@dashrender said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dave247 said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dashrender said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dave247 said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dashrender said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dave247 said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dashrender said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dave247 said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@dashrender said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

@nerdydad said in question about Hyper-V resource management?:

Computer Management -> Action -> Connect to another computer... -> Your Hyper-V host

Exactly - what he's not telling you is that Computer Management is a completely different tool. It's the Windows tool.

If you came from ESXi or even XS, you're in for some surprises. Unlike ESXi and XS, there is no single pane of glass to see all of the things related to Hyper-V. Instead you have to manage all the components the exact same way you would a normal server. Computer Management handles a lot of them, but not all. For example, you can't look at Device Manager that way anymore - MS removed remote access a bit ago.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH... yes. Shit. LOL

yeah - this is why I #$#%^@ hate Hyper-V

ugh.. I wish I knew this before.. Maybe I'll just use the free version of ESXi instead..

no - you shouldn't do that. If you bail on Hyper-V, you should look at KVM instead, so you aren't leaving often needed/desired feature that are free in KVM and Hyper-V and cost a ton in ESXi.

well I do want to gain some experience with Hyper-V so maybe I'll stick it out.. I just need to find a centralized guide on this or something.. The way to do things so far has been murky and illusive.. Part of the problem may be that I'm so used to VMware with ESXi and vSphere.

I have a thread.
https://mangolassi.it/topic/15767/building-a-hyper-v-2016-host-take-2

it covers all the things to get all the pieces working.
It assumes an Active Directory though.

Oh nice! I will comb thru this. And I do have AD running here. Thanks!

You will find tons of guides here on ML.

I think this has become my favorite forum. Much nicer than reddit, less BS than Spiceworks.. everyone is nice and thorough and we have SAM ruling with an iron fist

As a pretty green sysadmin, there have been times where I've needed to point things to an NTP server and I've been kind of fuzzy about the best way to go about this, despite reading various resources online... If my memory is correct, I think I've heard that best-practice is to point all your internal devices to the same internal NTP sever and then have that single internal NTP server sync with an external server. So like I would have all my equipment point to the DC and then have the DC sync with a trustworthy external time server. That being said, I'm a little unclear on the best way to do this.

I just ran w32tm /query /peers on my DC and it looks like it's pointed to pool.ntp.org. I have been checking various other servers and some things point to the DC where other things point to a list of time servers, usually, 0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org, 2.pool.ntp.org and 3.pool.ntp.org. Sometimes it's a mixture of both.

I guess my question is this: Should I set up my domain controller to use a better time sever that what it's configured for, or is there a better NTP server I should be using. And then should I just point all servers and appliances in my environment to my domain controller for time synchronization?

I'm trying out Microsoft's Hyper-V 2016 server -- not the OS role, I'm talking about the actual Hypervisor without the "Desktop Experience" GUI. I got that installed and joined to our domain and then added an administrator and then I installed the Hyper-V management tools on my Windows 10 workstation and then I tried to connect to the server as that user. However I can't seem to get connected. It's constant errors.

Right now I'm stuck on "Enable delegation" as I get an error that says "Delegation of credentials to the server could not be enabled. CredSSP authentication is currently disabled.

I keep trying to google things but 90% of the stuff I find seems to be about setting up the Hyper-V role, not the straight Hypervisor. Then anything more explicit than that, such as with the CredSSP stuff, I just find about of stuff regarding PowerShell scripts.

I'm now trying to run Enable-WSManCredSSP commands according to this guide but it's not working...

I've been slowly doing this for hours now and I'm just ripping my hair out at this point. Is there a more straight-forward way to set up and manage Hyper-V without having to do a bunch of obscure steps? I just want to get to where I can install some VMs. See I've gotten used to the user friendliness of WMware where I can just connect to the hosts or vCenter via web browser and go from there.

Now I'm not crying about this because it's hard -- I enjoy learning challenges.. but right now I'm just drained and need some guidance. Otherwise I was considering installing some other free Hypervisor in hopes that it's easier to setup.

@dashrender said in question about setting up a new domain controller:

@dave247 said in question about setting up a new domain controller:

So going back to the reseller vs partner bit:

• If I go through a partner, they will help me get set up with hosted Exchange directly through MS, so I am subject only to MS?

• If I go through a re-seller, I basically get their version of that service, which means I am subject to the limitations they put on it (max mailbox size for example) and I am also subject to their pricing as well as the risk that the are responsible for paying MS to keep our Exchange active?

yep.

holy shit do I actually understand something???

So basically, what I should do, is swap as much of my manual static to DHCP reservation that I possibly can. Then I can update DNS in the DHCP scope and all should be well... sounds like a good plan.

I was a complete idiot and incorrectly typed "172.0.0.1" instead of "127.0.0.1" which would explain all my errors over the weekend.

smacks head

@tim_g said in Girl Scouts - Training Girls to Run MLMs, Change My Mind:

The real question here is: what do girl scouts do besides MLM, and is it significant enough to categorize them as not just a MLM?

I was thinking the same thing. My daughter is in GS and has been for a few years now. They seem to do a bunch of other stuff, but I'm not that involved. I mean, I go to a lot of her events, but my wife is the main one doing stuff. My daughter is a brownie too so I think depending on the bracket (or whatever) and the people running the troop, the various activities they do probably can very a lot.

Actually, my wife has gotten stuck with being the troop's cookie manager two years in a row. She has to collect all the money from the parents and submit the orders online. She hasn't said anything to me about things seeming fishy, but she does have a lot of complaints about their website, plus a lot of parents are idiots about submitting and picking up their orders.

I'm also thinking that if it is a full blown MLM at this point, it probably didn't start off that way. I'm sure various levels of greed and corruption have gradually fueled changes that swung the cookie sales portion of the GS into the MLM arena of things.

I feel like pretty much anything that starts off with good and pure intentions and is successful is inevitably pushed more and more to the point that it becomes an obscene version of it's original self.

@obsolesce said in Staying at your shitty employer is your fault:

@dave247 said in Staying at your shitty employer is your fault:

@jaredbusch said in Staying at your shitty employer is your fault:

@dave247 said in Staying at your shitty employer is your fault:

Where is everyone searching for quality IT job postings these days?

Word of mouth. I've never gotten a good job from a random posting.

I suppose the correct answer to myself is a wide net of every combination, including word of mouth, job posting sites like Indeed, Monster, etc, direct job postings on the website of the company, LinkedIn, etc.

I managed to get my first IT job using my state's job network website. I got a call-back from HR and had some awesome back and forth and landed a great gig. My friend and past co-worker got an amazing job from a head-hunter on LinkedIn. Another friend got a job from a company website post...

The last several good jobs I was either offered or have started were directly from LinkedIn, and some of them are $300K to $500K jobs.

Can I ask what kind of IT jobs those were and the general requirements? That seems a little hard to believe unless you're talking about jobs in the major US technology hubs... but I have limited knowledge and experience in this area.

I have a few servers that are now available for whatever I want, since I've virtualized them to our vSphere 6.5 environment. We currently have a single SAN unit for our vm datastore which connects to two switches and then to three virtual hosts (SAM's Inverted Pyramid of Doom thing).

Anyway, I am trying to experiment with a different design as well as set up a new test environment. I want to install Hyper-V 2016 Server on my most powerful spare server, then I want to use my other two servers as mirrored or a distributed storage cluster.

I am not 100% on what is best practice on how exactly to set this up, so I'm hoping for some input. I mean, I'm a sysadmin at my job, so I understand how to install and configure stuff.. but I've not set up a completely new environment from scratch before.

Any advice is much appreciated!

@scottalanmiller said in Can I get some direction on setting up Hyper-V server with a storage cluster?:

I'm late, but yes, @StarWind_Software is the way to go here. It's free and native to Hyper-V and does exactly what you are looking to do.

Hi Scott. Yes, thanks. I am going to work on setting up vSAN. Looks like it will be a fun learning experience for me.

Another question: when I was researching Proxmox, someone mentioned that it doesn't fully support shared block storage currently. It was basically stated that Proxmox and others haven't come up with an equivalent to VMFS for shared block storage yet, so they are typically leveraging LVM to partition off portions of disk for each VM limit access to those regions to a singular host at a time.

I had looked at this comparison matrix which shows that Proxmox does fully support shared storage, so I'm unclear on the exact specifics and if it really matters in my situation. We basically have an iSCSI storage controller for VM storage and then our ESXi hosts for compute (mentioned in my original post).

All I really care about if we move to Proxmox is that we can store VMs in our storage controller and use the hosts for compute, similar to how we're doing it with VMware today.

@scottalanmiller said in Moving off VMware Hypervisor to something else - need input:

@dave247 said in Moving off VMware Hypervisor to something else - need input:

@scottalanmiller just out of curiosity, could you provide any arguments against using Hyper-V?

We are 99.9% Windows PC & Server shop where I work so naturally some might suggest us using Microsoft's Hyper-V. I have used it a handful of times in the past but it didn't seem very user friendly and seemed to have issues at the time, granted it was over 8 years ago.

Sure...

1. Microsoft no longer has faith in it, it would border on insane to trust as your core platform something that even its own vendor gave up on. The only production style deployment was removed and now only the dev / hobby style is still available. People argue "they didn't discontinue it" and no, not technically, but they did discontinue it from anything that could be argued to be a production methodology. Using HyperV means defining your virtualization infrastructure as a "hobby" environment where uptime and reliability don't matter.

2. It doesn't have the knowledge, development or care of a production system. Never did, but now its a tiny fraction of what it once was. So if you thought it was bad back when MS still pushed it, image how bad it is now!

3. No support. It's an MS product, that means you are left to your own devices and the third party support world is essentially entirely resellers, not skilled engineers. No serious support engineer works with HyperV, so you are depending on the market of somewhat technical salesmen to be your support network.

4. Licensing. Pure and simple, if your infrastructure product requires a license, it's a joke. Nothing causing outages like a license. That's why no serious business will touch that stuff. Risk for no reason is literally a form of sabotage.

5. Confusion. While someone, somewhere installed HyperV and knew what it was, you'll never find that person. Everyone who recommends and implements it does so out of thinking it is something that it is not. Many swear it is a Type2 (and then think that that is a good thing.) Almost no one can actually identify what is virtual and what is not when using it. Especially if you have a Windows show, the chances that anyone really will know HyperV is zero. Only very senior UNIX shops ever have the knowledge to really understand it and they avoid it based on that knowledge.

6. Cost. HyperV isn't free anymore and while someone might argue that you are SO tied to Windows that you'll never be able to make decisions based on what's best for your business, that's a horrific financial mentality to take. Again, risk without benefit, even if small, is very bad. It's what IT pros should be paid to protect against, not recommend. It's a product that only works against your interest, not for them.

7. Management. Like most Windows products, Hyperv's management is a sh1tshow and a completely joke compared to ProxMox and XCP-ng as examples. Not even in the game. If you thought VMware was bad, HyperV is the only thing that gives it serious competition for being so bad.

8. Source and Security. HyperV is closed source and from a notoriously unstable, insecure vendor. You might be stuck with Windows servers, but there's no reason to extend those problems into other arenas without benefit. One mistake does not justify another. Saying "we didn't care about price, security, auditability, performance, stability, etc. with our servers, why should we care now" is the antithesis of our jobs. It's worth noting that all those things clearly aren't top priority, so there might be other factors that we can weigh more heavily. But HyperV lacks ANY benefit (not even familiarity or ease of use!) to Windows admins (ProxMox is literally easier and more straightforward out of the box) so even the seemingly obvious factors work against it. So while giving low weight to production factors is okay, lacking other factors to outweight them doesn't change the outcome.

9. You'd never be able to feel proud of your environment or tell anyone what you run on without feeling embarrassed.

10. Backups, remote support, remote monitoring, etc. all harder. ProxMox and XCP-ng shine at how easy they are to automate, to manually manage, to manage from anywhere. HyperV falls flat in all those areas.

11. THis is a cheat benefit (IT should NOT consider this as it is cheating the company) but HyperV is a valueless skill. You don't want to have that on your resume instead of something of value. So every single person in your IT department should be up in arms at the idea because nothing about it makes their lives easier, and nothing about it is good for their personal careers. Everyone loses, no winners. Again... as IT pros, we should be taking the value to the business first and not making decisions based on what is good for us personally. But this is a care where those two things align.

12. Performance. Haven't checked this recently as HyperV is abandoned in production so it doesn't matter, but historically KVM was the performance leader for Windows workloads.

Most importantly, I can't think of any reason someone would give for even considering HyperV. The utter lack of upsides, being the sole product that EXISTS that's actually worse than, rather than better than, VMware is really something.

Thanks Scott. I was more or less assuming similar to most of the points you listed, but I'm not super knowledgeable or up to date in this area, so this helps me quite a bit. I am leaning towards Proxmox but I still need to show on paper that I've done my due diligence to evaluate each option and all that.

@scottalanmiller just out of curiosity, could you provide any arguments against using Hyper-V?

We are 99.9% Windows PC & Server shop where I work so naturally some might suggest us using Microsoft's Hyper-V. I have used it a handful of times in the past but it didn't seem very user friendly and seemed to have issues at the time, granted it was over 8 years ago.

@DustinB3403 said in Moving off VMware Hypervisor to something else - need input:

@dave247 Going from expensive VMWare to expensive Nutanix makes little sense.

Yeah I was just googling other Hypervisors and looking into each. Proxmox sounds like a really good option and I'm going to test it out in my lab next week.

@travisdh1 said in Moving off VMware Hypervisor to something else - need input:

I'm in agreement with Scott here. There is a very short list of options, and Nutantix is not one of them.

Proxmox would be the primary choice (the backup server is really easy to work with as well), and XCP-NG if Proxmox can't be used.

Migrating from a VMWare to Proxmox is also really easy. I did a trial at a former work place.

Thanks. That's great to hear that migrating from VMware to Proxmox is easy. And I'm currently using Veeam for our backups and that works well with Proxmox from what I'm reading.

@scottalanmiller said in Moving off VMware Hypervisor to something else - need input:

@dave247 said in Moving off VMware Hypervisor to something else - need input:

Looking at Nutanix VS Proxmox and surface level perception is that Proxmox could be better

I would quite literally place one as the worst possible option and one as the best. VMware would be close to Nutanix on the bad side. Nutanix, VMware and Hyper-V these days I don't know any argument for how to use them in production.

I like ProxMox and XCP-ng for pricing, licensing, experience, etc. There are loads of KVM systems out there, ProxMox is far from the only player. But I think you'd need a pretty incredible argument to use one given that most or all will be closed source (that means "not production ready" to us) and few have the experience, track record, support, industry knowledge and internal support of ProxMox.

Thanks for the input Scott. All I have really used for the last 10 years is VMware so I just did a surface level search for other Hypervisors, so I'm not really even considering Nutanix, it was just one that came up. Anyway, everything I'm reading suggests that Proxmox is rock solid and that sounds like what I'll probably test out for a while as a VMware replacement. Plus it's free which is a plus, especially since VMware renewal would be insanely costly. I can check out XCP-ng too.

I really just want something that is stable and easy to work with. We don't have that complex of an environment so the only things I'd be doing is server firmware upgrades and Proxmox updates when needed. Doing that stuff with VMware always made me nervous since something would often break.

Small but profitable financial institution with upside down pyramid of doom VMware environment (3 ESXi hosts and a storage controller (has been rock solid for years))

Used to have a lot more VMs but now we're down to around 15 (Windows servers and some Linux based appliances)

Broadcom/VMware renewal isn't looking promising so I'm trying to figure out other possible options.

Looking at Nutanix VS Proxmox and surface level perception is that Proxmox could be better

Just looking for input.

All my vendors recommend to avoid RAID all together, so we don't use it on the servers where I work.

Turns out I would also need proper MICR font, like this https://www.1001fonts.com/micr-encoding-font.html

@dashrender said in Looking for MICR check printing software that doesn't suck:

@dave247 said in Looking for MICR check printing software that doesn't suck:

@dashrender said in Looking for MICR check printing software that doesn't suck:

Isn't the MICR just in the toner? Does that part even matter? Maybe I'm wrong and those printers actually have two types of toner in them...

That's what I was wondering. And yes, MICR is just magnetic ink. I don't know if I could even just technically use Microsoft Word to print on them using the MICR printer....

I think you can. Only one way to find out

you know what, you're right hahaha