Posts made by KOOLER

@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

@Nic said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

@scottalanmiller not sure, they didn't delve into that level of detail. Their idea of having a hardware accelerator card is interesting though. Basically a combo of RAID, dedupe and their own custom file system under the covers.

It's an ASIC, I believe. An interesting approach to be sure.

Xilinx FPGA to be exactly correct. ASIC is a totally different level of engineering. Very few companies can actually afford one to have built.

https://www.simplivity.com/blog/2015/03/deduping-io/

P.S. There's nothing wrong with FPGA at all. As long as it gets the job done user shouldn't care is this CPU, FPGA or ASIC moving the bits behind the screen.

@Nic said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

I saw a presentation from them at a Chicago SpiceCorps meeting last night and the technology seemed impressive. Has anyone had any experience using them? Curious to see if they're as good in practice as they promise.

Well I'm at the other side of the fence really and it's difficult comment w/out look like I want to mock the competitor so... Let's flip it other side: SimpliVity and StarWind are very similar in terms of how we get the things done so I'm pretty familiar with the design they use. It's a combination of a local data protection with a hardware RAID (erasure coding) and some replication between a pair (or more) nodes on top. This approach definitely has it's benefits but drawbacks are there as well - any time your workload is bigger than a local data stores you're in trouble: either scale isn't going to happen or there's a performance penalty on that. So... I'd strongly suggest to do a POC with them and when you do provide a data growth estimations for another year and a half. If you'll go with them and you'll hit a roadblock later you can always backpedal providing info they have been warned.

Good luck!

Anton

P.S. It's a great pleasure to see known faces everywhere. It turns out IT is a very small world really

@scottalanmiller said in Potty Plotter:

What a cool idea. You could get places to compete for ratings or something, too. Bucees in Texas makes big claims to the best restrooms in the world. Time for them to be put the test!

...and start collecting sponsors' checks as well! What a brilliant idea guy has (honestly)!

@hobbit666 said in For MangoLassi.it Forum Geeks: StarWind Virtual SAN NFR (not-for-resale) License!:

Applied for one but got nothing says they E-mailed me a link and license. So tried again and it says already done, but can't see any E-mail.

Ping me with a DM and your e-mail account and we'll check what's wrong there. Thanks!

Great job! Thanks for brining it here. So many misconception and black magic assumed about RAID Z3...

@StrongBad said in For MangoLassi.it Forum Geeks: StarWind Virtual SAN NFR (not-for-resale) License!:

@dafyre said in For MangoLassi.it Forum Geeks: StarWind Virtual SAN NFR (not-for-resale) License!:

Only if setting it up to connect via iSCSI.

Isn't that what it uses?

Also NFS, SMB3 and iSER + vVols (very soon).

@Breffni-Potter said in For MangoLassi.it Forum Geeks: StarWind Virtual SAN NFR (not-for-resale) License!:

@tiagom said in For MangoLassi.it Forum Geeks: StarWind Virtual SAN NFR (not-for-resale) License!:

I need more rep

It's fine, if you want an eval license just ask them.

Yup. It's better to have a supported eval. Just in case

@MattSpeller said in For MangoLassi.it Forum Geeks: StarWind Virtual SAN NFR (not-for-resale) License!:

@StarWind_Software said:

Are your posts helpful?

Well, I'm out then.

Man don't think about yourself like that! Contribution is contribution!

@NETS said in 2.5" or 3.5" drives:

We are getting ready to build backup server based on a R720 should we look for 2.5" chassis or 3.5" chassis?

I'm thinking the density of the 2.5" chassis would be beneficial for future expansion.

1.8 or 2.5 SSDs for performance

3.5 HDD (slow spin) for on-site capacity tier

@scottalanmiller said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

There was thread on SW recently where someone said "NIMBLE SUCKS I DON"T GET THE IOPS I PROMISED". The next post was his Nimble sales rep posting "So I see your at 20% load, your IO latency is .5 ms currently and while your 220C model is one of our smaller ones we have far larger ones. If your having any problems please call us and we will help you" I laughed, but it made me realize the damage that incompetent IT do to the name of a product or application. We are at the point that a sales rep would rather piss off a customer and call them out as an idiot (he was nice about it) than risk their companies name being drug through the mud.

That's not incompetence, though. That's just someone lying. there is a difference.

There's no line in sand about that. Whatever you're going to do 10 people are going to love you but there will be one who'll either hate you or he'll not care. Nimble is more or less safe - they don't do software, but with software it's very easy to a) misconfigure and b) break something working and done by other guys. Who's one to blame? Of course storage vendor! He has SLAs!

@John-Nicholson said in The Inverted Pyramid of Doom Challenge:

One last thought...

IF the reason that Xen has 2% market share is because there is NO LOGICAL REASON for vSphere or paid Hyper-V (with VMM to manage) then that means 98% of IT people are idiots. If 98% are idiots, wouldn't that mean they should be outsourcing their IT as much as possible to their vendors or others? (and therefore not deploy Xen).

Catch-22

Xen has 2% of the market share because it never came out of the niche. Most admins are lazy (it's natural, all people are so deeply inside and lazy = OK) so if you need to perform 1 simple activity with ESXi and it "just works" but you need to run many whistles with Xen... Naturally you'll go ESXi next time! Just because you want to spend these +2 hours drinking Coors and watching Vikings losing another game. Being too professional != being good. IMHO of course.

Guys, anybody played with them so far? Any chances to hear your feedback? How many of you have all-Datacenter editions of Hyper-V / Windows installed (ones eligible to S2D/ SR upgrade n the future)?

Thanks!

Anton

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

I did look @ the free Starwind Virtual SAN, but from what I read, I understand that the free version will allow only storage and not compute, on the same host... That's allowed, only in the paid version... ??

I've never heard of that limitation. that would be a new and surprising one. I'm quite confident that you can put your storage on your compute nodes.

Checking with @KOOLER @StarWind_Software

I'm making this statement, based on my understanding of the Free vs Paid document, found on https://www.starwindsoftware.com/whitepapers/free-vs-paid.pdf

Please look @ the comparison on the second-last page of this PDF... It says, next to Deployment Scenarios , that Hyperconvergence, is available only for Certain User Statuses (Check Status)

Please ping me off-line and I'll be happy to help with the keys you need

@dafyre said in Converting to a virtual environment:

Their Endoint Recovery Free would work for backups in this scenario as well. And with that one, you do get file-level restores.

Unfortunately, it'd have to be loaded per VM, and is Windows only at the moment (Linux version just hit beta).

They are improving greatly and we'll get releases and fully commercially supported versions soon. VERY soon

@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@scottalanmiller said in Converting to a virtual environment:

@PRPL said in Converting to a virtual environment:

I did look @ the free Starwind Virtual SAN, but from what I read, I understand that the free version will allow only storage and not compute, on the same host... That's allowed, only in the paid version... ??

I've never heard of that limitation. that would be a new and surprising one. I'm quite confident that you can put your storage on your compute nodes.

Checking with @KOOLER @StarWind_Software

I'm making this statement, based on my understanding of the Free vs Paid document, found on https://www.starwindsoftware.com/whitepapers/free-vs-paid.pdf

Please look @ the comparison on the second-last page of this PDF... It says, next to Deployment Scenarios , that Hyperconvergence, is available only for Certain User Statuses (Check Status)

that does appear to say that, but goes against hundreds of posts from the company so I think that this might be outdated.

You're absolutely correct! Making long story short: somebody should try real hard NOT to get anything from us! Even if people don't fall down into listed categories and aren't eligible we still give away everything on a personal request. Just because

Referenced from the document link brings here:

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-nfr-license-users

StarWind Virtual SAN Free is a convenient and self-sufficient software, but in comparison with the commercial version, it has restricted functionality and features. It easily turns a pair of commodity servers into fault-tolerant SAN and NAS, but supports only Converged architecture, does not and provides only cloud-based asynchronous replication, etc. The full comparison of StarWind VSAN and VSAN Free can be found here. In case some of the features of the commercial version are needed for test and development, home lab or POC (Proof of Concept), there is still a way to obtain them.

StarWind highly values virtualization specialists and tries to assist them in every possible way, that is why professionals and students of the sphere can get a free license of StarWind Virtual SAN without restrictions and with all features enabled. Here is the list of users who can apply for this license:
Microsoft MVPs
MCTs (Microsoft Certified Trainers)
MCPs (Microsoft Certified Professionals)
SpiceHeads of at least “Jalapeno” level
Consultants
Students
VMware vExperts
VCPs (VMware Certified Professionals)
Trainers

Mangolassi members of reputation 200+

Bloggers

@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 ;(((

@dafyre said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:

@scottalanmiller Holy cow... can I borrow $5k ??

For $10k he could build 2 x 16TB usable storage units and use StarWind to make them happy.
(https://beta.wellston.biz/xByte SAM-SD R520.pdf)

yeah we can do that

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

there are some limitations with a free versions (no iscsi and only smb3/nfs) but OP can ping me offline and we'll be happy to help with a custom stuff

anton AT starwind DOT com

P.S. DRBD is another one for sure

http://www.drbd.org/en/use-cases/high-availability

https://blog.remibergsma.com/2012/09/09/building-a-redundant-pair-of-linux-storage-servers-using-drbd-and-heartbeat/

@KOOLER "do guy" = "do gui" LOL

@scottalanmiller said in OpenSuse 12.3 with Cinnamon:

I can honestly say that I have never run OpenBSD with XFCE. Or any GUI, for that matter.

it's really easy with a modern youtube howto guides

p.s. you have to have a good reason to run openbsd however back to gui... i'm spoiled with windows nt so if I can do guy I do gui and no cli

opensuse forever

openbsd + xfce is another one ;))