@Dashrender said:

@KOOLER said:

@hubtechagain said:

WTF is starwind?! ha

This is who we are

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free

We give away free version to use on a bare metal servers (so you take a pair of them and turn into HA NFS or SMB3 NAS). This one has no restrictions at all (capacity is unlimited, production use is OK and you can be anybody to get it).

HA iSCSI and hyper converged versions are available to different set of people like MVPs, SpiceHeads, VCPs, some restricted ones to MCTs & bloggers. Technically we can bring same program to MangoLassi community as well. I just need some sort of a low watermark (points, rank or whatever) to make the program look a bit of private so my VP of Sales would not burn me with a blow torch

Cheers and let me know if you'd have any questions

That is pretty cool. Most of us here are Spiceheads as well, so we're probably covered, though getting ML on the list would be awesome!!!

It's still a smaller community here as with a set of drawbacks it definitely has own benefits: much easier to have "special" handling

P.S. You know bigger you become more bureaucratic processes start to happen to slow the things down and complicate everything...

@scottalanmiller said:

Okay everyone, an important Change.org petition here. Get out there and sign this petition to Rename the Australian Currency to Dollarydoos.

Support the cause! Every voice matters.

Kangaroo$ ?

@Dashrender said:

StarWind isn't possible in this setup because of the lack of enough local storage on the two servers in the same location.

You can go virtual on top of an exiting hypervisor nodes. There's a way to obtain free license for hyper converged setup if you plan to support and maintain everything on your own. FYI.

@scottalanmiller said:

.... we compiled a guide to things that are never said by Western English speakers that immediately tip people off that English is not your first language? There are many of these "tells" that make it very obvious where someone is from based on their written language. In most cases they do not cause communications problems, but they do "give away" more than I think most people want given away by their written communications.

I don't want to do this if people do not feel it would be valuable, I don't want the spirit of it to be taken the wrong way. But I just spoke with someone in Spanish and instantly knew that Spanish was not their first language and knew where they were from just from the phrases they were uses and how they wrote.

I feel that knowing some simple basics to avoid could be extremely helpful in allowing those from outside the big English native countries (UK, Canada, USA, Belize, Australia, New Zealand, etc.) to be less obvious. I am guessing that bad speech patterns are taught in some regions of the world and that people learning English there have no idea that they are being taught very identifiable and non-standard English. Generally it is not wrong but does not conform to western speech.

Thoughts?

Guys who had started learning English in former Soviet Union (35+ years old) were usually taught by people who had never in their lives actually talk to anybody talking native English speaking people. You can guess results

@Dashrender said:

I wasn't aware that PCIe SSD were as reliable as RAID based SAS SSD until I ran across a thread on SW this morning.

These devices are (or at least were) normally more than 100% more than the cost of similar sized SAS SSD and the accompanying RAID controller.

Now obviously we IT folks in general have found that single RAID controllers are reliable enough to not warrant having a backup within the same chassis, we find that it's just as likely to have a whole die as to have the RAID controller die, so instead of backing up the RAID controller we backup the whole system to cover those situations.

I've done a little reading now, it seems that the resiliencies of PCIe SSDs are approximately equivalent to a RAIDed setup, and the controller is at least equivalent to normal RAID controllers.

As the costs come down, these seem like the clear winner.

What is your experience?

We recommend using PCIe and newer NVMes for cache. You can go all-flash of course but that's more expensive than desired typically. Back to SAS SSDs they are overpriced IMHO compared to their SATA siblings.

@scottalanmiller said:

No cheating.....

Surfing forums and answering e-mails.

PS Yes, it's 3:56 AM my time

@scottalanmiller said:

I think that the V100 is the big "find" of the set because it is small and easy to ship, quiet to run in a house, can be racked or easily wall mounted, is light and easy to move around yet provides a very cool non-PC server platform. Runs FreeBSD well, has two drives for RAID 1 but is Sparc based and is perfect for forcing you to gain perspective on using non-Intel and non-AMD architecture systems.

Absolutely love Sun hardware! Still have Ultra10 and Ultra40 in a running conditions somewhere in our basement.

P.S. It's a pity Sun is out. Pretty much like DEC.

Guys thank you for your HP greetings! I appreciate them! Sorry for delayed response, got flu... Damn, it's 4th birthday in a row I got flu! Need to move to some better place I guess Thanks again !!

@alvama said:

Scott, thank you for your topic. I am planning new installation and comparing between RAID 10 and RAID 5 on ssd drives. What do you think about stripe size and TBW for two types of raid? Do you know what size of blocks will be written on disks if service (sql for example) writes 8Kb on volume. For raid10 I think it will be two 8K blocks on mirror disks. But for RAID 5 it will be two blocks with size=stripe size and may be 32 or 64K. And in raid5 configuration TBW limit will be reached faster.

I'm not Scott but in your context RAID5 seems to be preferred. Because 1) Flash and not spinning disk used so typical parity RAID issues associated with high-capacity spinners are gone (see URL below) 2) Database logs are sequential writes of a big sizes so should "touch" maximum amount of spinners possible and because of sequential nature read-modify-write is not going to happen and 3) RAID5 gives you write performance of (N-1) and RAID10 does (N/2) (where N = amount of spinners).

https://slog.starwindsoftware.com/raid-5-was-great-until-high-capacity-hdds-came-into-play-but-ssds-restored-its-former-glory/

Good luck

@MattSpeller said in Looking for a Dashcam with ODB II:

Can't say enough positive stuff about getting an OBD2 reader, they're freaking fantastic.

I drive my poor car so freaking hard and I've had a bad misfire when it gets up to temp that no one has been able to diagnose. In less than 24h owning this widget I discovered it was misfiring on all 4 cylinders when it got hot on a low tank of gas. My theory is that the turbo is boiling the gas return line and it's heating up the tank. When the fuel pump goes to work it's not sending enough pressure (because hot gas / insufficient lube in the pump (gas lubes the pump)).

TL;DR epic little widget.

Throw in some wideband O2 sensor and gas pressure gauge and you'll know for sure. For me what you say sound like fuel pump issues.

@scottalanmiller said:

@JohnFromSTL said:

Due to our size and budget constraints we purchase refurbished equipment, which are typically 2-3 years old. Whichever solution I end up with needs to last 3-4 additional years.

Refurb is good. @xByteSean is around to help out with that. As is @ryan-from-xbyte

xBytes allows people to get Dell quality @ SuperMicro price

@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@StrongBad said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@StrongBad said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@thwr said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Here?

At least someone is

Yeah, was just reading about #Bareflank. New hypervisor framework as it seems, just running through Twitter like crazy. Not much info available otherwise.

I have not heard about that.

Same here, but I've got word because @KOOLER made a tweet.

didn't get a chance to review it though ;(((

@DustinB3403 said:

Of these two options, which would be better:

1. Purchase a 2 bay external LaCie

2. Build a OBR10 Desktop file server using consumer desktop parts.

The only limitation is the pricing has to be near identical.

For a two-disk enclosures (and two disk only!) you go for Netgear and Synology. They have smart software inside you don't need to spend time on tuning, tons of integration and MOST IMPORTANT their enclosures don't eat much of power. Anything you build yourself with a desktop is going to suck way more watts from your power socket

@johnhooks said:

https://virtualizationreview.com/blogs/mental-ward/2015/10/apple-drops-vmwares-esxi-for-kvm.aspx?m=1

Old news and actually something to be expected for a long time. Hyper-V was out of game obviously so it was Xen Vs KVM dogfight for 2,5 years...

@StrongBad said:

What kind of DAS devices are you looking at? Drobo makes some really nice ones that are smaller. The Drobo 5D is quite popular and can hold five 3.5" drives, can have an SSD cache if you want, does RAID 6 and connects over eSATA and USB3. It's kind of the Cadillac of desktop DAS units, which sounds like maybe all that you need here?

Don't go for Drobo! They apply mods to Linux so you'll have hard times recovering data back from their devices. Been there done that (c) ...

Cheap Synology and Netgear (don't go for their 4+ disk units as they have bad ROI commodity servers are preferred).

@DenisKelley said:

** I'll be at VeeamOn next week** and one of the things I need to wrap my head around is how Veeam processes synthetic fulls when pushing to the "cloud." I run my setup with Reverse Increments and drop to tape, but now that my Internet bandwidth is speeding up, I'm thinking of switching to Forward Increments and using the synthetic fulls.

Check you PM. I'll be there. You're welcomed to shake hands and share some drinks

@Bill-Kindle said:

I see this all the time. People will setup Shadow Copies as a replacement for their normal backups, and then are shocked when they run out of space on their under-provisioned servers. And on top of that, they create multiple copies per day!

I need to add "Shadow Copies are not a replacement for backups!" saying to the "Snapshots are not backups!" line I use all the time.

Aside from all of that, what is this forum running? Looks pretty slick.

Bill is active on SpiceWorks. Renamed himself to Little Green Man so you don't see "Bill Kindle" tagged posts anymore.

@scottalanmiller said:

It should also be mentioned vis a vis the VMware vs. HyperV situation that in both cases with two nodes and going for HA, the only reasonable storage option today is Starwind (paging @kooler @StarWind_Software ) and Starwind is better on HyperV. So while not a strict VMware vs HyperV benefit, in practical real world functionality, HyperV has a storage advantage in the case where you have two nodes AND go for HA.

Yes we can absolutely do that! Just in case OP can see:

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san

We'll also extend our NFR program for free hyper converged version to cover Mangolassi guys soon. Just let me return from MVP Summit and kick web guys with a long long stick :)))

@scottalanmiller said:

Check out refurbished parts. Often much cheaper while remaining fully supported and functional. Nearly all of our physical gear is refurbed.

+100500

xByte is a great source of refurb Dell hardware!

@scottalanmiller said:

Adding @KOOLER and @StarWind_Software

For lab use it's possible to chunk out one physical LAN with vLANs and make a pseudo-supported config. Something you absolutely don't want to do in production! Later this year we'll release dynamic quorum thing so it would be possible to use single LAN between hosts.