Best posts made by StorageNinja

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

DOn't know if VMware VSAN gives you that option

It does, but you will get a health alarm, as there isn't a real reason to disable it....

@Jimmy9008 said in How do you know what a fair salary is for the area you work?:

Hi folks,
How do you decide what is a fair salary for an IT position?

As a hiring manager It was:
Look at the skills, identify skills that align with the job (IE it's cool if you were an oracle RAC admin but If I didn't need that I didn't care). If I see a good alignment (Your skills mostly are skills I saw value in) I'd assign $$ modifiers to the skills (Say someone who can do BGP/MPLS work was worth an extra 20K over another admin who couldn't), sum them up and if the value > the cost to hire you and you had the best value of any candidates at the time you got hired!

I am finding it to be quite difficult to get an idea as many job listings that require a similar skill set often say 'salary depending on experience'. So, you cannot really get any data.

Working for a large company there's stuff like GlassDoor to get an idea of what a company has previously paid a given title but even then that can get iffy, especially in consulting where everyone might get the same title but have wildly different skillsets and value. If it's a company who has H1B's you can look up the salary data on that (I think our average H1B makes 120K but you could align specific jobs to specific visa's and guess based on that). For software companies trying to figure out what the pay bands and level's corresponding between companies (Say for titles like MTS) https://www.levels.fyi/ isn't horrible. If you want to pseudo-anonymously ask people internally at a given company https://www.teamblind.com/articles/Topics works for larger companies.
There's also just go drinking with people and ask.

Salary != Compensation. Say it with me...
. Once you add up, RSU's ESPP, weird 401K benefits (Post tax rollover maximums and supporting reverse rollovers), HSA pre-paid match, health benefits, unlimited vacation, variable bonus tied to my MBOs, training and T&E costs It could be argued I've had years where 50% (or more) of my compensation wasn't my base salary.

https://thenicholson.com/thinking-taking-offer-need-know/

Plus, I have never quite trusted the data shown on sites like PayScale. Its probably quite skewed towards data being provided by those on lower salaries anyway.

It's just a data point. Just because you don't like that data point doesn't mean it's not data. it just might not be relevant data.

I also expect each area varies quite drastically in salary. It doesn't feel right to judge say a Sysadmin salary for somebody working from Kings Cross or Old Street to somebody in Greenwich...

Once you get above helpdesk fodder this shouldn't matter as work remote jobs (or jobs where you can office out of a remote office).

How do you begin to decide whats fair?

Who gives a @#%@ what's fair? It's about you trying to provide the most recognized value and extract the most value back in compensation as possible. Seriously, Rules of Acquisition should guide you in compensation negotiations.

@scottalanmiller said in How do you know what a fair salary is for the area you work?:

Payscale is obviously BS. But even their show nearly 150K
https://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Chief_Information_Officer_(CIO)/Salary
And that's all businesses, all of the UK.

https://www.cio.com/article/3404205/how-much-do-cios-really-make-pay-packages-of-25-fortune-500-execs-revealed.html

Sample compensation packages from some F500 CIO's.

@scottalanmiller said in How do you know what a fair salary is for the area you work?:

I've been asked a few times to show evidence of why a salary should be given for a position. They often require similar job postings with the target salary in question... aka, if other companies are paying it, we should.

Most companies don't post the salary they are hiring at. The best jobs also don't go through recruiters (We don't pay/work with outside recruiters) so our payscales would be invisible in this case.

@scottalanmiller said in Remote management of employees personal cell phones ...:

And then they said "We want to get back the thing we just gave up."
Which do they want, to not pay for the phones, or to control the data? They have to choose.

Not really. Proper MAM/MDM systems can surgically handle company data on a personal device...

1. The app keeps only an encrypted cache. It validates the account is active every xxx minutes, days, hours. encypted cache auto purged at xxx hours without communication with corp network.

2. The app usage is Geo-fenced to specific areas.

3. When possible, data doesn't actually live on the phone. You have a SSO app on the phone that validates your access (and other criteria like network or location) and then brokers access to the other apps, or externally hosted SaaS assets.

This is how we do it. No need to brick my phone to take out company data, or turn anyone's smart phone dumb.

@Dashrender said in Remote management of employees personal cell phones ...:

Huh - I can't say i agree with you at all. Why do you need access to non company servers over SSH?

In any regulated industry preventing the efiltration of data is a hard requirement. allowing outbound SSH would make it trivial for people to sneak data out (or bad stuff in).

@Emad-R said in How M$ shakedown stupid corporations:

You have not seen much of "real business" then, I cannot disclose info, but I think this corp is like multi-million revenue.

Multi-million in revenue? That's cute. I worked for a crappy 50 man call center and we could do that.

Mainstream Support End Date was 10/9/2018 for Server 2012. It's in extended support (security patches only, no bug fixes). Complaining about a feature improvement (ultra precise timing which is needed for distributed clustered systems that didn't exist in 2012) is a REALLY odd thing to complain about.

Generally I don't side with calling anyone's business a hobby, but I don't particularly consider 1 billion in revenue to be really that impressive (outside of maybe the software industry where margins are higher). If your company is that small, and can't read when end of general support is, I would correctly argue they are a small business and not a serious enterprise by anyone's definition.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle/search?alpha=windows server 2012

@Pete-S said in Tool for Finding Rogue DHCP:

Capture with tcpdump, analyze with wireshark on whatever machine you want.

Turn on DHCP snooping on your switches and have it suppress DHCP servers on access ports.

@scottalanmiller said in Making a Raspberry Pi 4 or Similar SBC Desktop:

RP4 with 4GB of RAM

The problem with Pi (and frankly a lot of the low end ARM) is these things have incomplete UEFI bios etc. You currently need to really be working on one of the distro's designed for it (Which is likely fine for your use case). ARM and our engineers are working on this though..

@scottalanmiller said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:

The H330 is like for labs or testing. Shouldn't be found in a production environment. It's a fine card for what it is, just not a production use card

It's fine for a boot device but on Dell 14G most people use BOSS cards(Unless they are maxing out the PCI-E bays, and then getting a H330 embedded version)

@travisdh1 said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:

Does your Dell have the SD card reader? If so, it runs the SD cards as a RAID1 array.

SD Card raid controller are "Kinda raid" there's no patrol read, there's no scrubbing, and it they have ugly habbit of not always flagging failure correctly (forcing you to rip out the bad card).

@pmoncho said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:

You really only need a 4GB USB key but I like to use 8GB or higher as they are still cheap for a higher quality USB key.

If your doing embedded installs PLEASE get at least 32GB. Your going to have issues with a crash dump partition either now or in the future with 4/8GB at some point.

@pmoncho said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:

I get it, although, to even sell an H330 on a Dell PowerEdge R840 is like selling standard breaks on a Audi A6 and making the driver request anti-lock breaks.

The H330 is at least 10x better than the dumpster fire that was the H300 (256 vs. like 25 QD). Still no cache, bastard megaraid on a HBA blah blah blah is all true.

@pmoncho said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:

I have not seen any M.2 on dell servers yet

All 14G servers AFAIK support adding in a "BOSS" card that has 2 M.2 slots.
https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/Dell-PowerEdge-Boot-Optimized-Storage-Solution.pdf

@wrx7m said in VMware Host Cannot Connect from vSphere Client:

Could also be an issue if a vendor-specific ISO was used to initially install ESXi. I ran into a similar problem with Dell; I had to get the Dell ISO from their downloads for the specific server model/service tag.

For 6.0 this is fine (you'll use this to get ASNC drivers). You can also add the dell VIB depot to get them this way also.
For 6.7 Dell has (thankfully) stopped shipping ASYNC drivers and moved 100% to inbox. It's all for 3rd party management VIBs. Honestly I've seen 3rd party VIBs be a culprit for updates before. I'd make sure you are updating the BIOS/FIrmware also when updating ESXi (People forget this sometimes).

@black3dynamite said in Reconsidering ProxMox:

It’s supports multiple storage types like nfs or cifs

Obligatory - https://blog.fosketts.net/2012/02/16/cifs-smb/

(Saying CIFS is my pet peeve).

@scottalanmiller said in RAID rebuild times 16TB drive:

Even on bare metal, we normally see a lot of bottlenecks. But normally because almost no one can make their arrays go idle during a rebuild cycle. If they could, they'd not need the rebuild in the first place, typically.

Our engineers put in a default "reserve 80% of max throughput for production" IO schedular QoS system, so at saturation rebuilds only get 20% so they don't murder production IO. (note rebuilds can use 100% if the bandwidth is there for the taking).

@biggen said in RAID rebuild times 16TB drive:

I guess I was skeptical I had correct what @Pete-S said because I've seen so many reports that its taken days/weeks to rebuild [insert whatever size] TB Raid 6 arrays in the past. But I guess that was because those systems weren't just idle. There was still IOPS on those arrays AND a possible CPU/cache bottleneck.

Was the drive full? Smarter new RAID rebuild systems don't rebuild empty LBAs. Every enterprise storage array system has done this with rebuilds for the last 20 years...

@Pete-S said in Dell PERC H740 with SSDs?:

Only go with HDDs when you don't have any other choice. SSDs will be much faster. A single SSD has IOPs in the several tens of thousands range while a HDD can only do a couple of hundred.

The ultra low end .1DWPD drives can have terrible sustained write latency. I'm not convinced spinning drives might win in this category.

Read intensive SATA SSDs are getting close to the same price as 10K SAS. If you want to save money don't buy SAS SSDs, because you don't need them.

The cheap ones fall over once you exceed the limited SLC or DRAM buffer. Beware using these for large DB copy jobs etc.

If you want to save even more money don't buy drives from Dell

This is... problematic. I've seen a server OEM run into an issue between their HBA/RAID controller nad a given drive, and get the firmware patch only released for their make/model of the drives, and not the general-purpose regular ones. Also, good luck getting the out of band to properly provide SMART. Also unless you are buying something that someone validated, good luck with HotAdd support, or having to use one-off solutions like Intel VMD when doing a pass through drives.

For SSDs look for Samsung and Intel enterprise drives

Going to point out that Intel shares fabs with Micron.

Samsung PM883 or Intel S4510 in your case

Ehhh, be careful here. The PM8xx is the bargain basement cheap Samsung SATA devices. Samsung in the earlier versions of this series had some... interesting firmware bugs so make sure you patch your drives.

The Intel 4510 with newer firmware should work around the previous performance problems on the last generation of these (The S37xx was a nightmare on low QD writes), but again, this isn't the fast drive. This is the cheaper one. You normally have something act as a write buffer to shield these drives from aggressive writes.

The reality is that even an automotive engineer would still go through the same buying process because:

1. It’s how the channel works.
2. Someone who designs automotive chassis isn’t going to track who has the most cup holders of the smoothest ride.

A SE still has value even with a hardened IT engineer as an SE ca. Provide insight into a niche said practitioner doesn’t spend 40 hours a week on.