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bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


Our Pure arrays have been amazing.

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Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


The whole "upside-down pyramid" thing is a bit of a trigger since it's all that Spiceworks guy goes on about when he's telling people to have all their VMs stored locally and if you need lots of storage then shove a load of SATA disks into an HP Proliant and share it from Windows.

A proper SAN with dual paths from the hosts to the controllers to the disks is no more of a giant risk than, as above, the power supply into the room or the AC, or the structural integrity of the single beam holding up the floor above. At some point you need to say you have enough redundancy and shift your focus onto how to recover from a catastrophic failure.

Spring Heeled Jack
Feb 25, 2007

If you can read this you can read

YOLOsubmarine posted:

All your equipment is probably sitting in one room which is a more likely failure domain than a storage array. Even “shared nothing” distributed storage systems like Starwind, VSAN, etc can still fail globally via bugs in the data or control plane, network outages, etc...

Modern arrays are build to provide five-to-six nines of availability. Unless you’re a hospital or financial institution that’s probably plenty and you probably don’t have the budget to purchase a solution that can tear that number.

Talk to Pure or Nimble. Tegile is ZFS with a new coat of paint and developers that don’t know what they’re doing. Starwind has like a dozen customers.

I agree with this, my manager is the one obsessed with a second unit but I think I can dissuade him. That money would be better spent modernizing our backup/retention process.

CDW is our POC for Nimble and Tegile, so we will see what they come up with. I’ve seen only good things about Tegile pricing and performance, but maybe they have a good guerrilla marketing team.

Edit: oh god, S.A.M from spiceworks? It’s a good possibility that’s where he got the idea.

Spring Heeled Jack fucked around with this message at 00:50 on May 4, 2018

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Spring Heeled Jack posted:

I agree with this, my manager is the one obsessed with a second unit but I think I can dissuade him. That money would be better spent modernizing our backup/retention process.

CDW is our POC for Nimble and Tegile, so we will see what they come up with. I’ve seen only good things about Tegile pricing and performance, but maybe they have a good guerrilla marketing team.

Edit: oh god, S.A.M from spiceworks? It’s a good possibility that’s where he got the idea.

We resell Tegile and I get money from them directly to incentivize selling their stuff and I still hate doing it. Their marketing is a sham and their hybrid products fall over badly in a number of situations. It’s the only storage vendor we have other than NetApp from years ago where we routinely have customers suffering performance issues.

It’s possible your experience with it might be fine, but why take the chance when there’s other things out there that are just as inexpensive and will not fall over because you took too many snapshots, or your deduplication metadata grew unexpectedly and evicted most of your cache, or your file system is fragmented from steady use and the only fix is to get another shelf and build a new pool to move the data to...

Also, Pure is the best of the bunch if you can afford it. They also have an active/active synchronous replication technology that provides true zero RPO redundancy across a metro area. So your boss can see what it actually costs to try and architect around a full array failure.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

Moey posted:

Still liking my Nimble arrays alot. Unsure about the future with HP though.
other than a crappier look and feel to infosight, I have seen no difference under HP.

Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Spring Heeled Jack posted:

Edit: oh god, S.A.M from spiceworks? It’s a good possibility that’s where he got the idea.

He got banned from Spiceworks and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

adorai posted:

other than a crappier look and feel to infosight, I have seen no difference under HP.

I suspect the main difference will be in a lack of resources put into further developing the platform and a slow attrition of Nimble employees.

The main target of the acquisition was actually the IP around Infosight, the arrays are just a value add. But the platform will probably soldier on for a good long while as a stable and pretty performant and simple storage platform.

Docjowles
Apr 9, 2009

Internet Explorer posted:

He got banned from Spiceworks and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

Ahahaha, seriously? That is amazing.

Myrridinos
Jan 7, 2010
Would file system fragmentation cause a performance issue on a filesystem inside of a virtual hard disk?

YOLOsubmarine
Oct 19, 2004

When asked which Pokemon he evolved into, Kamara pauses.

"Motherfucking, what's that big dragon shit? That orange motherfucker. Charizard."

Myrridinos posted:

Would file system fragmentation cause a performance issue on a filesystem inside of a virtual hard disk?

Yes, though only for certain types of IO and not to the extent that fragmentation on the back end storage affects performance. Modern storage arrays pretty much all leverage copy on write semantics and snapshots and clones and deduplication and a bunch of other things that naturally fragment data on disk over time, but most of them also have methods for mitigating those problems. Tegile does not, unless you count just using a fixed, large transaction size, thus undoing one of the main innovations in ZFS.

You shouldn’t be defragging your virtual server drives though, that only makes things worse.

Myrridinos
Jan 7, 2010

YOLOsubmarine posted:

Yes, though only for certain types of IO and not to the extent that fragmentation on the back end storage affects performance. Modern storage arrays pretty much all leverage copy on write semantics and snapshots and clones and deduplication and a bunch of other things that naturally fragment data on disk over time, but most of them also have methods for mitigating those problems. Tegile does not, unless you count just using a fixed, large transaction size, thus undoing one of the main innovations in ZFS.

You shouldn’t be defragging your virtual server drives though, that only makes things worse.

That's more or less what I thought.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.
I've done way dumber things in production than Scott Alan Miller out of necessity and I can't wait until we're not doing them anymore so I can tell you about them

Docjowles
Apr 9, 2009

We all do dumbass poo poo all of the time. It's the proud sharing and evangelizing of your dubmass poo poo, with zero self-awareness that it is actually quite bad, that elevates the SAM's of the world above the rest of us.

anthonypants
May 6, 2007

by Nyc_Tattoo
Dinosaur Gum

bull3964 posted:

Our Pure arrays have been amazing.
Yeah, ours have been pretty stellar.

Tev
Aug 13, 2008
Echoing the love for Pure, a handful of my customers are using them and they are all really happy with their choice.

Spring Heeled Jack
Feb 25, 2007

If you can read this you can read
Are these Pure arrays hybrid or all-flash? Due to our budget we would most likely be looking to hybrid to meet our capacity needs.

anthonypants
May 6, 2007

by Nyc_Tattoo
Dinosaur Gum

Spring Heeled Jack posted:

Are these Pure arrays hybrid or all-flash? Due to our budget we would most likely be looking to hybrid to meet our capacity needs.
All flash. You should get them anyway.

bull3964
Nov 18, 2000

DO YOU HEAR THAT? THAT'S THE SOUND OF ME PATTING MYSELF ON THE BACK.


I just love how simple they are. Pure takes care of them themselves if you are under support contact.

Need a firmware update? Open up remote assist and grab a beer.

Capacity expansion is also as easy.

We once had a weird edge case issue with one of our SSDs in the middle of the night when one of the io paths became intermittent. I woke up the next day with an email from Pure saying "Hey, an SSD was dodgy and we sent out a new one. In the meantime we failed out that drive and dynamically reconfigured the raid set so that you still had the same amount of parity AND still had the same number of hot spares to guard against sudden drive failures, you just lost a little unused capacity."

Drive got replaced and the capacity came back.

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


If you want to satisfy a SAM fan and at the same time increase the usability of your actually-useful backup system, use veeam instant restore on a storage-optimized repository system with a good network card

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


Also, block spiceworks at your edge

Like reddit, it's blind-leading-blind malware for your brain

Smashing Link
Jul 8, 2003

I'll keep chucking bombs at you til you fall off that ledge!
Grimey Drawer
Anyone have experience with hosting/accessing VMs on Synology boxes? I just spun up Mint but cannot figure out how to connect to it through a client other than through the DSM interface?

Kachunkachunk
Jun 6, 2011
You're running Mint as a VM on a Synology, it sounds like?

I suppose you have to look at the Open-vSwitch configuration and see if the VM is bridged and pingable from whatever setup you have. Maybe it picked up a DHCP address, at least? Those are my expectations, anyway.
If the Synology is providing NAT, you have some hurdles ahead of you, but I doubt this is the case.

Either way I'm not too familiar with running VMs on a Syno, though, and will be learning from your other responses. : /

Also, vSAN is pretty great in 6.7. And if you want FTT=2 without lovely consumption costs, you probably want to only do that with All-Flash setups which can do deduplication, compression, and RAID6, etc. The pessimistic replies earlier are warranted for older releases of vSAN and hybrid setups. Which unfortunately I think that initial vx-rail proposal was, too.

Pure Storage is pretty great, and so are the people behind it. They're definitely competent and responsive/timely in resolving their bugs/problems from my experience.

Smashing Link
Jul 8, 2003

I'll keep chucking bombs at you til you fall off that ledge!
Grimey Drawer

Kachunkachunk posted:

You're running Mint as a VM on a Synology, it sounds like?

I suppose you have to look at the Open-vSwitch configuration and see if the VM is bridged and pingable from whatever setup you have. Maybe it picked up a DHCP address, at least? Those are my expectations, anyway.
If the Synology is providing NAT, you have some hurdles ahead of you, but I doubt this is the case.


Thanks for the reply! I did turn on Open vSwitch but I can't see any configuration options inside the DSM. The VM did pick up a DHCP address. Right now I am forwarding all my ports from my router to my Synology box...do I need to turn that off and forward VNC ports to the VM?

Kachunkachunk
Jun 6, 2011
Only question first, is if the IP that the VM picked up is from your LAN's DHCP server, or if it's an IP provided by the Synology. If the former, and you can ping it from your LAN, then yeah, forward to that VM's IP (consider giving it a static one if you're making it a server of sorts, or setting up a static lease in DHCP if that's your flavor).
If it's the latter, then you're probably NATting after all, and will need to forward to one of the Synology's IPs and then forward again from within Disk Station's Open-vSwitch config somewhere. I again don't think this is the case, though, it depends on what IP you picked up. I don't have Open-vSwitch or run VMs from my Synology so this is where we'd take to the Internet or some other goon experience.

Smashing Link
Jul 8, 2003

I'll keep chucking bombs at you til you fall off that ledge!
Grimey Drawer
Yep it's got a static IP from the LAN now - can ping and SSH in but no luck with VNCing in. From the web it does look like Synology is using noVNC (and the link VMM connects you to the VM with includes webman/3rdparty/Virtualization/noVNC/vnc.html) but can't seem to connect with a VNC client at port 5900 from either inside the LAN or outside. Will keep fiddling.

edit: Nevermind, I'm stupid. noVNC is browser only. That's good enough for me. Thanks for the help though.

Smashing Link fucked around with this message at 19:29 on May 19, 2018

Kachunkachunk
Jun 6, 2011
Nice, glad you got it sorted. Which unit is this? I didn't bother setting up VMs on my DS1517+ because I wasn't confident it would have enough CPU resources (decent amount of RAM, though). Sounds like you might have one of the fancier RS/rack units? Do you use Synology HA?

Smashing Link
Jul 8, 2003

I'll keep chucking bombs at you til you fall off that ledge!
Grimey Drawer
It's a 1515+ but I upgraded the RAM to 16GB. Gave the VM 4GB of RAM :shrug:

I am waiting for it to die due to the Atom bug but it seems to be holding on for now.

Fruit Smoothies
Mar 28, 2004

The bat with a ZING
Cross-post with Enterprise Windows Server:

I have a CSV based on a three-way mirror using storage spaces direct. These three physical servers also need to host HA HyperV guests. When configuring the hosts to point to the VHDX files, can I use C:\ClusterStorage\file.vhdx, or do I need to have a SoFS and reference them \\cluser\share\file.vhdx?

I only ask because during a migration, one physical server went down (!!!) and the migration (on another server) failed when referencing C:\ClusterStorage. This strikes me as odd, as I would have predicted the three-way mirror meant that the migration should continue regardless of if one node goes down?

Cheers

Potato Salad
Oct 23, 2014

nobody cares


Pretty sure you're supposed to use mount points for drives on clusters; I'm not using S2D for hyper-v specifically, though, so someone else may chime in here.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


I think you do reference C:\Whatever on each host and the fact they are cluster shared volumes is meant to look after everything else.

What’s the rest of your cluster like? Does live migration work without errors?

Fruit Smoothies
Mar 28, 2004

The bat with a ZING
Apparently, due to network loopbacks, storing on the C:\cluster is the way forward. Thanks guys

some kinda jackal
Feb 25, 2003

 
 
Is Proxmox still the recommended poor man's VMware? I'm tired of paying for vSphere at home and the only feature which keeps me from going to bare free hypervisor is the fact that I deploy templates a lot.

I'm waffling between oVirt and Proxmox. I like the idea of oVirt being a RedHat product since I'm sort of aligning all my systems in that direction, but Proxmox seems much more "here's some good virtualization with minimum setup/trouble" which is kind of what I'm hoping for. I want to think as little about configuring the underlying infrastructure as possible, which VMware was pretty good at in a basic one-node setup.

BallerBallerDillz
Jun 11, 2009

Cock, Rules, Everything, Around, Me
Scratchmo
fwiw I had a real difficult time getting a single node ovirt environment set up and running. I've only used proxmox a bit but from my limited experience with both, I'd recommend proxmox unless you really need multi site clusters with fail over and some of the other advanced enterprise features you can get from ovirt.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
VMUG Advantage gives you NFR licenses (and other benefits). Or I mean for home lab stuff, just look on pastebin.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer

BallerBallerDillz posted:

fwiw I had a real difficult time getting a single node ovirt environment set up and running. I've only used proxmox a bit but from my limited experience with both, I'd recommend proxmox unless you really need multi site clusters with fail over and some of the other advanced enterprise features you can get from ovirt.
I hosed around with ovirt a lot in the past. The first 3 or 4 times I tried to get a single node cluster running it was poo poo, but I learned a few "gotchas" from retrying and once I had it up, was able to expand my single node cluster to 2 nodes easily. It worked well, just a really steep learning curve. If you need a single node, I don't know why you wouldn't use vmware, but ovirt did ultimately live up to my expectations.

some kinda jackal
Feb 25, 2003

 
 
I mean, I have a few reasons. Cost is one, I’m trying not to be a huge pirate these days so I’m trying to be legit. I’m tired of needing a huge footprint VCSA server just to be able to deploy templates.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had VMware running flawlessly for the past three years with no hiccups and I love it, but I’m about to refresh my setup and I was thinking I could try something different. I may still stay with VMware, who knows. I’m at the point right now where I have the luxury of flushing everything without too much trouble.

The alternative is that I stay with VMware, possibly kill vcsa and invest time in a nice automation setup to spin up systems using kickstarts and such.

I’ve been fighting with oVirt myself, only finally being able to get a self-hosted setup running today. I had to do some ugly ugly hacking like exporting an nfs share from the node to .. itself, because the oVirt-node image apparently can’t just run the engine, it has to deploy a hosted-engine VM. It seems to be alright but I’ll probably give proxmox a try tomorrow.

some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Jun 19, 2018

Docjowles
Apr 9, 2009

Check out the free XenServer version.

Citrix recently crippled the heck out of the free edition, but I think for a single-node home lab, it would still be perfectly fine. You can create and deploy all the templates you want, and it's pretty trivial to install and get going.

I should add that I run XenServer in production, and don't particularly like it. There's lots of weird bugs around live VM migrations (which are no longer supported in the free edition anyway). And understanding which mode to run your VM in for best performance is the subject of much debate (PV? HVM? PVHVM? PVH? PV with HVM? All of these are very different things, but Xen reused the same letters over and over for no reason, lol!) But none of that poo poo is going to matter for your use case.

You may want a Windows machine somewhere to run the XenCenter management GUI. But it's not mandatory. You can do everything from the CLI or even REST API if you're willing to learn it.

Docjowles fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Jun 19, 2018

Hughlander
May 11, 2005

Martytoof posted:

Is Proxmox still the recommended poor man's VMware? I'm tired of paying for vSphere at home and the only feature which keeps me from going to bare free hypervisor is the fact that I deploy templates a lot.

I'm waffling between oVirt and Proxmox. I like the idea of oVirt being a RedHat product since I'm sort of aligning all my systems in that direction, but Proxmox seems much more "here's some good virtualization with minimum setup/trouble" which is kind of what I'm hoping for. I want to think as little about configuring the underlying infrastructure as possible, which VMware was pretty good at in a basic one-node setup.

I recommend it for sure. Good zfs support, Use an LXC for a docker engine host and have 100% of the resources available.

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

Martytoof posted:


I’ve been fighting with oVirt myself, only finally being able to get a self-hosted setup running today. I had to do some ugly ugly hacking like exporting an nfs share from the node to .. itself, because the oVirt-node image apparently can’t just run the engine, it has to deploy a hosted-engine VM. It seems to be alright but I’ll probably give proxmox a try tomorrow.

I'm actually the maintainer of oVirt Node and oVirt Appliance, so I can speak to this...

ovirt-hosted-engine-setup (which actually bootstraps the self-hosted engine) doesn't support local storage, which is the real killer for single nodes. oVirt Live as a single node is what you'd want.

oVirt is predicated on the idea of being "datacenter management" for historical reasons, and almost none of our users are on single hosts (or using local storage). There was an effort to dockerize oVirt about 4 years ago, but as it turns out, no users actually wanted to do this, so we mostly stopped development. It lives on in ovirt-containers, but doesn't see much use these days.

ovirt-hosted-engine-setup relies on the same backend code as any other storage domain in oVirt, and has 2 daemons plus sanlock to arbitrate bringing the engine up or migrating it, since the engine is essentially a single point of failure (vdsm, which is the utility which handles mapping oVirt to libvirt and system configuration) maps everything to the engine API.

That said, if you want a single system and you want to skip both oVirt Live and ovirt-hosted-engine-setup (which won't work without shared storage), you can set it up yourself on local storage.

Grab the appliance (yum -y install ovirt-engine-appliance) and yank the qcow off to another location. Add a user (saslpasswd2 -a libvirt martyoof) and use this to create a VM using the qcow and a cloud-init image (vdsm enforces sasl for libvirt). Run "engine-setup" on the VM.

This won't let you scale out if you want to, but if you get to that point, you can dump the engine DB (engine-backup) and import it to a hosted engine on shared storage when you add more hosts and shared storage.

More complex than proxmox, definitely. Use oVirt Live.

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Mr Shiny Pants
Nov 12, 2012

Martytoof posted:

Is Proxmox still the recommended poor man's VMware? I'm tired of paying for vSphere at home and the only feature which keeps me from going to bare free hypervisor is the fact that I deploy templates a lot.

I'm waffling between oVirt and Proxmox. I like the idea of oVirt being a RedHat product since I'm sort of aligning all my systems in that direction, but Proxmox seems much more "here's some good virtualization with minimum setup/trouble" which is kind of what I'm hoping for. I want to think as little about configuring the underlying infrastructure as possible, which VMware was pretty good at in a basic one-node setup.

Regular KVM with Virtual Machine manager also works pretty well.

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