@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

LTO-7 is 6TB native / 15TB compressed so still a lot.

Right, but he still hasn't said how much data he actually has. What is a standard full backup and what is his change rate. How often will full backups be run, etc.

Yes, but what he does today would probably change if he the tape up and running. Otherwise why invest in tape? A single tape drive is something like $3K-$4K and simple 2U tape library in the $7K-$8K range.

Definitely a considerable expense. However, if he is only filling up 5% of the tapes every week, what's the point in using tape?

Could be to take it off site and store it. Tape has many times fewer bit errors than hard drives and 30 year archival properties. So they are excellent for that.

I haven't used tapes in years. How does that change when they are used over and over or stored in less than ideal conditions?

What is the plan for off-site storage with tapes? A service like Iron Mountain or someone takes them home and puts them in a closet?

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

LTO-7 is 6TB native / 15TB compressed so still a lot.

Right, but he still hasn't said how much data he actually has. What is a standard full backup and what is his change rate. How often will full backups be run, etc.

Yes, but what he does today would probably change if he the tape up and running. Otherwise why invest in tape? A single tape drive is something like $3K-$4K and simple 2U tape library in the $7K-$8K range.

Definitely a considerable expense. However, if he is only filling up 5% of the tapes every week, what's the point in using tape?

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

LTO-7 is 6TB native / 15TB compressed so still a lot.

Right, but he still hasn't said how much data he actually has. What is a standard full backup and what is his change rate. How often will full backups be run, etc.

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

my plan had been to use real tape, as we wanted to physically move it off site. But things may change

How much data are we talking? How are you currently getting tapes offsite?

If he uses LTO-8 tapes it's 12TB native/ 30TB compressed per tape.

Yeah, that is quite a bit. Is he only using 1 tape a week, or 20?

@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

my plan had been to use real tape, as we wanted to physically move it off site. But things may change

How much data are we talking? How are you currently getting tapes offsite?

@Pete-S said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

@wrx7m said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

More info on VTL-
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-tape-library
https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/vtl/

That's disk backup, not tape. Just tape emulation in software.

I assume, like us, he wants to use real tape.

His second option says ditch tape

More info on VTL-
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-tape-library
https://aws.amazon.com/storagegateway/vtl/

@Donahue said in Hyper V Tape passthrough possible?:

About a year ago I had this thread discussing starting to use tape for backups. Well, it never got implemented and now I am just getting around to being able to make this work. However, I am running into issues that didn't come up in our planning and I think I need to modify the plan and or scrap it and come up with something else.

Right now I have a Veeam inside a 2012R2 VM running on Hyper-V 2019. My tape drive is connected via SAS to the host. I am trying to get Veeam to talk to the tape drive but I ran into a glaring problem. I cannot seem pass through a tape drive to my VM. Am I right about this? I can't pass through the entire SAS controller, it would have had to been the drive itself.

I see two options moving forward.

1. Run Veeam physically and not inside a VM
2. scrap the idea of tape and convince my management to consider cloud options.

Thoughts? I am in the process of completely reevaluating how we are setup and what exactly we would do if we encountered issues that required us to need these backups.

Or you can use a VTL with Veeam. AWS and Starwind have their own. There are others, but I am not familiar with them.

@dbeato said in Windows Offline files:

I disable Windows Offline Files for that reason, it is a pain to deal with and causes more problems than anything else. But yeah, even if it was locked out and the computer went to sleep it will mark it as offline since the computer detected a change on the network connectivity.

^^This. I have been disabling offline files for 15+ years. It never works the way people expect. #chasingghosts

New Google Chrome Security Alert: Update Your Browsers As ‘High Severity’ Zero-Day Exploit Confirmed
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2019/11/01/new-google-chrome-security-alert-update-your-browsers-as-high-severity-zero-day-exploit-confirmed/#7b9f293070b3

"Here's what is known so far
The October 31 disclosure from Google confirmed that the "stable channel" desktop Chrome browser is being updated to version 78.0.3904.87 across the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. This urgent update will start rolling out "over the coming days/weeks," according to Google. "

@Pete-S FS.com is where I got the SFP transceivers. I also got Extreme networks stacking cables, sfp and sfp+ transceivers and fiber from them. I got extras of all and was still way cheaper than oem. Been running for several years without issues.

I was going to get a dedicated media converter but ended up just getting an Adtran 8-port with 2 SFP ports.

@Dashrender said in How do you get your departments to quantify what they actually need for their jobs:

I ask - how is budgeting done for the IT ask for those departments? Is there just one centralized IT budget for the whole company? If so, then as IT, I would require departments to understand their needs and provide what you've asked for.

If the department has their own budget, then you don't care, let them spend and waste it anyway they want, it's their problem when they run out of money.

Except, it could also be IT's problem when they want to get more mileage out of dying equipment. Is there some sort of override for that?

@black3dynamite said in Windows Server - average RAM, vCPU allocation?:

2GB of RAM and 2vCPU is pretty good for a non-GUI Windows Server.

Yeah, non-gui would make a difference. I run gui for all Windows servers.

@dafyre said in Windows Server - average RAM, vCPU allocation?:

With Server 2012 or so, we do 4gb of RAM, 2016 and up, we do 8GB of RAM. Start with 2vCPU unless there are performance issues.

Yeah 2012 R2 I could probably do 4GB and 1 vCPU to start. It doesn't seem to use as many resources as 2016.

For 2016, I start with 6 GB of RAM and 2 vCPU. Rebooting takes a bit with less of each. Windows updates are much worse and will take forever to install and then after .net updates, when they come back up, will take forever to complete.

@dbeato said in PDQ Drops Inventory (Deploy) Agent:

Interesting, most Inventory solutions are working towards agents now.

Exactly. Now, I am looking for another solution that includes an agent.

I'll add my two cents.

I use this analogy to explain it to my boss. Virtualization is kind of like an apartment building or hotel, where the building and utilities are all shared by the rooms. The building is the physical server and utilities are the resources (CPU, RAM, Storage, Network). The rooms are the VMs (guests).

One of the reasons you would virtualize is to get more bang for your buck out of the hardware, whose resources are often idle or severely under-utilized for the majority of the time. Like others have mentioned, you have savings on physical hardware, power, cooling, density (physical space for servers), etc.

Other reasons include

• Portability of VMs (guests), as they are just files. This extends life-span of the VM OS, as it can run on any hardware just by simply migrating it.

• Snapshots of VMs to roll back to a point in time. For instance, prior to installing updates or making other significant changes.

• Faster server provisioning (using templates).

Any agent-based suggestions for Windows (Mac too) environment?

https://www.pdq.com/blog/pdq-agent-status-update/

"The bad: We are announcing the End of Life (EOL) of the optional PDQ Agent beta from our existing products."

I know this is about a month old, but I was reading release notes for the latest version and discovered that they were removing the ability to install the agent. Surprised that they couldn't get it working correctly.