Posts made by creayt

I'm offended for Iron Man that you put him in-league with inferior superheroes.

Upgraded: 4320x2560.

Seems like an appropriate thread to throw out this question: Has anyone here used Hyper V Replica? We're currently in the process of moving all of our production web sites and apps to a new Hyper V server and are considering

1. Using Hyper V Replica to back up our production VMs to a 2nd server
   or
2. Using Hyper V Replica to back up to Azure, which runs $54 a month per VM.

Curious to know what the popular opinion is. Being able to click a few times on a production VM and have it replicate only the changes ( deltas ), asynchronously, well it just sounds like God's gift to server newbs like me.

Our database component ( MySQL ) is independent and run off of the Amazon cloud, so the 30 second delay between delta sends shouldn't be an issue because both the main and replicated VMs will be connecting to the same external datasources.

@scottalanmiller said:

When you put them into RAID, the controller should be fully provisioning the drives at the drive level and then presenting you with only part of it. That you are only using part of the drive's capacity seems like it is part of it to you but to the drive, it has been fully provisioned.

Ahhh, I think I get what you mean. So given that it works that way, and given that our previous approach of pre-overprovisioning the drives didn't work ( http://mangolassi.it/topic/4614/how-should-i-determine-exact-over-provisioning-levels-for-1tb-samsung-850-pro-ssds-to-be-used-in-a-raid-10 ), is there just no way to do this?

@scottalanmiller said:

When you put them into RAID, the controller should be fully provisioning the drives at the drive level and then presenting you with only part of it. That you are only using part of the drive's capacity seems like it is part of it to you but to the drive, it has been fully provisioned.

That's the decision I'm trying to make, whether to do that or not.

http://serverfault.com/questions/654025/trim-support-in-hardware-raid-perc-h700

makes it sound like you can choose whether or not to throw the full drive capacity at the RAID, and if not, by implication, you'll be exposing unallocated space ( which seems functionally similar to overprovisioning w/ the Samsung tool ) to the underlying drives. Key part:

"There's no TRIM support on the hardware RAID controller (it's not common). It's also not that important. You can just under-provision the drives. Create a Virtual Disk smaller than the capacity of the SSDs; e.g. don't allocation all of the space to the disks."

@scottalanmiller said:

So this is a process question.... but what are people in the datacenter doing System Admin tasks? I've seen places do this before, but it seems like a bad idea. There is no need for a NOC / DC tech to be doing this and the SA always has to double check it anyway and there is a lot of room for error. And when you want to tweak things, like this, the process gets broken and it doesn't hold up anyway.

Why not let the DC do the physical work and leave the system's configuration to the systems people?

I actually don't know what any of those acronyms are LOL. I'm a web developer and this is my new server and it's colocated in a datacenter a few states away and at this point they have to do any and all non-remote desktop tasks, there's just no other option. It's got a DRAC card but I'm new to servers and learning this as I go and that's not set up ( yet ).

@scottalanmiller said:

@creayt said:

What's the better approach: 1. Configuring the new Raid 10 using only 80% of the total available space, and hoping that has the same result

Can't imagine how that would have the same result as the RAID controller has already provisioned the drives to 100%.

I'm not sure I got what you meant but we're adding 4 new identical SSDs ( for a total of 10 drives ) and redoing the RAID from scratch next week.

Back to the original discussion:

It turns out we want to deploy the additional SSDs now anyway, so will be reconstructing the RAID. Which brings me to my next question.

I had a previous discussion about overprovisioning the drives pre-RAID in hopes of reaping the performance and longevity affects of doing so even though our RAID controller doesn't support trim. So, I prepped the drives using Samsung Magician to manually configure somewhere around 20% of overprovisioning space ( up from the 7% default that ships w/ the 1TB 850 Pros, and had the datacenter RAID 10 them up.

It appears that the overprovisioning setup is little more than resizing the main partition of the drive to allocate a larger amount of unused space, which presumably the SSD knows internally to use for self-love and management. Thus, when the datacenter peeps created the RAID 10 it removed all partitions from all drives and used the full capacity of the drives for the RAID.

So the million dollar question is:

What's the better approach: 1. Configuring the new Raid 10 using only 80% of the total available space, and hoping that has the same result or 2. Using the full space for the virtual disk and then shrinking the main host OS partition inside of Windows Server to create an excess at that level? It seems like the first approach would have the best chance of doing what we want but at the same time I don't know whether it'll evenly distribute the unused 20% across the 10 drives or potentially just leave it floating at the end of the last drive or two.

See this post for the original strategy us folk at Mango Lassi arrived at for background, which ended up not panning out unfortunately: http://mangolassi.it/topic/4704/help-w-raid

Edit: Oops, wrong link. Correct one: http://mangolassi.it/topic/4614/how-should-i-determine-exact-over-provisioning-levels-for-1tb-samsung-850-pro-ssds-to-be-used-in-a-raid-10

Thanks!

I see.

So as far as it working this way, compared to just running as a layer on top of the host OS like type 2 does, is there anything worth thinking about / applicable to any decision making beyond "if we run it this way, the performance of the host won't be as good as its specs would indicate"?

Also, is there a way to guess/gauge how much of a performance hit the host will have w/ type 1?

Also, is the host VM's performance almost equivalent to the full host's hardware resources, or closer to a pretty limited VM?

@Ambarishrh said:

@creayt That issue of losing data is covered mostly by all tools by default I guess. Manictime which I am evaluating now, has a backup restore option, and also a scheduled backup function. I can schedule the backup to go to my dropbox/One Drive or even an external hard drive if uploading to a third party an issue.

End of the day, its every users choice, which I understand, but was not in the side of moving all my browsing history & work details to a third party server. I am kind of a person who would love to look at a self hosted option first for anything.

I see. The slang term for that is a "privacy fiend"

For what it's worth, RescueTime lets you configure it on a schedule so it ignores everything say, outside of work hours.

@scottalanmiller said:

@creayt said:

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that it's fascinating and I'd like to learn more. It's especially interesting because Windows 8.1 ( even Home I believe ) supports Hyper V so if it's converting the existing host OS into a VM it somehow maintains full, unthrottled performance in that new host VM and fully utilizes the real hardware drivers ( such as video ).

It does not, it loses performance and this is why VirtualBox is considered superior for that type of use since it is a Type 2 hypervisor, not a Type 1.

This stuff is blowing my mind! Very informative, thank you.

So is it safe to assume that if you uninstall Hyper V from say a Windows 8.1 Home laptop it reverts to the original pre-bare-metal-hypervisor state? Or does it stay in degraded performance mode for time and all eternity until the case of a full host OS reinstall?

@scottalanmiller said:

The role thing really gets people. There is no such thing as running HyperV on Windows Server, it looks that way but technically cannot happen. The "role" is not a role but is just a tool that introduces a shim and installs HyperV to the bare metal and then runs the Windows Server that you are looking at in a VM. It's all on HyperV, nothing on Windows. There is no exception to this. It just looks like something else.

Do you have some links to documentation on this?

If what you're saying is true, there are some weird implications:

1. The host OS "vm" has the special privilege of seemingly-unvirtualized/full access to its hardware resources and does not allow for any granular allocation/limitation on things like processor weighting or RAM ( for example, this special VM can see the real network adapters, not virtualized ones like all of the VMs do ).

2. All other VMs are dependent on this new host VM to run. They cannot run if the host OS isn't up and running. Correct me if I'm wrong.

3. The underlying files that run the host VM's OS are still on the main-level of the drive hardware, so not encapsulated into a .vhd, right?

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying that it's fascinating and I'd like to learn more. It's especially interesting because Windows 8.1 ( even Home I believe ) supports Hyper V so if it's converting the existing host OS into a VM it somehow maintains full, unthrottled performance in that new host VM and fully utilizes the real hardware drivers ( such as video ).

@Ambarishrh said:

@creayt What I meant was, all your activities are getting recorded at Rescue Time's servers. Found 2 tools which I mentioned on this thread, and was testing ManicTime on my machine today. I do get a report of all activities done on my machine, but then all those reports stays on my machine rather than uploading it to a third party. They also have a server version, bit expensive, for managing a team.

The time tracking I am looking at now is for analyzing my personal usage. When it comes to timesheets for clients to bill, I still use Freshbooks.

Good point. I agree, it's a huge advantage that RescueTime keeps your data on its servers so that even if your workstation fails you don't lose X years of back logs and reporting.

@Ambarishrh said:

@creayt Is it not something like you are sending all your browsing/app usage behavior to a third party?

I'm not sure I understand what you mean, but there is a client you install that uses the OS APIs to track what you do passively in the background, and then stream it to the company that makes Rescue Time's servers so it's in the cloud and you can run reports on it. I imagine this is how most professional-level time tracking tools work.

I'm using Hyper V, but as a role in Server 2012 R2. We don't have the expertise to run the standalone Hyper V Server.

VirtualBox is gross btw.

I have 2012 R2 Standard installed on the host but run all workloads in VMs. So I'll have to reconstruct the RAID and then reinstall the OS it sounds like.

Yes, I use Rescue Time. It's pretty amazing and the Pro version lets you see granular reports all the way down to what code FILES you spent your time in. Highly recommend it.

https://www.rescuetime.com/

I have a 10 slot server I recently deployed utilizing 6 of the slots in a Raid 10, thinking I could later add additional drives ( in sets of 2 ) to the RAID to expand it. I'm not seeing any options to do so in OpenManage, and now questioning whether or not it can even be done.

Current Raid 10 is running Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard. It's a Dell PowerEdge R620 w/ a Perc H710P Mini. Does anyone know if you can expand an existing Raid 10? It's possible it can only be done offline and that's why I'm not seeing the options. Unfortunately, getting an answer like this slash a simple reconnaissance ticket fulfilled w/ my current host is hit and miss and I might be out a few days waiting on a response. Hoping to leverage the experience of peeps here, thx.

Heard a lecture at the 99u Conference in NYC last month that said that the latest research showed that stress was actually... wait for it... a good thing. It was pretty convincing and from what I remember she showed some pretty shocking correlations between longevity, happiness, achievement in general, and physical health... and stress.

http://www.ted.com/talks/kelly_mcgonigal_how_to_make_stress_your_friend

The video of the lecture I saw should be available within the month ( they're slowpokes to get that stuff edited and available ) and I'll try to post it here when I see it. She also has a book on it:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583335617/

The big takeaway seemed to be that by simply changing your attitude around / perspective on stress you can use it as a driving force and motivation to excel rather than a crippling, paralyzing enemy. Easier said than done for sure, but the research she cited made a pretty impressive case for checking yourself before wrecking yourself.

http://blog.ted.com/could-stress-be-good-for-you-recent-research-that-suggests-it-has-benefits/

To anyone who'se curious: the drives ( all 6 SSDs and the 4 10k SAS HDDs ) are now deployed and all are working/"negotiated" at 6 Gbps. Hooray. The only drawback is that the SSDs are throwing the little alert symbols in open manage, though they appear to be functioning fine and at full speed. Open Manage can't read the power status, etc, and shows them as "non-critical" ( while online ). It's unfortunate.

Pic: RAID 10 of 10ks on the left, Raid 10 of SSDs on the right.