Virtualization Megathread V2: VMs inside VMs

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Virtualization Megathread V2: VMs inside VMs

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Pile Of Garbage: May 28, 2007

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

not anime

Take your meds mate and stop posting-while-drinking.

Actually just stop posting.

# ? May 15, 2015 11:04

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# ? Apr 20, 2024 03:31

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

The way I was mentioned was "Look he is one of two people in the area we can get... we aren't letting him leave".

That's an acknowledgment of their mediocrity, not of your achievement.

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

But man UCS/Nexus/EMC is getting boring....

That's because it's easy and it's always been easy. Complex storage, network, and systems issues are hard, but you don't get to see those when you spend your time as an integration person snapping together legos (because those products work together extremely well) to rebuild the same solution over and over again. Go specialize. Do you wanna be solving problems nobody's solved before, or ones so common there's literally a platform based around doing it?

# ? May 15, 2015 15:41

YOLOsubmarine: Oct 19, 2004; When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

I like Nimble as a technology but I can't imagine anything more boring than being a Nimble implementation engineer. It takes about two hours to stand up a Nimble and get storage provisioned. Who wants to spend all their time implementing a technology whose chief calling card is that it's so simple that a moron could do it?

# ? May 15, 2015 16:37

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

NippleFloss posted:

I like Nimble as a technology but I can't imagine anything more boring than being a Nimble implementation engineer. It takes about two hours to stand up a Nimble and get storage provisioned. Who wants to spend all their time implementing a technology whose chief calling card is that it's so simple that a moron could do it?

This. I have installed and admin few Nimble arrays. Really boring.

# ? May 15, 2015 16:43

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

Shrug, I'd be fine with flying around the country installing Nimble but my back is awful and I can't lift a drat thing.

# ? May 15, 2015 16:46

Inspector_666: Oct 7, 2003; _{benny with the good hair}

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

E: actually Japan is really hiring hard for "cloud" people IDK what that means but drat I will take free housing n poo poo

あなたはどのくらいの日本語を学びましたか？

# ? May 15, 2015 16:56

YOLOsubmarine: Oct 19, 2004; When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Tab8715 posted:

Shrug, I'd be fine with flying around the country installing Nimble but my back is awful and I can't lift a drat thing.

Specializing in a small market product that is really easy to set up and use isn't generally good for career growth. It may not be a bad weigh station job to get a foot in the door at Nimble or in the broader vendor ecosystem, since vendor hiring is incredibly incestuous, but it's not going to be very fulfilling work.

# ? May 15, 2015 17:13

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

NippleFloss posted:

Specializing in a small market product that is really easy to set up and use isn't generally good for career growth. It may not be a bad weigh station job to get a foot in the door at Nimble or in the broader vendor ecosystem, since vendor hiring is incredibly incestuous, but it's not going to be very fulfilling work.

Unless I'm mistaken Nimble has storage solutions from SMB all the way to Fortune 500.

Yea, I agree it's not a "permanent" position but I'm relatively young, single and no kids so I wouldn't mind the travel. As for vendor positions being incestuous I've never thought about it like that but its awfully clever.

EDIT - We discussed storage in the general IT thread a few months ago and I came out with asking how much more to SANs is there aside from the initial connection (SAS,iSCSI,etc) and provisioning LUNs. There was an overwhelming reply that there's a lot more and now I'm really confused.

Gucci Loafers fucked around with this message at 18:12 on May 15, 2015

# ? May 15, 2015 18:10

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Tab8715 posted:

Unless I'm mistaken Nimble has storage solutions from SMB all the way to Fortune 500.

Yea, I agree it's not a "permanent" position but I'm relatively young, single and no kids so I wouldn't mind the travel. As for vendor positions being incestuous I've never thought about it like that but its awfully clever.

EDIT - We discussed storage in the general IT thread a few months ago and I came out with asking how much more to SANs is there aside from the initial connection (SAS,iSCSI,etc) and provisioning LUNs. There was an overwhelming reply that there's a lot more and now I'm really confused.

There's a lot more happening on the head, with a ton of metrics available and specific optimization for use patterns, details of proprietary filesystems used by vendors, geo-replication, vaai, etc. Storage has a lot more going on, but a lot of Nimble's market base is "throw a shitload of flash into a chassis and present it to VMware, because you shouldn't need to do figure out storage to make your VMs happy". Which is true. But there are other cases (like tiering, distributed replicated, etc) where it's less true and there's a lot to learn and do.

# ? May 15, 2015 18:39

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Tab8715 posted:

Shrug, I'd be fine with flying around the country installing Nimble but my back is awful and I can't lift a drat thing.

Do techs usually do the rack-and-stack? I don't know about other vendors, but EMC usually sends Unisys to do the lifting and cabling and then the techs show up later to push the buttons.

# ? May 15, 2015 18:44

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

Vulture Culture posted:

Do techs usually do the rack-and-stack? I don't know about other vendors, but EMC usually sends Unisys to do the lifting and cabling and then the techs show up later to push the buttons.

No clue, I worked small MSP and we basically did it all. Moving a fully loaded N-Series wasn't pleasant.

# ? May 15, 2015 18:54

YOLOsubmarine: Oct 19, 2004; When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Tab8715 posted:

Unless I'm mistaken Nimble has storage solutions from SMB all the way to Fortune 500.

Yea, I agree it's not a "permanent" position but I'm relatively young, single and no kids so I wouldn't mind the travel. As for vendor positions being incestuous I've never thought about it like that but its awfully clever.

EDIT - We discussed storage in the general IT thread a few months ago and I came out with asking how much more to SANs is there aside from the initial connection (SAS,iSCSI,etc) and provisioning LUNs. There was an overwhelming reply that there's a lot more and now I'm really confused.

Nimble is a very small. They have some large customers but the company itself is small they play mostly in SMB and midmarket. Their revenue last year was 125 million. Netapp's was 6 billion. EMC's was 25 billion.

But more importantly, Nimble's product line is very small. They sell one type of array and that's it. Larger vendors have multiple hardware and software products that often need to be integrated so there's some breadth to what you get to learn and work with. Nimble has an array, a plugin, and a Powershell module. It's block only and basically iSCSI only despite token FCP support now.

It's not bad storage at all, but it's really really simple from a deployment perspective, which is by design. Their reps tell customers they could install it themselves. Anything interesting that might be done involving custom scripting for application consistent backup or DR wouldn't be handled by an implementation engineer.

Vulture Culture posted:

Do techs usually do the rack-and-stack? I don't know about other vendors, but EMC usually sends Unisys to do the lifting and cabling and then the techs show up later to push the buttons.

Nimble relies on the channel for most of their installation services, so whoever the VAR is will generally do all of it.

# ? May 15, 2015 19:15

Erwin: Feb 17, 2006

Vulture Culture posted:

Do techs usually do the rack-and-stack? I don't know about other vendors, but EMC usually sends Unisys to do the lifting and cabling and then the techs show up later to push the buttons.

With Nimble, I had one guy from start to finish. He did everything from demoing, sizing, quoting, requoting, racking, and setup. This was only two 3U boxes though. The advantage of Nimble's simplicity is that the tech can be the sales guy and vice versa, and setup is ridiculously easy. This streamlines Nimble's side of things for sure.

Tab8715 posted:

EDIT - We discussed storage in the general IT thread a few months ago and I came out with asking how much more to SANs is there aside from the initial connection (SAS,iSCSI,etc) and provisioning LUNs. There was an overwhelming reply that there's a lot more and now I'm really confused.

Now that my Nimble array is set up, the only choices I have to make are block size and cache/no cache for each LUN. That's it, and for my needs, that's all I want because I have a lot of other things to focus on. There's a whole world of enterprise storage out there that is complicated and is way more involved than connection and provisioning, but Nimble isn't in that space. I'm not sure that any moron could work for Nimble, but DAF could handle racking and setup, and he is a moron. I'm not sure he could sell anything to anyone though. Nimble does have great techs answering support cases, but DAF is not a good communicator either.

Having said all that, Nimble sales/setup would be a decent job for a young person, so long as they didn't spend too long in that job. Nimble employees (at least sales) get their own array to play with at home.

# ? May 15, 2015 19:19

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

NippleFloss posted:

Nimble relies on the channel for most of their installation services, so whoever the VAR is will generally do all of it.

we saved $5k by skipping our VAR implementation and doing it ourselves. Having never touched Nimble the rack/stack took about 10 minutes including cabling. Initial setup was about 20 minutes.

# ? May 16, 2015 00:07

Moey: Oct 22, 2010; I LIKE TO MOVE IT

adorai posted:

we saved $5k by skipping our VAR implementation and doing it ourselves. Having never touched Nimble the rack/stack took about 10 minutes including cabling. Initial setup was about 20 minutes.

Did you hate their rail system? And by their, I assume supermicro.

# ? May 16, 2015 00:59

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Moey posted:

Did you hate their rail system? And by their, I assume supermicro.

It was significantly less awesome than Cisco or Oracle rails, but wasn't so bad that it justifies the word hate.

# ? May 16, 2015 01:04

Gucci Loafers: May 20, 2006; Ask yourself, do you really want to talk to pair of really nice gaudy shoes?

Do I dare ask what Cisco/Oracle rails are like?

# ? May 16, 2015 01:50

Dilbert As FUCK: Sep 8, 2007; by Cowcaster; Pillbug

evol262 posted:

That's an acknowledgment of their mediocrity, not of your achievement.

IDK they compare me to a VCDX, might be a backhanded complement though. not sure yet

cheese-cube posted:

Take your meds mate and stop posting-while-drinking.

Actually just stop posting.

I don't take meds other than caffine and creatine to work out on, but stopping posting in SH/SC is solid advice.

# ? May 16, 2015 02:12

adorai: Nov 2, 2002; 10/27/04 Never forget; Grimey Drawer

Tab8715 posted:

Do I dare ask what Cisco/Oracle rails are like?

Expensive.

# ? May 16, 2015 03:33

luminalflux: May 27, 2005

Moey posted:

Did you hate their rail system? And by their, I assume supermicro.

I'm so happy we have integrators that build our racks for us, I could never put up with that. Especially after I managed to cut myself on a couple fat twin blades.

# ? May 16, 2015 06:14

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Dilbert As gently caress posted:

IDK they compare me to a VCDX, might be a backhanded complement though. not sure yet

My comment is kinda to stop worrying or thinking about other people's opinions of you, including good ones. It doesn't matter what they think

# ? May 16, 2015 07:32

Potato Salad: Oct 23, 2014; nobody cares

Tab8715 posted:

Do I dare ask what Cisco/Oracle rails are like?

Do the Oracle rails support anything?

# ? May 18, 2015 00:25

luminalflux: May 27, 2005

Potato Salad posted:

Do the Oracle rails support anything?

Yes but you need a license per cage-nut.

# ? May 18, 2015 04:40

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

luminalflux posted:

Yes but you need a license per cage-nut.

If your rack has three holes per rack unit instead of two on each side, you actually need to pay for all twelve cage nuts because you're licensing by the maximum number of cage nuts you might use.

# ? May 18, 2015 05:40

some kinda jackal: Feb 25, 2003; �
�

Is open-vm-tools still the go-to tools for CentOS 7 in vSphere 6?

I've got an ESXi 5.5 whitebox host connected to a VCSA 6 server. Only have one guest on it other than the VCSA itself -- CentOS 7 with open-vm-tools installed. It correctly reads all the tools info and shows the IP/DNS name, however it also says "VMware tools is not installed on this virtual machine". Technically correct, but I don't remember this error showing up when open-vm-tools was installed and the host was linked to my old VCSA 5.5 server.

# ? May 19, 2015 01:36

Proud Christian Mom: Dec 20, 2006; READING COMPREHENSION IS HARD

going to put Cisco Certified Rail Installer on my LinkedIn profile

# ? May 19, 2015 03:37

SlayVus: Jul 10, 2009; Grimey Drawer

Can I get some suggestions on where to start to setup some virtual pcs? I got some free c2d dell optiplex usff computers and I want to learn some basic virtualization. I have a desktop PC I can use as a host, but how do I go about setting up the optis as like "thin clients"?

# ? May 20, 2015 19:52

thebigcow: Jan 3, 2001; Bully!

SlayVus posted:

Can I get some suggestions on where to start to setup some virtual pcs? I got some free c2d dell optiplex usff computers and I want to learn some basic virtualization. I have a desktop PC I can use as a host, but how do I go about setting up the optis as like "thin clients"?

Do you mean a VDI setup using the dells as clients, or do you mean using the dells to run virtual machines?

# ? May 20, 2015 20:41

Gyshall: Feb 24, 2009; Had a couple of drinks.
Saw a couple of things.

If the desktops support booting to PXE, maybe look into that.

# ? May 20, 2015 20:47

SlayVus: Jul 10, 2009; Grimey Drawer

thebigcow posted:

Do you mean a VDI setup using the dells as clients, or do you mean using the dells to run virtual machines?

Using the dells as clients, not to run virtual machines.

Gyshall posted:

If the desktops support booting to PXE, maybe look into that.

According to the tech specs, the LAN supports PXE.

Since these are actual computers, would I still go about assigning them resources from the host or could they use their own CPU? There by reducing the hardware requirement of the host machine.

SlayVus fucked around with this message at 21:27 on May 20, 2015

# ? May 20, 2015 21:17

Mr Shiny Pants: Nov 12, 2012

SlayVus posted:

Using the dells as clients, not to run virtual machines.

According to the tech specs, the LAN supports PXE.

Since these are actual computers, would I still go about assigning them resources from the host or could they use their own CPU? There by reducing the hardware requirement of the host machine.

No, the point is you use server resources. The Dell machines are just dumb clients performing the least processing necessary.

# ? May 21, 2015 06:59

BlackMK4: Aug 23, 2006; wat.; Megamarm

Is there a virtualbox equivalent of isolation.tools.getVersion.disable = "TRUE"?
I need to hide that an app is running in a VM.

BlackMK4 fucked around with this message at 17:41 on May 21, 2015

# ? May 21, 2015 17:33

Vulture Culture: Jul 14, 2003; I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

BlackMK4 posted:

Is there a virtualbox equivalent of isolation.tools.getVersion.disable = "TRUE"?
I need to hide that an app is running in a VM.

What are you trying to hide from, specifically? There's a lot of telltale ways to determine whether something's in a VM, from enumerating hardware and comparing against known virtualized hardware lists to performing timing attacks against the host.

# ? May 21, 2015 17:56

BlackMK4: Aug 23, 2006; wat.; Megamarm

Vulture Culture posted:

What are you trying to hide from, specifically? There's a lot of telltale ways to determine whether something's in a VM, from enumerating hardware and comparing against known virtualized hardware lists to performing timing attacks against the host.

I'm trying to run WinOLS - the fix for VMWare people is to use the above command and it works. I guess I can try running VMWare instead of Virtualbox.

# ? May 21, 2015 18:38

Nephzinho: Jan 25, 2008

luminalflux posted:

Yes but you need a license per cage-nut.

You don't actually license per cage-nut, you license based on how many cage-nuts your rail may support. You could put those cage-nuts anywhere.

# ? May 21, 2015 18:47

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

Don't forget the cold spare licenses required for any cage nuts left in stock but not installed.

# ? May 21, 2015 19:44

Ciaphas: Nov 20, 2005; > BEWARE, COWARD

I know this thread's more business/server oriented but: I want to gently caress around with a virtual host for running a media server on my PC. I know there's VirtualBox for doing everything free, but I have a built in irrational hate of everything Oracle is and has ever done (blame my job), so I figured I'd double check--there's nothing else free out there that lets me make and fiddle with VMs, right? I know VMware Workstation has a trial but I'd rather not have that expire on me.

# ? May 31, 2015 04:59

1000101: May 14, 2003; BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

VMware player is also free.

# ? May 31, 2015 06:57

Internet Explorer: Jun 1, 2005

Not sure I understand your use case 100%, but if you already have Windows 8 installed...

Client Hyper-V

# ? May 31, 2015 06:59

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# ? Apr 20, 2024 03:31

Buttcoin purse: Apr 24, 2014

I avoided VirtualBox for a long time too but it really is a pretty good option on both Windows and Linux. If it didn't have Oracle branding, I don't think there'd be any other reason to think it was from Oracle.

If you were on Windows and really wanted to run open-source, you could use QEMU. I've never tried any nice front-ends for QEMU on Windows though, I've always used it from the command line. I'm pretty sure it doesn't perform anywhere near as well as VirtualBox though.

On Linux, virt-manager as a front-end to KVM is a fairly friendly option that performs well.

If this media server is something like Universal Media Server, you might need a bridged network, which is one area where I've heard of VirtualBox issues on Windows, although that was a fair while ago. I have a link to this bug, I can't check if it's fixed right now because their site is down: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/11948

# ? May 31, 2015 07:44

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