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skipdogg posted:You're young and eager and really into this stuff and there is nothing wrong with that. You're experiencing a period of hyper learning/growth professionally. I did something similar years ago before I got married and had kids. I spent 14 hours a day at work instead of going home to my apartment and was absorbing information at a incredible clip. quote:When you have children, you can have exactly one hobby. Anything else is an exercise in futility, self-deception, and ineffectiveness. Cooking healthy food is a hobby. Exercising is a hobby. Maintaining a website is a hobby. Writing a blog is a hobby. Bringing work home is a hobby. You have time to do exactly one thing after your kids go to sleep, if you want to do it well.
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Aug 29, 2013 23:01
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Well gently caress.
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Aug 29, 2013 23:08
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And it's not like it's particularly easy to get time when you're in a relationship either. I could myself lucky if I get 4 hours a week for professional development on top of 50-60 hours of work. Ideally, it'd be more like 8 hours a week on top of 40 hours of work if I didn't want "Why don't you ever spend time with me" questions out of the girlfriend. I really want to get my VCDX too, but it's a ton of work. Once you've got your VCP, you need to take the VCAP-DCA for administration and DCD for design. Theoretically, taking the optimize and scale class should have you ready for the VCAP-DCA but I just don't know. It's a lab exam and if you don't know how to do everything, and do it fast, you won't pass. $500 is a lot of money to wager that you know, for example, PowerCLI if it isn't something you use day to day. The VCAP-DCD doesn't have a single test bank or brain dump available from the usual suspects, and requires drawing out a ton of Visio style diagrams under a test clock that is generally agreed to make it very challenging. I'd expect 3 months of studying for each of those certs. Now we get to the fun stuff. You need to write up the design and implementation of new network in ~300-400 pages of documentation. That includes business needs and requirement gathering, a run book, and all kinds of stuff. There's a blueprint and book out there, go take a look. That's easily a 500 hour project I'd expect to take a year or eighteen months. In fact, I hear at VMworld there's still people defending designs based on 4.1, though this or early next year is probably the last possible defense session for a 4.1 design. There's ~150 VCDXs in the world, and there's a good reason why. Even getting either of the VCAPs is a big deal, since there's maybe 10,000 of those. I think the VCDX is going to be a "write your own ticket, anywhere in the world" cert for anyone, but there's a drat good chance you're going to be a consultant or a VMware employee. In fact, I hear VMware employs like 60% of them, VARs / consulting employees another 20%, and maybe 20% are VP level guys at big shops. I really laugh when I see these head hunting shops posting "VCP, VCAP or VCDX" for sysadmin jobs. VCAP is a senior level qualification and VCDX is really something for either consulting or management / senior architect. El_Matarife fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Aug 29, 2013 |
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Aug 29, 2013 23:35
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I'm totally going to get this cert today and be the only guy at work with a VMware cert. I'm definitely not the most knowledgeable guy here, but I'll have the cert. I'm gonna provision 1024 cores to every virtual machine and if anyone questions me I'll just ask "which one of us is a VMWare Certified Associate?"
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Aug 30, 2013 02:48
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:I'm gonna provision 1024 cores to every virtual machine
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Aug 30, 2013 03:03
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Misogynist posted:Dan Dreams of Coding had a good quote on this a few weeks back. Thats the dang truth. I got out of class last week and began studying in earnest for my VCP this week. It has essentially replaced everything else to become the primary thing I do outside work, besides kids and family of course. I would absolutely love to cert higher in Vmware one day because its what I am currently strongest in but I look at how crazy my life is and how much studying takes up and I have to sort of accept that VCP may be as far as I get. Even if its the highest level I obtain it will pair nicely with my CCNA and MCSE.
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Aug 30, 2013 03:27
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El_Matarife posted:And it's not like it's particularly easy to get time when you're in a relationship either. I could myself lucky if I get 4 hours a week for professional development on top of 50-60 hours of work. Ideally, it'd be more like 8 hours a week on top of 40 hours of work if I didn't want "Why don't you ever spend time with me" questions out of the girlfriend. I really want to get my VCDX too, but it's a ton of work. Sounds like lots of fun!
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Aug 30, 2013 03:42
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Sounds like lots of fun! Within the next few years, it will make a CCIE look like something from a box of Crackerjacks. (At least the DCV one will, I don't think we know if VMware cloud or OpenStack will win that battle. And desktop is a total blank slate.) The best part is, once you have the VCDX, you can upgrade to the next version by just taking the DCD test again. As far as VMware versus OpenStack goes, I think OpenStack does have a lead in the some areas right now, especially on the Linux side with everyone combining OpenStack and Puppet. And they've definitely got a deployment advantage with Rackspace onboard among other big names and tons of startups. However, VMware's hypervisor (and VMware Tools) is so far above and beyond HyperV, KVM, and Xen that I can't see anything but it remaining the standard as long as people still need Windows VMs. Worst case, VMware just wholesale rebrands their own version of OpenStack the way that Oracle does with Xen. Still, the whole "private cloud" space is still in its infancy. I think we're really at where hypervisors were in 2006, where it just got good enough to start getting mass deployment.
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Aug 30, 2013 04:43
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El_Matarife posted:Within the next few years, it will make a CCIE look like something from a box of Crackerjacks. (At least the DCV one will, I don't think we know if VMware cloud or OpenStack will win that battle. And desktop is a total blank slate.)
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Aug 30, 2013 05:11
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Misogynist posted:There is no "VMware versus OpenStack." VMware needs OpenStack to survive in the age of Amazon Web Services and Google Compute Engine and Rackspace Cloud. They faltered and screwed the pooch with vCD, and now they don't have time to build a proprietary product that people actually want. Agree strongly. El_Matarife posted:
The absolute best way to go through this process is with a real project. I got lucky that when I was accepted for my defense I had literally just wrapped up a customer design. I'd say that project itself was somewhere in the neighborhood of ~450ish hours nonstop. It really worked out because there were a lot of instances where I had to do some things due to customer constraints/requirements that fly right in the face of accepted best practices. Since I had a lot of defense-llike questions from the customer I was pretty well prepared for anything the panel was going to throw at me. All in all it was a fun experience (I enjoyed the first and 3rd portions of the defense the most.) Was pretty jazzed to make it through completely and I've made sure to take every VCAP-DCD exam since passing (I started with 3.X back when the program was first released.)
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Aug 30, 2013 05:39
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Doesn't the VCDX need to be based off a real project now of days?
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Aug 30, 2013 06:11
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Well, I passed the VMWare associate test, I'm really glad that I've been reading the Scott Lowe book for the last couple of months because if I had relied only on that 2.5 hour course I'd be 60 dollars poorer and without a cert. Edit: They're apparently working on a mock exam. If you're not already very familiar with the entire VMware product line, you might want to wait on this test. Dr. Arbitrary fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Aug 30, 2013 |
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Aug 30, 2013 09:08
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While folk are talking about certs, I'm looking to get the VCP5-DCV cert. Does anyone know of a qualifying training course in the UK ( or online ) that's not super expensive?Dr. Arbitrary posted:I'm really glad that I've been reading the Scott Lowe book Which Scott Lowe book did you read, this one ? http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mastering-VMware-VSphere-Scott-Lowe/dp/0470890800
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Aug 30, 2013 10:45
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jre posted:While folk are talking about certs, I'm looking to get the VCP5-DCV cert. Does anyone know of a qualifying training course in the UK ( or online ) that's not super expensive? Yes, but he's already working on a 5.5 edition so you may want to wait.
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Aug 30, 2013 11:18
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Doesn't the VCDX need to be based off a real project now of days? Strongly encouraged but not required, though even a real project may require some fictional elaboration to map to the blueprint.
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Aug 30, 2013 14:22
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El_Matarife posted:Within the next few years, it will make a CCIE look like something from a box of Crackerjacks. (At least the DCV one will, I don't think we know if VMware cloud or OpenStack will win that battle. And desktop is a total blank slate.) El_Matarife posted:As far as VMware versus OpenStack goes, I think OpenStack does have a lead in the some areas right now, especially on the Linux side with everyone combining OpenStack and Puppet. And they've definitely got a deployment advantage with Rackspace onboard among other big names and tons of startups. Do you know what OpenStack actually is/does? El_Matarife posted:However, VMware's hypervisor (and VMware Tools) is so far above and beyond HyperV, KVM, and Xen that I can't see anything but it remaining the standard as long as people still need Windows VMs. Worst case, VMware just wholesale rebrands their own version of OpenStack the way that Oracle does with Xen. Still, the whole "private cloud" space is still in its infancy. I think we're really at where hypervisors were in 2006, where it just got good enough to start getting mass deployment. This is, in a word, poo poo. Complete and utter bollocks. VMkernel is not "far and above" HyperV, KVM, or Xen, and specvirt (and a million other benchmarks) agree. It's a better all-arounder than any of the rest (Xen and HyperV can beat it at I/O, KVM at CPU and memory performance as well as density). It's that VAAI, dvSwitches, svMotion, and all the rest of the VMware sauce have no real comparisons in RHEV, HyperV, or XenServer. We (RHEV) can offer some of it, but not all. HyperV is the same. But if you wanted to compare KVM vs ESXi/VMkernel, you'd be surprised at how little performance difference there is, because essentially the entire Linux ecosystem has standardized on it (regular contributors include Google, Intel, IBM, and AMD). VMware can't really "rebrand their own version of Openstack". It moves far, far too quickly for that, and VMware (flatly) doesn't have the Linux expertise to beat us (Redhat) at our own game, and we employ most of the Openstack core developers. VMware will not disappear. Even if they don't win the 'cloud wars', they won't disappear. Not every virtualization workload is suitable for the cloud paradigm, and VMware is the clear winner in traditional virtualization environments. But the commoditization of virtualization is here. Now. In 2013. VMware has a long head start on value adds, and they need to keep it.
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Aug 30, 2013 16:07
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Just in case it wasn't abundantly clear from the previous good posts, you can use ESXi as the hypervisor within OpenStack. It's not either/or.
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Aug 30, 2013 16:48
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We currently are looking at going to a virtual server environment. Both myself and my manager know very little about VM stuff but want to learn. We currently run a Citrix Zen server for a couple of Citrix VMs and a few other windows VMs. So most of our (My) experience is with the Citrix stuff. We would like to leave that alone as it works fine but we want to consolidate some of our other servers and turn them into VMs. Our current structure is mostly Dell servers and we will probably stay Dell when buying new stuff. A lot of our current ones are older and falling off service contracts. We are looking to buy new (used) servers, instead of extending the service contracts, that have contracts on them still. What we have now. 1x Dell PowerEdge 2950 running our Exchange 2010 server 1x Dell PowerEdge 2950 (Main file server & backup machine) connected to: Dell MD1000 SAN with 14TB of storage (mostly filled) Dell MD1000 SAN (split, half on this machine & half on another) Dell PowerVault 2000 Tape Drive (backups go to LTO4 tapes) 1x Dell PowerEdge 2970 that runs a specific app We also have about 10 Dell PE SC1425 server that are running windows 2003 server for little things (plan on consolidating most of these to 1 or 2 VMs.) We also currently have 3 servers in our DMZ for webserver/application servers that need to be accessible from the outside. (we will probably make these into VMs too on their own host in the DMZ) Other things we won’t virtualize 1x Dell R710 that runs our Databases (this is other machine connected to MD1000 #2) 1x Dell PE 2950 that is running the Citrix Zenserver stuff (will probably move to a newer machine though) Our Voip phone system (custom box) We are not running Gigabit Ethernet and currently do not have plans to switch to that. We have 3 buildings with fiber running between them. Our switches are mostly NetGear GS748TPs and I think we have a couple Dell 2748s for non-PoE stuff. Most servers are Windows Server 2003 and a couple are running 2008R2 (Exchange & DB) We are a small company with about 35-40 users on site, mainly in 2 of the buildings. We keep pretty much everything in house because of the data we deal with. Web Servers, Exchange etc are all hosted here. Ok now that I have hopefully explained our environment enough, here are my questions. I will be the primary one to be learning and implementing this. I have quite a bit of free time daily at work to read & study things and have a few (old slow) servers to play with stuff also. I would like to turn this into me also getting some certs from the studying and project too. We are looking at some Dell R520 servers to run as our hosts. We are thinking probably 3-4 hosts clustered and 1 more for the DMZ stuff. What kind of licensing do we need to handle this if we go with Esxi/vmware? Will we have issues with converting the box that has the HBA (tape drive) & PERC cards for the file server? Or should we not bother and just leave this as a standalone machine (upgrading it to a newer server though)? Am I overlooking anything that is going to be a pain or just not possible? I will try to answer any questions that I can.
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Aug 30, 2013 17:01
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Docjowles posted:Just in case it wasn't abundantly clear from the previous good posts, you can use ESXi as the hypervisor within OpenStack. It's not either/or. I also have no idea what the plan is with vCD, vCAC, and whatever other vProducts VMware creates in the future is. As far as I'm aware your options are:
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Aug 30, 2013 17:02
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evol262 posted:I also have no idea what the plan is with vCD, vCAC, and whatever other vProducts VMware creates in the future is. As far as I'm aware your options are: disclaimer: I do 3rd party consulting and I'm currently a VMware partner. vCAC is going to be the portal you'll see in enterprise IT. Straightforward to use, cost reporting, etc. vCAC should be able to consume resources from vCenter, vCD, AWS and coming soon Openstack (with an initial focus on Canonical and Red Hat's implementations first.) It's going to be the "user friendly" cloud interface with approvals, cost reporting, etc. vCD is going to stay mostly with service providers. We've had some success with vCD in some places but other places it flops because the customer wants to use it in a way it wasn't meant to be used. The plan is to eventually merge vCD entirely into vCAC and vCenter sometime in the future. Hopefully they don't completely scrap it since there's a number of folks
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Aug 30, 2013 17:14
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Trastion posted:We currently are looking at going to a virtual server environment. Both myself and my manager know very little about VM stuff but want to learn. We currently run a Citrix Zen server for a couple of Citrix VMs and a few other windows VMs. So most of our (My) experience is with the Citrix stuff. We would like to leave that alone as it works fine but we want to consolidate some of our other servers and turn them into VMs. Trastion posted:What we have now. Trastion posted:We also currently have 3 servers in our DMZ for webserver/application servers that need to be accessible from the outside. (we will probably make these into VMs too on their own host in the DMZ) Trastion posted:We are not running Gigabit Ethernet and currently do not have plans to switch to that. We have 3 buildings with fiber running between them. Trastion posted:We are looking at some Dell R520 servers to run as our hosts. We are thinking probably 3-4 hosts clustered and 1 more for the DMZ stuff. Trastion posted:What kind of licensing do we need to handle this if we go with Esxi/vmware? Trastion posted:Will we have issues with converting the box that has the HBA (tape drive) & PERC cards for the file server? Or should we not bother and just leave this as a standalone machine (upgrading it to a newer server though)? If it were me, I would get a SAN (MD3200i or whatever) and build a 4-node R520 cluster around it. Migrate your physical machines there one-by-one. All of them other than the R710. Move as much as you can off those MD1000s (those are DAS, not SAN) so you can repurpose them. Create a VLAN for the DMZ and trunk it into a vSwitch for your DMZed VMs to keep it segregated. Take the beefiest old boxes and create a 2nd cluster for dev/testing/etc. Create a datastore on the (now empty) MD1000. Migrate VMs off of XenServer to the dev one. Sell useless old hardware on eBay.
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Aug 30, 2013 17:19
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1000101 posted:coming soon Openstack (with an initial focus on Canonical and Red Hat's implementations first.
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Aug 30, 2013 17:21
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Trastion posted:We also have about 10 Dell PE SC1425 server that are running windows 2003 server for little things (plan on consolidating most of these to 1 or 2 VMs.) This isn't necessarily a no-brainer, unless the services are really trivial or so tightly coupled that if Service A goes down Service B is dead in the water anyway til A comes back. One nice thing about virtualization is that you can run one host per service and not care that they're running at very low utilization because it's not a $3000 server taking up rack space. Now you can patch the OS or reboot it for whatever reason and only take down the one service instead of taking down all 10. Also, since it's going to make my OCD brain catch fire, it's Xen not Zen 
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Aug 30, 2013 17:33
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Trastion posted:Ok now that I have hopefully explained our environment enough, here are my questions. quote:We are looking at some Dell R520 servers to run as our hosts. We are thinking probably 3-4 hosts clustered and 1 more for the DMZ stuff. quote:What kind of licensing do we need to handle this if we go with Esxi/vmware? quote:Will we have issues with converting the box that has the HBA (tape drive) & PERC cards for the file server? Or should we not bother and just leave this as a standalone machine (upgrading it to a newer server though)? quote:Am I overlooking anything that is going to be a pain or just not possible? You are on the right track but here is what I would look at. What are you expecting 3 years down the road in terms of data/Server/Company growth? What budgetary constraints are you working on? Ballpark, no 20k probably won't take you far. What kind of Availability is required? What kind of Disaster recover is needed?
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Aug 30, 2013 18:00
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evol262 posted:I'm going to do a small writeup later today, because everyone talks about it like it's this nebulous thing and it's really not. Please do.
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Aug 30, 2013 18:05
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Depending on your hosts and requirements for uptime, you may look at Essentials+ or Standard. While Essentials CAN do what you want you probably are going to want to have some HA features, and backup integration for your VM's. Essentials+ is a screaming deal for small businesses, Trastion, definitely consider it. But bear in mind when you're sizing your hardware that it's hard-capped at 3 physical hosts. More than that and you need to be looking at Standard. But if you can fit your environment comfortably into Essentials Plus, it's a great value. (Posted for Trastion, not Dilbert, obviously )
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Aug 30, 2013 18:08
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evol262 posted:Whoever is talking about this to you doesn't understand OpenStack at all. I'm going to do a small writeup later today, because everyone talks about it like it's this nebulous thing and it's really not. They were mostly complaining that rackspace is doing some things differently (guessing more around the services they offer than anything.) I'm not an openstack guy though so who knows. Also the fellow I talked to was a director not an engineer so who knows.
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Aug 30, 2013 18:34
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1000101 posted:They were mostly complaining that rackspace is doing some things differently (guessing more around the services they offer than anything.) I'm not an openstack guy though so who knows. Also the fellow I talked to was a director not an engineer so who knows. I guess my point was more that one of biggest points about OpenStack is API consistency. Interacting with and consuming data from Rackspace, Redhat, Canonical, and some guy who got the git sources running on his own distro which doesn't appear anywhere else should be identical. From a "we interact with your services" perspective, there ought to be zero differences between Redhat, Canonical, Rackspace, Paypal, and anyone else running Openstack.
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Aug 30, 2013 18:45
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evol262 posted:I guess my point was more that one of biggest points about OpenStack is API consistency. Interacting with and consuming data from Rackspace, Redhat, Canonical, and some guy who got the git sources running on his own distro which doesn't appear anywhere else should be identical. From a "we interact with your services" perspective, there ought to be zero differences between Redhat, Canonical, Rackspace, Paypal, and anyone else running Openstack. I agree with you I just don't have the practical experience to confirm if that's actually the reality though. Hoping in the next few months to start becoming acclimated though.
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Aug 30, 2013 19:07
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Thanks for the replies everyone. evol262 posted:2748s do GigE. So do GS728TPs (per Google). Is there a reason you're not? I messed up and meant to say that we are not on 10GBe. We ARE running GB to everything except the desktops. evol262 posted:Tag a VLAN and create a VM network for the DMZ instead of putting a separate virtualization server in the DMZ. Ok I didn't know that was possible yet so I will look into that. evol262 posted:Every single one of these is rife for conversion. You can almost certainly p2v that 2970 (p2v is physical->virtual, and there are products to convert running physical machines) and give it extra resiliency, then retire the hardware. I have already been reading about the vmware converter, thanks. Dilbert As gently caress posted:Order the Scott Lowe Mastering vSphere 5 off Amazon and READ IT seriously this will do you so much good. I am planning on this, the new one seems to have a release date of Nov 4th but I may get the one that is out now so I don't have to wait. Dilbert As gently caress posted:What are you expecting 3 years down the road in terms of data/Server/Company growth? As far as budget, we really don't have one. What brought this about is that a lot of the servers are coming off service contract/warranty and if it will cost $2000 to extend the contract and we can instead get a used R520 (w/ 2-3 year on warranty still) for $2000 then we are getting better hardware and still getting it under warranty. Availability is 24/7 since we run our own web servers and exchange. DR is basically off-site tapes right now.
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Aug 30, 2013 19:14
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Trastion posted:As far as budget, we really don't have one. What brought this about is that a lot of the servers are coming off service contract/warranty and if it will cost $2000 to extend the contract and we can instead get a used R520 (w/ 2-3 year on warranty still) for $2000 then we are getting better hardware and still getting it under warranty.  You're talking about a Dell MD1000 "SAN" but the MD1000 is a DAS enclosure designed to be attached to a single host. Which do you have? Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Aug 30, 2013 |
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Aug 30, 2013 19:38
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Trastion posted:I am planning on this, the new one seems to have a release date of Nov 4th but I may get the one that is out now so I don't have to wait. did not know there was anotherone coming out but the current one is amazing. quote:As far as budget, we really don't have one. What brought this about is that a lot of the servers are coming off service contract/warranty and if it will cost $2000 to extend the contract and we can instead get a used R520 (w/ 2-3 year on warranty still) for $2000 then we are getting better hardware and still getting it under warranty. Stop and back up at this point. Do not try to squeeze to pennies together to make a dollar. Get with your higher ups and work on determining a budget and implementation plan. While Virtualization has a somewhat high startup cost the CTO/ROI brings it all back. If you cheap out on this it will end in nothing but heartache and misery. If 24/7 is a requirement, you're going to need to spend some dosh, also your DR probably has a RPO of DAY(s). How would the company function if it you had to go back to tapes? How much of that would be saved with spending a bit extra to get a bit more? What you probably should be looking at is at min is an architecture similar to this. Site A) 2 Hosts, I pinged dell's MSRP 2 R420's 2x4c E2470's, 64GB ram, 1QP nic, ~2500 a pop, connect these to your gig 2 switches over NFS or iSCSI MD3200i Teir your storage depending on what you need, do not buy all large TB drives, some things like SQL/ExchangeOS/OS VMDK's may need 10k or 15k, while things like File Shares, stale data, can sit happy on 7.2k. You'll need to look and see how much data needs fast access high IOPS and what can manage with slower storage higher capacity, dell has something called DPACK which can help show you this. Then use something like Veeam Backup and Replication to go to your SiteB) SiteB)- Here is where you may want to order and place something like a 720xd or R910, load it with 15k for OS VMDKS and some high density drives for other, this will be your replication and DR site, where if SiteA) burns down/waterdamage/internet blows up you can fail over to and help meet your 24/7 SLA. Seriously if you have 14TB used how long do you imagine restoring everything from tapes would take? If you have a Disaster at one site, you can recover from it pretty quickly. Alternatively you could re-purpose that MD1000 for this site, which can help mitigate some of the costs associated with throwing a bunch of storage into a 910/720. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Aug 30, 2013 |
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Aug 30, 2013 19:59
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Misogynist posted:This is cute Yeah sorry it is a DAS not a SAN. And as far as the budget goes it is not that we can't spend money. As long as we can prove it is needed we can spend it. We just don't have any set type of budget. The company makes a few million in profit every year and the owner knows that spending money on things we need is not a bad thing. I just can't say that I have $50k to spend. I am sure my manager will want to keep it on the lowest side that we can so it is easier to get it approved though. We currently use DFS on the DAS will that cause any issues in a VM environment? I don't think my manager is too keen on also asking for a NAS right now so we will probably have to stay with the storage that we have.
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Aug 30, 2013 20:06
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Weird Uncle Dave posted:Couple hours ago, I went through the free training for this. And by training, I mean "basically a three-hour VMware ad with no content whatsoever". I'm on a waiting list for a VCP class in January. Even if this is just resume fluff, it's not a bad thing to have for $60 (I have spent much more on a round of shots). Going to take the exam before the end of my workday today.
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Aug 30, 2013 20:11
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Moey posted:(I have spent much more on a round of shots). You need a nicer dress.  I got an old shuttle (775 socket) sitting around with 4GB of ram and a C2D chip of some kind. I wonder if it'll be a fun vCenter host to mess with and keep my memory usage off my main host. This is a home lab, so nothing important. kill your idols fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Aug 30, 2013 |
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Aug 30, 2013 20:16
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Trastion posted:Yeah sorry it is a DAS not a SAN. Yeah that's always the hard part of IT, showing the value and cause for what you need. Gather a list of materials that you know you need, hosts, APC's, Switches, Storage, Software and backup/replication tools and get a total. Show the value such as; The RIO/TCO where now you do not need to order another box for your new services and applications, or spend time setting up HW, lowered HVAC costs Improved RPO of site failover, if building A burned down which houses your server environment, what would that cost the company in terms of loss of productivity, or business continuity? Improved up time for with HA, fewer maintenance windows, even the possibility of Virtual Desktop to avoid more costly upgrades Many MSP's and VAR's would love to get their foot in the door and work with you on developing a solution, may cost more but they can easily show the value. quote:We currently use DFS on the DAS will that cause any issues in a VM environment? I don't think my manager is too keen on also asking for a NAS right now so we will probably have to stay with the storage that we have. No, plenty of our clients use DFS in their VMware environments, which are VM's backended on NAS/SAN. If you scale your storage for the requirements, IOPS/RAID level/capacity you should be fine. VVVV- yup that is a really good point licensing changes when you got from physical to virtual YAY MS Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Aug 30, 2013 |
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Aug 30, 2013 20:21
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One issue you may have with P2V Dell 2003 servers is one I just ran into, licensing. Our older dell servers have OEM licensing and after I did the P2V I was smacked with 'You have to activate this or shutdown the machine' (2003 was so much less lenient on this than 2008 is.) Now, the unfortunate part is, there's no way to switch from OEM channel to VLK channel in 2003. 2008 and above allows you to change between channels when you change the key, but an OEM copy of 2003 will not accept a VLK. What I eventually ended up doing was running a repair install to switch over to the VLK which worked, but broke the .NET installation on the machine which had to be repaired. Aside from that though, it went fine and there were no strange hardware issues.
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Aug 30, 2013 20:25
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evol262 posted:This is, in a word, poo poo. Complete and utter bollocks. VMkernel is not "far and above" HyperV, KVM, or Xen, and specvirt (and a million other benchmarks) agree. It's a better all-arounder than any of the rest (Xen and HyperV can beat it at I/O, KVM at CPU and memory performance as well as density). It's that VAAI, dvSwitches, svMotion, and all the rest of the VMware sauce have no real comparisons in RHEV, HyperV, or XenServer. We (RHEV) can offer some of it, but not all. HyperV is the same. But if you wanted to compare KVM vs ESXi/VMkernel, you'd be surprised at how little performance difference there is, because essentially the entire Linux ecosystem has standardized on it (regular contributors include Google, Intel, IBM, and AMD). I'm sorry, I should have specified the ecosystem / features of VMware are far and away better for the reasons you just listed. I had no idea what the benchmarks were but now I'm curious. Would you say all hypervisors sit within a 10% band of each other on every metric? And how does VMware Transparent Page Sharing factor in? Last I heard, no one else had a similar feature. 1000101 posted:All in all it was a fun experience (I enjoyed the first and 3rd portions of the defense the most.) Was pretty jazzed to make it through completely and I've made sure to take every VCAP-DCD exam since passing (I started with 3.X back when the program was first released.) Wow, I met VCDX #69 about four weeks ago and he did his on ESX 5 I think. You must be VCDX number what, <20? Are there still no public VCDX designs that passed for reference, beyond the blueprint? Pantology posted:Strongly encouraged but not required, though even a real project may require some fictional elaboration to map to the blueprint. I believe that no one has ever passed with an entirely fictional design even though it's allowed, so "strongly discouraged" is putting it lightly, but it's really, really common for people to take a real design and add some fictional elements to make it touch every necessary area. El_Matarife fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Aug 30, 2013 |
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Aug 30, 2013 21:30
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evol262 posted:Whoever is talking about this to you doesn't understand OpenStack at all. I'm going to do a small writeup later today, because everyone talks about it like it's this nebulous thing and it's really not. What OpenStack is: IaaS. It's backed by AMD, Brocade, Canonical, Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Rackspace, Red Hat, Novell, VMware, and more. Essentially every player in the industry. OpenStack's essential aim is to provide a toolset for implementing private and public EC2-alike cloud, so to take a step back: What cloud computing is: Rapidly scalable anonymous services. The essential basis of IaaS, PaaS, NaaS, SaaS, and anything else on which you don't have a vested interest in configuration, statefulness, and the nitty-gritty details. If you just made the frontpage of Slashdot and you need 100 more servers right now and you have a configuration management deployment environment ready to provision them, add them to load balancers and clusters, IP them, and all the other parts of configuration, you may be a good candidate. If you have basically identical development/QA servers, and you want to be able to create them at-will (and don't care what happens to them when they disappear), you may be a good candidate. If you want a VDI environment and you have images ready to go for users to log into with roaming profiles and no local... you get the point. There are volume services available for running persistent cloud images, and this is definitely a thing you can do, but you should go through this CERN presentation which explains it pretty succinctly. You want more cattle than pets. What cloud computing isn't: A generic term for things that may be represented by a cloud on a Visio diagram. In the sense that your Dropbox documents are in the "cloud" and you don't need to worry about the implementation of it and your GMail is in the "cloud" and you don't need to worry about the implementation of it, that's true. But cloud computing is not a generic synonym for "on the internet". It is also not a generic term for by-the-hour grid compute services (SQL Azure or otherwise) to which you can submit data. These may be PaaS or SaaS, but "cloud computing" (especially in the OpenStack sense) is IaaS. So, what is OpenStack? OpenStack is a collection of services which work together to provide the essentials of a "cloud" environment. There are others (Eucalyptus is the big competitor), but OpenStack is far and away the leader in this space, and aims for EC2/S3 API compatibility, where Eucalyptus is hoping for API compatibility and to be architecturally similar. The difference to you (as an end user) between OpenStack, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, EC2, and any other cloud provider which isn't Azure or overtly different should be zero.
The key thing is that all of these services can run anywhere. You can run 100 nova instances on 100 PCs. Or 1 on 1. You can run Horizon, Glance, Swift, Keystone, and Nova on 5 different PCs. Or VMs. It doesn't matter. RHOS/RDO or whatever we're calling it now is probably the fastest way to get up and running with OpenStack unless you have a lot of time and in-house expertise to get it all talking. There are OpenStack releases every 6 months. Concurrently developed by all members. So Canonical, RH, Rackspace, and whoever should present exactly the same info. Depending on how you configure accounting in Horizon, your billing may be different. But it's all the same out of the box, so vCAC can talk to it all exactly the same way. We're running the same software stack with the same API, and your images can be seamlessly migrated from EC2 to Eucalyptus to RDO to Rackspace with no changes whatsoever. It's the entire point.
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Aug 30, 2013 21:53
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El_Matarife posted:I'm sorry, I should have specified the ecosystem / features of VMware are far and away better for the reasons you just listed. I had no idea what the benchmarks were but now I'm curious. Would you say all hypervisors sit within a 10% band of each other on every metric? And how does VMware Transparent Page Sharing factor in? Last I heard, no one else had a similar feature. KVM has Kernel Samepage Merging (KSM) and has for a while now.
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Aug 30, 2013 21:56
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