@dashrender said in SAS SSD vs SAS HDD in a RAID 10?:
This really does boil down to math, but odds are of course never zero, and someone does have to be the one who suffers the failure outside of the typical odds from time to time.
Human error tends to be the biggest cause. People go to replace a drive while a rebuild is going on and swap the wrong drive.
@dave247 said in SAS SSD vs SAS HDD in a RAID 10?:
I see on xbyte, the PM863a is a lot cheaper, though I can't tell if that's a used/refurb part. What other places would you suggest I look?
It's just a bit long in the tooth at this point (That drives been around 2-3 years since the refresh). It's also low endurance TLC with a smallish DRAM and SLC buffer. It's not going to take sustained write throughput very well.
@JasGot said in How do YOU demo VDI?:
Cloud based VM on slow ASYNC cable ISP connection for large file usage when the file is in house
That's just stupid. If you move to hosted VDI, you move your files to it. NORMALLY you deploy VDI to the gravity well of where the data or latency sensitive application is.
@Dashrender said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:
Why are you locked to GPO? Why can't another management solution be used?
Because plenty of people have other applications and platforms that for AAA use AD and don't support other LDAP/Kerberos systems so given how cheap per user a CAL is they say "screw it" and use AD to distribute GPO (note GPO isn't tied to AD it's just commonly viewed that way).
@scottalanmiller said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:
@Dashrender said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:
@scottalanmiller said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:
@StorageNinja said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:
@Dashrender said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:
Why are you locked to GPO? Why can't another management solution be used?
Because plenty of people have other applications and platforms that for AAA use AD and don't support other LDAP/Kerberos systems so given how cheap per user a CAL is they say "screw it" and use AD to distribute GPO (note GPO isn't tied to AD it's just commonly viewed that way).
Wouldn't that affect the other side of the VDI, though, not the client side?
Couldn't it do both?
Maybe, I mean you CAN control thin clients with GPO, but not normal thin clients.
Correct. The thin client itself I see managed by either thin client management tools (Terradichi) or by MDM API's.
@bbigford said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:
They are slow as fuck in most environments
Are they slow, or did someone underprovision the Shitrix environment behind it?
@Dashrender said in Is the Physical Thin Client Era Dead?:
Just wasn't expecting to need thin client devices as powerful or more so than desktop machines running XP to be required to get an as good experience
Zero Clients have less intelligence than a rock (It's an ASIC that gets it's firmware by PXE boot) and I can play Skyrim on them over PCoIP. Printer Redirection will not really work, and god help you with a IO USB device over the WAN but a Thin client doesn't need to be that powerful for graphics beyond 2D resolution support, and number of monitor support.
All the new Thin Clients protocols are based on H.265. That is decoded in cheap(ish) SOC. Even an old iPhone 5/iPad 4 support H.265. In this case the CPU load is zero for the graphics as it's fully offloaded end to end.
@DustinB3403 said in With ESXi Licensing what happens if I let it lapse:
Microsoft started pulling Security patches off of their servers after your contract expires but the platform is still supported.
Microsoft no longer provides patches for XP Server 2003 unless you pay them a lot of extra money. It's basically a license with security updates for a fixed interval that can be extended for a ton of money...
@JaredBusch said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
Once changed, cockpit, of course, shows it. But is stilled greyed out.
Not to rub salt in the wound, but this is stuff that ESXi's had for a decade. It's why I hate "feature checklist" or over-focus on 1-2 aspects of a system. It ignores the operational realities of what most people's day 0, or day 2 operations look like.
If Free KVM UI's were full featured, and intuitive, and had a low-cost support option for backing them I think we would see Scale Computing and other KVM appliance offerings have zero VC/Market Cap. Given these products have existed for 10 years, and they struggle in these most basic of ways I don't feel there is a huge amount of money going into solving this problem (and by proxy) not a lot of market demand.
The fight for the management plane has moved on from Hypervisors (That war is frankly over) and has moved on to containers, hybrid cloud management, networking/security and a host of other things.
In containers Kuberentes has "won", but there's a lot of adjacent product space for making things like Networking and security, not a dumpster fire. The reality is that ESXi "won" the on-premises datacenter war, Hyper-V's entire focus is on Azure/AzureStack now (fighting VMware on a full SDDC stack and Hybrid Cloud). Talking to one large OEM recently Microsoft has pulled all funding for headcounts on competitive Hyper-V trying to displace ESXi on premises. They recognize that the fight has moved on.
KVM is showing up in a few turnkey appliance vendors (Scale Computing, NTNX) but from what I'm seeing adoption numbers are a rounding error of the total addressable market (Some could argue though that everyone underestimates the growth of on-premises IT, especially on the edge making this still an underestimated TAM). I suspect we'll KVM in IoT platforms on a net adoption rate, but not in people actually having SSH to the platform or consuming it at large scale as a pure open source, roll your own. KVM in public cloud (like AWS) still has solid market share growth going on (As it slowly replaces the massive amount of Xen especially at AWS).
Meanwhile OpenStack continues to lurk in Telco where it's gotten a solid footing despite the rest of us all forgetting it exists 
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
But in the space where no one is keeping track of deployment numbers, it used to be ESXi that was always being replaced. Now it is Hyper-V.
It's a misnomer that people don't try to track free installs. There's phone home telemetry for vendor products, download tracking and a host of other voodoo to at least make an attempt at reconciling these data sets. IDC and the like tend to only report revenues, but there are ways to track embedded ESXi free edition at the OEM and distribution level as well as the phone home level etc. Looking at unique downloads of security patches isn't a terrible proxy for active installs that are being maintained. There are also groups like IDC who conduct phone and other survey's in line with statistical models. Vendors who work in the ecosystem and have to make product judgments of where to invest in also do their own private tracking (Backup vendors do some fairly large stuff).
Are you sure you are doing tracking and statistical modeling of this, or are you just reviewing anecdotes and assuming the plural of an anecdote is data? I feel like we were just arguing 3 years ago that Xen going to take over the world.
@scottalanmiller said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
To say that they won the war, when they appear to have given up, seems odd. In the enterprise I assume that ESXi is still dominating, that's a different game. But in the space where no one is keeping track of deployment numbers, it used to be ESXi that was always being replaced. Now it is Hyper-V.
To clarify, the "war" was claiming a major stake in revenue and market share when Hypervisors and Hypervisor management software was still in Hypergrowth and a double-digit CAGR. That war is over (It's single-digit growth at best).
I'd argue It's the other hypervisor vendors that have largely given up in this space...
Microsoft shifted licensing for datacenter and VMM to per core to drive up costs for server edition and applications and shift customers to hosted providers (making SPLA look a lot cheaper at small volume). They've cut their bounties for partners to deploy Hyper-V, removed partner competitive resources and adjusted field compensation to focus entirely on Azure/AzureStack. Hyper-V as a stand-alone free entity isn't a priority beyond it being a sum of the parts that they want to sell. I'd argue this was a smart move (Stop trying to get a piece out of a market that is in single digit growth which is where revenue is for stand-alone hypervisor management products is today). I would summarize what I've seen of their strategy as "Go to Azure, or go somewhere else". Oracle's pursuing a similar strategy with their cloud (Field Rep's only get paid on cloud consumption).
RedHat failed to gain any meaningful market share for KVM and their management platform. I'd argue their new focus is more around containers, and PaaS things. Curious if the marriage of this could make IBM cloud a much more diverse beyond IaaS competitor in the field. Note, IBM Cloud has a massive amount of VMware in it (SDDC as a service in the form of VCF popular for the bigger shops). IBM's service heavy leanings and existing customer base put them at the least married to the hypervisor that they de-facto own/control. KVM could become more strategic (Get everyone off LPAR's and VMware) or it could become less strategic (Redhat has a lot of other IP that will work fine on multiple hypervisors and makes plenty better margin). My bets on the later, but we will see.
Citrix last I heard has been losing market share with XenServer and Xen itself is losing market share in public clouds in general.
There's a massive long tail of other niche vendors, none of which I"m aware of having 1% market share in Hypervisor management revenues. The Cloud Service Providers (AWS/Microsoft/Google/IBM) are sucking all the air out of the room as public cloud expands. There could be an argument about Hybrid Cloud revenue being a market split between both, but that's still a growing market.
There are other ancillary markets still with a lot of growth that there's still strong battles going on in. There are a few minor players trying to bundle HCI with higher level functions (Containers etc) but I'm seeing more of these falling off analysts and revenue tracking radar than being added on.
HCI in Hypergrowth, which is mostly being deployed on vSphere. Analysts underestimating the TAM on this one should be a meme. I do think we are past the uniform BBQ phase.
Cloud Management Products (CMP) - VMware still leading this and outgrowing market but there's a decent bit of diversity and I'm convinced this one will continue to fracture for a while until we see more consolidation. It's worth noting that the CMP's were chosen for app's today will likely Zombie for another 20 years if CA and BMC's continued relevant irrelevance says anything.
Advanced micro-segmentation and security services - There's a lot of growth but this is currently a small space due to the massive capital requirements of this arms race. I expect security, in general, to end up with fewer players in the long run. Too many vendors cause much confusion on operationalizing them and gaps form.
I have to agree with Jeff Ready. The Unicorn BBQ phase is on. We are not going to see large scale growth of new competitors entering now. I think while HCI has plenty of growth, there is going to be an increasing push to show revenue to maintain investments and this is going to leave a lot fewer players at the dance.
@wrx7m said in VMWare Shutdown:
For vmware, if you are going to shutdown only (no patches), do you always put in maintenance mode first?
@Dashrender said in Why I Feel KVM Is the Easiest HyperVisor to Learn the Basics On:
The question is - why is the quality so bad? Isn't the process supposed to catch bad quality?
Their process is consider the windows insider group (extreme power users) to be a good enough replacement for proper QE teams, and writing automated build tests.
@scottalanmiller said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:
How do they handle if doctors get sick or can't come in?
It's like a 30 day transition in theory but I"ve never heard of that being enforced. I suspect that has more to do with niche surgical practices.
Doctors can reach the EMR from home and put in notes. For in patient care whoever is coming off call on the weekend calls whoever is taking over and does a transfer of knowledge over the phone on top of the notes.
It's considered unethical in medicine to just "Dump" someone with an existing condition that you began treatment on without making sure someone else picks them up. Example.... can't set a central line and then as a practice not take it out.
@scottalanmiller said in Finally leaving my job, and it's just as annoying as I thought it would be:
@Dashrender there's also a value in providing a benefit, employee retention is an important metric which translates to dollars. And a car is so much more than a coffee machine.
Higher pay retains people too, and better I'd argue. I'll take pay over a car any day, in fact, I'd rather not have a car at all.
I have a car (Drive maybe 1800 miles a year on it?). I just use Uber for work (Have platinum status lol) for work. I earn the points and can take calls and get things done on the way to the meeting/airport etc.
The problem with a company car is I'm on the hook for maintaining it on some level more than likely (Unless you have fleet services), There are limits to how I use it (Can my kids ride in it?, Can I take it out of town?), the car might also be a car I don't like to drive (Ford Ranger, with no stereo) or really want.
@JaredBusch said in Payroll Provider gets Encrypted & Pays Ransom:
But restoring an entire infrastructe is never a fast task.
Couple ways...
@DustinB3403 said in Payroll Provider gets Encrypted & Pays Ransom:
Um. . . fire those experts and get someone in there who once you're are up to fix your systems, that meet real RTO and RPO objectives. . .
You realize that the consultants who get brought in to clean up these messes are almost never the same muppets who built this out, or let this happen?
@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?)
@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.
A few things...
Google and AWS don't bother running them on Baremetal. While some people do, they tend to be shops that like running lots of linux on bare-metal and for them, it's a OS/Platform choice rather than a Hypervisor vs. non-hypervisor choice. The majority of the containers in people's datacenters and in the cloud are in VMs.
VMware with the project pacific announcement at VMworld called out that they get better performance with their container runtime in a Virtual Machine, than bare metal Linux container hosts. (This makes sense, once you understand that the vSphere scheduler does a better job at packing with NUMA awareness than the Linux kernel. Kit explained this on my podcast last week if anyone cares to listen).
I run them on bare metal on my Pi4 cluster because I'm still waiting on drivers and EFI to be written for it so I can run a proper hypervisor on them.
@Pete-S said in VM replication vs vSAN on two hosts?:
So it would be an option to use vSAN as shared storage but without having the HA features in play?
This is a stupid idea. If you have vSphere HA available, enable it. It doesn't cause problems.