Best posts made by StorageNinja

@Dashrender said in Time for me to move on from Webroot:

@Jason said in Time for me to move on from Webroot:

Our company just made it against the rules to smoke even if it's legal in your state. No matter if you are doing it for recreation or medical reasons (on or off the clock)

Is that legal?

In Colorado it is. If I was going to do a masters thesis in economics it would be fun to track, if his employer has to pay more per hour for the same skill of work because of this (or if they just end up with shittier workers).

Nifty, but it only works if your moving computers. VMware' Migrate can do in place XP --- 7 re-imaging, While migrating the profile. Can even pre-stage the Windows 7 files and do a fan out imaging system for ROBO so you can do hundreds of clients at the same time.

@scottalanmiller said in How would you counter offer a job proposal:

I've had the opposite. Had a staffing agency call me a liar for saying that I made more than "anyone pays." Totally by coincidence, that agency was forced to pick up my current contract and pay me what they claimed I could not be paid.

It's funny when both sides of a staffing agencies negotiation gets exposed. I've seen them lie and say the candidate was demanding more, while simultaneously telling the candidate that they needed to cut their expectations and the company wasn't willing to pay more. The agency got screwed in this as the hiring manager and contractor were drinking buddies.

@Minion-Queen Live on airplanes and airports. Hopefully grab one walk down La Rambla in the morning before I'm off to my metal tube prison.

All communication problems can be solved with pretty pictures in IT.

@scottalanmiller said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:

@momurda said in How Do You Evaluate IT Skills for Hiring:

Perhaps someone could write a guide on how to get your CV past the 23 year old HR major that cant do anything with technology except text and email? Just about every time I have ever had an interview ive been offered a job, but getting past the HR drone...

Consider it a good thing, good companies don't have HR drones, ever. You actually want to be filtered out by those people to make your job of selecting a job easier. It's one of the reasons I take my education and certs off of my CV. I specifically want to be filtered out by bad companies (e.g. I want to filter them out before I waste time talking to them.)

My last 3 times getting hired...

1. Recruiter sets me up with a meeting with the CEO and IT Director. Talk to IT director for an hour, get an offer. No HR involvement.

2. Former Vendor who remembered having a good talk with me about VOIP and storage calls and asks me to go to coffee. Go to coffee with VP of company.

3. Chief Technologist for BU messages me on Twitter asking if I'd be interested in a roll. Makes sure I get an interview with Hiring manager. Recruiter involved, but more to see if I was interested and work out logistics for my flights.

None of these companies had HR that filtered IT hires. Particularly past the first job my skill level was above that. If your more than 2-3 years in this industry and have that as a problem the guide isn't on how to bypass them but how to Network (I go to a lot of conferences and maximize my time meeting people), get involved in influencer programs (I'm in vExpert and Veeam Vanguard) write good technical blogs (done a few of these), get on podcasts (done a LOT of these), and connect with other experts (I spend a lot of time on private slack channels).

Previous interviews I've done....

1. VP of company messages me on linked in asking if I can meet him for lunch. Remembers me from a meeting, where I impressed his head of ops.

I've hired ~8 people over the years and NEVER was HR involved in "filtering" beyond an after the fact doing criminal background checks and telling me if someone tripped a flag.

@stacksofplates They will end up costing the same as 10/40 in not too long. Same number of lama's used.

Note, RDMA, and RCoE require your protocol support it, and your platform support it end to end.

@nerdydad said in I am going to start an ISP:

I would try to keep the business itself as paperless as possible, but would give the sub the option either way.

This one is simple. Charge $5 more a month for paper billing and outsource it to someone who does paper billing.

@scottalanmiller Microsoft has spent 100 Million dollars hiring architects to push their solutions. They will pay thousands to MSP's on the back end per 3 node Hyper-V cluster they deploy (even if it doesn't work).

Think back to the early years of SQL. SQL 2000 WAS AWFUL. Microsoft funded startups who would build their applications on Microsoft SQL.

@scottalanmiller Always loved CS Lewis's quote on this.

It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion

@zachary715 said in Notorious Short-seller labels Ubiquiti Networks $UBNT as FRAUD:

I know from an investor standpoint, it's not ideal to see a young, growing company with a CEO who may be more focused on signing the next star free-agent player vs developing the next great networking device

You mean like Mark Cuban? (who's a tech billionaire).

@donaldlandru said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:

My next biggest concern, like any technology, is how do I get there from here. I have enough budget for a storage node, and we are going to run out of space within the next 60 days. I do not have, and will not receive additional funding this year for new servers. So some form of "in-place" style of upgrade has to occur. Obviously, this is a server down, convert vm bring it back up type of process that has an unknown LoE.

So when someone says "You will not get more funding" you need to reply "You will not get more IT for no spend". Apply quota's to the file servers, implement aggressive archiving cut back vCPU and memory allocations so your cluster can fail over, quota mailboxes on Exchange and in general "enforce" their "no new budget policy". Turn on FSRM reporting and post reports that show who's using the most space (Dump similar reports from Exchange). Don't let things hit a wall and crash, start putting the breaks on growth. IT is not a magyver episode where your expected to conjure IOPS and capacity and RAM from thin air.

Trying to not paint a picture of a rock and a hard place, but realistically where else am I at right now?

Your not between a rock and a hard place they are. Follow the rules above, and they will either find you capital to invest in so they can continue to use more storage and compute, or they will agree that its not worth the spend. THIS IS NOT YOUR PROBLEM. Your problem is to quantify what it will cost to deliver x and deploy if funded. It is not your job to be given an arbitrary budget and produce y. I remember when I realized this, and my job became a lot more Zen like. "Do what you say you will do" was my old office motto. Because of that people said no a hell of a lot.

My dog is in another fight (Clustered storage for vSphere not Hyper-V) but in this case honestly I'd trust a synology over Storage Spaces Direct. At least I have a slight clue of what black magic is going on underneath it.

@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

@scottalanmiller Totally agree it's often really obvious in SMB, but to them it's not a question of whether there is theft or not even when they notice it, but whether the individual is worth losing over it. Enterprise minded people have this mistaken idea oftentimes that everyone is replaceable or interchangeable. SMBs don't have the luxury of such a silly notion, so when they detect theft they must weigh relative value where Enterprises often simply don't bother because they seem to think they don't have to.

SMBs definitely have that option. It's an illusion that the do not. SMBs need fewer resources and at a lower level so actually have more ability to replace. What's often approaching impossible for an enterprise might be trivial for an SMB. SMB needs are so often generic and interchangeable compared to enterprise. They have a big advantage here.

Wait, is he saying people in SMBs are not easy to replace? The MSP and SaaS industry continue to make that a less defendnable position.

@nerdydad said in VMware on Azure?:

Kind of interesting in concept. Charges has to be outrageous though because one would be paying for both Azure and VMware licenses at the same time. Suppose Azure annually would be comparable to physical hardware on-prem throughout its lifetime.

Recently I discovered that I can restore a VM from Veeam on a VMware workload to Azure. I thought that was a twist.

The issue with doing a restore like that is it's typically a one way trip as...

1. Transit costs OUT of azure suck.
2. You would have to switch to doing agent-based backups to get data out.

In the case of this announcement, it's unilateral (With VMware saying they were not consulted). Considering VMware licensing for hosting providers is a special program and Microsoft is not in it this leads to speculation that...

1. Are they trying to get another partner to deploy/manage it? This would likely breach the EULA on the hosting program as it prevented co-marketing/white label stuff like this the last time I read it.

2. Microsoft thinks it can offer vSphere as a service without joining the VMware Cloud Provider Program (This will likely be met with legal).

3. Azure is known to run on custom hardware servers. Unless they've got DL380's or something certified this will not be supported.


@scottalanmiller You say free storage migrations?

http://www.vladan.fr/free-tool-extrasphere/

@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

@stess said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:

Quick question: When would you justify Datacenter license for Windows Server 2012R2? Seem to be about having each VM running individual Windows server role.

Simple rule is when you need 14 or more VMs per node of Windows servers, then DC makes more sense than the alternatives. This is purely a financial licensing factor, not a technical one.

DC gives you the ability to split more workloads, though, so you tend to do somewhat bad things like condensing VMs until you have a DC license. So DC tends to make you behave better. DC is also much, much more flexible for disaster recovery for semi-obvious reasons.

This is going to change shortly as 2016 will involve core's in that calculation. If your buying 2012R2 with SA and the possibility of executing upgrade rights, keep this in mind...

@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:

For me, benefits don't cost us anywhere remotely close to 25K/yr, it's more like 15K/yr.

There's a lot of costs to carrying an employee. Unemployment insurance/tax, the other 1/2 of FICA, corporate insurance and liability often is a per head charge and then others that could be sunk costs, or not (Real estate for office, air con/power for employee, parking spots that can be anything from a free dirt pad, to a $150 a month contract garage). Throw in software licensing (CAL's, 365/office) and general software licensing for IT specific tools (License for Fusion, a Secret server for password management) and the stuff adds up. MSP's get to amortize this stuff across multiple customers and their RMM and other tools get to take advantage of licensing at scale. We paid maybe $2 per device per month we were doing log analytics against, where a comparable onsite license for the same product was $250 per device. (We didn't even have much scale).

@DustinB3403 said in Veeam Company Announcement:

I don't.

You sound like CEO material

@donaldlandru

Edit: I don't always use WD NAS (RED) drives, but when I do I use the WDIDLE tool to fix that problem

The problem is that its a 5400RPM drive that is way to damn slow to use for virtual machines that have any kind of transactional workload. In order to get any functioning amount of IOPS out of the drive you have to wide stripe across a bunch, and then operate at deep queue depth (driving latency through the roof).