Interested in Working with the NTG Lab?
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Some of the gear today:
Four Dell PowerEdge Servers sponsored by xByte
Full Scale stack sponsored by Scale (brand new, on its way)
Netgear ReadyNAS (sponsored by Netgear)
IOSafe Synology NAS (sponsored by IOSafe)
Drobo B800i SAN (sponsored by Drobo)
Two HP Proliant ServersInitial stack will be a XenServer cluster and a Scale/KVM cluster. HyperV is planned to be added soon. The plan is to implement a massive SAM-SD storage system as well, likely built on CEPH.
I am very hopeful that we can acquire a CoolThreads-based large UltraSparc / Solaris platform as well in the near-ish future.
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I think that would be cool. We could all put our heads together and come up with some neat projects, I'm sure...
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Yes, and people would be free to do their own as well. But it would be awesome if we had some shared components for people to use as well. Like a shared DNS, authentication, jump servers, NFS general storage, log collection, monitoring, etc. Could do some really cool stuff.
Hopefully we'd be able to build out local CentOS repos, as an example, so someone building a new VM could do so with that as the repo location instead of going out to the Internet. So builds would be FAST.
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We could have central ISO repos too, easy access to tools that people tend to use.
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Is this physical access or remote or both?
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And what localities are we discussing if this includes physical access?
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SSH
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@DustinB3403 said:
Is this physical access or remote or both?
Not physical access, enterprise data center - so like "real" IT work. This actually makes the lab better in many ways, especially for people used to working in the SMB where they blend bench work and IT work together. This will be more like enterprise IT - all the bench work is handled by bench staff at the datacenter.
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I think I be interested.
The ability to have our iso would be awesome for rolling freepbx or elastic, etc. -
Yes, things like testing appliances would be very easy. Very different than a traditional cloud system like Amazon or Rackspace.
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I would be into this. Having access to a more robust lab environment would be incredible.
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I think I would be into it...
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That's a great idea. I won't be taking part in it but I think it's a tops idea.
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We were kicking around ideas today on a lab team call discussing maybe using the hosted free Spiceworks product to do a lab ticketing system and letting people take on lab roles rather like admins for different tasks, like have a SAN Admin responsible for carving out LUNs. So someone using the lab could request a LUN via a ticket and it would all get documented and done kind of like an enterprise environment. This would make it easier to manage the lab and, more importantly, make the lab experience far more valuable by providing something closer to actual experience rather than just playing around with equipment.
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Looks like a good response! Several people really interested.
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I especially like the idea of running it like its own little enterprise... as long as we have more than one person doing each "admin" role... IE: @scottalanmiller and @coliver doing storage, and me and @AVI-NetworkGuy handling Hyper-V, etc...
It would be horrible to put in a ticket for whatever and have to wait for 3 or 4 days before we actually get it, lol... By them we have forgotten what we needed it for, lol.
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The 25$/month thing is going to be the sticking point for me... got some good new the other day that is going to tie my money up for a longish time. Not sure I can afford the 25$/month at this point.
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@scottalanmiller said:
We were kicking around ideas today on a lab team call discussing maybe using the hosted free Spiceworks product to do a lab ticketing system and letting people take on lab roles rather like admins for different tasks, like have a SAN Admin responsible for carving out LUNs. So someone using the lab could request a LUN via a ticket and it would all get documented and done kind of like an enterprise environment. This would make it easier to manage the lab and, more importantly, make the lab experience far more valuable by providing something closer to actual experience rather than just playing around with equipment.
I love this idea.
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@coliver said:
The 25$/month thing is going to be the sticking point for me... got some good new the other day that is going to tie my money up for a longish time. Not sure I can afford the 25$/month at this point.
Unfortunately there is a rather heavy bit of cost to cover. Going to be rather than expensive endeavor with a full cabinet being used in a datacenter. Will provide for some amazing capabilities and growth, but it's a non-trivial expense to run it all.
