@scottalanmiller said in Designing a Reliable Web Application:

@thwr said in Designing a Reliable Web Application:

Don't know if KVM or Xen can do active standby VM's (mirrored VMs) like VMWare, at least Hyper-V can't do that (as of 2012R2)

Do you mean shared memory where there is full fault tolerance and absolutely zero downtime and zero crash consistency issues? Then no, no one does that except for VMware right now. It's the biggest feature that I think makes VMware worth it for shops that need VMware. But it is a massively expensive feature both in terms of VMware licensing as well as in terms of performance hits, OS licensing and system overhead. Doing memory mirroring across nodes is very, very painful in terms of system resources.

Exactly. It's like a RAID-1-ish VM.

@scottalanmiller said in Designing a Reliable Web Application:

MS SQL Server and SharePoint are more complex and you'll need to address those individually if you really need HA for them. This will have licensing costs and other overhead. Almost never would these be candidates for HA. These will be a big deal on their own. Everything else is trivial.

SharePoint is HA by default. At least it can be if you did a farm install (which you hopefully did? All kinds of evil things will try to eat you alive you if you did not so). In SharePoint, you basically have 3 types of server roles: DB, Backend (or "Application" role) and Frontends (which are basically just IIS). DB (should be) HA by using at least an active-passive SQL Server failover cluster, better an active-active or AlwaysOn one. You can have multiple frontends and backends by SharePoints internal mechanism. You can put a regular load balancer in front of the IIS's.

If you need to go cheap, you can achieve at least active-passive failover by virtualization mechanisms, like @scale mentioned. Don't know if KVM or Xen can do active standby VM's (mirrored VMs) like VMWare, at least Hyper-V can't do that (as of 2012R2)

What works in some cases is to look at the target side for file operations. That depends a bit on the filesystem and doesn't work for thin provisioned files for example, but for a lot of other things. The watch-command will execute any given command ever N seconds, for example:

watch -n10 'ls -lsah /path/to/target'
watch -n30 'du -sh /path/to/target'
watch -n1 'df -sh | grep /mnt/point/of/the/target'

In some other cases, you can send specific tools a signal to report stats, for example

kill -USR1 PROCESSID_OF_RUNNING_DD_OPERATION
kill -USR1 PROCESSID_OF_RUNNING_CP_OPERATION
killall -USR1 rm

Replace USR1 with SIGINFO if you are on BSD or OSX. USR1 is specific to Linux, most other *nix are using SIGINFO.

This will also work with watch or a while-command-sleep loop (watch is basically doing the same in the background).

Quite a few long running operations will report back on USR1/SIGINFO. Check the manpages or just try it.

@scottalanmiller said in MS System Center Licensing:

Anyone know someone from 5Nine that could jump in and answer some questions?

I know someone from over at SW. Will send him a mail tomorrow.

@RojoLoco said in HRC Verdict:

@thwr said in HRC Verdict:

@RojoLoco said in HRC Verdict:

@thwr said in HRC Verdict:

@RojoLoco said in HRC Verdict:

That's right kids, all politicians are useless scumbags that deserve a slow death at best... Just like the police, they are able to do anything they like without reproach or penalty. Had y'all not already figured this out??? How many decades has it been since a politician was accountable for their actions??? They all deserve the Targaryan treatment... see video below for further details. Skip ahead to 3:25 for the real essence of my message. Very NSFW.

Youtube Video

Let me translate that: You need to watch this video directly on Youtube because the copyright holder does not allow this video to be embedded on other websites.

...

Hey, it works over here in 'Merica....

My point is that all politicians should be locked in a building and burned alive.

Yeah, I guess that's something where I have to say

THANK YOU GEMA

NOT

(GEMA is responsible for collecting fees whenever someone uses music that MAY belong to their license pool. They are using bots to report next to anything and Google is trying hard to automatically remove those videos. A very major topic here in good ol' Germany.)

Well... that's thoroughly shitty. Maybe we need to teach you some good, old fashioned pirating techniques...

Still know very well what black- and blueboxing is

Small hint:

@RojoLoco said in HRC Verdict:

@thwr said in HRC Verdict:

@RojoLoco said in HRC Verdict:

That's right kids, all politicians are useless scumbags that deserve a slow death at best... Just like the police, they are able to do anything they like without reproach or penalty. Had y'all not already figured this out??? How many decades has it been since a politician was accountable for their actions??? They all deserve the Targaryan treatment... see video below for further details. Skip ahead to 3:25 for the real essence of my message. Very NSFW.

Youtube Video

Let me translate that: You need to watch this video directly on Youtube because the copyright holder does not allow this video to be embedded on other websites.

...

Hey, it works over here in 'Merica....

My point is that all politicians should be locked in a building and burned alive.

Yeah, I guess that's something where I have to say

THANK YOU GEMA

NOT

(GEMA is responsible for collecting fees whenever someone uses music that MAY belong to their license pool. They are using bots to report next to anything and Google is trying hard to automatically remove those videos. A very major topic here in good ol' Germany.)

@RojoLoco said in HRC Verdict:

That's right kids, all politicians are useless scumbags that deserve a slow death at best... Just like the police, they are able to do anything they like without reproach or penalty. Had y'all not already figured this out??? How many decades has it been since a politician was accountable for their actions??? They all deserve the Targaryan treatment... see video below for further details. Skip ahead to 3:25 for the real essence of my message. Very NSFW.

Youtube Video

Let me translate that: You need to watch this video directly on Youtube because the copyright holder does not allow this video to be embedded on other websites.

...

@travisdh1 ah ok, didn't see that on the picture. Thanks for mentioning it.

@IRJ Well, like the past showed us, even lying about a war reason isn't a problem in the US of A. And it works at least twice.

BTW, my dear Travis, breadboards are meant for temporary testing, not for permanent installations

Thanks for sharing. Plan to post something about using DS18B20 with C# (or whatever language you like) during the next days.

@IRJ Isn't it always the same? Get high enough and you don't need to be afraid of anything.

Same here in Germany:

• BER (IATA), our new "mega-airport" in Berlin, exploded in costs. Planned for EUR 1B in 2006. We're at EUR 6B right now. People in charge got changed at least 3 times. No one was sentenced.
• Hamburg Elbphilharmonie (high class concert hall): Planned for EUR 77M in 2007, right now at roughly 750M. 10 times higher. Any serious sentencing? Nope.
• Eurofighter
• Eurocopter
• Puma, armored car / small tank
• NH90 helicopter
• A400M
• G36 rifle
• (anything military)

And this is just about money. Sure, politics involved, but nothing that may fall under 18 U.S. Code § 793

@BBigford said in MS System Center Licensing:

@thwr said in MS System Center Licensing:

@BBigford said in MS System Center Licensing:

@thwr said in MS System Center Licensing:

@BBigford said in MS System Center Licensing:

@TAHIN said in MS System Center Licensing:

I'm not a fan of VMM. Literally every time I log in there's something about he console I have to fix. Or the constant WMI queries to the hosts killing my backups. The virtual switch/logical switch/logical network concept is a overly complicated knockoff of VMware distributed switches.

I am very interested in 5nine Manager however. Have you run a demo in your environment?

Haha ooooh I am SO done with VMM. I tore that stuff out months ago. Never again.

Same here. I'll buy 5nine Manager when I finally get a budget clearance...

I looked into a few months ago when I was getting away from VMM but never returned. What sets it apart from just loading up all your hosts into one Hyper-V console? Offer any additional features or flexibility?

Ever tried to manage hosts that are not part of your forest? <------------ No, can you give me a scenario where you'd want that?
A second cluster maybe? <----------------- You mean like another host of VMs? I just connect to all the hosts in my forest with Hyper-V Manager (there's about 10-12 hosts).

Well, I got 2 clusters, 3 hosts at my main office and 2 hosts at a branch site. That's a scenario for example. I will probably also manage a host in a shared office in the future which won't belong to my forest.

Just got a mail today where they ask if I would like to review HPE’s HC380 from some well-known orange themed website. Am I really supposed to risk a bad back from unpacking and lifting servers for just 50 bucks?

@BBigford said in MS System Center Licensing:

@thwr said in MS System Center Licensing:

@BBigford said in MS System Center Licensing:

@TAHIN said in MS System Center Licensing:

I'm not a fan of VMM. Literally every time I log in there's something about he console I have to fix. Or the constant WMI queries to the hosts killing my backups. The virtual switch/logical switch/logical network concept is a overly complicated knockoff of VMware distributed switches.

I am very interested in 5nine Manager however. Have you run a demo in your environment?

Haha ooooh I am SO done with VMM. I tore that stuff out months ago. Never again.

Same here. I'll buy 5nine Manager when I finally get a budget clearance...

I looked into a few months ago when I was getting away from VMM but never returned. What sets it apart from just loading up all your hosts into one Hyper-V console? Offer any additional features or flexibility?

Ever tried to manage hosts that are not part of your forest? A second cluster maybe? Possible, but PITA, even with 'improved' client on Windows 10.

http://www.5nine.com/5nine-manager-for-hyper-v-product.aspx#features

@Jason said in MS System Center Licensing:

@thwr said in MS System Center Licensing:

Hehe. My point was just that MS did a very large step away from the SMB with SC2012. No more simple workgroup edition, complicated licensing and so on.

5nine can fill that gap, IMHO.

They've been gone from enterprise day one. System Center is junk. No one at the enterprise level uses it.

It looked like a valid option when I bought it (and honestly, license costs are nothing more than a joke for us because we're on a very big contract - and on top of that public EDU)

@BBigford said in MS System Center Licensing:

@TAHIN said in MS System Center Licensing:

I'm not a fan of VMM. Literally every time I log in there's something about he console I have to fix. Or the constant WMI queries to the hosts killing my backups. The virtual switch/logical switch/logical network concept is a overly complicated knockoff of VMware distributed switches.

I am very interested in 5nine Manager however. Have you run a demo in your environment?

Haha ooooh I am SO done with VMM. I tore that stuff out months ago. Never again.

Same here. I'll buy 5nine Manager when I finally get a budget clearance...

@TAHIN said in MS System Center Licensing:

I'm not a fan of VMM. Literally every time I log in there's something about he console I have to fix. Or the constant WMI queries to the hosts killing my backups. The virtual switch/logical switch/logical network concept is a overly complicated knockoff of VMware distributed switches.

I am very interested in 5nine Manager however. Have you run a demo in your environment?

I've tried that, but the free version is very limited and you can only manage a single host. But what I saw is just what I expected: All the functionality of Hyper-V Manager and Failovercluster-Manager, some stats and a bit on top. Just what you need. Saw quite a few people calling it the "vCenter for Hyper-V".

Request a fully functioning demo maybe.

@BBigford said in MS System Center Licensing:

@thwr said in MS System Center Licensing:

All the products are great, that's not the question

That's not the question of this thread... but that is definitely the question I ask myself every single time I log into my System Center server.

Hehe. My point was just that MS did a very large step away from the SMB with SC2012. No more simple workgroup edition, complicated licensing and so on.

5nine can fill that gap, IMHO.