Burned by Eschewing Best Practices
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Yes, and it seems to be me that two hosts, two switches and two SANs (2-2-2) offers a decent level of redundancy without over-complicating the system. That's where I'm not getting where the "doom" is coming from.
Any unnecessary complication is over-complicated. You don't design a system to be "less than ideal" for no reason. The idea that the system isn't "terrible" is correct as long as you don't take into consideration the alternatives. He could have a system that is easier, safer, faster, simpler and cheaper. Why sacrifice all of those things just because something worse in all those ways is still "good enough?" You don't. You go for the clear win. His design, while "good enough" for nearly any scenario, only looks that way if you are dealing with raw numbers rather than the relative ones provided by other approaches.
To think of it another way - if you go to buy a car and you are going to buy a Ford Focus, would you be fine paying $80K for it? If you had no idea what cars cost and never compared other options, sure, a car is a miracle of engineering and over the life of a car you probably get more than $80K of value of it. So you would spend that money. BUT what if you knew that you could buy that car for $20K? Would you still be happy and recommend that someone spend $80K on it when you know that the market value is only $20K and you can go anywhere and buy it for that?
In one case the raw value to you of "a car" might be $80K. But that doesn't mean that you should pay that much when you have the option of getting the car that you need for far less. The $80K would be good enough if better options were not readily available. But given that they are, it's not a good decision.
In the case of IT, imagine that IT is like a car buying consultant. Would you be happy if your car buying consultant sold you an $80K Ford Focus because he knew you could afford it and that it was worth that much to you do have a car? Of course not, you'd say that he wasn't doing his job and looking for the best value. That's what is happening here. The IT guy's job is to not just know how to spend money but how to get good IT value without wasting money. But in this situation, the IT guy is delivering a system worth less but spending tons more on it.
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Another one for the pile, not nearly as bad as some others, but in this case the Hypervisor infrastructure was setup on a singular Spinning Rust drive, which when it failed killed the entire Hypervisor host.
In this case though, they have a XenPool so recovery should be simple enough, install a new drive and reconfigure the host, lastly rejoin it to the pool.
But had they configured the host from a USB drive, they could simply install the backup USB drive and be up and running in a matter of moment.
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To boot on the above's system the designer left the battery backup off of their iSCSI storage unit which houses all of their VM's.
"...........ugh..."
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Now quite sure where this post belongs here so I'm placing it here.
An IT person is looking to setup a hypervisor setup, with Server 2011 SBS, and looking for advice, but doesn't appear to be looking at actual business needs and weighing the options.
Just going off of some information he heard from somewhere.
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This is a good thread & I like it, but I would be curious to see it's opposite as well - Burned by BP
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@MattSpeller said:
This is a good thread & I like it, but I would be curious to see it's opposite as well - Burned by BP
Ever seen that happen? If it is even possible, then it can't be a BP.
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@scottalanmiller if doing windows updates is best practice, that's an easy one
I was thinking server configs that conflict or other goodies like that
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller if doing windows updates is best practice, that's an easy one
Don't confuse burned BY a best practice with being burned IN SPITE of a best practice. Not the same thing.
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@scottalanmiller I don't really see much distinction in that difference but I get the gist of what you mean
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@MattSpeller said:
@scottalanmiller I don't really see much distinction in that difference but I get the gist of what you mean
It is a HUGE distinction. It's like wearing your seatbelt. You can still get killed but it doesn't tell you that wearing a seatbelt was a bad idea. It still was the safer bet, even if it doesn't always save you.
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Nothing protects you 100% of the time. There is always risk. Best Practices only exist when they reduce the risk or universally make sense. They can only reduce risk, though, not make it go away. So if it is truly a correct Best Practice sure, it might be wise to understand that they do not protect you 100%, but it is misleading to think of it as being burned BY the best practice which would lead to people saying that they are avoiding doing BPs because of these risks that they present. If anything hints at such behaviour, it is the wrong thinking.
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Hopefully we managed to head this guy off at the pass. http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1236071-postgresql-on-ad
Installing PostgreSQL on an already overloaded Active Directory servers! Linux VMs are not just better for this, they are free!!
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The topic is all kinds of backwards, he offers nothing of what his goal is, just want he wants to do. Has no concept of how everything should work, and is just extremely ill informed.
Does he even have a hypervisor to run VM's on? I'm guessing not and that he's wanting to "make-do" with what he has at the companies disposal.
Which doesn't seem like much.
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What RDS/Terminal Server on a DC.. Worst thing you could do.
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@Jason said:
What RDS/Terminal Server on a DC.. Worst thing you could do.
Too late for that particular mistake. But at least, hopefully, kept him from turning his DC into a PostgreSQL server too!
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@DustinB3403 said:
The topic is all kinds of backwards, he offers nothing of what his goal is, just want he wants to do. Has no concept of how everything should work, and is just extremely ill informed.
But this is typical. So we start with the standard, let's back up and ask what the goal is first before we consider any solutions.
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This guy gets super defensive when he gets called out for attempting to do the worst possible things. Doesn't even manage a rational defense, actually proves why he was wrong in his response. http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1237579-vmware-workstation-required-for-xp-32-bit
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That topic sounds an awful lot like several others asking where to find cracked CD keys and what not. Doing everything illegally because it's "free" to do so.
Yet when the system needs support or work done, nothing can be performed because they aren't legitimately licensed. So then comes the question of "How do I do <insert something completely weird> ?"
The answer is always, license your self properly and upgrade as needed. Trying to maintain 20 year old software without any upgrades is insane.
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What's weird is he was ONLY trying to spend money and specifically unwilling to even talk about free options, he claimed for the opposite reason. Since when is someone too poor to do something free but can waste money on a paid solution that is more effort? Makes zero sense. That guy is scamming his clients and hoping no one notices. He's just creating something complex so that he can charge more for supporting it.
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Here's another topic for the pile where an IT person is a contractor for a customer assisting with domain administration, yet there are outside vendors who have domain admin rights, and are changing other domain admin credentials.
Nothings been burned yet, lets find out what's left after the smoke dissipates.
