Posts made by NetworkNerd

I would say don't waste your time on it. I've found Spiceworks and MangoLassi so much more valuable than anything else most of the time.

@ajstringham said:

@scottalanmiller said:

You are late to the party on that news

Yeah, this might be our first duplicate post on ML!

Oops - sorry about that. Feel free to delete the post if needed.

Are HP and Symantec in cahoots on their decision to split?

http://investor.symantec.com/investor-relations/press-releases/press-release-details/2014/Symantec-Announces-New-Strategy-to-Fuel-Growth-and-Plans-to-Separate-into-Two-Public-Industry-Leading-Technology-Companies/default.aspx

@ajstringham said:

Is strategic more planning ahead and tactical more reactionary?

Tactical is more day-to-day type stuff (break / fix) while strategic is larger scale projects like planning ERP system upgrades, server migrations, moving to VOIP, getting a new office online, deciding how to roll out new software, etc.

I think it's worth your time to contact them and see if they might do the interview via Skype.

So if you had to divide the tasks you do into those 2 categories, which one gets the most attention, and what is the percentage breakdown?

I don't know about you, but it feels like more and more the strategic stuff suffers because of tactical issues getting in the way. What do you do to make time for strategic stuff so you don't have 80 hour work weeks?

@Minion-Queen said:

The conference was great for me as the head of GroveSocial and for NTG as well. Love that my hobby and my day job blend together so well. I did not attend much of the technical things. I was there to see how the conference was done. I did attend some sessions but really I just positioned myself in busy seating areas and asked questions of those attending.

I was able to get a couple questions answered for @NetworkNerd that he wanted to know about V8.

This conference is very much centered around Veeam's software that the vendors that support them. If you have questions I can try to answer them but I was there as a Media Analyst so very different view of the conference than many of you would have.

Yes - thank you for that! It's nice to know people who can go straight to the source and get you a quick answer.

@scottalanmiller said:

Awesome. I really need to join the NYC VMUG. Have not had a chance to get around to that yet.

Yes, you really do need to join VMUG. The content even at just regular meetups is often very valuable. Sometimes they talk about technologies that would not apply to SMBs, but it really is interesting to learn about them. Overall, I find the content very good if you have a good VMUG leadership group.

@scottalanmiller said:

@NetworkNerd said:

It talks about SUSE, Debian, and Fedora families. The first few modules were general overview of how the Linux kernel and boot loader work, and they break out the steps in examples (at least those I have done up through chapter 4) for a distro in each family with screenshots. It's really helped me just doing what I have done thus far.

That is an unexpected lineup. One enterprise distro (Suse) which is primarily popular in Europe (and with me) and two hobby distros. That's weird.

I would expect Red Hat, Suse and Ubuntu if there were three.

The specific distros they show are CentOS, Ubuntu, and OpenSUSE. Notice I said families above.

It talks about SUSE, Debian, and Fedora families. The first few modules were general overview of how the Linux kernel and boot loader work, and they break out the steps in examples (at least those I have done up through chapter 4) for a distro in each family with screenshots. It's really helped me just doing what I have done thus far.

@scottalanmiller said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

Yes, but You usually use 10GB ethernet or fiber for it not your normal 1GB switch.
You also need switches designed for Iscsi/sans for the best performance.

Most people are still on GigE connections and it works fine for the bulk of users. It is amazing how little throughput you normally need.

You don't need switches designed for iSCSI, just ones that are fast enough. Edison labs uses unmanaged, low end Netgear switches because they are so fast. Not designed for SAN use, just fast and that is all that matters.

You can also skip the switches altogether.

Yep - we use a passive Netgear gig switch between our backup target (Drobo B800i SAN) and our ESXi hosts. It works great.

@coliver said:

@NetworkNerd said:

EdX

No, is it still being offered?

I do not believe so - http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/549894-free-linux-course. I do have a coupon for $100 off the re-run of that course if you want it.

@art_of_shred said:

@NetworkNerd said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

I didn't know VSA used a VM on each host to do it's job. How does it control the disk beneath the other VMs?

You can build your own VSA to see how it works. You can do it with Linux or BSD quite easily. You build a virtual NAS (which is what VSA means) and use DRBD (Linux) or HAST (BSD) to make the cluster work. You share the storage to the local machine via NFS. Now you have a VM that can provide storage for the other VMs locally.

Quite easily to SAM is not so easy to the person who is semi-familiar with Linux.

Something SAM needs to be reminded of occasionally.

That's why you are here, Art - to slap him around a bit.

Did anyone else take advantage of the free Linux course offered by EdX a couple of months ago? I have been working through it slowly as I can, but I am struggling to get the time to do it. How far did you get?

Would NIC teaming / link aggregation help at all from a VMWare standpoint (i.e. multiple uplinks from SAN / NAS to switch to host)?

You're also going to need to know how read / write your environment is in terms of hitting the database, no?

@DenisKelley said:

Wow, this is very, very cool. Can't wait to see how it integrated into my Veeam B&R console.

Amen to that - did you sign up to be notified once it is available?

That's awesome! I can't wait to try it. Ok, I guess I have to wait....

If you are a VMUG member (free), check this out:
http://vcloud.vmware.com/service-offering/virtual-private-cloud-ondemand.

And if you are not a VMUG member, you can sign up for free. I just wanted to share.

@art_of_shred said:

@NetworkNerd said:

@ajstringham said:

@NetworkNerd said:

Maybe I could use the HP DL 385 G5 I have with the MSA 70 and run something like FreeNAS on it for another datastore option?

That's one option. Something that would be good for, to be honest, would be your StorageCraft server, if you go with that.

I was thinking use it as a NFS datastore and a place to store the VM files for my current physical machines like was mentioned above. That saves money on a secondary backup solution.

Actually, that would be a tertiary backup solution, as you have Veeam and BE already. The original decision seemed to be "buy hardware or buy another backup solution". It seems that utilizing current hardware like that could avoid both?

I'd get rid of BackupExec with the P2V of the physical boxes and be able to use Veeam. That eliminates cost of software. But, I cannot avoid some investment in increasing backup storage. So this does not completely eliminate a need for more hardware but does decrease the cost of the hardware needed by a large factor.