cooling, and such are just side benefits.