Best posts made by donaldlandru

Installing Korora on my home desktop.

Outdoor movie night underway

@Danp This is where I would end up if I brought this home from the hardware store.

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

This place is crazy quiet today, what's up?

I'm not running into more silly issues with Windows that I don't find the fix for until the 3rd page of Google results today

So you haven't turned your computer on yet today I take it?

@fuznutz04 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@JaredBusch

I will be slumming it in normal clothes.

We were supposed to wear clothes???

Couldn't live without my Outlook. It has everything I need bundled together in one spot. Love the OneNote integration for meetings.

On my mobile I use Touchdown for Android -- to me this is the best featured mobile app; although it does lack the integrations of the Outlook client, I do mostly only use my phone for send/receive.

@scottalanmiller said:

@donaldlandru said:

Ahh -- there is the detail I missed. Just re-read my post and that doesn't make this clear. Yes, the discussion was supposed to pertain to the non-production side. My apologies.

LOL, a rather sizeable detail I think we've been focused almost entirely on the operations cluster in our discussion and/or putting the two together to assess needs as a whole - which is worth considering, is there actually a good reason that they are independent to this level?

LOL -- it's all in the details is there a :sheepish: emoji??? Nope.

As to them being separate this why a design consideration outside of my control being hired in mid process. I believe the thought was to have a separate pane of glass. I would much rather have a three node cluster in this case holding both roles but what I have is what I have.

If I bring up the operations nodes only have 1CPU each and only 64GB of memory I just cringe and this goes a third direction.

And the reply all hell has started on the Horizon DataSys email thread

Warning! Wall of text ahead. Tried to provide the same details I am considering so I can receive the best feedback. Please help me think about things I already haven't or insert additional ideas. Thanks!

Problem Statement: Operations (production) virtual environment is running in an inverted pyramid of doom. Performance of storage array is low due to oversubscription. Looking for advice to correct this.

Background: This is a continuation of my other thread (http://mangolassi.it/topic/6236/zfs-based-storage-for-medium-vmware-workload) where I was looking for feedback on our delivery "development" environment storage. Our operations network consists of the following hardware and dependency chain. (See diagram at bottom for overview)

VMHost hardware

• VMH-OPS1/2 VMware 5.5 essentials plus
  • HP Proliant DL360p G8
  • 2x intel Xeon E5-2667
  • 128GB memory
  • 2x 146GB SAS disk (VMware OS install)
  • 8x total 2.5" drive bays
  • 1x p420i controller with 1GB ram and BBU
  • Internal SD card slot available not used
  • 1x dual port 10GB
  • 1x quad port 1GB
  • 1x dual port 1GB

Storage hardware:

• SAN-ARR0 is an HP MSA P2000 with dual 1GB iscsi controllers (4 ports each controller)
• each controller port pair A/B shares the same VLAN -- 4 VLANS for this storage network

Primary Network to VMHosts

• Serviced by two 10GB switches (HP 5820X-24XG-SFP+)
• Each server has a single 10GB dual port cart (SPOF - single NIC)

Storage Network to VMHosts

• Serviced by two 1GB switches (HP V1910-24g)
• Servers have 1x 4 port GNIC and 1x 2 port GNIC
• Two links from each switch go to one port on each card
• Each link is a separate VLAN
• MPIO round robin

Services currently hosted on the operations platform

• Active Directory/DNS (2008R2)- 2 servers (one on each host)
• DHCP - 1 server
• Exchange 2010 Standard - 1 server
• SharePoint 2010 Foundation - 1 server
• Windows File server (2008R2) 1.5TB data - 1 server
• SQL Server 2008 R2 (SharePoint,VMware) - 1 server
• dozen or so other low IO VMs for business applications, mostly CentOS

I acknowledge this setup should not have been deployed inexperience coupled with an outside vendor pushing this solution is what drove this implementation.

Opportunity: The business has decided to move to Office 365 next year on the E3 plan. This allows us to move Exchange/SharePoint off of the on-premise infrastructure and shrink our storage needs. Given the recent discussions around SSD and the likely return of RAID5, I set out to examine how to remove risks and dependencies in the chain.

Q1 and Q2 Goals:

• Migrate all operations Windows servers (that are not being eliminated by Office 365) to Server 2012 R2 or maybe 2016 but don't think it will be ready in time.
• Migrate business to Office 365 (120 users)
• Eliminate P2000 hosted storage from operations environment Plan:
  • Reinstall VMware on embedded SD card slot to regain two SAS bays
  • Add second 10GB card to each server
  • Install 8*SSD into RAID5 in each server (Currently looking at SDSSDXPS-480G-G25 and MZ7GE480HMHP-00003)
  • Migrate data hosted on P2000 back to local storage
  • If business determines file server requires reliability/redundancy setup second file server with DFSR

@scottalanmiller said:

@donaldlandru said:

I agree we do lack true HA in the production side as there is a single weak link (one storage array), the solution here depends on our move to Office 365 as that would take most of the operations load off of the network and change the requirements completely.

Good deal. We use O365, it is mostly great.

If I can sell them on Office 365 this time around (third times a charm), but that is for a different thread

@Minion-Queen said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

SpiceWorld Follow up emails introducing everyone to ML :). @donaldlandru did an awesome job trying to get more vendors over here! I think @JaredBusch did some too!

Happy to help!

@Dashrender said:

You mention that you're having performance issues today - do you know where those issues are coming from? Disk IO not enough? Production network not fast enough, etc?

It is definitely in the storage network that is slowing us down. I am sharing 8 SATA spindles for too many virtual machines. Plus MPIO on the 1Gig side gets saturated quite frequently, but upgrading the controllers in the P2000 to 10GB iSCSI is more than the SSDs I referenced above.

And out of the woodwork I come. Spiced and replied.

Just finishing breakfast. Dunkin donuts for the win. Even they have ways for supporting my starch and sugar free lifestyle.

@johnhooks said:

How about one of these

Winner!

@scottalanmiller said:

@donaldlandru said:

• Being 24/7 means I can't drop the whole thing for maintenance.

How much maintenance do you do? What is the annual downtime caused by VMware? Only VMware and hardware maintenance is assisted by having the second server.

Now there is an aha moment and presents me a question to bring back to the business. How much downtime is acceptable die to server hardware failure vs spending an additional $1600 to eliminate all but a dual server failure from impacting the services provided by these virtual machines (other disasters of course not included).

Just as @scottalanmiller gets reasonable connectivity, I am sitting here without Internet. Thanks lightning bolt.

I really like the idea of a "forced" mingle. Being generally introverted and totally okay doing my own thing lends itself not to get involved.

During SW I constantly forced myself to be around people "in the know" and was able then to feel like less an outsider, making this a core part of the events going on (social gatherings) would make it even easier for those of us who don't do as well forcing ourselves to interact.

@johnhooks said:

@coliver said:

@johnhooks said:

Just a quick question. I have my FreePBX dial my cell number as part of the extension list for some of the IVR options. If I don't have service (which at our house is common) my voicemail picks up after one right. What's the best way you've found to deal with that? Just a follow me? Or is there a better way?

Which voicemail picks up? The one on your cellphone or the one on your PBX?

The one for my cell phone. Once the IVR dials the ring group, it will only ring once and then the cell phone voicemail picks up (when there is no cell service).

With ring groups I always use, and recommend, the confirm calls option. The only slight annoyance is the fact you have to press 1 on your cell/home phone to answer the call. To me the benefit of retaining the caller ID and knowing it is an office call before accepting the call outweighs that.

And internet is back. UNMS reports outages nicely.