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ghostinmyshell
Sep 17, 2004



I am very particular about biscuits, I'll have you know.

Corvettefisher posted:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/FatTwin.cfm

Just purely asking, does anyone use or know people who use super micro? I can't help stop thinking how awesome that FatTwin looks, then I found out the price and can't stop thinking about it

I have about three of these from three different storage vendors, and they are pretty awesome servers. Well not the storage software we overpaid for...

http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/sbb.cfm

I'm trying to square away $15k for a fully loaded one for a dev environment.

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Pantology
Jan 16, 2006

Dinosaur Gum
Had an interesting question from one of our recruiters today. She's wondering if there are any key words or phrases that you'd expect seasoned VMware people to use that less-experienced people might not. Some kind of shibboleth she can look for in resumes and cover letters, and during the initial phone screen.

Two that came to mind were spelling it "VMware," and referring to the vSphere client as the "VIC." I'm not wild about either--the former only catches the truly clueless, and the latter just means you remember 3.x. Anyone have anything better?

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Pantology posted:

Had an interesting question from one of our recruiters today. She's wondering if there are any key words or phrases that you'd expect seasoned VMware people to use that less-experienced people might not. Some kind of shibboleth she can look for in resumes and cover letters, and during the initial phone screen.

Two that came to mind were spelling it "VMware," and referring to the vSphere client as the "VIC." I'm not wild about either--the former only catches the truly clueless, and the latter just means you remember 3.x. Anyone have anything better?

You are in luck, VMware loves acronyms!

HA, DRS, FT, vMotion, SvMotion.....

Just take a look at their product pages.

three
Aug 9, 2007

i fantasize about ndamukong suh licking my doodoo hole
Anyone here doing much with vCloud Director? If so, could you explain your use cases and thoughts? I'd love to hear what people are doing with it.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

three posted:

Anyone here doing much with vCloud Director? If so, could you explain your use cases and thoughts? I'd love to hear what people are doing with it.

Yes, IaaS, and on demand services. Don't you use it for IaaS or SP sales?

It really helps deal with the tickets that sales reps submit

1000101
May 14, 2003

BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY BIRTHDAY FRUITCAKE!

three posted:

Anyone here doing much with vCloud Director? If so, could you explain your use cases and thoughts? I'd love to hear what people are doing with it.

I do a lot of integrations of VCD in software development shops and QA. Normally I hear things like "I want to check code into SVN and have it automatically provision a VM and then we'll test it and throw the VM away."

I had another customer who's core product was an email security tool. They supported 2 versions of exchange and lotus notes and wanted to test clients from Windows XP, Vista and 7 with varying versions of said clients. We built a bunch of vApps that included Exchange, AD, the security server itself and a handful of client VMs and used vCloud Director's fencing so nobody had to worry about changing IPs or dealing with all these extra systems on the network.

Yet another customer actually put other orchestration tools in front of it and basically used it to roll out (with approvals, etc.) staging machines for various applications.

Overall there are a great many things I like about the tool. It's extremely extendable, particularly if you're familiar with things like vCenter Orchestrator. It can bring a whole mess of problems into your datacenter though if you aren't careful.

Pretty much anyone who wants a sandbox environment but you want to avoid having the 3000 test VMs that can be destroyed but no one can be bothered to do so. T

It also happens to be pretty decent if you're a service provider or if you want a RESTful front-end to your environment.

Any specifics you want to know?

quote:

Yes, IaaS, and on demand services. Don't you use it for IaaS or SP sales?

It really helps deal with the tickets that sales reps submit

Not sure what you're trying to say.

madsushi
Apr 19, 2009

Baller.
#essereFerrari

Pantology posted:

Had an interesting question from one of our recruiters today. She's wondering if there are any key words or phrases that you'd expect seasoned VMware people to use that less-experienced people might not. Some kind of shibboleth she can look for in resumes and cover letters, and during the initial phone screen.

Two that came to mind were spelling it "VMware," and referring to the vSphere client as the "VIC." I'm not wild about either--the former only catches the truly clueless, and the latter just means you remember 3.x. Anyone have anything better?

You could ask them what 'ESX' stands for (Elastic Sky X) or ask them if VMware snapshots are a good idea (lol) or about VMFS block sizing (if they say "thank god VMFS-5 fixed that poo poo") or what the best way to do VMware bandwidth aggregation is (if they say "thank god vSphere 5.1 has LACP").

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Pantology posted:

Two that came to mind were spelling it "VMware," and referring to the vSphere client as the "VIC." I'm not wild about either--the former only catches the truly clueless, and the latter just means you remember 3.x. Anyone have anything better?
How about just forwarding the CVs to someone who actually has a clue?

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

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

evil_bunnY posted:

How about just forwarding the CVs to someone who actually has a clue?
Yeah, if you guys don't have 10 seconds to be spending screening a resume, you clearly don't actually care about who you're hiring. I read every single resume that comes in, which has been a couple of hundred this year.

Unless you're Google (and probably even if you're Google), 98% of the resumes you get in will be from people who are completely clueless. You'll be able to tell in 5-10 seconds if the candidate is useless to your team or not, sometimes without even having to read a single word on the resume.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

madsushi posted:

You could ask them what 'ESX' stands for (Elastic Sky X) or ask them if VMware snapshots are a good idea (lol) or about VMFS block sizing (if they say "thank god VMFS-5 fixed that poo poo") or what the best way to do VMware bandwidth aggregation is (if they say "thank god vSphere 5.1 has LACP").

Snapshots rock for certain situations. When Veeam shits the bed and I find a production app/db running on a snap? I am not too happy.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

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

Moey posted:

When Veeam shits the bed
100% of the time, without fail

Pantology
Jan 16, 2006

Dinosaur Gum

Misogynist posted:

Yeah, if you guys don't have 10 seconds to be spending screening a resume, you clearly don't actually care about who you're hiring.

The issue is that the technologically competent people are spread thin doing real, billable work, and this recruiter lady is just trying to help increase the signal-to-noise ratio of the candidates she does pass on to us to review more thoroughly.

I think madsushi touched on a good, simple question we can give her--"What is your favorite new feature in vSphere 5.1." Any answer is fine, so long as they have one, and they sound excited about it. Shows that they stay current, and that they give a poo poo. Everything else we can teach them.

EoRaptor
Sep 13, 2003



Thank you, vCenter 5.1 SSO, for requiring a strong password.

Bollocks to you for passing the password in plain text to the command line.

Completely retarded failure of development/QA for not checking for characters that cannot be used on a command line.

A special shoutout to the SQL Installer for using purely numeric error messages.

I want my day back! :argh:

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Misogynist posted:

Yeah, if you guys don't have 10 seconds to be spending screening a resume, you clearly don't actually care about who you're hiring.

Wait you mean people don't set up a defunked lab and ask you to fix all the issues when hiring VMware people :doh:

luminalflux
May 27, 2005



Mierdaan posted:

Anyone updated to vCenter or ESXi 5.1 yet? Any trip reports?

I'm wondering as well. Might go ahead with it next week.

Devian666
Aug 20, 2008

Take some advice Chris.

Fun Shoe

Mierdaan posted:

I'm sorry, did I stress enough that a loving VMware tech recommended I update my NIC firmware by running the firmware update tool in a Windows guest VM?

I prefer going the hardware upgrade path, especially when I'm running a VM inside a windows VM. I just haven't figured how to physically remove the virtual NIC. :v:

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Corvettefisher posted:

Wait you mean people don't set up a defunked lab and ask you to fix all the issues when hiring VMware people :doh:

Watch as the guy methodically disables all of your alarm conditions.

I like turtles
Aug 6, 2009

Two primary questions:
Is there a good reason not to convert a physical file server to a virtual one? I have something nagging in the back of my mind that a virtualized file server is a bad idea, but I can't be sure.

GPT data disks. Said file server has two slices of a fiber attached storage device used as its primary storage 3TB and 4TB. I have about 1.3TB used between the two of them. vCenter converter 5 freaks out because the two storage devices are GPT disks, and doesn't let me get to a point where I can tell it to just do the system disk. Converting the disks to be not GPT is not an ideal option, and given that I'm not sure how long the P2V would take, I'm hesitant to take the production fileserver offline for however long to experiment with the process.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Rhymenoserous posted:

Watch as the guy methodically disables all of your alarm conditions.
Oh god I laughed way too hard at this.

Lookit! All fixed.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

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

I like turtles posted:

Is there a good reason not to convert a physical file server to a virtual one? I have something nagging in the back of my mind that a virtualized file server is a bad idea, but I can't be sure.
A file server is more likely than most applications to be a huge drain on the network throughput to your ESXi hosts, and file servers love lots of memory for cache -- both of these properties make physical hosts attractive targets for high-volume file sharing. If you're comfortable with a latency hit from (presumably) decreasing the memory allocation to cache, and you have the network bandwidth to spare, there's nothing wrong with it.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug
If your fileserver is accessed by a common group of other virtual servers or desktops, it can reduce load on the physical network as requests will be handled at the ram level as long as they reside on the same host. Personally the virtualization benefits are worth a slight performance hit, but it depends on what your users need and the resources you have available.

Just set up performon and spec out the needs of the system prior to p2v, or DPACK if you are a dell partner

Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Sep 17, 2012

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

What about running something like a firewall appliance on a virtual machine, as long as it has a dedicated set of NICs?

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Bob Morales posted:

What about running something like a firewall appliance on a virtual machine, as long as it has a dedicated set of NICs?

I wouldn't see an issue with this. I run a virtual VPN appliance and have had no issues so far (not a large load on it quite yet though).

Only issue with items requiring their own NICs means you have to setup and reserve those NICs on any other host you want to be able to vMotion/DRS that machine to.

Edit:

I still cannot get my standalone test/dev host updated from 5.0 to 5.1 properly.

The updates goes smooth. Reboots and loads into ESXi. Cannot manage it at all. The vSphere client errors out connecting. Pulling up the webpage gives me a "503 Service Unavailable" error.

Anyone have any ideas? It is a PowerEdge 2950 (still on the HCL).

Moey fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Sep 17, 2012

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

Bob Morales posted:

What about running something like a firewall appliance on a virtual machine, as long as it has a dedicated set of NICs?

We do it without dedicated nics, just use vlans.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

I like turtles posted:

Two primary questions:
Is there a good reason not to convert a physical file server to a virtual one? I have something nagging in the back of my mind that a virtualized file server is a bad idea, but I can't be sure.

GPT data disks. Said file server has two slices of a fiber attached storage device used as its primary storage 3TB and 4TB. I have about 1.3TB used between the two of them. vCenter converter 5 freaks out because the two storage devices are GPT disks, and doesn't let me get to a point where I can tell it to just do the system disk. Converting the disks to be not GPT is not an ideal option, and given that I'm not sure how long the P2V would take, I'm hesitant to take the production fileserver offline for however long to experiment with the process.

*looks over at his virtualized file server*

It's fine. The P2V for just an OS drive generally only takes a couple of hours at most.

EDIT: it's a fileserver though so I'm not sure why you are even bothering with a p2v?

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Rhymenoserous posted:

*looks over at his virtualized file server*

It's fine. The P2V for just an OS drive generally only takes a couple of hours at most.

EDIT: it's a fileserver though so I'm not sure why you are even bothering with a p2v?

I agree. The best way I've found to handle a large file server is to create a new virtual server, do a one-way file sync until everything is synced up. Schedule some downtime and deny access to the files to users, do a final sync, then shut down the old server and rename the new one.

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online
Anyone have any good recommendations for a home ESXi 5.1 server? I looked at savemyserver in the OP but I'd rather avoid the ancient, watt sucking, monsters they have for sale. I was thinking build my own, but I don't know what parts would be good for such a thing.

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl
If it's light on load, something with an A-350. Cheap, runs ESXi (get an Intel NIC), low power.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
I went with a mini-itx build using an Intel i7 3770. Biggest downfall is I can only fit 16gb of memory in there.

madsushi
Apr 19, 2009

Baller.
#essereFerrari

Goon Matchmaker posted:

Anyone have any good recommendations for a home ESXi 5.1 server? I looked at savemyserver in the OP but I'd rather avoid the ancient, watt sucking, monsters they have for sale. I was thinking build my own, but I don't know what parts would be good for such a thing.

The HP Microserver (N40L) is a very popular home ESXi server, very cheap, low power, and there's a lot of great documentation/blogs with info on setting one up.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Goon Matchmaker posted:

Anyone have any good recommendations for a home ESXi 5.1 server? I looked at savemyserver in the OP but I'd rather avoid the ancient, watt sucking, monsters they have for sale. I was thinking build my own, but I don't know what parts would be good for such a thing.

Granted SaveMyServer is a bit more in the line of power sucking but a lot cheaper.
For example a 2950 which is on the 5.1 HCL is 179
http://www.savemyserver.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=ID012420
Quad core, 4GB ram, 4x146GB drives. I am sure ebay or some googling will find you some cheap ram to buff it up to 16 gigs

E: Oh wow you can get the E52xx which support FT, maybe I'll just get two of these

If power is a big concern you might want to bump up your desktop to 16 or 32GB ram, an SSD, and x4/x6 core processor, and run things inside workstation 8 or 9. You Should be able to a great deal of things you normally would with physical hosts. However, troubleshooting the physical boxes and applying the updates is really fun.

Another option is what I am doing.
I am probably getting two of these next paycheck, as well as an intel dual or quad port nic, and cisco switch or the like. YOu can swap the CPU I have for a 1265L which is 45w ----VVVV

Only registered members can see post attachments!

Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Sep 18, 2012

Fancy_Lad
May 15, 2003
Would you like to buy a monkey?
Is there any reason to not look at AMD for a home lab?

I just started lazily poking around the other day, but it looks like you can get an 8 core AMD FX-8120 plus a motherboard for less than the price of any of the 4 core hyperthreaded Intel CPUs alone...

Goon Matchmaker
Oct 23, 2003

I play too much EVE-Online

Fancy_Lad posted:

Is there any reason to not look at AMD for a home lab?

I just started lazily poking around the other day, but it looks like you can get an 8 core AMD FX-8120 plus a motherboard for less than the price of any of the 4 core hyperthreaded Intel CPUs alone...

The 4 core Intel will beat out the "8" core FX-8120 on performance, power, pretty much everything.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Fancy_Lad posted:

Is there any reason to not look at AMD for a home lab?

I just started lazily poking around the other day, but it looks like you can get an 8 core AMD FX-8120 plus a motherboard for less than the price of any of the 4 core hyperthreaded Intel CPUs alone...

To my knowledge,
the FX-8120 and bulldozer 8 core in general only have 1 FPU per 2 cores, which really don't give it that much better performance over a 6 core

I did my current X6-T1055 against the FX-8150, the results speak for themselves
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/147?vs=434

Keep in mind the X6-T1055 is a dated processor by comparison.


E:

The Opterons are pretty cheap and feature rich if you are going for a server CPU in your desktop, but the Xeon 12xx v2's are pretty drat good for the price. Not to mention Intel's drivers are miles ahead of amd's

Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Sep 18, 2012

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

Goon Matchmaker posted:

The 4 core Intel will beat out the "8" core FX-8120 on performance, power, pretty much everything.

Except for density with lots of vCPUs (and their associated interrupts) and cost in a home lab.


Oh, man. I recommend that you don't run 1U servers at home.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

evol262 posted:

Oh, man. I recommend that you don't run 1U servers at home.

Other than they whirl a little and get warm why?

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Corvettefisher posted:

Other than they whirl a little and get warm why?

Tiny fans are loud as gently caress.

Bob Morales
Aug 18, 2006


Just wear the fucking mask, Bob

I don't care how many people I probably infected with COVID-19 while refusing to wear a mask, my comfort is far more important than the health and safety of everyone around me!

Corvettefisher posted:

The Opterons are pretty cheap and feature rich if you are going for a server CPU in your desktop, but the Xeon 12xx v2's are pretty drat good for the price. Not to mention Intel's drivers are miles ahead of amd's

Don't even businesses avoid AMD unless they are trying to pack like 32 CPU's in one box?

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Bob Morales posted:

Tiny fans are loud as gently caress.

Agreeing with this. Sitting in my office at home with a 1u server buzzing away next to me sounds awful. There is a reason most desktops have transitioned to 120/180mm case fans.

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Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Bob Morales posted:

Tiny fans are loud as gently caress.
Can't say I am annoyed by the sound of a 1u but if worst comes to worst I place them in my bedroom and close the door and work from another room or my balcony.

Bob Morales posted:

Don't even businesses avoid AMD unless they are trying to pack like 32 CPU's in one box?
Yeah, Dell dropped AMD from the 12th gen line up, and hp is sticking with them. I don't know if it is just a coincidence but I have seen alot of VDI boxes use amd.

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