@dafyre VNC kinda sucked IMHO over the wan.
The other thing is VDI environments are complicated beasts and rich monitoring tools (everything from protocal level network into, to troubleshooting infrastructure issues) are something you need at the scale where VDI normally makes sense.
@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
As far as job sharing, that's precisely why I said that SMBs require generalists. There will likely never be a time or place where SMBs don't need generalists (not just in IT), and an IT generalist is a cost-saving factor that no one who has posted here has seemed to enter into their calculations. If you try and consider SMBs in Enterprise terms, you're quite likely doing it wrong, because SMBs aren't generally like that until they reach a certain size. They're entirely different types of entities whose similarities largely end at the point where you acknowledge that they are businesses of different scale. You can't run an SMB like an Enterprise, because SMBs don't possess the scale to staff like an Enterprise. It's extremely rare in most fields that it is cheaper to hire a contractor than it is to utilize your own staff. The cost-savings only ever comes when expertise is required, or regulation requires typically. The on-staff IT in an SMB is probably not only doing IT, you're correct. That is precisely why the MSP saves money argument is wonky, because it fails to account for the other tasks that that in-house IT staff does in addition to the basic management and maintenance of the environment. Sure, one can make the argument that the IT staff may not be adequately managing the environment... but it's a may, not a will or a must. It's also entirely possible that they're bringing lots of added value over an MSP by doing other tasks that an MSP won't do at all, or will only do for added, cumulative costs that simply don't exist with on-site staff.
Of course this is true - but it's now likely that you are over or under paying that person for these other non IT jobs. It's extremely unlikely that a person is clocking out when done with IT work at wage X and then clocking in at wage y when they are doing non IT things.
This is where the company can either come out ahead or behind.
So we have two situations, the over and the under paid - there's always the potential for parity pay, but that really seems pretty unlikely based on skill sets.
You either end up with someone who's bad at IT and the right price for taking apart printers or mopping the floors, or you get someone who's amazing at IT and completely over priced.
In reality, you get the former until they leave, get replaced by the latter, suffer from thisuntil they become the former, they leave and the cycle starts all over again.
@donaldlandru said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
If I can sell them on Office 365 this time around (third times a charm), but that is for a different thread
What version of Exchange are you on?
2010 is in extended support (That's why OWA is broken in Chrome, Microsoft doesn't care). Its time to START budgeting to move to the current version. Show the hardware costs to deploy a 2 or 3 site DAG (this is apples/apples with 365), show the current version CALs, show the cost for backup software that can handle it if you do not have that, and show the cost of GSLB's to front the DAG cluster.
Don't show the cost to "keep running your 2007 server into the ground". Present real options, not hobo IT stuff that's cheap.
@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
Because performance and availability problems come from the bottom up not the top down. SQL has storage as a dependency, storage doesn't have SQL as a dependency, and everything rolls downhill...
That doesn't make sense, though. Applications care that they have enough CPU, memory, IOPS, bandwidth, etc. That's it. They don't care how it is delivered, only that it is available when needed. This would be, again, a failing of any application team and any IT team if they look to the application for issues involving not providing enough resources for performance.
If your point here is that incompetent IT departments tend to buy unsupportable, crappy software.. sure. No one is denying that people don't do their jobs well. But that doesn't mean we should recommend doing things poorly just because lots of people aren't good at their jobs.
Most IT departments (Even enterprises) are not skilled (or skilled well) at troubleshooting infrastructure (Especially beats like ERP that might have a dozen interdependent systems) without assistance. Most ERP vendors know this and so rather than let the customers deploy a database for 20K users on a Hyper-V host with a 3 Disk RAID 5 (and then the project be written off as a failure and their name be damaged) take this choice away.
For the 5 years I consulted "why is this slow" was one of the most common engagements. 9/10 of the time I was chasing some crazy application issue it had nothing to do with the application. Generally it was staring people in the face, had a giant RED alarm, and was fairly obvious (Disk latency isn't supposed to be 1200ms, and NL-SAS drives shouldn't be used for DB's in 5 billion dollar companies Yo?). Assuming that vendors are crossing a line by assuming internal IT doesn't understand what it will take to deliver their applications is CRITICAL to being a successful application vendor. I've seen users, IT and C-suite trash applications that worked fine, but the infrastructure was all wrong....
This is part of a huge reason for many vendors pushing for SaaS offerings, or OPEX offerings. If you don't bundle high levels of support that can extend beyond the application your risking your revenue. Much like why Scale (and other highly successful HCI vendors) try to own support of the ENTIRE stack. If they didn't own support of the hypervisor people would do awful, awful things then blame them.
Its not fair, but its the reality we live in...
@scottalanmiller said in Where Does University Need to Focus for IT Students:
I think moving IT programs from CS/SE schools into being under a business school makes a lot of sense. IT is 80% business, 20% tech. Of course you need both, but universities are experts at teaching business and liberal arts, this is what they've done for hundreds and years and done well. Teaching tech is not in their traditional mandate and is something they have no historical track record for and little current capacity. Not only is the non-tech stuff dramatically more important, it's where universities have the most skill. Teaching too much tech makes universities almost certainly set up to fail while teaching something that isn't even very useful.
At Baylor it was in the business school (Under management information systems). Gave a much more rounded degree than the stuff I've seen put in CS schools.
@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:
Application owners have RPO/RTO's and they expect the infrastructure people to often take care of that. (When I have a 5TB OLTP database, in guest options generally fail to deliver somehow).
Yup, and if they outside IT to the application vendor, that SLA isn't owned by the actual IT department but by someone who came in, put in something new and ran away. If the application owners need a reliable RPO/RTO, they need to work with IT, not work against them.
Its the reality in most companies. Software vendors requirements are not rooted in how IT SHOULD be run, but how it does. I agree with you in principal (it shouldn't matter) I've just seen hundreds of counter examples that would have destroyed these companies names.
There was thread on SW recently where someone said "NIMBLE SUCKS I DON"T GET THE IOPS I PROMISED". The next post was his Nimble sales rep posting "So I see your at 20% load, your IO latency is .5 ms currently and while your 220C model is one of our smaller ones we have far larger ones. If your having any problems please call us and we will help you" I laughed, but it made me realize the damage that incompetent IT do to the name of a product or application. We are at the point that a sales rep would rather piss off a customer and call them out as an idiot (he was nice about it) than risk their companies name being drug through the mud.
The "IT guy is always" right attitude in IT bothers me. Part of why I always enjoyed arguing with you (and others internally) as its the only way to challenge my idea's and learn and thing of new things. Part of the reason I enjoyed consulting (although I did learn a lot of tact of how to carefully make people think it was their idea, or gently expose why what they were doing was hilariously a bad idea).
@scottalanmiller said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
@tirendir said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
However, I will say that the acting as a partner versus a vendor, service provider, or a supplier has been very noticeable in the MSPs I've talked with, as most of the MSPs I've talked with seem to be all about what they can do for us instead of what we actually need or want them to do for instance.
Well keep in mind that an MSP by definition means that you adapt to them. If you are choosing the MSP subset of the ITSP market, that's an up front expectation. ITSPs might be more flexible and be there to do whatever you need, rather than having a pre-packaged product that you conform to.
Lets say you think Juniper or Checkpoint is a better firewall for what you do. Fine. But if you pick MSP A, and they exclusively use Palo Alto firewalls, you are getting a Palo Alto. The "benefits" of the checkpoint will likely be offset by the fact that they have 3-4 people on staff who are certified in Palo Alto, and can do anything you need in seconds vs. someone who knows 3-4 vendors costs them more to staff and is slower on all platforms.
Now if the MSP is standardized on technology that will not work for you (You have windows apps and they are a Mac OS only, or Linux Virtual Desktop only MSP) then maybe they are the wrong MSP. Maybe they focus on Accounting only clients, and you want a MSP that will do full stack support for some Sage ERP system. That's another example of a bad fit.
90% of the time I see people complain about the products a MSP will bring in they may be technically right (Brocade VDX, or Dell Servers is a better product than say Meraki, or HPE Procurve, or Cisco UCS servers) but if you can fit within their bubble of supported products you get to enjoy crazy cost savings by piggybacking on their procurement scale, their support scale, and their training/experience being focused.
One last thought...
IF the reason that Xen has 2% market share is because there is NO LOGICAL REASON for vSphere or paid Hyper-V (with VMM to manage) then that means 98% of IT people are idiots. If 98% are idiots, wouldn't that mean they should be outsourcing their IT as much as possible to their vendors or others? (and therefore not deploy Xen).
Catch-22 
@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
Then I'm lost how you say IT cares more about the business than the owner/CEO does? They don't know the IT side of things, so they more or less have to rely on others to help them, if they choose not to follow those recommendations is another matter.
Lifestyle businesses where they don't care about making money beyond xxx amount to maintain their lifestyle. Pretty common in SMB.
I just showed up to say you are all wrong
They should buy Software Assurance which will let them migrate that license back and forth whenever they want at a lower cost than buying a full stand alone license.
@dustinb3403 said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:
Why / when did this become an acceptable practice?
Discharging of debts as a government mandated process? 1787 when the constitution mandated Congress to write uniform bankruptcy laws. Reorganization of unpayable debts? (Chpt 11) 1930's.
The limitations on discharging of education loans in bankruptcy or through the courts or law is actually a relatively new thing.
@dustinb3403 said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:
Sorry people, pay your debts! Don't be one of the millions of assholes who say "not my problem" it is your problem and it's why this country is royally screwed.
An old proverb. If you owe someone $100 he controls you. If you owe him 100 Million dollars you control him.
I'd argue the problem isn't people not paying back debt, the problem is LOANING people 90K in debt who are statistically speaking unlikely to pay it back (Masters in professional dance). I blame the person extending the loans that were unlikely to be paid back, and collectively (as this is a republic) that's all of us.
When LBJ created student loans, it was originally for STEM, Education, Business, and law degrees. Loan amounts should be weighted based on historical payback rates for a school, major or program.
@scottalanmiller said in How Are You Measured?:
There is only one useful way to measure IT.... Its impact to the way that the CEO is measured. Anything else like SLA, uptime, tickets, etc is misleading, actively undermines the organization and leads to gamification.
RIOC, Average Revenue per customer/whatever the metric of your industry is, IT should be serving improving that metric.
@dashrender said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:
Question - do you think it's BS that people that work for Cox Communication get free free cable/phone/internet because they work there? The loan forgiveness as a government employee is really no different.
Other untaxed benefits. Hotel and airline mile points. I've known guys in sales getting like 40-50K worth of untaxed fringe benefits for this. This is basically a subsidization of traveling sales roles by the federal government. I spent a week in Bali with TAX FREE earnings from my Marriott points if we want to get pedantic. The optics on that politically look awful.
I work for a software company so I can eat 2 meals a day in our break room from all the ridiculous stuff we have (also not taxed).
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@John-Nicholson said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@coliver said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
Looks like an ipod... This is going to be interesting in the long term. Those Cisco chassis can do some expending though so you may be able to get to a more reliable system with what you have.
Actually UCS can't really expand much from a storage perspective. They don't have any native DAS JBOD support, and the MegaRaids on them they do little in integration or customization. UCS was never really designed to use local storage in RAID I'm convinced (at scale anyways). They are useful if your using them in true JBOD (VSAN, they are certified for use) or with HBA's to talk to an external disk array.
Definitely not designed for that use.
Other thing is get some training. There's some rookie mistakes lurking in that config that scare me about other things...
http://vmware.stanly.edu is the poor mans path to a VCP. Grab a copy of mastering vSphere. The HA deep dive book is free now if you know where to look. and increasingly we'll have storage and availability documents lurking at storagehub.vmware.com
@dustinb3403 said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:
Removing someone debt for a public sector job like this doesn't help the matter of the national debt at all. It only compounds it.
Student debt is 1Trilliion, or ~6% of the federal debt. ~2% of employees are federal (a little less actually). Lets assume 1/2 of federal employees have college degree's, and 1/2 of them stay for 10 years.
This is .03% of the federal debt going to loan forgiveness. BUT WAIT THERE IS MORE?!?
The people who use this program actually pay back the debt for the most part they just don't pay interest. Considering the interest rate for the past few years has hovered around 2%, that means the government is only out a 2% interest on a loan that amounts to .03% of the deficit.
This is a program that assuming pretty generous participation costs us nationally 100 Million a year? That's actually a rounding error at the Pentagon.
@Dashrender said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
Ya, this whole thing started because Dustin said he should drop them since they don't support anything else. That's ridiculous.
I see. Yeah that's going to far. That's lacking variety and options, but not lacking an enterprise deployment option. You have to figure the costs associated with VMware into the product's costs when decision making, but that's about it. VMware is very, very enterprise. It's a bit crappy that they don't offer ANY lower cost options for companies like this where VMware is way out of their league and crazy that they allow 100Mb/s Synology iSCSI but require VMware ESXi... so they have some clear problems in their thinking and requirements, but VMware itself is just fine.
This is another break down at the vendor end, most likely. The vendor probably only said - we only support ESXi as a hypervisor. Beyond that they probably don't say what server hardware they support/require, or the NICs or the Switches, or the SAN.
What they should be providing is minimum requirements in things like RAM and IOPs, then say - you must supply these, we really don't care how. Clearly if that had been done, it's likely that the synology SANs and the 100 Mb switches would have failed that test and other options would have had to be implemented.
To be fair, its implied that you have at least GigE for iSCSI/NFS/vMotion. The Implementor had to have been either an idiot or greedy to deploy this. I got asked one time to do something like this and I just walked out and told sales to refund their money when they refused to get real gear. I couldn't risk my company name and professional reputation being attached to such clown car stuff.
Even personally (working in house IT) you have to put your foot down at some point, because otherwise the users will talk about how shitty your IT is, and it will impact your ability to get a job elsewhere when others hear about all the outage and performance issues. Even if you can tell in an interview why it was that bad, no one wants to hire someone who worked in a clown car for 3-5 years.
@scottalanmiller said in Why Do Recruiters Never Get Involved in Forums Like This:
how can someone effectively recruit if they don't know the position that they are trying to fill or the candidates that they are trying to place?
Couple reasons...
If the learned enough technology they would stop being a recruiter and get paid more doing Technology (I know one recruiter who did this).
There are a LOT of industries where you don't have to know how to BUILD xxx to identify people who are good at it.
A lot of being in a meta position like this is knowing what DOESN"T work out, as much as what does. I would expect recruiters to target online communities who have the following capabilities if they do...
Niche forums are better...
If I'm hiring for a VMware expert I'm going to look at the VMware community forums first. If I'm hiring for REDIS I"m going to hire in forums that focus on REDIS.
Recruiters are going to target communities where higher pay individuals hang out. A forum that focuses on SMB IT is going to get less focus on one that favors enterprise IT or developer positions. Remember these guys get paid a % of the salary for the job. SMB recruiters filling a $40K role need to find 5 people to get as much as 1 x 200K role. In fact, that 200K role is better by definition as fixed overhead part of the conversation is the same for both, and commisions % actually GO UP to the more niche the role. Toss in the candidate pool is smaller making elimination of candidates actually easier, SMB recruitment is just a crap job.
Recruiting by virtue of not paying well until you get to the higher end headhunting, is going to suffer the fate of other low barriers to entry, no education requirement, low skill relationship jobs. GOOD talented, capable people are going to shun it (or move up quickly) while the talent, for the most part, will be.... well what we see.
Another general trend is for larger technical focused companies (who have the better jobs) to refuse to work with outside recruiters. This is a secular threat to the business model. My employer REFUSES to work with outside recruiters.
In short, the dumpster fire that is recruiting in SMB is by design, and there isn't strong enough financial incentive to fix it unless all boats rise and pay goes up a lot.
@Dashrender said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@John-Nicholson said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@John-Nicholson said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
Ya, this whole thing started because Dustin said he should drop them since they don't support anything else. That's ridiculous.
I see. Yeah that's going to far. That's lacking variety and options, but not lacking an enterprise deployment option. You have to figure the costs associated with VMware into the product's costs when decision making, but that's about it. VMware is very, very enterprise. It's a bit crappy that they don't offer ANY lower cost options for companies like this where VMware is way out of their league and crazy that they allow 100Mb/s Synology iSCSI but require VMware ESXi... so they have some clear problems in their thinking and requirements, but VMware itself is just fine.
To be clear, requiring VMware ESXi in a supported configuration is at odds with the 100Mb/s for vMotion and iSCSI (VMware does NOT support this abomination of a configuration).
I thought that I was stating that... that they had a mismatch, going for the biggest, baddest, most expensive enterprise hypervisor and then... don't care if it is set up in a viable way.
To be clear, he has Essentials Plus which is only 6K up front and $1200 a year for 24/7 support and free upgrades. This is the CHEAPEST hypervisor from an ongoing support for 24/7 support of 6 sockets, and a central management and monitoring solution. (Citrix for XenServer, and Red Hat cost more. Microsoft crazy more for SCCM-VMM and a support agreement).
I guess the difference there, at least with MS, is that you don't expect to get your expert support from MS directly, instead you get it from companies like NTG or those who know it.
But the bigger fail is - did they really need Essentials Plus in the first place? Could they afford near zero downtime? seems unlikely, unless they are a location that's open 24/7.
I can't disagree with you more.
Its a medical facility that has beds occupied 24/7 so yes. There is a bizarre assumption (That I used to be guilty to) that because you are small you don't need 24/7 availability and that is just changing. An increasing number of SMB's operate 3 shifts, or have customer expectations of availability 24/7. Its true you can have maintenance windows and things, and maybe we should blame google for it, but the game has changed. More mission critical systems have gone from pen and paper to the computers.
Spending 6K so you can get 24/7 support (That's not even an option of Essentials) is less on a per daily basis than my wife's star buck's addiction. That's not a big fail and nothing anyone should be shamed over especially one with no training and no backup (That's a bigger fail, but not a replacement for vendor support).
MSPs are NOT a replacement for a support agreement (In fact most REQUIRE you have them). If there is a driver issue someone has to stay on the phone and deal with it. Most MSP's worth a damn are going to charge you for 24/7 support of a hypervisor ~$150-250 per host. So the support costs for his 3 hosts from the MSP would actually be more even if you went Free Hyper-V. Given the MSP would need to manage patching, the costs for overtime to force it being done after hours disruptively would likely negate any savings from going local storage with no vMotion for patching.
I advocate having both. In house steady state IT should NOT be running outage's by them self's without the opportunity for a shift change. Also MSP's see every kind of outage and know how to isolate and react to them. In this case any normal MSP would have...
A proper MSP is like having an enterprise support army in your back pocket for less than the cost of a FTE. Honestly as a SMB you shouldn't hire an in house resource before you hire a MSP first, and any shop that doesn't want to pay for a MSP but will pay for a FTE is a GIANT red flag that they lack any level of competence in IT governance, budgeting, or common sense.
@jmoore said in Why Do Recruiters Never Get Involved in Forums Like This:
@scottalanmiller Those are all good points. If I was a recruiter and cared about my job then I would want actual IT experience myself and follow a forum like this. Seeing what people contribute and their solutions would just be "gold" I would think when looking for someone.
Your viewpoint is based on outside recruiters actually caring that a person stays 1 day longer than 90 days (what it takes to get them paid), or that the people who use outside recruiters know how to judge talent and interview them properly (they don't, or why wouldn't they have in-house staff deal with this?) or that the people who use outside recruiters know how to broadly communicate their skills and network (to be blunt, they likely wouldn't be using an outside recruiter if they had a strong network).
@hobbit666 Normally you just use VUM and have it download the newest version
If your old school you can just consult this handy KB and compare it to your build number. In your case you are a few patches behind on the 6.0 branch.
Express Patch 7 is the newest in the 6.0 major release family.