|
Free ESXi is also ram limited, so workstation's better unless you have a license.
|
#
?
May 15, 2012 08:12
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 20, 2024 02:38 |
|
|
Alright, so apparently our licensing was done back in VMWare ESX 3.5 days, and our 2 vSphere standard licenses have been long since paid for. We're just paying yearly maintenance fees for upgrades, so licenses for vSphere 4 and 5 came with the maintenance/support contract. We've just never used them until now. I'm not sure if the whole Essentials Plus thing wasn't available then, or what. It sounds like just adding vCenter Server is going to be rather expensive, and Essentials Plus is half that but still expensive unless there's some way to convert our current licenses to Essentials Plus? What's the best way to talk about licensing? Should we just straight up call VMWare, or are there better people to call that will help us get what we need, without getting us to buy more than that? Both my boss and I are lost on this licensing thing and we're not sure the best way to go about trying to fix it. VMWare's website is awful.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2012 18:10
|
|
|
evil_bunnY posted:Free ESXi is also ram limited, so workstation's better unless you have a license. In case anyone else was curious about how single-server ESXi works now since the CPU->VRAM entitlement stuff goes out the window when you're not paying them any monies, here is the FAQ on VMware vSphere Hypervisor. That's what they're calling single-server unlicensed ESXi now.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2012 18:28
|
|
|
Frozen-Solid posted:Alright, so apparently our licensing was done back in VMWare ESX 3.5 days, and our 2 vSphere standard licenses have been long since paid for. We're just paying yearly maintenance fees for upgrades, so licenses for vSphere 4 and 5 came with the maintenance/support contract. We've just never used them until now. I'm not sure if the whole Essentials Plus thing wasn't available then, or what. Just call VMware's Sales department and they will sort you out. Either put you in touch with someone in direct sales or point you to a 3rd party reseller.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2012 18:36
|
|
|
Mierdaan posted:In case anyone else was curious about how single-server ESXi works now since the CPU->VRAM entitlement stuff goes out the window when you're not paying them any monies, here is the FAQ on VMware vSphere Hypervisor. That's what they're calling single-server unlicensed ESXi now. Goes out the window? The free version of ESXi 5 is capped at 32gb memory. And I believe the free version of ESXi 4 was unlimited memory. Frozen-Solid posted:VMWare's website is awful. If you are in the Chicagoland area, the vendor we recently started working with has been awesome (they do licensing as well as contracting work).
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2012 18:39
|
|
|
edit not quote.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2012 18:40
|
|
|
Moey posted:Goes out the window? The free version of ESXi 5 is capped at 32gb memory. And I believe the free version of ESXi 4 was unlimited memory. Right, I'm just saying that when you're figuring out how much RAM you're entitled to use, that's typically dictated by how many CPU licenses you've paid for. When you're running unlicensed, that limit has to be coming from somewhere else, and I didn't know where that was.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2012 18:43
|
|
|
Moey posted:If you are in the Chicagoland area, the vendor we recently started working with has been awesome (they do licensing as well as contracting work). Who is that, out of curiosity? We have a vendor we get most of our licensing stuff (not just vmware) through but I'd like to know of someone a bit more vmware-centric.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2012 18:45
|
|
|
Mierdaan posted:Right, I'm just saying that when you're figuring out how much RAM you're entitled to use, that's typically dictated by how many CPU licenses you've paid for. When you're running unlicensed, that limit has to be coming from somewhere else, and I didn't know where that was. Rodger that. Cidrick posted:Who is that, out of curiosity? We have a vendor we get most of our licensing stuff (not just vmware) through but I'd like to know of someone a bit more vmware-centric. PM sent, not sure if I should put companies names up here.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2012 18:52
|
|
|
Mierdaan posted:Right, I'm just saying that when you're figuring out how much RAM you're entitled to use, that's typically dictated by how many CPU licenses you've paid for. When you're running unlicensed, that limit has to be coming from somewhere else, and I didn't know where that was.  Moey posted:PM sent, not sure if I should put companies names up here.
|
|
#
?
May 15, 2012 18:52
|
|
|
I've been watching performance logs the past few days, since we finished our migration, and found a few oddities. Maybe I'm being paranoid and this is just a glitch or something not to worry about, so tell me if I am... but I've seen 3 of these messages: Device naa.6782bcb00059f777000004f74f7b7e13 performance has deteriorated. I/O latency increased from average value of 1744 microseconds to 35681 microseconds. Once on the 12th at 3:22am, once on the 14th at 2:00am, and once on the 15th at 12:28pm. The first two errors were on our first host, the third error was on our second host. They use shared storage, connected by (I believe) 2 pairs of trunked fiber. I find it odd we didn't get the same errors on both hosts, and other than those events I don't see anything actually not working. I start looking at the performance tab of each host. I see nothing really out of the ordinary. Latency shows no cause for alarm.  Until I start looking at each individual VM. Most of them looked exactly like Quagmire at the bottom here, but four of our VMs... well.   Mousing over the maximum...    
Frozen Peach fucked around with this message at 17:19 on May 16, 2012 |
|
#
?
May 16, 2012 17:08
|
|
|
Nothing to add but I like your naming schemes.
|
|
#
?
May 16, 2012 18:22
|
|
|
complex posted:Nothing to add but I like your naming schemes. Anyone that doesn't have fun naming their servers is doing it wrong  I try to make each character name fit the role of the server.In other news, all those weird latency numbers have since disappeared. Now everything reads 0 latency all the way down the list. I haven't seen a repeat of that error message since the 15th.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2012 15:35
|
|
|
Frozen-Solid posted:Anyone that doesn't have fun naming their servers is doing it wrong Not to be a hater, but that's cute in smaller environments, but I worked with someone who named their servers after candy.. like Twix, Snickers, Rolo, etc. Funny and cute when you have 5 servers. We had over 100. Not so much fun trying to track that fucker down in a rack. Maybe I'm getting old and grumpy, but I much prefer functional names these days.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2012 16:07
|
|
|
Also, its less fun when you try to replace servers. (That is, retire them while transitioning to the replacements) The only correct solution is to start with 12th century European royalty, and work your way down.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2012 17:11
|
|
P.S. STILL COMPLETELY DEVOID OF MERIT
|
we have names like exchmail, lar1, lar2, dc5, callmgr1, etc.. creativity at it's finest.
|
|
#
?
May 17, 2012 22:49
|
|
|
Anyone have blog or RSS suggestions? V12n is obviously the go to but simply subscribing to the aggregate is a pretty bad signal to noise ratio. I know a lot of the blogs on v12n must be amazing - which are they?
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 01:17
|
|
|
MC Fruit Stripe posted:Anyone have blog or RSS suggestions? V12n is obviously the go to but simply subscribing to the aggregate is a pretty bad signal to noise ratio. I know a lot of the blogs on v12n must be amazing - which are they? I can recommend you don't follow Scott Lowe on Twitter.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 01:29
|
|
|
FISHMANPET posted:I can recommend you don't follow Scott Lowe on Twitter. 
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 03:32
|
|
|
Misogynist posted:Scott Lowe was such a good blogger before he became an EMC advertisement Now it's just retweeting his wife's company (spousetivities, which I have ideological problems with) and tweeting back and forth among some insular group of people, so I never know what he's talking about. E: But you're right about the blog. I discovered his blog a while ago without knowing who he was when I was working on using AD as an LDAP server.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 03:35
|
|
|
adorai posted:we have names like exchmail, lar1, lar2, dc5, callmgr1, etc.. I got the idea several years ago to name our vm hosts after planets and our vms after moons orbiting those planets. I think I got the idea from here actually. I was so proud of myself. I then took it further. I started naming remote servers after stars, but not just any star, no I named the remote server based on the proximity it was to the corporate office using the proximity of stars to earth. Then after about two years of hearing staff and vendors and consultants try their best to pronounce proximacentauri or lalande or thebe or callisto or try to figure out what each server did I just threw my hands up and went back to FS1, DC1, etc.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 13:43
|
|
|
Misogynist posted:Scott Lowe was such a good blogger before he became an EMC advertisement
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 14:10
|
|
|
FISHMANPET posted:tweeting back and forth among some insular group of people, so I never know what he's talking about. This is what I find pretty much any time someone recommends an IT twitter to follow. 99% retweets of poo poo about whatever conference they just went to/are at/are going to and 1% political commentary I don't care to have shoved at me. Apparently it's possible to get sysadmin gigs where you do literally nothing but attend conferences, must be sweet. Yellow Bricks is a good VMware blog.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 15:38
|
|
|
http://www.vhersey.com/ <= my teachers site, usually does videos and known issues http://professionalvmware.com/brownbags/ <= some nice meetups, videos, and discussions on cool vmware stuff
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 15:40
|
|
|
So I am working on an infrastructure right now, stuff is configured completely wrong My current goal is to get everything in the environment as modular as possible, currently things are on DAS storage, with VM's going through a central/lone vDswitch for EVERYTHING. Here is my goal, any input would be awesome I just want to bump heads with a few goons and get some different view points on it. We have about 12TB of storage now, 100% is DAS in various RAID arrays. Some servers have 2 500Ggb drives in raid 1, some have 8 1TB drives in Raid 6. There enough storage space to support all the +50ish VM's, but as it is right now it is hard to manage and isn't very redundant. Some of the servers have 10Gb adapters as well as the switches. I am putting together about a 30k SAN made of dell NX3100 storage servers, NAS_1 10 600GB drives @ 15k 6 w/ 1024MB write cache, Customer servers, high I/O DB servers run here NAS_2 10 1TB Disks @ 7.2k Raid 5 + HS w/ 512 write cache, VDI enviroment, Domain Controllers, Web servers, other NAS_3 10 2TB Disks @ 7.2k Disks Raid 6 w/ 512 write cache, onsite backups, Low Disk I/O VM's, Large DB servers I can get this for ~30k, redundant PSU's, 2 gig nics+1 10Gb, ~35TB total Hook all these to our Switches via 10GbE, and use 2 1GB lines for failover as I run out of ports for the 10Gb ports on our backed switches. On our front end we have some nice Cisco C210 servers which perform well, all CPu's are intel, All Enterprise Plus C1 - 2 x 4 CPU's 64GB ram <= half of VDI, 1st Domain Controller, File server C2 - 2 x 4 CPU's 64GB ram <= half of VDI, 2nd Domain Controller, Vcenter/View Server C3 - 2 x 4 CPU's 24GB ram <= Pool reserved for HA/DRS, Standby C4 - 2 x 6 CPU's 48GB ram <= Client Servers host C5 - 2 x 6 CPU's 48GB ram <= Client Servers host All this over Iscsi, might be 1GB FCoE Then we have some dells, I would like to make this a Dev Cluster, since our Enterprise Plus license would be for the cisco servers D1 - 1 x 4 CPU's 8GB ram D2 - 2 x 6 CPU's 16Ggb ram AMD!!!! D3 - 1 x 4 CPU's 8GB ram Whitebox NAS device here Right now the previous guy configured the VM nas backup to run on the same DAS as the VM's so it does nothing of use! I am not doing VSA, too many horror stories and space limitations for it I would be better off with a SAN. Since I haven't presented my ideas to the bossman yet I just want to check with you all and see if my want for a san is unreasonable. I can give more info if needed Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 17:45 on May 18, 2012 |
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 17:40
|
|
|
Docjowles posted:Yellow Bricks is a good VMware blog. Seconding this.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 17:42
|
|
|
Here are my Google Reader Tech RSS entries: http://chasechristian.com/i/techsubs.xml There's some Exchange, some VWMare, some storage, some networking.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 17:57
|
|
|
Corvettefisher posted:
Is this the way it is now, or the way you're going to do it, or both? Why so many small clusters? My intuition would be 2 clusters, grouped by CPU count, and setting host affinity if you really want to keep that segregation in tact (not sure why you would, though). My reasoning would be more HA resiliency. Edit, never mind I'm dumb. Erwin fucked around with this message at 18:15 on May 18, 2012 |
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 17:59
|
|
|
Corvettefisher posted:NAS_1 10 600GB drives @ 15k 6 w/ 1024MB write cache, Customer servers, high I/O DB servers run here My very nitpicky 2 cents is why are you putting IO intensive servers on a RAID level with the worst IO penalty. Assuming the 6 after 15k means RAID 6.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 18:08
|
|
|
Erwin posted:Is this the way it is now, or the way you're going to do it, or both? Why so many small clusters? My intuition would be 2 clusters, grouped by CPU count, and setting host affinity if you really want to keep that segregation in tact (not sure why you would, though). My reasoning would be more HA resiliency. OOPS I meant to state C = Cisco and $number server number Sorry there was no documentation walking into this so I am still in document mode. it would be one cluser and those are the machines running on the hosts Docjowles posted:My very nitpicky 2 cents is why are you putting IO intensive servers on a RAID level with the worst IO penalty. Assuming the 6 after 15k means RAID 6. With a 1Gig Write buffer I shouldn't have too much of a hit, I might be changing it to raid 50 Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 18:12 on May 18, 2012 |
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 18:08
|
|
|
Erwin posted:Is this the way it is now, or the way you're going to do it, or both? Why so many small clusters? My intuition would be 2 clusters, grouped by CPU count, and setting host affinity if you really want to keep that segregation in tact (not sure why you would, though). My reasoning would be more HA resiliency. I think he is explaining two clusters, one with all the Cisco hosts (C1, C2...) and one with the Dell hosts (D1, D2...). At least that is how I read it. Edit: Beaten.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 18:11
|
|
|
For twitter, I don't follow people, but the #sysadmin and #virtualization tags are decent. I always find new things in there.
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 20:55
|
|
|
Thanks to all who replied - I've been subbed to the v12n RSS feed, but it's like 150 entries per day if you subscribe to the aggregate, and even the act of figuring out what I want to read is a 20 minute process, much less the actual reading. Another VM question, this might be for corvettefisher since I know he runs a lab, but of course it's for anyone. If I set up ESXi within Workstation, I want to configure the ESXi VM with all of the RAM/HD that I would need for every VM I'm going to build on it, right? I just don't want to under or overcommit resources, but whereas a normal VM I might give 2gb/20gb, for an ESXi with 4 VMs on it, I'd probably want to do more like 8gb/80gb, right?
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 21:55
|
|
|
MC Fruit Stripe posted:Thanks to all who replied - I've been subbed to the v12n RSS feed, but it's like 150 entries per day if you subscribe to the aggregate, and even the act of figuring out what I want to read is a 20 minute process, much less the actual reading. I do 8GB HDD 5GB RAM then run ISCI Data Stores w/openfiler VM's for everything else, That way I can fool around with sDRS, understand iscsi problems that come up and what not I can take some screenes and upload them if you want, or I can upload the configs if you give me a site
|
|
#
?
May 18, 2012 22:32
|
|
|
Yes you'll want to assign as much as the VMs will need to ESXi
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2012 00:21
|
|
|
Long shot here: I have been traveling for the last 7 months and have a couple more to go before settling temporarily in Australia. I plan to get my VCP prior as I can take the course for much cheaper in India; unfortunately I only have my laptop with 4gb (though it does have an SSD) which makes it drat difficult to setup a lab. Does anyone know of any remote resources which allow access for practice? The few I have found are incredibly expensive. Otherwise I have to call in some favors which I would rather save, or pickup some overpriced RAM in Vietnam.
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2012 10:39
|
|
|
You could lease a server with esxi?
|
|
#
?
May 19, 2012 20:51
|
|
|
evil_bunnY posted:Yes you'll want to assign as much as the VMs will need to ESXi Corvettefisher posted:ISCI Data Stores w/openfiler VM's for everything else, Up next: a second ESXi VM which points to openfiler, to get the full storage array experience
|
|
#
?
May 20, 2012 04:54
|
|
|
MC Fruit Stripe posted:That's what I thought! and I am doing it by I can give you a join.me session on my inter workings of my VM's if you want happy to help other succeed in their job! Anyone want to learn VDI stuff? I am about to start up my own website of everthing virtual/unix/networking/MSCE and wondering if anyone is interested in it. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 05:08 on May 20, 2012 |
|
#
?
May 20, 2012 05:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 20, 2024 02:38 |
|
|
Update: I'm pretty sure I'm receiving prank phone calls from Veeam support even though (because?) I'm no longer a customer.
|
|
#
?
May 21, 2012 21:21
|
|