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):
@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.
So they don't need to be fully supported, but let's say the IT guy down the street who's used Linux twice in his life installs the software in a VM with a non preallocated QCOW2 with an rtl8139 NIC. It's going to run slower than anything. So he calls the vendor for support and they try to help him. Nothing they are going to be able to tell him is going to help him, because it's nothing to do with their software. It's in their best interest to try to control what you're installing on to to mitigate stupid issues like that.
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
That is the issue of the IT Guy not understanding the system requirements, the fact that it is virtual means nothing. He could install that image to a bare metal system and have just as poor performance!
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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.
So they don't need to be fully supported, but let's say the IT guy down the street who's used Linux twice in his life installs the software in a VM with a non preallocated QCOW2 with no caching and an rtl8139 NIC. It's going to run slower than anything. So he calls the vendor for support and they try to help him. Nothing they are going to be able to tell him is going to help him, because it's nothing to do with their software. It's in their best interest to try to control what you're installing on to to mitigate stupid issues like that.
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Let's say he puts it on hardware they don't know and it does the same thing. What will they do? Or he uses an OS he doesn't understand? You aren't created a new problem with virtualization, just solving others.
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
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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):
@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.
So they don't need to be fully supported, but let's say the IT guy down the street who's used Linux twice in his life installs the software in a VM with a non preallocated QCOW2 with an rtl8139 NIC. It's going to run slower than anything. So he calls the vendor for support and they try to help him. Nothing they are going to be able to tell him is going to help him, because it's nothing to do with their software. It's in their best interest to try to control what you're installing on to to mitigate stupid issues like that.
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
That is the issue of the IT Guy not understanding the system requirements, the fact that it is virtual means nothing. He could install that image to a bare metal system and have just as poor performance!
No, those are specific to a hypervisor. Bare metal would be much faster than that, you woudln't have those issues.
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@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
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What if your critical enterprise app ONLY supported Mac OSX based on similar logic. Would you start deploying Mac Minis without a car as your enterprise platform? We would not normally consider that an enterprise option. But it's a similar approach. They would know the hardware and the OS. Is them knowing something more important than it being something good to know?
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@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):
@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.
So they don't need to be fully supported, but let's say the IT guy down the street who's used Linux twice in his life installs the software in a VM with a non preallocated QCOW2 with an rtl8139 NIC. It's going to run slower than anything. So he calls the vendor for support and they try to help him. Nothing they are going to be able to tell him is going to help him, because it's nothing to do with their software. It's in their best interest to try to control what you're installing on to to mitigate stupid issues like that.
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
That is the issue of the IT Guy not understanding the system requirements, the fact that it is virtual means nothing. He could install that image to a bare metal system and have just as poor performance!
No, those are specific to a hypervisor. Bare metal would be much faster than that, you woudln't have those issues.
THOSE issues, yes. But you can create all the issues that you want. YOu can use QCOW for bare metal too, if you want.
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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):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
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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):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
Ya, this whole thing started because Dustin said @wirestyle22 should drop them since they don't support anything else. That's ridiculous.
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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):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
Ya, this whole thing started because Dustin said @wirestyle22 should drop them since they don't support anything else. That's ridiculous.
I specifically said I'd look for alternative software if an appliance vendor said they only supported a single hypervisor.
Big difference.
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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):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
Ya, this whole thing started because Dustin said he should drop them since they don't support anything else. That's ridiculous.
I see. Yeah that's going to far. That's lacking variety and options, but not lacking an enterprise deployment option. You have to figure the costs associated with VMware into the product's costs when decision making, but that's about it. VMware is very, very enterprise. It's a bit crappy that they don't offer ANY lower cost options for companies like this where VMware is way out of their league and crazy that they allow 100Mb/s Synology iSCSI but require VMware ESXi... so they have some clear problems in their thinking and requirements, but VMware itself is just fine.
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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):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
Ya, this whole thing started because Dustin said @wirestyle22 should drop them since they don't support anything else. That's ridiculous.
I specifically said I'd look for alternative software if an appliance vendor said they only supported a single hypervisor.
Big difference.
App vendor, not appliance vendor. An appliance would have any virtualization baked in under the hood.
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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):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
Ya, this whole thing started because Dustin said @wirestyle22 should drop them since they don't support anything else. That's ridiculous.
I specifically said I'd look for alternative software if an appliance vendor said they only supported a single hypervisor.
Big difference.
Although the client SHOULD consider the high cost of VMware for such a small system. They are looking at a $40K SAN to support that one application now based on that one app. And that's a lot of VMware costs. We don't know how much that one app costs, but holy cow is that a huge budget for a tiny company just as support costs for a single app. SMBs don't normally have total budgets that big, let alone that much to spend as ancillary costs to a single app!
You'd "hope" that this was a $200K+ application to make that make sense.
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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):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
Ya, this whole thing started because Dustin said he should drop them since they don't support anything else. That's ridiculous.
I see. Yeah that's going to far. That's lacking variety and options, but not lacking an enterprise deployment option. You have to figure the costs associated with VMware into the product's costs when decision making, but that's about it. VMware is very, very enterprise. It's a bit crappy that they don't offer ANY lower cost options for companies like this where VMware is way out of their league and crazy that they allow 100Mb/s Synology iSCSI but require VMware ESXi... so they have some clear problems in their thinking and requirements, but VMware itself is just fine.
Right. That's why I was going mentioning KVM specifics with my examples. They probably know what settings work best with their software in VMware, but not in others. A lot of these places don't have enough support people to know all of that anyway.
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@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@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):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
Ya, this whole thing started because Dustin said @wirestyle22 should drop them since they don't support anything else. That's ridiculous.
I specifically said I'd look for alternative software if an appliance vendor said they only supported a single hypervisor.
Big difference.
App vendor, not appliance vendor. An appliance would have any virtualization baked in under the hood.
App, appliance, application everything is an App now.
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Here is a physical system
Here is a virtual system.
Now tell me which system would you prefer to use if IOPS performance was an issue.
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@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@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):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
Ya, this whole thing started because Dustin said @wirestyle22 should drop them since they don't support anything else. That's ridiculous.
I specifically said I'd look for alternative software if an appliance vendor said they only supported a single hypervisor.
Big difference.
Although the client SHOULD consider the high cost of VMware for such a small system. They are looking at a $40K SAN to support that one application now based on that one app. And that's a lot of VMware costs. We don't know how much that one app costs, but holy cow is that a huge budget for a tiny company just as support costs for a single app. SMBs don't normally have total budgets that big, let alone that much to spend as ancillary costs to a single app!
You'd "hope" that this was a $200K+ application to make that make sense.
In healthcare there's a strong chance that the cost of the application, the migration, and the accompanied support agreements make a 40K storage array "cheap". Combined the fact that he likely has 4-5 applications in this situation (at a minimum) and a small HDS or a VxRAIL appliance (~$65K starting) could be a rounding error.
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@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
What if your critical enterprise app ONLY supported Mac OSX based on similar logic. Would you start deploying Mac Minis without a car as your enterprise platform? We would not normally consider that an enterprise option. But it's a similar approach. They would know the hardware and the OS. Is them knowing something more important than it being something good to know?
Oddly I'm in a conversation with a (Unicorn) over a 64 node All Flash VSAN cluster because they have software that is critical that requires OS X (They do a heavy amount of mobile development with heavy xCode dependencies). I've worked with (Gaming development company) who did FC to Mac's running ESXi for test/dev environments. You can run HA clusters on Mac's and VMware does support this.
That said if a medical EMR had this requirement I would tell them to GTFO.
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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):
@scottalanmiller said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
Same vein, how many avoid them because they don't provide ANY reasonable support options? I'm never asking anyone to support everything, but everyone needs to support something serious.
Right, and they do. VMware.
Oh okay, well that's fine then. Not the BEST option, but acceptable. And by BEST I don't mean that VMware is or isn't the best, I mean ONLY supporting that one is not as good as supported a few options.
Ya, this whole thing started because Dustin said he should drop them since they don't support anything else. That's ridiculous.
I see. Yeah that's going to far. That's lacking variety and options, but not lacking an enterprise deployment option. You have to figure the costs associated with VMware into the product's costs when decision making, but that's about it. VMware is very, very enterprise. It's a bit crappy that they don't offer ANY lower cost options for companies like this where VMware is way out of their league and crazy that they allow 100Mb/s Synology iSCSI but require VMware ESXi... so they have some clear problems in their thinking and requirements, but VMware itself is just fine.
To be clear, requiring VMware ESXi in a supported configuration is at odds with the 100Mb/s for vMotion and iSCSI (VMware does NOT support this abomination of a configuration).
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@stacksofplates said in Domain Controller Down (VM):
@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):
@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.
So they don't need to be fully supported, but let's say the IT guy down the street who's used Linux twice in his life installs the software in a VM with a non preallocated QCOW2 with an rtl8139 NIC. It's going to run slower than anything. So he calls the vendor for support and they try to help him. Nothing they are going to be able to tell him is going to help him, because it's nothing to do with their software. It's in their best interest to try to control what you're installing on to to mitigate stupid issues like that.
At least if the other end knew what he needed he could get some help. But now he might cancel his subscription and go somewhere else (which I believe is what they are trying to avoid). I can't imagine the amount of "IT Pros" that contact them looking for support for issues like that.
That is the issue of the IT Guy not understanding the system requirements, the fact that it is virtual means nothing. He could install that image to a bare metal system and have just as poor performance!
No, those are specific to a hypervisor. Bare metal would be much faster than that, you woudln't have those issues.
If bare metal was with a single ATA 66 drive, it might not be... Virtualization doesn't have a monopoly on stupid non-supported configurations.