Domain Controller Down (VM)
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@DustinB3403 said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
what advantages do you get from dedicated hardware that aren't present with a virtual environment
Storage, compute nodes, RDMA, etc
I get all of those with virtual.
And it's a waste for them to be virtualized.
What? Virtualization is an "always" for really important reasons. Safer, more reliable, better support, better stability, fewer caveats, better support options, lower cost for both parties, more flexibility... all things that are pretty important for production systems.
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Don't need to. They don't support every OS at that level either, right? You support at least one. That you can't support "all" doesn't matter. They lack ANY production deployment scenario at this point. Not just limited ones.
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@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@DustinB3403 said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
what advantages do you get from dedicated hardware that aren't present with a virtual environment
Storage, compute nodes, RDMA, etc
I get all of those with virtual.
And it's a waste for them to be virtualized.
What? Virtualization is an "always" for really important reasons. Safer, more reliable, better support, better stability, fewer caveats, better support options, lower cost for both parties, more flexibility... all things that are pretty important for production systems.
No it's not. It makes no sense to virtualize a system like that when at bare metal you're pegging the system at 100%. I can re-kickstart the system in the same amount of time it takes to copy the image back onto the hypervisor.
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
If you're running on something using PV drivers that they don't understand...
Then your critical app vendor is below the home line. THAT'S how scary this should be to companies.
When your "business critical support" lacks the knowledge and skills of your first year help desk people, you need to be worried about their ability to support. Sure, when nothing goes wrong, everything is fine. But if anything goes wrong, you are suggesting these people don't have even the most rudimentary knowledge of systems today. That's worrisome. And it's why so many systems simply have no support options - relying on software and hardware that is out of support meaning that while the app might call itself supported, they depend on non-production systems making the whole thing out of support by extension.
So when running with a preallocated qcow2 image, which caching mode do you use for your disk? Writethrough, writeback, directsync, none?
What about IO mode? native, threads, default?
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Build your own qcow2 image, this way you can set the options specific to the software you plan to run.
Your argument here is "no one can support all of the settings" but if you have a qcow2 image, presumably it's coming from the vendor in a configuration that is supported / supportable.
Why else would they release it...
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@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Don't need to. They don't support every OS at that level either, right? You support at least one. That you can't support "all" doesn't matter. They lack ANY production deployment scenario at this point. Not just limited ones.
Hold the phone - this whole thing started because Dustin says that no vendor should be able to demand what hypervisor you can or can't use. (FYI - I don't agree with Dustin, it's just where this started).
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
If you're running on something using PV drivers that they don't understand...
Then your critical app vendor is below the home line. THAT'S how scary this should be to companies.
When your "business critical support" lacks the knowledge and skills of your first year help desk people, you need to be worried about their ability to support. Sure, when nothing goes wrong, everything is fine. But if anything goes wrong, you are suggesting these people don't have even the most rudimentary knowledge of systems today. That's worrisome. And it's why so many systems simply have no support options - relying on software and hardware that is out of support meaning that while the app might call itself supported, they depend on non-production systems making the whole thing out of support by extension.
So when running with a preallocated qcow2 image, which caching mode do you use for your disk? Writethrough, writeback, directsync, none?
What about IO mode? native, threads, default?
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Also, none of those things need to be supported by the app vendor. They just need to support the app and stop looking for meaningless excuses to block support. I understand some vendors want to support all the way down the stack, but if they don't know how to do that with virtualization, they don't know how to do it. The skills to support the stack would give them the skills to do it virtually even better (fewer variables.) So that logic doesn't hold up.
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@DustinB3403 said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
If you're running on something using PV drivers that they don't understand...
Then your critical app vendor is below the home line. THAT'S how scary this should be to companies.
When your "business critical support" lacks the knowledge and skills of your first year help desk people, you need to be worried about their ability to support. Sure, when nothing goes wrong, everything is fine. But if anything goes wrong, you are suggesting these people don't have even the most rudimentary knowledge of systems today. That's worrisome. And it's why so many systems simply have no support options - relying on software and hardware that is out of support meaning that while the app might call itself supported, they depend on non-production systems making the whole thing out of support by extension.
So when running with a preallocated qcow2 image, which caching mode do you use for your disk? Writethrough, writeback, directsync, none?
What about IO mode? native, threads, default?
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Build your own qcow2 image, this way you can set the options specific to the software you plan to run.
Your argument here is "no one can support all of the settings" but if you have a qcow2 image, presumably it's coming from the vendor in a configuration that is supported / supportable.
Why else would they release it...
Yes that's what I'm saying. A qcow2 image you set up.
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@Dashrender said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Don't need to. They don't support every OS at that level either, right? You support at least one. That you can't support "all" doesn't matter. They lack ANY production deployment scenario at this point. Not just limited ones.
Hold the phone - this whole thing started because Dustin says that no vendor should be able to demand what hypervisor you can or can't use. (FYI - I don't agree with Dustin, it's just where this started).
I never saw that, only that they don't support any production deployment (virtualization) whatsoever.
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@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
If you're running on something using PV drivers that they don't understand...
Then your critical app vendor is below the home line. THAT'S how scary this should be to companies.
When your "business critical support" lacks the knowledge and skills of your first year help desk people, you need to be worried about their ability to support. Sure, when nothing goes wrong, everything is fine. But if anything goes wrong, you are suggesting these people don't have even the most rudimentary knowledge of systems today. That's worrisome. And it's why so many systems simply have no support options - relying on software and hardware that is out of support meaning that while the app might call itself supported, they depend on non-production systems making the whole thing out of support by extension.
So when running with a preallocated qcow2 image, which caching mode do you use for your disk? Writethrough, writeback, directsync, none?
What about IO mode? native, threads, default?
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Also, none of those things need to be supported by the app vendor. They just need to support the app and stop looking for meaningless excuses to block support. I understand some vendors want to support all the way down the stack, but if they don't know how to do that with virtualization, they don't know how to do it. The skills to support the stack would give them the skills to do it virtually even better (fewer variables.) So that logic doesn't hold up.
You still haven't provided a single healthcare vendor that does any of what you say is appropriate.
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@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@Dashrender said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Don't need to. They don't support every OS at that level either, right? You support at least one. That you can't support "all" doesn't matter. They lack ANY production deployment scenario at this point. Not just limited ones.
Hold the phone - this whole thing started because Dustin says that no vendor should be able to demand what hypervisor you can or can't use. (FYI - I don't agree with Dustin, it's just where this started).
I never saw that, only that they don't support any production deployment (virtualization) whatsoever.
No, it was that they only supported VMware.
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
If you're running on something using PV drivers that they don't understand...
Then your critical app vendor is below the home line. THAT'S how scary this should be to companies.
When your "business critical support" lacks the knowledge and skills of your first year help desk people, you need to be worried about their ability to support. Sure, when nothing goes wrong, everything is fine. But if anything goes wrong, you are suggesting these people don't have even the most rudimentary knowledge of systems today. That's worrisome. And it's why so many systems simply have no support options - relying on software and hardware that is out of support meaning that while the app might call itself supported, they depend on non-production systems making the whole thing out of support by extension.
So when running with a preallocated qcow2 image, which caching mode do you use for your disk? Writethrough, writeback, directsync, none?
What about IO mode? native, threads, default?
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Also, none of those things need to be supported by the app vendor. They just need to support the app and stop looking for meaningless excuses to block support. I understand some vendors want to support all the way down the stack, but if they don't know how to do that with virtualization, they don't know how to do it. The skills to support the stack would give them the skills to do it virtually even better (fewer variables.) So that logic doesn't hold up.
You still haven't provided a single healthcare vendor that does any of what you say is appropriate.
We don't work in healthcare, so why would we know the vendors. The point is that software should be supportable in it's environment (hypervisor agnostic)
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@Dashrender said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Don't need to. They don't support every OS at that level either, right? You support at least one. That you can't support "all" doesn't matter. They lack ANY production deployment scenario at this point. Not just limited ones.
Hold the phone - this whole thing started because Dustin says that no vendor should be able to demand what hypervisor you can or can't use. (FYI - I don't agree with Dustin, it's just where this started).
I never saw that, only that they don't support any production deployment (virtualization) whatsoever.
No, it was that they only supported VMware.
Yep - John that helped @wirestyle22 said that the vendor for the EHR only supported VMWare - and then this exploded this morning when I mentioned that same fact.
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
No it's not. It makes no sense to virtualize a system like that when at bare metal you're pegging the system at 100%. I can re-kickstart the system in the same amount of time it takes to copy the image back onto the hypervisor.
If you are pegging the system at 100% you need a bigger system, virtual or physical. No app vendor is selling systems that need resources that can't be virtualized. The only market for that is latency, not capacity, based and all latency sensitive apps of that nature that I've ever heard even proposed are bespoke, no vendor support.
Virtualization has effectively zero overhead, if you are at 100% capacity, virtualization isn't your problem. Moving to physical just makes scaling up and solving those problems a little harder. You are assuming failed capacity planning and a lack of support as reasons to have to do more things poorly - making mistakes to justify mistakes.
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@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
No it's not. It makes no sense to virtualize a system like that when at bare metal you're pegging the system at 100%. I can re-kickstart the system in the same amount of time it takes to copy the image back onto the hypervisor.
If you are pegging the system at 100% you need a bigger system, virtual or physical. No app vendor is selling systems that need resources that can't be virtualized. The only market for that is latency, not capacity, based and all latency sensitive apps of that nature that I've ever heard even proposed are bespoke, no vendor support.
Virtualization has effectively zero overhead, if you are at 100% capacity, virtualization isn't your problem. Moving to physical just makes scaling up and solving those problems a little harder. You are assuming failed capacity planning and a lack of support as reasons to have to do more things poorly - making mistakes to justify mistakes.
No we don't need bigger systems. We have jobs that run over 20 nodes (multiple clusters) at 100% each with 256 GB RAM and 20 E7 cores. They take 100% no matter what you run. And they run for as long as 6 months on one calculation. There is no scale issue. I plug the new one in and it's part of the cluster.
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
No we don't need bigger systems. We have jobs that run over 20 nodes (multiple clusters) at 100% each with 256 GB RAM and 20 E7 cores. They take 100% no matter what you run. And they run for as long as 6 months on one calculation. There is no scale issue. I plug the new one in and it's part of the cluster.
Ah, you are using a different type of virtualization. You are using a multi-system virtualization platform. That's different that it is semantically not what people normally mean by virtualization but is covered by what we mean. That's not a server, that's a node in a server. I ran the 10K node compute cluster for a Wall St. firm. That was virtual, but the virtualization was at a higher layer above the individual nodes. Like you have there. It's one cluster, not individual servers.
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
If you're running on something using PV drivers that they don't understand...
Then your critical app vendor is below the home line. THAT'S how scary this should be to companies.
When your "business critical support" lacks the knowledge and skills of your first year help desk people, you need to be worried about their ability to support. Sure, when nothing goes wrong, everything is fine. But if anything goes wrong, you are suggesting these people don't have even the most rudimentary knowledge of systems today. That's worrisome. And it's why so many systems simply have no support options - relying on software and hardware that is out of support meaning that while the app might call itself supported, they depend on non-production systems making the whole thing out of support by extension.
So when running with a preallocated qcow2 image, which caching mode do you use for your disk? Writethrough, writeback, directsync, none?
What about IO mode? native, threads, default?
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Also, none of those things need to be supported by the app vendor. They just need to support the app and stop looking for meaningless excuses to block support. I understand some vendors want to support all the way down the stack, but if they don't know how to do that with virtualization, they don't know how to do it. The skills to support the stack would give them the skills to do it virtually even better (fewer variables.) So that logic doesn't hold up.
You still haven't provided a single healthcare vendor that does any of what you say is appropriate.
I know Greenway didn't have a virtualization plan 3 years ago when we were looking at them. It's why I had to build a ridiculous $100K two server failover system. Today the performance needed could be done for $25k.
The sad thing is that the vendor could not provide any IOPs requirements, etc. They only had this generic hardware requirement.
SQL Dual Proc Xeon 4 cores each two drive boot, 4 drive RAID 10 SQL, 4 drive log
RDS single proc xeon 4 core 2 drive boot, 2 drive data
IIS application dual proc xeon 4 cores each, 2 drive boot, 6 drive RAID 10 data
etc
etc -
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
No we don't need bigger systems. We have jobs that run over 20 nodes (multiple clusters) at 100% each with 256 GB RAM and 20 E7 cores. They take 100% no matter what you run. And they run for as long as 6 months on one calculation. There is no scale issue. I plug the new one in and it's part of the cluster.
Ah, you are using a different type of virtualization. You are using a multi-system virtualization platform. That's different that it is semantically not what people normally mean by virtualization but is covered by what we mean. That's not a server, that's a node in a server. I ran the 10K node compute cluster for a Wall St. firm. That was virtual, but the virtualization was at a higher layer above the individual nodes. Like you have there. It's one cluster, not individual servers.
It's just a job scheduler over the nodes. It's not really virtualization (I guess maybe if you consider the scheduler some kind of virtualization). The master node just runs on whatever we tell it. It can also just run on itself.
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
No we don't need bigger systems. We have jobs that run over 20 nodes (multiple clusters) at 100% each with 256 GB RAM and 20 E7 cores. They take 100% no matter what you run. And they run for as long as 6 months on one calculation. There is no scale issue. I plug the new one in and it's part of the cluster.
That's kind of a scale issue, though. You can get single servers bigger than that that would likely do the calculation in a fraction of the time. Not seconds, still months, but potentially a bit faster and without needing a cluster (and all big iron servers are 100% virtual.) You only have this semi-physical option because you are running below a certain scale and virtualizing at the cluster level.
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@Dashrender said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
If you're running on something using PV drivers that they don't understand...
Then your critical app vendor is below the home line. THAT'S how scary this should be to companies.
When your "business critical support" lacks the knowledge and skills of your first year help desk people, you need to be worried about their ability to support. Sure, when nothing goes wrong, everything is fine. But if anything goes wrong, you are suggesting these people don't have even the most rudimentary knowledge of systems today. That's worrisome. And it's why so many systems simply have no support options - relying on software and hardware that is out of support meaning that while the app might call itself supported, they depend on non-production systems making the whole thing out of support by extension.
So when running with a preallocated qcow2 image, which caching mode do you use for your disk? Writethrough, writeback, directsync, none?
What about IO mode? native, threads, default?
No one can support every hypervisor at that level.
Also, none of those things need to be supported by the app vendor. They just need to support the app and stop looking for meaningless excuses to block support. I understand some vendors want to support all the way down the stack, but if they don't know how to do that with virtualization, they don't know how to do it. The skills to support the stack would give them the skills to do it virtually even better (fewer variables.) So that logic doesn't hold up.
You still haven't provided a single healthcare vendor that does any of what you say is appropriate.
I know Greenway didn't have a virtualization plan 3 years ago when we were looking at them. It's why I had to build a ridiculous $100K two server failover system. Today the performance needed could be done for $25k.
The sad thing is that the vendor could not provide any IOPs requirements, etc. They only had this generic hardware requirement.
SQL Dual Proc Xeon 4 cores each two drive boot, 4 drive RAID 10 SQL, 4 drive log
RDS single proc xeon 4 core 2 drive boot, 2 drive data
IIS application dual proc xeon 4 cores each, 2 drive boot, 6 drive RAID 10 data
etc
etcBecause... no support
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
No we don't need bigger systems. We have jobs that run over 20 nodes (multiple clusters) at 100% each with 256 GB RAM and 20 E7 cores. They take 100% no matter what you run. And they run for as long as 6 months on one calculation. There is no scale issue. I plug the new one in and it's part of the cluster.
Ah, you are using a different type of virtualization. You are using a multi-system virtualization platform. That's different that it is semantically not what people normally mean by virtualization but is covered by what we mean. That's not a server, that's a node in a server. I ran the 10K node compute cluster for a Wall St. firm. That was virtual, but the virtualization was at a higher layer above the individual nodes. Like you have there. It's one cluster, not individual servers.
It's just a job scheduler over the nodes. It's not really virtualization (I guess maybe if you consider the scheduler some kind of virtualization). The master node just runs on whatever we tell it. It can also just run on itself.
But the work is spread out over the different compute nodes, the fact that the main program doesn't care where the compute comes from is what makes this a virtualized setup. Nodes versus servers. i.e. a node is useless on it's own, like a CPU is useless outside the server, but a server is a complete thing, it's usable on it's own.
