Best posts made by Francesco Provino

I wrote a little post about my messing around with the new Ubuntu, containers and OpenVSwitch.
I hope that could be useful to someone!

http://www.francescoprovino.com/2018/04/27/network-management-with-lxd-and-openvswitch-in-ubuntu-18-04/

Yesterday morning, I've gone under 70Kg for the first time in 12 years .

@scottalanmiller said in I moved to Linux!:

@Francesco-Provino said in I moved to Linux!:

@scottalanmiller said in I moved to Linux!:

@Francesco-Provino said in I moved to Linux!:

@stacksofplates I don't think anything you wrote about KVM is true, and it never was true also. I don't think I'm biased towards KVM in any way, I use more vSphere and XS hosts than KVM ones as of today, but… KVM and the standard toolstack has everything. At least, anything apart from some very new and particular GPU or latency-related stuff that only ESXi and customized (AWS!) Xen have. But of course, the basic and advanced stuff are absolutely covered. Every single thing.

He's talking about Boxes, not KVM.

Oh, ok, now it makes sense! Never heard about Boxes… libvirt is really anything you need for KVM. Maybe virt-manager, if you are used to XenCenter-like administration…

Boxes is a VERY nascent KVM front end. I'm playing with it right now, it's neat that it uses KVM with local console redirect. But it needs some polishing, the interface is awkward and missing a lot of basic features.

Why use Boxes when virt-manager and virsh are mature and already in place?

Here we are, 5 years later…

Just an old thread in which I was arguing of KVM being the best thing since sliced bread…
Luckly, I remain of the same idea and continue to experience with KVM till today.

I just want to give credit to @scottalanmiller for have brought me to know the VMware and Xen world, at that time :).

Thank you Scott, your claims have significantly boost my IT career, even if we did not agree at all!

Hello, I'm about to move one of the infrastructure I administer from IPOD (one SAN with 12 spindles) to local PCIe SSD replicated into SAN. I just want to hear some opinion about single PCIe SSD reliability VS a spindles array…

Or, better, should the PCIe card be as reliable as an hardware RAID card? NAND wearing aside, of course.

My desk at home, z240 with some power ups (GTX 950, 32Gb of RAM, samsun 951).
The screen is a 43' 4k from Philips, the keyboard is a Unicomp.
Running OpenSuSe 42.2, of course with Kde 5…

The book is "Modern quantum mechanics" from Sakurai & Napolitano :).

@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

@virtualrick said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

Frankly, I haven't seen anyone say they don't want the product after seeing whet we do and understanding the architecture.

This is a major, and common, sales mistake. You don't see them. Right, of course you don't. Most of us have talked about this at length before... you don't see them because the moment that you don't have pricing info many of them are already gone and you never get their contact info or ever realize that they might have been customers.

I've seen HR do this with new hires - tell people things so bad about a company via anonymous "pre-contact" information that the company never gets metrics on how many people they've turned away that never moved past the anonymous phase because the candidate turns them down for the job before they even have an interview.

Think about the presentation in Chicago. Every single person had the same concern. Only ONE of them put something online to complain, the others... walked away. You just got lucky that someone cared enough to inform you... and only because another vendor asked a question about you. If Nic hadn't wondered if anyone was using Simplivity, this would never have come up in a public channel (we'd already heard complaints in private ones days before this, and live during the presentation there were messages going around about how pricing was being refused) you would never have had this conversation.

So sure, you don't see the people you are turning away. That's how bad the situation is, you aren't even aware that it is happening.

And it's FAR more than you think. Before this thread, at least a dozen market influencers had a private conversation, none of whom had been at the Chicago event, about what a waste of time talking to Simplivity would be because pricing was being held back. You didn't just risk turning away a room full of people that you talked to directly - but that those people were then actively telling other people that there was no pricing info so to avoid you. You have no idea the degree to which you got the word out that you didn't have pricing.

You never see the people who turn your product down immediately. Never use that as a metric.

I completely agree with you, and I'm a CTO based in Italy (so, I suppose, no cultural background involved). I wouldn't even CONSIDER a company that isn't clear in THAT way, in a time where the cloud providers offer bill-explorer tools.

Something very simple:

https://pastebin.com/zSvJCsCR

I see you are using LVM (that's good!), so…

• First, create a new block device in the free space;
• PVadd the new block device to your VG (fedora, I think);
• lvextend your root LV;
• xfs_growfs your root FS, and you'll be done ;).

@scottalanmiller said in Linux OS advice for building a SAM-SD:

@magicmarker said in Linux OS advice for building a SAM-SD:

I've still been researching this topic. After digging deeper, I was curious as to why nobody recommended Proxmox...

We get asked this all the time.

1. It's just a GUI on top of KVM and Open-VZ (and now LXC). It's weird and complex and while a GUI is nice, we have GUIs already that work great and don't require completely third party packages.
2. The ProxMox company are scammers and rotten people. You don't want to deal with them. This isn't a nice project.
3. @StorageNinja can tell you, they actually run a full on spam marketing organization. They are deleted constantly with fake accounts on SW. We've been dealing with them spamming constantly for about five years.
4. It's attempting to solve a problem we don't have.

Your points are all true. The major selling point is that oVirt is too much a hassle to configure and manage, and the last time I tried it I wasn't able to use it in any productive way. Something like XO for KVM could be a deal breaker for the GUI aficionados. As of today I can do anything without a GUI on plain KVM (virsh console is my friend), so I don't really care/need it, but a lot of people want it of course.

@RojoLoco said in Flip becomes SapientRazorfish:

I wouldn't brag about being "identified by Gartner"... because they are strictly pay-to-play. Your company was "identified as a leader" because they bought that rating. Not exactly an accomplishment.

I was also skeptical about other Gartner reports, like VMware THAT WAY on top in the virtualizazion market, when XEN and KVM leads public cloud and are widespread in such many on-permise installation…

Scott, let me tell that you're completely right.
I use vi as my primary editor, with little customization.
Vi is everywhere, from the ESXi busybox to router firmware CLI… and I really like how it works.
My only non-standard temptation is ZSH, but I usually can do almost everything with plain bash (set -o vi, of course).

@Grey said in New laptop:

@Francesco-Provino said in New laptop:

@Grey said in New laptop:

@Francesco-Provino said in New laptop:

@WrCombs I just come back from a Dell conference: Latitude 7480 seems to be the new gold standard for business laptops, apart from Lenovo.

You went to a Dell conference and they said the new standard is a Dell laptop. Gee, I wonder why?

No, it was a conference about servers and storage.

One of the Dell people let me try his Latitude, and I say that the new Latitude are very well made.

http://i.imgur.com/uKn7S.gif

Yup.

Or, maybe I'm a sysadmin from Italy that suddenly join Dell sales workforce yesterday, and now is trying to sell laptops in the US from Italy.
Seems reasonable, nay?

LOL

@sreekumarpg
Mount S3 as a filesystem with https://github.com/archiecobbs/s3backer , and use your standard backup tools.

@obsolesce said in Linux-based StarWind VSAN: hardware-agnostic, minimalistic, and FREE SDS:

@travisdh1 said in Linux-based StarWind VSAN: hardware-agnostic, minimalistic, and FREE SDS:

@obsolesce said in Linux-based StarWind VSAN: hardware-agnostic, minimalistic, and FREE SDS:

Is this tied together with VMWare? I thought this was going to be usable on Fedora, for example.

If the Starwind software is running on Linux, the hypervisor shouldn't matter. You'll be able to mount the share Starwind it's exporting on XenServer or KVM just as well, but well all the experts just in case. @KOOLER @Oksana

I'm asking because Linux and SW vSAN are worded everywhere as if it's 100% tied to VMWare, with no other use case. I can't imagine that being the case, but am asking to make sure... perhaps it's worded like that because it's written by a VMWare Architect trying to boast and sell VMWare. Just wondering, because I was under the impression you can use it how you want, not just with VMWare.

I agree with you, seems like bad marketing. I’ll be interestes in using it with KVM, for example. I thing it will just export iSCSI.

I have to migrate a whole vmware-based environment (vcenter, mani esxi hosts) with AD domain that also host DNS and dhcp to a new and bigger subnet. Today everything is on 192.168.0.0/24 (old consumer router bad habit), I want to move all to something like 10.45.1.0/22 (so, over 1k usable IPs). I can put the whole environment down for a couple of hours at maximum. It's mainly windows-based and everything authenticate through AD.
There's also a VMware Horizon (ex View) client pool, with two connection servers.

Now, I have some doubts on the best practices to follow regarding this migration, for example, how to change the vCenter subnet without losing the Horizon functionality? Should I reconfigure everything in a DNS-based fashion? What about the DCs (there are two in production)?

@stacksofplates said in Netflix starts to get with the program on more Linux distributions.:

That's 99% the reason I was using Chrome instead of Chromium or Firefox.

Yeah, same!

@scottalanmiller I think that the only "advanced step" is to put your hands into XAPI… what a powerful toolstack! Its logic is different than libvirt, but is just as capable, if not more! Create cronjobs and non-trivial scripts is very easy.

Maybe, something that is lacking is some form of integration with libguestfs, a KVM-centric set of tool that can do anything with disk images… for example, you can pull the cloud image of your favourite distro and inject ssh keys or passwords, completely skipping the installaton process. Maybe we will see something like that for windows, some day…

Cannot find a purpose.

It's too pricey to be a graphic/video workstation, still lack performance vs the many multi-socket workstation/workstation, use AMD instead or Nvidia (CUDA!!!), non upgradable, non modular design with integrated display… any high-end workstation from Dell/HP/Supermicro can easily destroy it in any benchmark for a fraction of price, and with much better ROI, also.

@FATeknollogee if you can understand italian, mine it's already out: http://www.francescoprovino.com/2016/08/22/xenserver-7-software-raid-con-mail-alert/ .

Maybe I will translate into english, if someone in ML is interested…