What Are You Doing Right Now
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New hire orientation.
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@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
All weekend it is doing a VMware migration from 6.5 to 6.7 on two hosts, not a cluster. Should be SO simple.
As this is VMware, it's over 150 hours of engineering time already. VMware support had to be engaged as we hit a bug in VMware's code that they didn't patch and doesn't get hit very often and it took them hours to figure out once they were engaged.
VMware is a train wreck. If we were doing this on ProxMox, this entire process would have been fifteen minutes, for real.
And we have a green zone. There's no attempt to do this online. This is a powered down process, and VMware can't do it.
Ouch - That doesn't offer much confidence.
Nothing about my real world experience with VMware inspires confidence. Nearly every deployment seems to be done based on emotions or confusion (you mean there are other options? but I've seen ads for this? but it is expensive, it must be good?) so the starting point is bad. And every deployment seems to need to bring in specialized outside help because nobody can manage it on their own. Every aspect of it is 100x harder than with every other product out there. People act like it is easy or well known, but how can every IT shop easily support KVM, Xen or HyperV, but we always have to get brought in as VMware specialists because no one can run patches reliably on ESXi?
Before ESX 7.0.3, I can count the number of times I had to call VMswear for support on one hand.... Heck, one finger. They seriously screwed the pooch on 7.0.3. We had to open several tickets with them about new issues.
They change the driver name for an intel NIC... but didn't check the depenency chain and update those to look to the new driver too. So that causes problems installing things like... Security patches. Go VMswear!
After we got past that hurdle, at some point on the 7.0 branch of ESX, we started seeing file locking issues where DRS would try to migrate a machine to a more suitable host -- which is fine... Except that if the VM is in the middle of a snapshot cleanup, the move will fail and the VM will power down and you can't get it back up until you reboot the original host it was on... Which in our environment here is not a bad thing, just aggravating.
So yeah, I'm not happy with recent editions of VMware. However, KVM and Proxmox (both personal setups) have worked beautifully! Proxmox makes KVM much easier.
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@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
All weekend it is doing a VMware migration from 6.5 to 6.7 on two hosts, not a cluster. Should be SO simple.
As this is VMware, it's over 150 hours of engineering time already. VMware support had to be engaged as we hit a bug in VMware's code that they didn't patch and doesn't get hit very often and it took them hours to figure out once they were engaged.
VMware is a train wreck. If we were doing this on ProxMox, this entire process would have been fifteen minutes, for real.
And we have a green zone. There's no attempt to do this online. This is a powered down process, and VMware can't do it.
Ouch - That doesn't offer much confidence.
Nothing about my real world experience with VMware inspires confidence. Nearly every deployment seems to be done based on emotions or confusion (you mean there are other options? but I've seen ads for this? but it is expensive, it must be good?) so the starting point is bad. And every deployment seems to need to bring in specialized outside help because nobody can manage it on their own. Every aspect of it is 100x harder than with every other product out there. People act like it is easy or well known, but how can every IT shop easily support KVM, Xen or HyperV, but we always have to get brought in as VMware specialists because no one can run patches reliably on ESXi?
Before ESX 7.0.3, I can count the number of times I had to call VMswear for support on one hand.... Heck, one finger. They seriously screwed the pooch on 7.0.3. We had to open several tickets with them about new issues.
They change the driver name for an intel NIC... but didn't check the depenency chain and update those to look to the new driver too. So that causes problems installing things like... Security patches. Go VMswear!
After we got past that hurdle, at some point on the 7.0 branch of ESX, we started seeing file locking issues where DRS would try to migrate a machine to a more suitable host -- which is fine... Except that if the VM is in the middle of a snapshot cleanup, the move will fail and the VM will power down and you can't get it back up until you reboot the original host it was on... Which in our environment here is not a bad thing, just aggravating.
So yeah, I'm not happy with recent editions of VMware. However, KVM and Proxmox (both personal setups) have worked beautifully! Proxmox makes KVM much easier.
The team has been working ALL weekend. Six engineers doing 10-12 hours a day. They've been going for 5+ hours already today. Finally after four days of 60-70 hours of engineering time per day, including Dell / VMware support involved, two simple 6.5 ESXi hosts non-clustered have now been updated to 6.7u3.
So that's about 250 hours of time, so far. The hosts are now up, but the VMs aren't back yet.
I don't understand how any company deploys VMware in this day and age. This is insanity. We told them 60 hours in that we could move them to KVM in a few hours. But they wanted to stay the course, which is fine. But wow. That moving to KVM is SO much easier & more reliable than staying on VMware is a big deal.
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@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Before ESX 7.0.3, I can count the number of times I had to call VMswear for support on one hand.... Heck, one finger. They seriously screwed the pooch on 7.0.3. We had to open several tickets with them about new issues.
This is all ESXi 6. The customer doesn't want to upgrade to 7. Jaja.
So this is, in theory, the "good" Vmware.
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@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
So yeah, I'm not happy with recent editions of VMware. However, KVM and Proxmox (both personal setups) have worked beautifully! Proxmox makes KVM much easier.
Yeah, we have dozens of ProxMox machines currently and it keeps rising as we migrate customers. We do a migration every week or two.
The entire ProxMox farm combined has a fraction of the issues of every, single Vmware server.
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one of the issues that we ran into is apparently a common filesystem corruption problem with 6.5. A key problem with Vmware is that it doesn't have the filesystem reliability of any modern OS.
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Imagine a flaky filesystem in this day and age.
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@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Imagine a flaky filesystem in this day and age.
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@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Before ESX 7.0.3, I can count the number of times I had to call VMswear for support on one hand.... Heck, one finger. They seriously screwed the pooch on 7.0.3. We had to open several tickets with them about new issues.
This is all ESXi 6. The customer doesn't want to upgrade to 7. Jaja.
So this is, in theory, the "good" Vmware.
ROFL! Just don't upgrade them to 7.0.3. Apparently, that's when the problems really got bad.
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@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
one of the issues that we ran into is apparently a common filesystem corruption problem with 6.5. A key problem with Vmware is that it doesn't have the filesystem reliability of any modern OS.
I've run VMware since v2.0 in various forms and have NEVER had file system corruption happen. That's crazy! .... although as of late, I can definitely believe it, lol.
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@dafyre said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
one of the issues that we ran into is apparently a common filesystem corruption problem with 6.5. A key problem with Vmware is that it doesn't have the filesystem reliability of any modern OS.
I've run VMware since v2.0 in various forms and have NEVER had file system corruption happen. That's crazy! .... although as of late, I can definitely believe it, lol.
I had the same feeling. How could a filesystem be bad in this age? And such a simple one!
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tuesday morning. can't get going this morning.
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@siringo said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
tuesday morning. can't get going this morning.
I feel your pain. I've been up since 4am EST (it's now ~7:20 EST)... Still pouring caffeine into me to see if I can get my motivation for the day.
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Packing. We leave for Costa Rica in T Minus 21 hours!
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@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Packing. We leave for Costa Rica in T Minus 21 hours!
anything specific going on there - or vacation?
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@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Packing. We leave for Costa Rica in T Minus 21 hours!
anything specific going on there - or vacation?
Border run.
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@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Packing. We leave for Costa Rica in T Minus 21 hours!
anything specific going on there - or vacation?
Border run.
oh - still not a resident?
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@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@Dashrender said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
Packing. We leave for Costa Rica in T Minus 21 hours!
anything specific going on there - or vacation?
Border run.
oh - still not a resident?
That's many years of process. It takes six months or so just for the US to produce the necessary paperwork to file!
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@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
It takes six months or so just for the US to produce the necessary paperwork to file!
fucking US immigration process is a dumpster fire.
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@JaredBusch said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:
It takes six months or so just for the US to produce the necessary paperwork to file!
fucking US immigration process is a dumpster fire.
Oh yeah, that's even worse. This is ONLY the outbound paperwork. Like apostile of birth records and crap like that.
