Best posts made by StorageNinja

https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2017/09/08/tintri_second_quarter_revenues_dwarfed_by_losses/

80mil cash, 70mil debt. GAAP Net Loss of $51.7m for the quarter. They are running out of money fast.

@scottalanmiller said in FIPS 140-2 compliance and Ubiquiti VPN:

OpenVPN is FIPS compliant.

It's a cryptographic module that can be inside solutions so the term would be "FIPS 140-2 Inside" technically (As the implementation hasn't been validated).

@dbeato said in Xenserver and Storage:

@olivier I would not do HA Lizard, it is problematic with XenServer. You can ask @StorageNinja . I have gone through many SW posts having issues with this. I did recommend it once but it was not worth it. XOSAN will be much better
https://xen-orchestra.com/blog/xenserver-hyperconverged-with-xosan/
or if you can afford two more host with WIndows Server and StarWind VSAN then it would be good too.

Note, XOSAN is just Gluster under the hood. You do NOT WANT TO RUN GLUSTSER WITH 2 nodes. IT IS NOT SUPPORTED. (you can run a 3rd metadata only node, but you need SOMETHING out there to provide quorum).

It requires a proper stateful quorum of a 3rd node. Also for maintenance, you really likely want 4 nodes at a minimum so you can do patching and still take a failure. You'll also need to consider having enough free capacity on the cluster to maintain health slack on the Bricks, (20-30%) AND take a failure, so do that math into your overhead. Also for reasons, I'll get into in a moment you REALLY want to run local raid on Gluster nodes.

Also note, Gluster's local drive failure handling is very... binary... RedHat (who owns Gluster) refuses to issue a general support statement for JBOD mode with their HCI product, and directs you to use RAID 6 for 7.2K drives (no RAID 10). Given the unpredictable latency issues with SSD's (Garbage collection triggering failure detection etc) their deployment guide completely skips SSDs (as I would expect until they can fix the failure detection code to be more dynamic, or they can build a HCL). JBOD because of these risks is a "Contact your Red Hat representative for details." (Code for we think this is a bad idea, but might do a narrowly tested RPQ type process).

@olivier said in Xenserver and Storage:

That's why I asked if you have better knowledge of community on this solution because I really don't. So if it's the case, that it's not stable (darn, it's here since a long time!), that's indeed not an option.

Issue with HA lizzard is that it doesn't have a stateful quorum system (just pinging a single IP address). You can split brain it.

@scottalanmiller said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:

$100/yr is more than the cost of entirely replacing it with something modern and better from a vendor that treats you better. Making $100 an insane price for keeping crap gear patched.

Who will all in the firewall space provide 24/7/365 follow the sun support for a firewall/router for $100 a year, as well as patches, feature improvements etc? I wouldn't call that expensive for what it is.

@scottalanmiller said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:

Who needs that, just have a spare. Better protection, a fraction of the price, and no arguing with Cisco to try to get support from those idiots. Not trusting Cisco support is another facet of the situation

If you need product support (Question about why something isn't working) if you need a bug fixed, or a workaround for a 3rd parties bug (Cisco gave me the workaround for fixing interop issues caused by bad RSTP implementations by HPE and others etc). Also, same day replacement with labor to do it (If I've got a firewall at a lumber mill in the middle of no where having the staff to deal with that). I can pay someone but that costs money (It's an insurance policy against having to deal with all this stuff or do my own RCA's on obnoxious interop issues of SIP inspection with a broken 3rd party Avaya system etc).

@mike-davis said in MSP ticketing system:

I should add I'm running on a server in vultr so there is a cost, but better than running my own server.

There is a cost to using Spiceworks (period) for MSP usage. It's not designed for it, so you have to waste tons of extra time making up for the lack of proper client tracking features, billing and reporting integrations and general functions that a PSA like Autotask or connectwise has.

5.1 isn’t a supported release (Its ancient). Update the host to something Modern (even 5.5 has less than a year left).

@ghani said in VMware PSOD happening on VMware host server:

@storageninja

Dear Team,

customer dont have VMware SnS support for upgrading VMware latest.

You don't need active SnS to upgrade to 5.5 which is still in support for another 300 days or so...

@dustinb3403 said in Major Intel CPU vulnerability:

https://i.imgur.com/PLVrZdk.png

It takes 3 seconds to look at his stock trades and see the pattern, and another 5 minutes to see that he filed paperwork for this plan back in 2015

At the end of Q4 he sells his awards. Nothing to see here fake news from the internet mob who's too lazy to learn basic finance skills.

@scottalanmiller said in New laptop recommendation - Mom compatible:

But MS Office is specific and needs compatibility

Office Online (If they have 365) runs just fine in Chrome.

@wrx7m Always hated CIP myself also. The standalone update utility is gone. You can use VUM through the web client. Also, try out the HTML5 client while you are at it. It's nice in 6.5

@wrx7m A 6.5 vCenter can manage a 6.0 host just fine.

@bnrstnr said in If all hypervisors were priced the same...:

I've never even used VMware, but I'm pretty sure if every single feature was available for free (like all the other hypervisors), then I'm pretty sure that's a no-brainer.

It's not just feature but ecosytem to consider. xxx hypervisor may work for what you do, but what if you need to run XenDesktop. It's not a supported hypervisor for them to do PVS/MCS automation with. What if you needs FIPS 140-2 compliance, or need a DISA STIG.

What if you need NSX/microsegmentation and service insertion support? NSX-T can cover KVM, but for Hyper-V or Xen you'll need to deploy a gateway.

Hypervisor requirements tend to not live in a vacuum, and that drives a lot of stuff.

@scottalanmiller said in If all hypervisors were priced the same...:

My question here is... what makes Hyper-V or VMware better on those small systems? Hyper-V's main problems, mostly huge management overhead and complexity, are worst at the small scale. where KVM or Xen's ease of use is a really big deal.
VMware I see in that mid-range... but companies in that range are crippled by cost today. If it was free, I think it would make sense all the way down. Hyper-V really depends on "free" more than KVM and Xen do.

There are quite a few points but one low hanging fruit is the DRS family of features (Compute/network DRS, Affinity rules, Storage DRS, SIOCv2 VAIO filters, Proactive - DRS). It's balancing logic is significantly more advanced. combined with better scheduler overheads, more advanced new workload placement logic means you can get by with a lot less hardware.

For someone with 10 tiny VM's this isn't going to matter, but for someone who's operating with a decent amount of scale having to throw money at hardware, and bodies instead of software become a trade-off that throws things into DRS being worth the premium for TCO.

Now if the hardware is free to you, and labor is $2 an hour then TCO will shift the other way vs paying for software.

Also, decisions are often more nuanced than simple TCO decisions. If you have compliance requirements this often shifts to commercial solutions that have validated FIPS 140-2 modules/solutions. If you need a DISA STIG at a given level paying some money and being able to deploy a single VIB to harden compliance vs. go through checklists and argue with auditors can be a big deal. How do you quantify the cost of applying with NIST for validation with a do it yourself setup vs. a turnkey solution?

The cost of management tools are generally looked at as a function of the cost of existing management labor (People), the cost of the solution stack, and the premium for availability.

If you have Oracle RAC or SQL Always ON clusters that cost 40K per host in licensing it's different math. Paying 2K for some hypervisor management tools that will let you run 1.5x to 2.5x denser on host usage (and drop associated licensing costs), or free up 15% time for a Sysadmin who's paid 100K so he can go get other projects finished, isn't a "Crippling cost" but a simple, logical conclusion.

Customers who need VM Fault Tolerance don't care what the cost is because the alternative is generally proprietary solutions that cost 250K per server, or death (US wrongful death is what 2.5 million each?) or re-writing their application and getting it revalidated by regulators(Millions in capex if even an option).

If you have Excel/Access Databases and 5 Windows XP VMs, and you have outsourced your sysadmin work to SouthEast Asia for 5K a year, and an outage is going to cost you nothing sure.

@dafyre said in Licenses for APs and Switches:

With that campus the size that it is, I would definitely recommend finding something to handle the Layer7 stuff.

I'm relatively certain you could drop in Ubiquiti APs, and possibly grab a Palo Alto that could work and still come out cheaper than doing the licenses for the Meraki gear.

Palo Alto does far better layer 7. If this is a school you need to meet CIPA compliance.

@markferron said in Licenses for APs and Switches:

@scottalanmiller said in Licenses for APs and Switches:

@markferron said in Licenses for APs and Switches:

@scottalanmiller said in Licenses for APs and Switches:

@storageninja said in Licenses for APs and Switches:

@dafyre said in Licenses for APs and Switches:

With that campus the size that it is, I would definitely recommend finding something to handle the Layer7 stuff.

I'm relatively certain you could drop in Ubiquiti APs, and possibly grab a Palo Alto that could work and still come out cheaper than doing the licenses for the Meraki gear.

Palo Alto does far better layer 7. If this is a school you need to meet CIPA compliance.

Private college, should be free to avoid CIPA.

Muhaha... Yes we are free to avoid CIPA, but it would still be nice to comply. It would look great on accreditation.

To the accrediting board, you mean? I suppose that makes sense, with the things out there that they are willing to give accreditation to, clearly education isn't what they are focused on.

Yeah no kidding. I saw a few items on the list of of things they wanted to know about our college and it made me laugh. Wish I could remember what they were...

Do you offer dual credit classes to high school students? Curious if that trips the need for CIPA?

@dave247 said in Is AirWatch or AirWatch Express dead or something?:

We set up MaaS360 ourselves and it wasn't very difficult. Additionally, I have set up AirWatch Express and added a handful of test devices and it was quite easy to do. Its just that there are limitations on Express and I think regular AirWatch would be better to meet our needs. Those needs are: secure container with the AirWatch inbox/browser/etc. And as far as I can tell, Express only works with the device's native email client.

It's been 3 years since I did airwatch training, but from memory here, you would need full airwatch to create a separate container.

The Boxer Mail Client VMware bought is actually quite nice and comparable to Inbox by Google (I generally wanted to extract rage on some other MDM's mail clients I've used). The auto-tunneling browser and app stuff, as well as the container to separate work vs. personal makes usability quite nice.

I'll be in Atlanta next month (Got a conference downtown) but I'll see if I can meet those guys for drinks and figure out what they are up to. Their R&D office is really damn cool (The first floor was a trading floor for commodities they somehow put enough soundproofing in to adopt into one giant room with hundreds of engineers).

@markferron said in UniFi Home Lab vs Campus:

@dustinb3403 Awesome, thank you very much. Our current security gateway, Meraki MX400, was going to be changed out but the costs of license renewal is far cheaper than purchasing the Palo Alto I was looking at , bummer.

You looked at running PA in a VM? It's a lot cheaper.

@scottalanmiller said in Networking and 1U Colocation:

@eddiejennings said in Networking and 1U Colocation:

@scottalanmiller said in Networking and 1U Colocation:

@eddiejennings said in Networking and 1U Colocation:

@aaronstuder said in Networking and 1U Colocation:

What are the specs of the server?

Intel Xeon CPU Quad Core X3430 2.4GHz
32 GB RAM
Two 2 TB SATA drives in RAID 1

Could be worth calling xByte and getting something a little beefier.

I'll give it some thought. I need to think through how I intend to use it beyond just building and destroying VMs just to tinker. Might start a "spec my server" thread.

Your CPU is fine, but 64GB of RAM might be worthwhile.

That CPU dates back to when I began my IT career. I'm fairly certain Intel hasn't released Meltdown/Spectre Microcode patches for it.