|
Do anyone have any recommendations/horror stories for a DaaS provider? I like Amazon WorkSpaces because it's Amazon but my client choices seem pretty limited. We use Vmware and horizon sounds cool and there's a slew of partners doing this. Don't know the space very well so trying to get a feel for who the best companies are.
|
#
?
Aug 19, 2014 23:10
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 17:10 |
|
|
Nukelear v.2 posted:Do anyone have any recommendations/horror stories for a DaaS provider? I can tell you that if you're looking for a true Windows desktop (Windows 7/8/8.1) from a provider, you won't find it. Microsoft does not allow hosting providers to deliver desktop operating systems. The best you'll get is a Windows Server instance with terminal services and the "desktop experience".
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 12:44
|
|
|
Richard Noggin posted:I can tell you that if you're looking for a true Windows desktop (Windows 7/8/8.1) from a provider, you won't find it. Microsoft does not allow hosting providers to deliver desktop operating systems. The best you'll get is a Windows Server instance with terminal services and the "desktop experience". Interesting, didn't know licensing was the reason behind that. I've seen it but haven't been too concerned by it, are there any major gotchas because of this? We use terminal services here to handle ~10 remote users and afaik there haven't been many issues with it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 14:31
|
|
|
This may be a dumb question, but is there a preferred "go to" USB drive for diskless ESXi machines, or should I just be buying a case of 16GB+ flash drives and swapping them out when they die?
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 17:50
|
|
|
Maneki Neko posted:This may be a dumb question, but is there a preferred "go to" USB drive for diskless ESXi machines, or should I just be buying a case of 16GB+ flash drives and swapping them out when they die? I have used a few different kinds, never noticed a difference between any of them. All 8gb.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 17:53
|
|
|
Maneki Neko posted:This may be a dumb question, but is there a preferred "go to" USB drive for diskless ESXi machines, or should I just be buying a case of 16GB+ flash drives and swapping them out when they die? Your ESXi boot partition is rarely written and rarely read so you're unlikely to wear out your flash drive any time soon.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 18:39
|
|
|
Nukelear v.2 posted:Interesting, didn't know licensing was the reason behind that. I've seen it but haven't been too concerned by it, are there any major gotchas because of this? We use terminal services here to handle ~10 remote users and afaik there haven't been many issues with it. The gotchas are apps that are not supported on either a server OS or in a TS session. Other than that, not really.
|
|
#
?
Aug 20, 2014 21:06
|
|
|
Richard Noggin posted:The gotchas are apps that are not supported on either a server OS or in a TS session. Other than that, not really. Well hell given that nobody is replying to DaaS, I'm guessing most people do it themselves. I can see the pros to this, so thoughts on Horizon vs Citrix VIB vs HyperV for ~100 users? We're primarily a vmware shop, but I hear citrix is better for this.
|
|
#
?
Aug 21, 2014 21:05
|
|
|
Is there a way to tell who took a snapshot in Hyper-V?
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 20:05
|
|
|
MC Fruit Stripe posted:Is there a way to tell who took a snapshot in Hyper-V? Ha, did you have a datastore fill up?
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 20:56
|
|
|
MC Fruit Stripe posted:Is there a way to tell who took a snapshot in Hyper-V? In VMM you could just check who ran the job. With just Hyper-V, I have no idea.
|
|
#
?
Aug 23, 2014 22:10
|
|
|
Sickening posted:Ha, did you have a datastore fill up?  We use Hyper-V in about half of our test environments - the other half of test and all of prod are vSphere. Obviously the team is a lot more familiar with VMware. But no matter what I do, I can not get people to understand that no, you do not know what you're doing in Hyper-V. Yet this is constantly an issue and it's killing me slowly.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 00:10
|
|
|
I'm in datastore hell. The guy who set up all these hosts before me allocated 99% of the datastore to VMs, thick provisioned, with no thought for future expansion or backups. So now when I come in and am asked to do Veeam backups I am literally just .. "welp" Also, with regards to my stupid SSD issue from a page or two ago. I booted up the loving VM today and my DAVGs are all normal. Worst -- loving -- timing since I just got VMware on the phone to start verifying this. HAS to be something to do with the SSDs, like garbage collection or something. Not even sure what to do now. I don't want to put my production VM back on that box in case it happens again but I can't find anything wrong with it at this point. My vendor actually verified that they were seeing the same problems I was so they'll back me up to a point, but I don't even really know what they can do about it at this point if everything checks out between HP and VMware.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 01:07
|
|
|
Martytoof posted:I'm in datastore hell. The guy who set up all these hosts before me allocated 99% of the datastore to VMs, thick provisioned, with no thought for future expansion or backups. So now when I come in and am asked to do Veeam backups I am literally just .. "welp" How full are the SSDs?
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 02:04
|
|
|
PCjr sidecar posted:How full are the SSDs? It's 8 236GB drives in a RAID 10 setup. Our only VM is 512GB so there's only data to fill a little more than half the drive capacity. I don't know how the RAID controller is distributing the data though.
|
|
#
?
Aug 24, 2014 03:51
|
|
|
Finally got my cluster up to 5.5u1. Is 2012R2 just part of the 2012 OS profile when you're deploying a VM or am I missing something?
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 14:55
|
|
|
I've been deploying it using the 2012 option for a while with no issues. E: I guess the OSes are similar enough that they didn't need to make a new profile.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 15:14
|
|
|
Now that I'm on 5.x, the cores per socket feature. Does that have performance benefits for multi-cpu VM's by keeping the vCPUs from spreading out over multiple sockets on the host, or is it more to help comply with software licenses that go by by socket count and you get screwed by the every core counts as a socket thing?
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 17:08
|
|
|
BangersInMyKnickers posted:Now that I'm on 5.x, the cores per socket feature. Does that have performance benefits for multi-cpu VM's by keeping the vCPUs from spreading out over multiple sockets on the host, or is it more to help comply with software licenses that go by by socket count and you get screwed by the every core counts as a socket thing? It's generally best to go with a flat-and-wide vCPU configuration of one core per socket to avoid spreading the workload across NUMA nodes. Edit: thanks Misogynist, that's the exact article I was thinking of when I wrote this post! Pile Of Garbage fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Aug 25, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 17:20
|
|
|
BangersInMyKnickers posted:Now that I'm on 5.x, the cores per socket feature. Does that have performance benefits for multi-cpu VM's by keeping the vCPUs from spreading out over multiple sockets on the host, or is it more to help comply with software licenses that go by by socket count and you get screwed by the every core counts as a socket thing? To expound on cheese-cube's answer about performance: http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2013/10/does-corespersocket-affect-performance.html The short answer is that in most cases, it will not affect performance at all. However, you have specific circumstances, like on hyperthreaded Intel processors or on Bulldozer-family Opterons, where you can cause some performance problems. If you allocate too many cores per socket you can end up forcing your VM to run on HyperThreading logical processors or on Bulldozer integer units sharing a pipeline instead of spreading the workload to a higher-performing core on another CPU. If you're allocating less than half the threads available on a specific CPU as cores per virtual socket, you'll never see this in practice. If it makes sense to run the workload for a VM entirely on a single NUMA node, the vmkernel is smart enough to do that for you already, so you'll basically never see an increase in performance by trying to force the workload into a specific NUMA topology. Vulture Culture fucked around with this message at 17:41 on Aug 25, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 17:34
|
|
|
Also in very extreme circumstances you can increase memory latency by over-saturating QPI/HyperTransport due to workloads being spread across physical NUMA nodes (I've never seen this proven but it's still a possibility).
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 17:45
|
|
|
Yeah, I figured as much. With the 6 core 2 socket hosts I never go above 3 vCPU per VM to help keep the ready time down. At least this gives me an option for the lovely Oracle licensing.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 17:54
|
|
|
Double check that license, I've heard of some newer products that license by the physical machine size and not the vm running on it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 18:41
|
|
|
That's good info to know. I never realized that corespersocket could impact performance.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 19:17
|
|
|
Are there any drawbacks on enabling VT-x on my VMs across the board? Will it screw with how VMware handles cpu resource scheduling?
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 22:31
|
|
|
Interesting announcements from VMware today. Apparently they'll be putting out their own OpenStack distribution next year? Having trouble finding a ton of detail (presumably because of NDA fuckery) but it seems to boil down to official support and easy installation. So you can use all of the OpenStack API's and tooling to build and manage your cloud, and under the hood it's running on vSphere for the hypervisor instead of the more typical KVM or Xen. Which I gather is theoretically possible to do already, but pretty ugly in practice. Here's the least terrible writeup I've come across so far. They're building closer ties with Docker, too.
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2014 23:59
|
|
|
Anyone out here for VMWorld? I am going to a few sessions this week but didn't have enough free time to dedicate the whole week like I did last year.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 00:16
|
|
|
I'm at VMworld for the first time, holy crap you can be drunk here 24/7 for free. Shoot me your contact info at my username dot gmail if you want to meet up, would love to meet another goon!
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 05:01
|
|
|
ESXi 5.5 question. I have a drive full of data that is coming out of a non-virtualized server, about 1480GB of data on a 1500GB drive, so 20GB free. The problem is I dont really have a drive at-hand that can take the data from this drive I'm moving I'd like to plug it into a VMware server, and ideally have a vmdk created with this data inside of it. Whats the best way to get the data into a vmdk without moving it off the drive? I was thinking about creating a thin-provisioned VMDK for the size of the data, but I dont know how to get the data to move from the drive into the VMDK. As far as I know, vsphere cant do that? Is there a way to create a VMDK that encapsulates existing data?
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 14:25
|
|
|
Jim Silly-Balls posted:ESXi 5.5 question. I have a drive full of data that is coming out of a non-virtualized server, about 1480GB of data on a 1500GB drive, so 20GB free. The problem is I dont really have a drive at-hand that can take the data from this drive I'm moving You're going to be kind of boned here IMHO. Even if you could create the thin VMDK on the same drive, the existing partition won't shrink when you move data over so your VMDK will grow to 20GB and that's all she wrote. Intermediate storage is pretty much your best bet I think.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 14:53
|
|
|
I don't think there is any way to do what you're asking. You need storage to copy to.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 15:15
|
|
|
Are any of you VMworld people coming down to the south bay at all? I decided to skip VMworld this year, because it is usually pretty boring.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 15:33
|
|
|
Martytoof posted:You're going to be kind of boned here IMHO. Even if you could create the thin VMDK on the same drive, the existing partition won't shrink when you move data over so your VMDK will grow to 20GB and that's all she wrote. Internet Explorer posted:I don't think there is any way to do what you're asking. You need storage to copy to. Bah, thats kind of what I thought. I was hoping I could get away without having to buy another hard drive, but oh well.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 15:47
|
|
|
Regarding VSAN SAS controllers, the LSI 9211-8i is on the VSAN SAS controller HCL. You can find this controller on ebay for decent prices listed as IBM M1015 and then crossflash it to the 9211-8i IT firmware if you want to play with VSAN in a home lab.
|
|
#
?
Aug 26, 2014 21:52
|
|
|
Jim Silly-Balls posted:ESXi 5.5 question. I have a drive full of data that is coming out of a non-virtualized server, about 1480GB of data on a 1500GB drive, so 20GB free. The problem is I dont really have a drive at-hand that can take the data from this drive I'm moving Attach the disk to an ESXi server and access it via RDM, attached to a virtual machine. In the Guest/VM, you can then mount the drive as a normal local disk and copy your data over to the other local disk, stored on a datastore as a regular virtual disk. Often RDMs cannot be created for local disks using the user interface, so use http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2046370 or: "vmkfstools -z /vmfs/devices/disks/<disk id> /vmfs/volumes/yourdatastore/yourvm/yournewdisk.vmdk" Then attach the disk to your VM (can be done live). If you don't want to do an in-Guest copy, you could still do the process above, but then do a clone from the RDM to a new thin disk: vmkfstools -i -d thin your-rdm.vmdk your-new-thin-disk.vmdk If you can't stick it in the physical ESXi server, then I'd suggest using VMware Converter. Kachunkachunk fucked around with this message at 04:18 on Aug 27, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 04:16
|
|
|
I think you're losing track of free space there. The existing partition won't be shrinking as the VMDK is expanding, so as Martytoof mentioned, you'll only get 20gb copied into the VMDK before the operation fails. e: I'm imagining some shockingly painful pattern of moving about 10gb worth of files into a thin provisioned VMDK, defragmenting and then shrinking the partition, and copying another 10gb at a time here. This of course, going on until you remember that, oh yeah, 4TB hard drives are like $130 at Costco. MC Fruit Stripe fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Aug 27, 2014 |
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 04:41
|
|
|
Okay, I think I finally understand here. The creation of said VMDK is supposed to be on the very same drive? Yes, your idea of shimmying the data around, combined with lots of partition resizes, is the only way to do this. Really should just get a large drive and actually migrate the data.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2014 05:19
|
|
|
Yeah, I'll just pick up a bigger drive and move the data. I figured if there was an easy way to get vmware to just encapsulate existing data in a VMDK and save me a drive purchase, then I'd do it, but that seems not to be the case.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2014 14:54
|
|
|
Do any of you guys use Nimble Storage? We're looking to move off of using Hitachi SAN and getting a dedicated storage array solely for VMs, and Nimble seems like a pretty attractive option, but I'm wondering if there's any horror stories out there since it's still a relatively young technology.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2014 13:42
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 17:10 |
|
|
Cidrick posted:Do any of you guys use Nimble Storage? We're looking to move off of using Hitachi SAN and getting a dedicated storage array solely for VMs, and Nimble seems like a pretty attractive option, but I'm wondering if there's any horror stories out there since it's still a relatively young technology. You should post this in the enterprise storage thread, but the general opinion on Nimble is very positive. I've had a couple of horror stories, but every vendor has those so it's not a big deal. If you're fine with iscsi and limited app integration (which you probably are if you're using Hitachi) then you'll probably like it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 29, 2014 16:50
|
|