Domain Controller Down (VM)
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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.
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@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.
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.
It won't though. This breaks the calculations up so each is manageable. CFD is kind of nuts. The acoustics solves are crazy also. They kind of have to be broken up in pieces.
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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.
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.
It won't though. This breaks the calculations up so each is manageable. CFD is kind of nuts. The acoustics solves are crazy also. They kind of have to be broken up in pieces.
We've done a bit of research on what the highest we can get out of everything is (for single jobs). We are at about the peak right now.
If we have 300 jobs running then we could get more, but we're at about the max right now. (Unless we want to spend a ton of money for very little more performance).
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@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@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
eh? yeah Greenway didn't bother to do the right thing for their customers and have support for hypervisors! Shit, how can they really support their customers on bare metal if they don't know the IOPs requirements, etc? Just keep stabbing hardware until they "get lucky"?
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@Dashrender said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@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
eh? yeah Greenway didn't bother to do the right thing for their customers and have support for hypervisors! Shit, how can they really support their customers on bare metal if they don't know the IOPs requirements, etc? Just keep stabbing hardware until they "get lucky"?
That's my guess. Lacking support of VMs isn't exactly the big issue... it's WHY they lack that support that is the big issue.
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
We've done a bit of research on what the highest we can get out of everything is (for single jobs). We are at about the peak right now.
If we have 300 jobs running then we could get more, but we're at about the max right now. (Unless we want to spend a ton of money for very little more performance).
Have they looked at other architectures like ARM, Power and Sparc? That's often where the big performance boosts are, but not always. It's very workload dependent.
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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):
@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
eh? yeah Greenway didn't bother to do the right thing for their customers and have support for hypervisors! Shit, how can they really support their customers on bare metal if they don't know the IOPs requirements, etc? Just keep stabbing hardware until they "get lucky"?
That's my guess. Lacking support of VMs isn't exactly the big issue... it's WHY they lack that support that is the big issue.
Why the don't support VM's is very important, almost as important as the question of what made them not want to support their application in a VM?
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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):
@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
eh? yeah Greenway didn't bother to do the right thing for their customers and have support for hypervisors! Shit, how can they really support their customers on bare metal if they don't know the IOPs requirements, etc? Just keep stabbing hardware until they "get lucky"?
That's my guess. Lacking support of VMs isn't exactly the big issue... it's WHY they lack that support that is the big issue.
LOL - Short of someone like Epic, from what I can tell, they are mostly software developers, who don't care about the hardware/VM it's running on. They don't approach the software holistically.
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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.
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.
It won't though. This breaks the calculations up so each is manageable. CFD is kind of nuts. The acoustics solves are crazy also. They kind of have to be broken up in pieces.
I understand how it works, that's why we used massive Monte Carlo clusters and such. Some calculations are pretty discrete. but ther eis still cluster coordination overhead.
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@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
We've done a bit of research on what the highest we can get out of everything is (for single jobs). We are at about the peak right now.
If we have 300 jobs running then we could get more, but we're at about the max right now. (Unless we want to spend a ton of money for very little more performance).
Have they looked at other architectures like ARM, Power and Sparc? That's often where the big performance boosts are, but not always. It's very workload dependent.
We used to have a lot of Sparc (still have a lot around), but they found the performance was better on x86. (before my time).
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@Dashrender 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):
@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
eh? yeah Greenway didn't bother to do the right thing for their customers and have support for hypervisors! Shit, how can they really support their customers on bare metal if they don't know the IOPs requirements, etc? Just keep stabbing hardware until they "get lucky"?
That's my guess. Lacking support of VMs isn't exactly the big issue... it's WHY they lack that support that is the big issue.
LOL - Short of someone like Epic, from what I can tell, they are mostly software developers, who don't care about the hardware/VM it's running on. They don't approach the software holistically.
That's just another way of writing... not well supported. If they demand certain hardware but don't know anything about hardware, are they really supporting it or just "not supporting" things.
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@DustinB3403 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):
@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
eh? yeah Greenway didn't bother to do the right thing for their customers and have support for hypervisors! Shit, how can they really support their customers on bare metal if they don't know the IOPs requirements, etc? Just keep stabbing hardware until they "get lucky"?
That's my guess. Lacking support of VMs isn't exactly the big issue... it's WHY they lack that support that is the big issue.
Why the don't support VM's is very important, almost as important as the question of what made them not want to support their application in a VM?
it's because they don't ever support anything other than their own software, most likely - they think the server hardware is magic. it will just do what they want, they don't KNOW they need xyz IOPs, or RAM, etc.
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@Dashrender said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@DustinB3403 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):
@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
eh? yeah Greenway didn't bother to do the right thing for their customers and have support for hypervisors! Shit, how can they really support their customers on bare metal if they don't know the IOPs requirements, etc? Just keep stabbing hardware until they "get lucky"?
That's my guess. Lacking support of VMs isn't exactly the big issue... it's WHY they lack that support that is the big issue.
Why the don't support VM's is very important, almost as important as the question of what made them not want to support their application in a VM?
it's because they don't ever support anything other than their own software, most likely - they think the server hardware is magic. it will just do what they want, they don't KNOW they need xyz IOPs, or RAM, etc.
And therefore should be on the short list of software vendors from which the business should be considering.
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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):
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.
Exactly. It doesn't "Exactly" have the hardware abstraction that you want to see from virtualization, but it has most of the aspects of it. The entire cluster is a single computer and has hardware abstraction at a higher level abstracting the entire cluster as a single thing. You could absolutely still virtualize again on the individual nodes, but the "always virtualize" rule is handled by the abstraction higher up. I've written about this scenario before.
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@DustinB3403 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):
@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
eh? yeah Greenway didn't bother to do the right thing for their customers and have support for hypervisors! Shit, how can they really support their customers on bare metal if they don't know the IOPs requirements, etc? Just keep stabbing hardware until they "get lucky"?
That's my guess. Lacking support of VMs isn't exactly the big issue... it's WHY they lack that support that is the big issue.
Why the don't support VM's is very important, almost as important as the question of what made them not want to support their application in a VM?
NOrmally it's because they don't have support at all and are just milking customers until things don't work. The illusion of support makes the money. Support itself is expensive.
