@tim_g said in Veeam Backup and Replication for ESXi:
@storageninja said in Veeam Backup and Replication for ESXi:
I suggest MacOS and Time Machine
Now, there's a vendor I do despise.
Let me guess.... You like the System III/V side of the UNIX family instead?
@tim_g said in Veeam Backup and Replication for ESXi:
I don't hate Veeam. I just hate how they support some of their products.
They will support it, you are just not willing to pay....
@tim_g Welcome to Linux. All kinds of shit breaks on new kernels...
If you want a *Nix based desktop that just "@#$@% works" and has a bare metal backup may I suggest MacOS and Time Machine? You can from the BIOS re-install bare metal even from Apple's servers (PXE over WAN).
What's bizarre to me is that you would waste time on forum support for something you complain enough to spend 30 minutes troubleshooting in forums or complaining here about. A license is $50-$30 per desktop per year. You apparently WANT a backup of the desktop and see value in it, but don't want to spend money....
I want a functioning car. I don't want to pay for gas. Sadly this doesn't work.
@eddiejennings said in Resume Critique:
Part of me believes it's a liability as so far all I've done is create / destroy VMs in a Hyper-V and KVM environment
Go do a few of the free Hands on Labs so you can speak to knowing the interface and how things work.
Get your VCP class and cert for a few hundred bucks from vmware.stanly.edu online!
@eddiejennings said in Resume Critique:
I'm still young within my IT career, so it's not going to be possible for me to craft an impressive, look-at-what-all-I-have-built-and-managed resume and have that resume be connected to reality at this time.
It is not about age or time in the field. I had a resume better than most people with 10-15 years experience less than 3 years in the field. Find the right job (Consulting for a partner/VAR/MSP) and this can change VERY VERY quickly.
@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.
@scottalanmiller said in Websites like Mangolassi or Spiceworks:
@dashrender said in Websites like Mangolassi or Spiceworks:
@scottalanmiller said in Websites like Mangolassi or Spiceworks:
@scotth said in Websites like Mangolassi or Spiceworks:
@storageninja said in Websites like Mangolassi or Spiceworks:
I honestly spend more time on Slack these days than forums.
Slack?
Super expensive (or crazy limited) instant messaging platform for internal users. It's like Rocket or Mattermost but only hosted and too expensive for any real use.
yet tons of companies are using it. Sure perhaps not as many that you have heard of...
Because companies primarily focus on marketing.
There's a free version. I'm pretty sure on 1/4 of the slack I"m on are paid ones.
In our case It's likely because we spend more on M&M's but that's another matter (I try not to bring up the great engineering M&M revolt of 2012).
Because large enterprises need certain features (In our case SAML/SSO integration, an SLA, the millions of plugins that get used across the company for integration, compliance requirements that they can deliver on) and more importantly, large companies don't pay list. Not even remotely close.
Why not run it internally?
Large enterprises don't run apps in-house that they can outsource for less than it costs them to deploy and operationalize with all their weird requirements. Throw in the fact that you only pay for people who are actively logging in, it gets smaller. Let's say of our 20K employee's 3/4 use it (So 15K). Let's assume we pay 50% of list (So $6 for the plus tier, which is honestly likely on the high side). That's 90K a year, for hosting costs, managed updates, securing it, storage (20GB per user). This wouldn't pay the cost on a single developer for us to fix gaps, or for operations staff to deal with it and train on it.
Why not go look for a cheaper smaller competitor?
When do I like working with smaller companies.
@scottalanmiller said in Websites like Mangolassi or Spiceworks:
Have you looked at Rocket or Mattermost? most of those Slack features I find really annoying and disable. They are just distracting.
If you are talking about /giphy that's fighting words...
In all seriousness, our engineers aggressively use that stuff (Tickets, and alerts and all kinds of fun interops with Jenkins, Jira etc).
@fateknollogee said in Websites like Mangolassi or Spiceworks:
@storageninja said in Websites like Mangolassi or Spiceworks:
I honestly spend more time on Slack these days than forums.
Any interesting Slack groups we should know about?
All mine are private ![😕](https://mangolassi.it/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f615.png?v=160ba1d2c04 ":\")
My company's internal slack is pretty interesting (20K employee's tons of whom are software engineers). It's how my remote team organizes things. The Veeam one is good (Vanguards and Veeam Certified people), the vExpert one is amazing (like 400 smart infrastructure people who between them know just about everything you would want to know about any topic). Part of what I like about Slack Teams and Subreddits is they have purposes and some degree of focus.
I honestly spend more time on Slack these days than forums.
@scottalanmiller said in Websites like Mangolassi or Spiceworks:
There is Reddit, but it is awful.
Reddit depends HEAVILY on the subreddit. /r/sysadmin is a hit or miss (too many people from too many different size shops and experiance levels there). /r/storage has a few smart guys (NIMSO and what not) that I've had some good conversations with. /r/VMware outside of the VMware Community forums is a good place to get a question bounced off a few VCDX's.
TalesFromTechSupport is fairly hilarious somedays (again, hit or miss).
@scottalanmiller said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
I replaced a Cisco a few weeks ago because we could get a Ubiquiti that was new faster, delivered to the site, than we could get a cable to hook into the Cisco. Saved both time and money and got them better quality gear. Pure win. Cisco's "deal with our BS" overhead is very high and a huge factor on their TCO.
Their optics division makes 2 Billion a year I hear. 3rd party optics are made by the same people so I never blinked at using them and duck taping some spares to the side of the chassis.
@tim_g said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
@storageninja said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
@tim_g said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
huge enterprises that that have a lot of money to spend, but don't have the IT staff to make good purchasing decisions.
To be fair with the big enterprise vendors, they don't pay list, or anything close to what you pay.
I did a deal with Brocade where they went 90% off list because I needed 34 campuses worth of switches. Storage and networking vendors will go to 4% margin if your deal is big enough (and they plan to make it up on later smaller expansions, support renewals etc).In the end, it'd still be a hell of a lot cheaper and more effective to go with non-Cisco hardware (given that points 2 or 3 don't apply to them).
We big 2 Million with Brocade and Cisco bid 12 million. That said Cisco was the incumbent and the incumbent generally yields less margin in a mid-scenario as it's expected that the migration will be simpler (Just copy/paste configs and no new interop issues to worry about).
To be fair, we ran into two issues.
Also to be fair to Cisco, Brocade wasn't a "major" player in ethernet and since then has split up its ethernet products into 3 companies so the customer now has to deal with Extreme for their Datacenter and another company for their ICX campus.
Still, the savings were worth it to that school.
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
@scottalanmiller said in Resume Critique:
@jimmy9008 said in Resume Critique:
Why are you saying I'm comparing to failure? No failure here.
IT is business. Business buying fifteen servers to do the job of one is failure. Period. That's what failure means in business - not doing things that are good for the business. You are cherry picking a massive failure (wasting $150K for no reason) and using that failure assumption (where did that come from?) to compare against "what was done."
Buying sixteen servers to do the job of one is literally just like driving the taxi into the brick wall. It's insane, illogical and no one that knows how to drive would do it. So you don't use avoiding brick walls as the baseline for success. You don't use 16,000% overprovisioning as the baseline for success, either.
I didn't say but 16 to do the job of one. I said buy one, where 16 was proposed. Showing you can help a company and steer them in a better direction saving money is a great thing.
But how did sixteen get propose and why was the company talking to someone looking to screw them like that and why was that taken seriously? See the problem? To make the Hyper-V deployment sound "cool" we have to throw the company competence under the bus. And in doing so, we take any value proposition that we add to it along with it because we've only demonstrated that "business smarts" are what was missing.
If the goal is to show business smarts, you can't push business smarts in front of the bus.
Because, whatever reason for any bad project. Whoever can stop bad solution for far better, should say that. Stopping the bollocks up project and putting something better in place is a success.
Not success that you want to brag about to someone else. Telling them that the place you worked for was incompetent but that you were at least "less incompetent" is absolutely not what you want to be showing off on your CV. You want people to want to hire you, not want to avoid you.
Also, you can't explain purchasing scenario's on a resume line. There are too many factors. Maybe that other plan included a DR site and you cut those out in going to "1" server. Maybe you run mission-critical systems that people's lives depend on and you really should have app HA, FT, and VM HA, stretched clusters and other systems and you just went cheap. Maybe the application is used by 1 person and it does nothing and ZERO servers were the right amount. The only case where discussing "number of servers" matters is if the company hiring is looking for skills associated with managing at scale (Someone with 1 Host isn't going to likely know vCenter, OpenManage or SCCM very well). A single server shop tells me that you likely are not familar with remote datacenter operations.
@tim_g said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
huge enterprises that that have a lot of money to spend, but don't have the IT staff to make good purchasing decisions.
To be fair with the big enterprise vendors, they don't pay list, or anything close to what you pay.
I did a deal with Brocade where they went 90% off list because I needed 34 campuses worth of switches. Storage and networking vendors will go to 4% margin if your deal is big enough (and they plan to make it up on later smaller expansions, support renewals etc).
@penguinwrangler said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:
@scottalanmiller said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:
@coliver said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:
Of course now the Department of Education (which I'm not sure what authority they would have here) is saying they are under no obligation to respect the federal loan forgiveness program. Hopefully that will be ironed out by the time you need it.
In America, the government is under no obligation to anything.
It is a gamble that they won't end it before 10 years. I am still willing to take that gamble. The job still has better pay and retirement so it is still a win if they don't.
The flip side of this is they did change pension benefit programs in Houston and Dallas recently and Colorado I think allowed changing them retroactively.
@coliver said in Student Loan Forgiveness Rant:
Of course now the Department of Education (which I'm not sure what authority they would have here) is saying they are under no obligation to respect the federal loan forgiveness program. Hopefully that will be ironed out by the time you need it.
The likely plan for phasing out the program is not accepting new people into it. This (or a one-time cash payout) is typically how you end entitlement programs (like the Peanut quota's).
We have a massive office In Atlanta (likely bigger than everything but our Palo Alto campus). Our remote professional services team (Precious just Airwatch now doing VSAN installs and other stuff) is growing, and that kind of work is good for finding some of everything.
HPE and Veeam also have large facilities on the north side.
@storageninja said in Anyone with Cisco download access (firmware) can help me ?:
@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).
My point is you don’t always control the 3rd party device you connect to. 1/2 the stuff I called my networking vendor was getting a work around for someone else’s gear (ISP, SIP peer, security vendor switch) misbehaving.