@DustinB3403 said

And that was my hesitation as well... if anything in the world happens to that iSCSI target...

Yep.

Now, how much data do you need to backup? And how long can you wait to restore the data?

What's the budget to do this?

@DustinB3403 said in Does it make sense....:

@Breffni-Potter said in Does it make sense....:

What's the budget to do this?

"Using existing in office hours, and no additional hardware"

Meaning I can't replace the failed drive or purchase 4 higher capacity drives.

Even if the drive is replaced or the capacity is increased, what if the controller fails on the unit? or the PSU?

@Kelly said

I'll only have a total of four licenses (2 Standards). If I've used all of them on VMs will I be able to stand up a new DC and decom the old one?

Oh no one would ever do th...

@Dashrender said

but I've done it, and I've know tons of people who have...

I promise you @Dashrender is the only one who has done that. The rest of us are good and would not lie to you.

@BRRABill said in Lab/Demo/Training Server, Refurb:

@Breffni-Potter said

The only thing I'm not happy about, is getting the iDrac 6 virtual console working. Trying a few things out.

Is the iDrac6 like the 7 and later models? Where it is installed with very basic functionality in every server, and things like the virtual console have to be licensed?

I thought that only happened with 7 and up but in looking at it it seems they did it by the card.

So you can get an express card or an enterprise card, but not a license.

And don't get me started on the website.

https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/

Documentation exists in one place: https://xen-orchestra.com/#!/faq - What's the first thing people need with a new product? Give it to me in the email link they send, give it to me when I fill in the download form.

The reality is they are a new company, with a really good idea. But the tool on it's current form will end up turning away Hyper-v or VMWare admins, it's not that it's different, it's unhelpfully different. Different can be good.

Case sensitive emails are apparently a thing.

Thanks @DustinB3403

Basically, the OP of the topic was

"Why is VMWare considered so often"

They've got lots of money, lots of people and lots of partnership details to constantly re-enforce the idea of VMware being the best and most reliable. It falls down under scrutiny but that's another topic.

So my thing with Xen Orchestra is, if you can do the same thing on a small scale, to help encourage people to think about XenServer. Why would that not be a good thing for you, you don't need to set your sights on 100 million marketing campaigns but can something be done.

@DustinB3403

But...why leap for the stuff which costs money to do? My point is, If you can't do what the big boys do, what can you do instead with what you have?

@aaronstuder said in Building a Home Lab Cluster:

@gjacobse What's the cost on something like that?

"Materials for an enclosed 20U server rack came out to just under $400. For an open rack it was only about $100 including casters."

Yeah. I don't mind child companies but this was a fairly basic thing to get wrong.

A lot of the stuff I was told was just plain BS. Fastest way to lose a customer is to lie.

I know the person who hosts this.

All files wiped after 48 hours. Everything encrypted. Surprisingly fast bandwidth too.

https://uploadr.eu

You could run even a GUI DC of Windows Server on a 2GB of Ram box with low processor resources and it will be fine as a DC.

DKIM is the next step up from SPF records.

What anti spam filter are you using?

So Xen has been running for weeks now.

I've thrown everything under the sun at it. I've seen VMWare and Hyper-v on boxes of a similar spec but Xen is out-performing them, not by a huge amount but enough to make me consider it as a choice for deployments.

If only more vendors supported it....

TL:DR - Most of the functionality comes from using Log Me In. - There is no scope of service for their NOC technicians, lots of grey area on who does what. A huge amount of complaints from current users of the platform (even on their internal social media) very dismissive/corporate replies as well.

Now, this could easily change in a year or 2. The future of MSPs is that there will be a number of large scale providers and the smaller guys will go, It's not a question of if but when. So although Continuum have a long way to go, they and other providers are going to get there.

Let's start with the offer

---

You can get access to hundreds of technicians and become a managed services provider, you get to leverage their economies of scale, their time spent tuning and setting up systems, a whole host of benefits.

You pay for what you use, per device There is no on-boarding fee or device minimums but they do have a strict (which I like) process of training and on-boarding so you get the most out of the product and you don't have a bad experience of it.

You receive a fully white labeled service, from the agents you install to the US based technicians who answer the phone in your company name. So you are not just getting RMM or tooling, you also get the man-power.

Sales & Marketing

---

I had 2 excellent sales reps in the Continuum team. Really nice guys who were part of the process.

Marketing on the other hand...the single biggest reason I avoided Continuum was their marketing team for a whole host of reasons. Marketing lets the sales guys down in a big way.

Looking at the RMM app.

---

Almost everything that the RMM agent does, it does through data that Log Me In captures. So much of the cost goes towards the license for that.

The first machine I installed it on (A Windows 10 I5 with SSD system) it locked up the system and crashed it. This is a clean system that I use and it caused a fair bit of worry, took about 4 restarts before the system was back to normal.

The RMM app itself does not register in the portal for a good 2-4 hours for a new device. This is worrying because if you task an engineer to a customer site and want to deploy the agent to all their devices in an hour, you won't know whether it has worked or not. Every other RMM agent syncs with the console in about 10-15 minutes.

The installer and the agent software is full of Continuum branding & marketing. The listing in add remove programs screams "We are Continuum" so you don't get a true white label experience.

Compared with other RMM apps, there are better tools out there which you can use, Comodo One is free and it sadly does a much better job but most of the cost of the RMM app seems to go towards Log Me In rather than their own developed app.

Looking at the NOC technicians

---

There are lots of promises made about what the NOC guys can and will do but there is nothing written down or credible about where they involvement stops and yours begins. So it sets them up to be shunting off as much of the work as they can onto you.

Has this happened? Yes.

They have an internal social media platform which you get access to upon joining and out of everyone on that site, the consensus was, the NOC guys pass the buck as much as they can and you spend a lot of your time either micro-managing them or having to do the work yourself.

The biggest promise of Continuum is that you get access to that man-power but without a clearly defined scope or agreement, I can see this will continue to happen in the future.

Patching service

---

As part of the service, they offer a patching service where they will screen and filter the Microsoft updates for you, sounds great in principle.

The problem? A huge number of essential security updates are blocked by default and a lot of the stability updates are blocked as well.

The user interface

---

It's a very dated interface. Lots of things hidden away in menus. A lot of things which should be quick and easy are just a chore to set up and manage.

Alerting and reporting as for example, if you want to set alerts and reports, you have to do it per day of the week for each hour but this is a maze of drop down menus and it's a very tedious process, a more modern interface could let me draw hours of time for an entire week quickly but instead I have to use the drop downs per day Mon-Sun. Then I have to do this again for another site.

This kind of stuff seems trivial but it really slows you down if you have a large network of sites, so for growing and scaling, it needs to be put right.

Finally

---

There is no single product or service which will let you become an MSP. This is a fantasy and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Continuum might improve a lot of this in the future but for now, Don't use.

OVH. Have a try of them.

@Joel said

What is Seatools and Memtest?

For Seagate hard drive diagnostics and memtest is a free tool which checks for bad RAM.

Neither of which you want to do if the system is under warranty. Pass it off to Dell support, let them walk you through their checks.

Remember, the more time you spend on "maybe it's this" fixes, the more money it costs to fix in usage of time.

That's not downtown, that's the arse end of London my friend Nobody likes the area around Excel. Make sure you head West into the heart of it.

Are you there for a conference?

I can pop over there I reckon.