@DustinB3403 said in Infrastructure Needed for Hypervisor Cluster:
I suppose if you are going from a bunch of 1U servers with six 300GB 10 NL disks to two 1U servers with 2 disks and a SAN sitting behind it that it looks consolidated. . .
I'm more a fan of not using spinning drives for boot devices. Flash SATADOM, M.2 devices. Even USB/SD cards (Slower on boot, have to redirect logs) tend to have better thermal resistance to spinning disks.
@scottalanmiller said in Infrastructure Needed for Hypervisor Cluster:
Sort of, but it then begs the question of "Didn't SAN and VLAN already do that?" And they did, so it's not a great definitely all on its own.
VLAN's don't provide end to end transport across long distances (unless your that insane person who believes in running layer 2 between continents or data centers at the physical underlay, and want to risk the spanning tree gods destroying your data center). VLAN's don't provide portability of networks across sites. VLAN's don't provide consistent layer 3 and layer 7 security and edge services between hardware. Yes I know PVLAN's exist, and no they don't do all or really any of this (Just useful for guest to guest isolation). Microsegmentation, security service insertion, VxLAN gateways and overlays, policies that stick to VM's (or users of VM's) and follow them etc fall under modern networking virtualization services.
Hypervisors provided similar features to mainframes of old (LPAR) but did so on generic servers, without the need for proprietary hardware. SAN's typically ended up with proprietary disk arrays, and while storage virtualization is a thing, it's generally always tied to one proprietary platform that it hair-pinned through. SDS systems also exist, but your dedicating compute to these platforms while HCI is about being able to flex that pool of resources for storage, compute and networking functions.
Notice I saw generic servers and not just x86. ARM HCI is upon us 
@DustinB3403 said in Infrastructure Needed for Hypervisor Cluster:
You take several smaller boxes and create a virtual, larger box out of the individual smaller boxes.
When you say that I think of LPAR combining servers (Bull, Hitachi).
HCI is just about doing for networking and storage what virtualization has already done for computing.
@scottalanmiller said in Infrastructure Needed for Hypervisor Cluster:
3PAR makes it less likely to be redundant, rather than more, I would wager.
3PAR is Active/active symmetric architecture with a full fiber mesh between controllers. Most cases where I've seen issues were tied to firmware on SSD's (Specifically the ~4TB Samsung ones) and people making giant RAID 5 pools, or people trying to move the array while it's running (yes this is dumb).
One really nice thing with the array is it does offer pretty solid vVols support with vSphere so you can manage it as a object system in that regards (No need for VMFS).
@scottalanmiller said in Cost per user:
And a tiny business, say 2-5 users, has to spend a percentage higher than larger businesses. And enterprises can use scale to reduce the percentage.
The costs are a lot lower when you have enough users to get a 90% discount.
@jmoore said in Cost per user:
While also not a real answer so take it for what its worth. I feel like the IT department has to really understand how users make use of the software they have.
This is actually a core feature/function of our internal SSO broker and MDM tooling etc is that we have dashboards for what application usage looks like. IT should be able to run a report and know how many people are using xxx software, how much they use it etc.
@guyinpv said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:
They hired some IT service provider for like $600+ a month to do random stuff we don't even need, but mostly be an IT backup phone if ever needed by the new guy. The dollar bills in my eyes are kinda saying, screw paying them $600, just pay me $600 retainer and I'll answer emails from the new guy and maybe do a few more advanced things like web dev. But that is contract rates, they would only get about 20-30 minutes of my time a day, max. Is that worth a retainer? Just for a few months or something? I suppose they can contract me just like any other client who comes calling. So I'm trying to decide whether I completely cut ties, or let them keep paying me to aid the new inexperienced person.
I know even if I try to cut ties, I will not escape the occasional communication, I just know it.
You are one person. They are a cross-function team with different skills you might not see, and also they have SOMEONE who can work 24/7 365. You occasionally might be at a wedding, or in Maui or just might not feel like picking up that day. There is a large premium on this.
@JaredBusch said in Dashrender why did you migrate to Hyper-V from XenServer:
The XCP-NG team is a team that had a horrible business model that they were trying to implement around XenServer (XOA). Great concept, poor business model.
I wish them well but they are fighting a few things...
Citrix couldn't make any real money even when they charged more and people were taking the product seriously.
Last time I checked they were just replacing some management components and packaging some storage stuff. They are not investing in upstream and there's a lot of... changes coming in hardware that are going to require non-trivial investments for hypervisors to remain relevant.
The real problem with Xen is upstream investment is drying up. Citrix has pulled back, Amazon and other cloud providers have moved on to KVM, SuSE doesn't even market virtualization (SAP HANA support, containers, OS is as close to bare metal as they get). Outside of some people in ARM/automotive virtualization I haven't seen anyone picking it up for net new projects. In the enterprise Oracle is the only champion of it these days. KVM won the open source hypervisor war (although at this point does anyone really care?)
@scottalanmiller said in KVM VM Replication:
No other platform has a thing called "platform replication".
vSphere Replication is most certainly a product/feature, and other ecosystem replication solutions out there like Recovery Point, RP4VM, Veeam Backup and Replication and Zerto. Couple things...
DRDB is a kernel driver. There's positives (It's low overhead) but also negatives vs stuff like VAIO that loopback to userspace (if it borks it takes down the host). For async you don't want WAN backups or other issues to cause problems, and how you deal with resume from the replication being borked without having something like CBT or WAN acceleration can change hugely how the stuff is operationally managed.
Compression/Deduplication/WAN efficiency. In theory I could run DRDB through a WAN optimizer, but this is a standard function in a number of replication products. If your on metered connections this can get expessive. (vSphere Replication uses LZFast for compression, Veeam lets you tune what compression you want etc). Honestly don't remember what compression Hyper-V uses other than that they do it.
Encryption. A lot of other async replication products/features support TLS encryption at the transport layer for this connection. In theory you could IPSEC DRDB.
Does the product support GFS retention of the async replica's? Can I keep snapshots on the other side and is merging them out to age out old ones a zero overhead operation.
Application and guest quiescence etc tied to recovery points. What does management for this look like?
Can I target 1 cluster to another cluster without having to manually pair hosts and volumes? (IE can I just target a resource pool etc on the other side, or am I manually deciding target hosts and volumes every time).
Some other nice to have's is something that manages orchestration of testing, failover, failback with full runbooks, replication of network firewall rules, handling BGP failover, network overlay stuff etc.
Saying "It's cool DRDB can do async replication" may be TECHNICALLY true, but there's a rabbit whole of features people tend to look for with async replication
@scottalanmiller said in Payroll Provider gets Encrypted & Pays Ransom:
@JaredBusch said in Payroll Provider gets Encrypted & Pays Ransom:
@scottalanmiller's recent example clearly shows that. I would be interested to know how many man hours @NTG sunk into restoring that. And it was a small typical SMB office. Not a huge SaaS provider.
Not done yet. But ~28 to mostly recovered.
I"ve seen everything from 1 billable hour of labor (kicking off Veeam restore of 4 VM's and coming back when it was done) to 200 hours (rebuild from scratch, and recovered core ERP database from a developer clone on someone's laptop).