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Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Martytoof posted:

Ugh, my 60 day vSphere trial ended and I barely made it through a few chapters of Mastering vSphere 5 thanks to some contract work I had to start.

Is this a thing where I email VMware and say "I'm trying to get vSphere experience so pretty please with a cherry on top can I have another 60 days" and they'll be agreeable, or do I basically have to game the system and create a second VMware account, redo my lab with the new keys?

I can't even download things like the vCSA that I was hoping to play with :|

How the hell do people manage setting up home ESXi labs with this limitation? :(
Reinstall with the same key, unless things have changed with V5.

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madsushi
Apr 19, 2009

Baller.
#essereFerrari
Most people running home labs are using the free version of ESXi, so there's no 60-day limit. The timer only applies for the paid features (vCenter and everything it enables, etc).

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

madsushi posted:

Most people running home labs are using the free version of ESXi, so there's no 60-day limit. The timer only applies for the paid features (vCenter and everything it enables, etc).

I think he is using/wanting the features

some kinda jackal
Feb 25, 2003

 
 
Yeah, I should have specified, I'm looking to get actual feature++ "experience". I'll try reinstalling with the existing keys, thanks!

Shame I can't download vCSA though. If it comes down to it I'll just create a second account.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug
It might not be your cup of tea but

If you want to learn scripting/PowerCLI, you can script a datacenter rebuild whit shared storage adapters and what not. Once you set the script all you need to to is run it again to pick up where you left off.

I might do a script like that and post it if anyone is interested, 3 hosts, 2 NAS, windows DC AD/NTP/DNS/gateway.

Might save some people time who are learning but run into the 60 day limit

Alctel
Jan 16, 2004

I love snails


Ok, so backing up a VSphere 5.0 enviroment, 2 ESXi servers, ~20 machines.

Having to choose between Veeam, Commvault, VRanger (and symantic ahahaaha)

I am leaning heavily towards Veeam but my manager has heard great things about Commvault and wants to go with them

halp

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Alctel posted:

Ok, so backing up a VSphere 5.0 enviroment, 2 ESXi servers, ~20 machines.

Having to choose between Veeam, Commvault, VRanger (and symantic ahahaaha)

I am leaning heavily towards Veeam but my manager has heard great things about Commvault and wants to go with them

halp

If your environment is small, Veeam seems to work pretty well, but gets squirelly and terrible as things get bigger

Do you already have Commvault in place? It's kind of overkill to backup 2 VMWare servers.

Maneki Neko fucked around with this message at 20:45 on Mar 12, 2012

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Alctel posted:

Ok, so backing up a VSphere 5.0 enviroment, 2 ESXi servers, ~20 machines.

Having to choose between Veeam, Commvault, VRanger (and symantic ahahaaha)

I am leaning heavily towards Veeam but my manager has heard great things about Commvault and wants to go with them

halp
Is there any reason you're not considering PHD Virtual? We're most likely switching over to them from Veeam in the next couple of weeks. (The stories I could tell you about Veeam.)

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug
Definitely take Veeam for a drive before purchasing it.

Hyrax
Jul 23, 2004

I'm the Goon in the OP. Dispatch your messenger forthwith.

Alctel posted:

Ok, so backing up a VSphere 5.0 enviroment, 2 ESXi servers, ~20 machines.

Having to choose between Veeam, Commvault, VRanger (and symantic ahahaaha)

I am leaning heavily towards Veeam but my manager has heard great things about Commvault and wants to go with them

halp

We've got Veeam backing up ~140 VMs that are anywhere from 20 gigs up to 300 or so. The only time it's been problematic is when had some of the storage poo poo the bed in the middle of it trying to do a backup and left some snapshots in an inconsistent state. 20 minutes of cleanup later everything was good to go.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Misogynist posted:

Is there any reason you're not considering PHD Virtual? We're most likely switching over to them from Veeam in the next couple of weeks. (The stories I could tell you about Veeam.)
I meant to ask you: what happened that made you go from "rargh IBM die in the fires of hell" one year ago to considering buying their stuff again?

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

evil_bunnY posted:

I meant to ask you: what happened that made you go from "rargh IBM die in the fires of hell" one year ago to considering buying their stuff again?
The IBM stuff that we were having problems with was the Midrange Storage series (DS4800, DS5100) which is rebranded LSI with some IBM tweaks and parts fulfillment. The new stuff is IBM engineering from the ground up (DS8000 and GPFS), which we've had much better experiences with. I'm really looking forward to our V7000 stuff coming in.

Mierdaan posted:

Definitely take Veeam for a drive before purchasing it.
And log a support ticket on some trivial issue if you want to see the real Veeam.

My big beef with Veeam is that they got too big too fast, and their entire company largely seems to be a mismanaged, organically-grown, sprawling wreck where nobody can coordinate to get anything done. When you call and hit the button to speak with an operator, it directs you to HR for some reason. At least the woman managing support is really nice and gets things done, once you figure out how to escalate to her. (Nobody in support will actually escalate you when you ask them to, and you generally need to move through your sales rep to get any wheels turning.)

For what it's worth, our backups finish in 20% of the time with PHD Virtual versus Veeam, and PHD Virtual's architecture is way easier to manage.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 21:25 on Mar 12, 2012

Fancy_Lad
May 15, 2003
Would you like to buy a monkey?
And here our ESX guys are wanting to drop PHD because their support is apparently horrible as well. Fun!

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Fancy_Lad posted:

And here our ESX guys are wanting to drop PHD because their support is apparently horrible as well. Fun!
Did any techs get fired over repeated passive-aggressive comments made in your last support case?

I'll put up with it if the product works. My experience with Veeam has been 2 months of fighting with this product just to get it to back up all our VMs halfway reliably. Now that it does, it takes 26:30:00 to back up 200 GB of nightly changes, which is precisely six times as long as PHD Virtual takes.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 02:33 on Mar 13, 2012

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug

Fancy_Lad posted:

And here our ESX guys are wanting to drop PHD because their support is apparently horrible as well. Fun!

Pretty sure the only backup application I've heard universally good things about over the years is...... rsync. If you need a more sophisticated solution than that, you're in for disappointment.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Misogynist posted:

The IBM stuff that we were having problems with was the Midrange Storage series (DS4800, DS5100) which is rebranded LSI with some IBM tweaks and parts fulfillment.
Urgh LSI.

On another subject: I'm trying to put together some hosts, and hitting an information wall: can I run a 8GB and a 4GB DIMM per channel (for 96GB totalon a 2socket box), or a 8GB and a 16GB DIMM per channel (for 192GB total) and still run them at 1.6ghz? Dell website says yes, but my rep checked with an Intel presales guy and he said 1.3ghz max?

This is annoying because I'd rather not run all my hosts at 128GB (gently caress you VMware licensing).

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

evil_bunnY posted:

Urgh LSI.

On another subject: I'm trying to put together some hosts, and hitting an information wall: can I run a 8GB and a 4GB DIMM per channel (for 96GB totalon a 2socket box), or a 8GB and a 16GB DIMM per channel (for 192GB total) and still run them at 1.6ghz? Dell website says yes, but my rep checked with an Intel presales guy and he said 1.3ghz max?

This is annoying because I'd rather not run all my hosts at 128GB (gently caress you VMware licensing).

From my general knowledge of memory, I don't think you want to be mixing sizes in the channel, but not all pairs have to be equal.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008
So I'm virtualizing an old MSSQL box, a 2005 era IBM X Series 3850 M2 with 64G of memory. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I should actually give it less resource than the old physical machine correct?

*new servers are DL380G7's

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Start low and watch application performance is the general rule of thumb.

One question is why it needed to be P2V'ed instead of re-implemented as a VM.

Rhymenoserous posted:

It's not P2V'd, started fresh.
Ah. I'd start at 1 vCPU and vRAM according to there and the load you saw on the old machine. Without metrics it's kind of hard to tell you what to expect.

evil_bunnY fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Mar 13, 2012

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

evil_bunnY posted:

Start low and watch application performance is the general rule of thumb.

One question is why it needed to be P2V'ed instead of re-implemented as a VM.

It's not P2V'd, started fresh.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Rhymenoserous posted:

It's not P2V'd, started fresh.

That's the best thing to do. Get rid of all the old crap that isn't needed and start with a clean properly setup VM. As for the resources, I do what evil_bunnY said. Start low and monitor it. I consistently have to argue with my boss here that our VMs do not need 8 cores and 32gb memory when they are using less than 10% of their current resources.


Anyone ever come across a folder on a datastore that will not delete? Folder is empty. There is nothing else on that datastore, the drat folder just wont delete. I am going to blow it out anyway (and that whole storage device actually) but wanted to make sure there is nothing that I am missing that is somehow relying on this empty folder.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Moey posted:

Anyone ever come across a folder on a datastore that will not delete? Folder is empty. There is nothing else on that datastore, the drat folder just wont delete. I am going to blow it out anyway (and that whole storage device actually) but wanted to make sure there is nothing that I am missing that is somehow relying on this empty folder.



One of your hosts is causing the problem, it thinks it has something in the folder, I've had this happen in the past and the only thing to clear it up was a host reboot.

That was in ESX 4.1, I haven't run into this in 5.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Rhymenoserous posted:

It's not P2V'd, started fresh.
Same advice applies. Start medium-low and scale up/down as necessary -- Windows Server 2003+, in Enterprise Edition or higher, can hot-add CPU and memory as long as you have the option checked off in the VM options. Make sure to actually watch what SQL is doing with the memory, because it will take up most of the available RAM on the host for use as cache whether you need it or not. Only the SQL Server-level statistics will give you the memory usage information that you need to know.

Keep in mind what co-scheduling does to latency of underutilized SMP systems. Start with no more than two vCPUs unless you're positive you'll be consistently using four cores, or it will actually hurt your application response times.

Cpt.Wacky
Apr 17, 2005
I had it once with a Nexenta datastore. Had to reboot the Nexenta to fix it.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Rhymenoserous posted:

One of your hosts is causing the problem, it thinks it has something in the folder, I've had this happen in the past and the only thing to clear it up was a host reboot.

That was in ESX 4.1, I haven't run into this in 5.

That's what I am thinking, our storage was/is very jacked up. Getting pretty close to having it all sorted out properly. I honestly just want to delete the datastore then drop the connection, then rebuild it from the storage, but am terrified to do that during production, even if nothing is running on that NAS unit.

Bitch Stewie
Dec 17, 2011

Alctel posted:

Ok, so backing up a VSphere 5.0 enviroment, 2 ESXi servers, ~20 machines.

Having to choose between Veeam, Commvault, VRanger (and symantic ahahaaha)

I am leaning heavily towards Veeam but my manager has heard great things about Commvault and wants to go with them

halp

PHD, Veeam, possibly Unitrends are also worth a look.

Commvault is good poo poo, but as others have said it may (almost certainly is) be overkill for just a pair of hosts unless you're getting a bundle or something that makes it a good deal financially.

Of course where it excels is that it supports pretty much anything/everything else whilst PHD and Veeam are almost entirely focussed on VMware.

Unitrends is an interesting product IMO. Seems to get good feedback and a nice licensing model.

complex
Sep 16, 2003

Use vmfstools to examine any locks on the volume, break lock if necessary.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

evil_bunnY posted:

On another subject: I'm trying to put together some hosts, and hitting an information wall: can I run a 8GB and a 4GB DIMM per channel (for 96GB totalon a 2socket box), or a 8GB and a 16GB DIMM per channel (for 192GB total) and still run them at 1.6ghz? Dell website says yes, but my rep checked with an Intel presales guy and he said 1.3ghz max?
On previous generations of Intel processors (not sure about sandy bridge or whatever is newest) exceeding 48 or 64GB per populated socket caused a memory slowdown. You could mix DIMM sizes but there are guidelines to follow when doing so in regard to ranks, not sure of the specifics.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
I haven't seen anything on Sandy Bridge downclocking memory when additional banks are populated like on Nehalem and Westmere, but do be aware that supported DDR3 memory speed ranges from 1066 MHz up to 1600 MHz depending on your CPU model. DDR3-1600 is only available on the 2637, 2643, 2667, and all of the eight-core models.

Kachunkachunk
Jun 6, 2011
My guess is that you would want to see what the chipset's specifications say about this stuff.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Kachunkachunk posted:

My guess is that you would want to see what the chipset's specifications say about this stuff.
Sandy Bridge moves the northbridge on-die, FYI.

Kachunkachunk
Jun 6, 2011
Yup, but was that since Nehalem, specifically?
But I don't truly know, honestly. When I was speccing out a couple of Sandy Bridge-based workstations some time ago, the maximum supported memory allowance varied with the few chipsets offered. The options may have offered the same number of sockets and the same kinds of processors and RAM configurations, but they handled different amounts of it. I don't know if it was as simple as having enough slots or not... I doubt it based on earlier experiences from older chipsets. So it really could just be that simple. But possibly not.
Really I figure it would not be entirely surprising if the chipset also had some/significant impact on these kinds of memory bank quirks.

Or poo poo, I could really just be completely wrong. It's either going to be in the CPU or chipset spec, I'm pretty sure? Intel docs are pretty good, if long.

Alctel
Jan 16, 2004

I love snails


quote =! edit

Alctel fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Mar 14, 2012

Alctel
Jan 16, 2004

I love snails


Maneki Neko posted:

If your environment is small, Veeam seems to work pretty well, but gets squirelly and terrible as things get bigger

Do you already have Commvault in place? It's kind of overkill to backup 2 VMWare servers.

How big is 'bigger?' We probably have about 3-4 TB of data (most of it on 2 file servers).

Agree on the commvault, but my manager wanted to look into it, he decided against it once he saw the cost

Misogynist posted:

Is there any reason you're not considering PHD Virtual? We're most likely switching over to them from Veeam in the next couple of weeks. (The stories I could tell you about Veeam.)

Never even heard of PHD - what problems did you have with Veeam?

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Alctel posted:

Never even heard of PHD
PHD Virtual is one of the biggest players in this space, and the easiest to set up (the entire product is virtual appliance-based). You can have an eval up and running in less than 10 minutes (download time not included). Management is a little wonky for really big environments, since the appliances don't share settings. However, unlike Veeam, it actually multithreads correctly, so you don't need to break your backups into 10 mini backup jobs in order to get concurrency.

Alctel posted:

what problems did you have with Veeam?
First Veeam tech being evasive about needing to troubleshoot issues with vCenter when all of our backups were timing out on vCenter SOAP calls:

Veeam Support posted:

That's great that the job is successful when backing up directly through the host. Let me know if you have any other questions regarding this issue or if it's ok to close the ticket.

When Veeam actually does, one in a hundred times, back up our 110 VM job correctly:

Veeam posted:

Elapsed Time: 26:34:26

Level 2 Veeam tech on the same set of backup issues (backup failures due to vCenter timeouts). When I was asked for the third time to restart management agents and re-run a 26-hour backup job by a tech who clearly didn't read my case notes and was stalling me until the following Monday, I replied that this was done. I got this reply:

Veeam Support posted:

Wow!
I've never seen someone be able to disable firewalls, check services, then restart a Veeam job (and have it complete) that quickly before!

Most of the support side of the company, from what I've seen of them, is staffed by passive-aggressive work-averse little shits, which I would be more than willing to tolerate if the product actually worked. I've never done business with such an unprofessional vendor before.

Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 14:28 on Mar 14, 2012

Kachunkachunk
Jun 6, 2011
Holy cow! I had no idea that's what people go through when working with Veeam.

Erwin
Feb 17, 2006

We just deployed Veeam about a month ago and it's not without its headaches, but support has been decent in general. Perhaps they've changed in the last month?

Misogynist posted:

Did any techs get fired over repeated passive-aggressive comments made in your last support case?

Did the tech really get fired? It sounds like he should have.

Mierdaan
Sep 14, 2004

Pillbug

A VMware developer posted:

I’ve spent the past few months on a prototype, one I’m proud to say we’re shipping as part of the Workstation Tech Preview. It’s currently called WSX (name may change in time), and it brings your VMs to your tablets, smart phones, and any PC or device with a modern browser.

WSX is installed as a mini web server in your network and serves up an interface for accessing your Workstation Shared VMs and your VMs on vSphere/ESXi 5. You can power your VMs on, off, suspend them, and interact with them. All from a web browser, and all without plugins, with nothing to install on the client end.

Want want want.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Kachunkachunk posted:

Holy cow! I had no idea that's what people go through when working with Veeam.
Everyone's had their bad support experiences, and I don't want to color the company unfairly with my impressions -- lots of other people have had fairly decent experiences with Veeam, and I don't want to sway anybody's opinions away from what might be a good solution for them. But the amount of time I'm likely to invest in making it work correctly in our environment far outweighs the cost of switching to another vendor right now.

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Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug
Oh wow this VSP/VTSP,
"Did you know virtualization can run two machines on one physical host?"
"True or false virtualization can run Windows and Linux on the same host?"
"True or false Virtualization can help improve up time and lower TCO?"

Can't you all just take my VM certs and use those so I can skip this boredom, ~12 hrs of these videos and stuff I have to complete prior to getting Professional level partnership.

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