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So we're going to be replacing some older infrastructure stuff, and we're trying to virtualize everything. I'm really only planning on virutalizing about 4 physical servers, none with any kind of heavy IO load at all. Think basic windows stuff, file/print share, DC, low usage IIS and WSUS. We're a HP shop so am I off base in thinking 2x DL360's with a LeftHand iSCSI SAN is a good starting point? We can tweak the actual specifications of the hardware such as cores and RAM. We do have some larger EMC SAN's so EMC isn't out of the question but I'm not familiar with their smaller offerings.
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May 9, 2012 18:24
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Frozen-Solid posted:Anyone that doesn't have fun naming their servers is doing it wrong Not to be a hater, but that's cute in smaller environments, but I worked with someone who named their servers after candy.. like Twix, Snickers, Rolo, etc. Funny and cute when you have 5 servers. We had over 100. Not so much fun trying to track that fucker down in a rack. Maybe I'm getting old and grumpy, but I much prefer functional names these days.
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May 17, 2012 16:07
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I try to make each character name fit the role of the server.
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Is there any real concern about virtualizing your domain controllers and going 100% virtualized? I've never done it but I'm kinda wondering if we could just put everything on ESXi - or would I regret that for some untold reason? There's certain scenarios it might be beneficial to have a physical DC hanging around just in case, but you should be OK in a HA environment. I attended a Hyper-V thing put on by Microsoft, and the guy there was telling a story about how he had a Hyper-V cluster setup, and both DC's inside the cluster. The cluster went down....and well it didn't come back up. So they recommended leaving a DC outside the cluster. We're Virtualizing all our DC's...but the odds of a complete AD meltdown is practically nil. Both redundant WAN links would have to go down, and there would have to be a catastrophic SAN failure.
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Jun 13, 2012 21:14
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Well I'm part of a global company, so we have about 9 different physical locations with 2 DC's each across the world, but as far as a local AD outage, yeah, both WAN links and the entire SAN would have to crash. AD would be fine in other locations, an extended outage would require another site grabbing the FSMO roles, but short of the world ending we're covered.
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Jun 13, 2012 22:57
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Nukelear v.2 posted:I know next to nothing about HyperV but doesn't it use Windows clustering, which requires AD? While I only have a cursory understanding of Hyper-V clustering, this seems to be true. Both DC's were on the HV cluster, the cluster went down and couldn't come back up because there was no available DC's. So now they leave 1 DC outside of the cluster on a different Hyper-V host. An interesting gotcha. The guy at the MS Event also touched on their newer datacenter here in San Antonio which I found interesting. He claims there are only 4 admins that work there.. The rest of the people are facilities and security. It's almost completely automated with System Center 2012, holds 140,000 servers running an average of 10VM's each. The datacenter runs at exactly 94 degrees F. and they use over 900,000 gallons a day of grey water to cool the place down. He mentioned many features of System Center 2012 were directly influenced by Microsoft's own issues trying to manage their datacenters. I thought they put it here because our city power company has some of the lowest rates around and we are fairly insulated from most natural disasters. According to this guy it was the ability to get the grey water from the city that pushed the decision over. He mentioned that hardware failure was under 3% even running at 94% and the savings in cooling costs outweighed the increased hardware costs by many factors.
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Jun 14, 2012 17:38
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That server isn't worth the electricity it takes to run much less 250 bucks. You can find newer models of servers on ebay for that price. If you want a cheap server that will run ESXi just fine, try to find an off lease HP DL380 Gen5. Solid little boxes and there should be plenty of off lease models being listed. I just checked ebay and saw serviceable units from 199 to 999 dollars depending on how many drives and how much ram you want. As with anything IT, whats your budget?
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Jun 19, 2012 16:55
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evil_bunnY posted:Hehehehehe Waiting for someone to catch that. Now the question is was that posted ironically or not.
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Jul 22, 2012 01:05
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CSParsons posted:I'm having a hard time finding what I would guess would be a product that exists. Probably not with your own licensing. I know there's limitations with some licenses that prevent that stuff.
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Jul 25, 2012 17:03
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Misogynist posted:Are you bottlenecking on CPU speed? It's by far the least utilized resource in our environment. We average about 20-25% across the cluster. Great point. All our VMWare clusters run at 10 to 15% CPU but 50 to 80% RAM utilization. We're definitively RAM limited and I would imagine people are as well.
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Jul 27, 2012 19:34
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It is hard to get established folks on the track that bigger is not always better. All our hosts are nothing but DL360 1U boxes with dual quad or 6 cores and 144GB of RAM.
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Jul 27, 2012 20:41
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Corvettefisher posted:There are some rumors that 5.1 ups the RAM entitlements, however they are just rumors at this point As a predominately MS shop, Server 2012 Datacenter makes a compelling price argument.
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Jul 27, 2012 21:26
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Find a consultant that's done this before. I've looked at VDI and Thin Clients before and there's just so many gotchas in setting up an environment you really need a skilled consultant that's done it before. Last time I really looked at the numbers, Citrix was the most expensive. VMWare View is pretty nice these days, or you can go straight Microsoft Remote Desktop Services (RDS is the new name for Terminal Services). MS VDI with all the new R2 improvements is supposedly not terrible and much cheaper than laying VMWare or Citrix licenses over the MS licenses. Sizing the back end is the hardest part. If 30 nurses all show up and log on at 7AM you need to make sure the backend doesn't poo poo itself.
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Aug 10, 2012 16:46
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how many people, and what kind of workload are you looking at?
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Aug 10, 2012 18:36
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Mierdaan posted:Have to wonder if anyone actually bought the ~21 Enterprise Plus CPU licenses for their 2TB hosts and is kicking themselves now... Someone in this situation will get taken care of I'm sure.
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Aug 24, 2012 01:54
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cheese-cube posted:Sorry I should have clarified that I was talking about a Windows Server based DHCP and DNS server. For non domain joined machines.. yes. In a 100% Windows domain environment you don't need to enable that as domain joined machines will reach out and automatically register themselves with the DNS server. I had to turn this on at one of my engineering sites so their Linux hostnames would populate in DNS.
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Oct 15, 2012 19:55
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OK guys, need a little help. Our main VMWare guy is leaving in a month, I have a solid understanding on how Virtualization works, can do basic administrative tasks in VCenter, etc, but I need to get into the nuts and bolts of this poo poo in case something goes wrong. We have Premium support or whatever for all our production stuff, and believe it or not there's money for training. I'm a MS guy though, so my VMWare experience is limited. Besides the Lowe book what other books should I purchase? I can swing a training class up to a week long, which one should I go for? Any recommendations? My thoughts are to pick up the Lowe Mastering VSphere 5 book and the official VCP5 cert guide books and then take the vSphere: Install Configure & Manage course.
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Oct 18, 2012 20:50
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BangersInMyKnickers posted:Was your VMware guy also managing the network configuration and/or storage systems? You're going to need to bone up on those since more likely than not those will be the things that bite you in the butt, especially if they were done wrong and you need to fix it. The EMC SAN is FC and managed by my boss. Shouldn't be on my radar for a while I hope. Mierdaan posted:^^ absolutely. I'll check this out. I looked at it, but it mentioned extended hours and I have a hard stop at 5PM most days to get the kids. If I take it in East Coast time though it might work.
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Oct 18, 2012 21:14
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Misogynist posted:Your employer is looking at paying $5500 for the course but you can't get a babysitter for a few hours out of one week? Oh I could, I just like picking my kids up from daycare and spending time with them. 5:30 to 9:30PM is kiddo time, I try to avoid anything work related between these hours.
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Oct 18, 2012 21:23
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Misogynist posted:It's really not a huge issue if the training is close to you, hours typically run 8:00 to 6:00 with a short lunch in the middle. I'd probably do this Online Live... I'm not seeing an in person class here in San Antonio anytime for the rest of the year. I did my SCCM training with that Online Live format and it wasn't terrible. Lots of downtime though waiting for other folks to roll through the labs. 2 Grand is a big price difference for the extra 10 hours of instruction.
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Oct 18, 2012 22:41
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Great info to know. Thanks!
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Oct 18, 2012 23:18
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You'll be getting 12 dollars an hour to fix it right? Sorry CF, I couldn't resist. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 19, 2012 22:34
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do any of those let you pop a tab out of the main window like chrome does with a browser tab? I used to use VisionApp Remote Desktop (old free 1.5 version) but now I find myself with 2 or 3 remote sessions open at once across my sea of monitors.
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Nov 2, 2012 18:52
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Anyone have any experience with running ESXi from a SD Card on HP DL3xx G8 servers? I'm assuming it works well as long as you stick to supported cards. Any gotchas? We have a remote office in another country where hard drives are stupid expensive and could save quite a bit of money by not having the ESXi hosts with local drives. Boot from SAN is another option, but I'd like to explore the SD card first.
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Jan 23, 2013 00:35
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It's been a while, as we stopped using our RSA system, but I think if you can get the original seed file for your token you can install the soft token in multiple places. I recall having the softtoken on my laptop and my phone and either one could be used.
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Feb 12, 2013 06:39
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Our cluster is having major issues, been on the phone with VMWare support most of today, another guy is taking a crack at it right now. 2 hosts just show up disconnected from vsphere. The VM's are still running and accessible but VMWare support is telling us to manually shut down all VM's and hard reboot the hosts. It's a last resort option right now, there's 3 SQL servers on there among other servers. One host isn't even responsive on the console... bleh.
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Feb 16, 2013 02:02
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I don't know how, but basically some old LUN's from our previous SAN showed back up somewhere/somehow causing an All Paths Down issue.
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Feb 18, 2013 16:25
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Anyone have an easy way to calculate how much a VM costs? It doesn't have to be accurate for chargeback purchases, more of a 'look VM's aren't free and can't just be provisioned willy nilly'. Is there an accepted formula? Say my main cluster has about 600K of expenses tied up into it and someone wants 12 average sized VM's.
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May 1, 2013 19:36
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I guess that answers a question I had. Going to be installing ESXi on a DL360G8p, and wasn't sure if I would be better off using vanilla ESXi or the HP branded ISO. Seems the HP one is the way to go.
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Jun 12, 2013 20:51
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What's the best way to migrate a massive amount of data? I have 1.4TB of data in a VM, and it needs to move from a west coast datacenter to the east coast. Wan links are 45mbit. I have all the goodies that come from VMware, Veeam, or external hdd and priority overnight shipping at our disposal.
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Jun 17, 2013 18:52
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Moey posted:How saturated is that 45mbit link already? I think using Veeam Zip for a one time backup to external then mailing it would be dead simple. Probably averages at 10% util during most days. The only problem is business is going to push back for any kind of major downtime which is going to make this tough. We could do it over the weekend probably, but 1.4TB over 45mbit will take ~75 hours in perfect conditions. It's a poo poo ton of SQL data though, so maybe it'll compress really well.
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Jun 17, 2013 19:06
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I don't manage the Veeam stuff here, but I talked to the guy that does, they moved 350TB over the WAN in like 4 hours. Veeam pulled almost 7x deduplication. Knocked down 350GB to 53.8GB. Pretty neat poo poo, I should learn more about this. The 1.4TB is closer to 450GB of actual data, so we shouldn't have a problem getting this done even overnight.
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Jun 18, 2013 18:28
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FISHMANPET posted:Yeah, I think my dream job would be consulting or MSP where I get to come in and build nice stuff from scratch then leave other people to run it, occasionally coming in to check up on it and stuff. Yeah you want work for a VAR or to be an implementation engineer or something. You should know by now MSP= Shoestring budget and busted rear end equipment.
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Jun 26, 2013 00:36
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Can't advise on your environment since we don't have a good picture of it, but tell EMC you're going to go talk to Exagrid to see what they have and they'll shut up. They talk tough, but usually fold when it comes down to getting a check or not. They dicked us around on maintenance on our DD units, so we said screw it, cancel it, and they came back.
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Jun 28, 2013 01:13
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drat, I thought I was getting a steal at 219 for my course this fall.
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Jul 8, 2013 21:16
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Martytoof posted:That's still a really good price. Online? Nah, local community college system here in San Antonio got a decent sized NSF grant to teach Virtualization courses. They have Hyper-V, VMware, and OpenStack next semester. I'm taking it as a Continuing Ed student. Unfortunately my Tuesday night for 4 months is booked, but it'll be worth it I hope
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Jul 9, 2013 15:39
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Wicaeed posted:For those in the know, how quickly can VMware become prohibitively expensive? Throw that poo poo in Amazon. We moved something simlar to AWS, and we're saving assloads of money. Bring it up... test... bring it down. pay by the hour.
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Jul 11, 2013 20:08
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Your budget is low. The VMware license alone is going to run you close to 20K. List on that MD3600 with dual controllers and 12 drives is about 22K. You might get 40% off that. I didn't even estimate the servers, but those are at least 8K each as well. Haven't touched networking and you're at 60K already. You can save a ton by going with a Standard Acceleration kit. 10GB networking isn't needed either for your workload, I would stick with the 1G.
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Aug 2, 2013 17:53
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three posted:What if you mash 0 repeatedly then say its a production-down issue to the operator? If you're not paying for a TAM and BCS or MCS levels of support they'll probably just take your case and tell you to expect a callback like everyone else. We don't have an EMC TAM, but we do with Microsoft and it's so nice having our TAM raise holy hell if there's an issue.
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Aug 5, 2013 21:09
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Quick networking question.... I'm out of my depth here. What's the best way to setup the iSCSI network for the following config.. At this point I'm just looking for failover, no teaming or anything, although I wouldn't be opposed to it. Bringing up a single ESXi host connected over GigE iSCSI to a VNXe SAN. Config: Server has 8 ethernet ports, vmnic0-7 SAN is configured to use 2 ethernet ports on each storage processor (They're mirrored, so the config on eth2 and eth3 on SPA is the same on SPB and only act as fail over). Right now I have 8 total ethernet connections going to a non routable iSCSI only VLAN. From the SAN eth2 is configured with .20 IP, and eth3 is configured as .21. 4 ports total, 2 for Storage Processor A, and 2 for B for failover. From the host, I have vmnic 0,1,4,5 physically connected to the iSCSI VLAN. Right now only vmnic4 is configured, vmkernel port on vSwitch1. I can see the storage and everything looks happy with green check marks. Where I'm getting lost is how to bring the other 3 into the fold as standby/failover connections. Do I just add the additional adapters to the vSwitch? If I do that, the iSCSI initiator yells about something being not compliant.
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Aug 14, 2013 17:23
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drat man, thanks for taking the time to reply with a very informative post. Much appreciated.
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Aug 14, 2013 18:03
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