Posts made by NetworkNerd

I remember Maxta and Pernix as well as Atlantis saying they do storage reclamation and dedupe. But I think each has it's own virtual appliance that runs on each host to be able to do this.

For those that do blog, how much time would you say you spend on it per week, per month, etc.? I do not mean to hijack the thread but was genuinely curious. I've thought about starting a blog a couple of times, but it normally fizzles due to time constraints.

If you had the money you could register for the conference and get the VMCE video training for $650. It would be worth it even if you could not go. They sold out of VMCE seats at the actual conference, so it's online training for anyone who signs up for VMCE. But the rate for the training is only available to those who register for the conference. Otherwise it is $3K.

I want to go back to the days before there were even featured threads and you just saw your feed. That was so much less clunky.

I'd actually like to hear a session about growing your department, coaching and development of the people who work for you, letting them grow without stunting your growth, justifying that the team needs to grow, etc.

I think a general talk on risk mitigation, how it translates to the bottom line, and how to get projects approved by management by justifying the cost might be good. You could throw in helpful hints about how to align projects with business need and not departmental wishes.

After seeing some storage virtualization vendors at Spiceworld like Infinio and Maxta, it makes me wonder how applicable / valuable those types of technologies would be to the SMB. I've heard of Pernix Data as well as Atlantis who also do this kind of thing. It's normally some kind of software / virtual appliance that pools your local storage / NAS / DAS / SAN together and uses host RAM / other storage to cache. I'm not saying they all do this, but that has been my general takeaway. Some advertise to do deduplication and storage reclamation. I think you can install most of these non-intrusively in your VMWare environment.

So, if you were starting over with server virtualization at your company, would you look at maybe getting servers with all local storage, 7200 RPM drives, and using one of these software technologies over going to 10K SAS, SSDs, or vSAN?

Has anyone out there used any of these technologies? Should we be pointing to these kinds of things rather than suggesting something beyond local storage?

I'd love to get your feedback because these technologies are very interesting to me.

I seem to remember a talk Scott gave at Spiceworld a few years ago (maybe 2010) about storage that I watched one night randomly.

It was good, but I do like the series idea.

I have seen people in Spiceworks talk about doing a manual module upgrade from FreePBX 2.8 to 2.9 within Embedded FreePBX that can be accessed from an Elastix install but have never tried it.

And in conjunction with this, check out Jeffrey Snover's session about JITJEA. He shows some pretty neat Powershell tools to beef up your security for admins.

Does connecting to the PBX via SSH and running asterisk -rvvvv show any kind of activity when you are not making / receiving calls?

Is traffic from any ip being allowed into your network and able to hit the PBX, or is it restricted to just traffic from Google?

So if you are someone who works in a small VMWare environment (meaning you use Essentials and nothing more), would getting the VCA-DCV and VCA-Cloud be helpful to give a career boost? The hands on labs are free as is the training course you can take / not take before taking the exams.

Has anyone done this to get your name out there in the VMWare community / get yourself to that next level with VMWare?

I realize VCP is probably better, but when you don't have the funds to take the required training for that the VCA looks pretty attractive.

It sounds like from a VM standpoint it's probably best to make a vHD that is independent and persistent to store all the updates.

@Dominica said:

I really think you need to move on to CYOA on this one, now that the CFO has the impression that you approved everything, your ass very well could be on the line, even though it had nothing to do with you. If I were you, I'd set the record straight ASAP.

Ok, I just did that. I just let the CFO know the conversation happened after the lease was signed and really all I could do was verify the machine would seemingly do the job from a technical standpoint since IT had previously been left out of the process.

@Minion-Queen said:

WHO WHO WHO!! Inquiring minds want to know

Meet this guy: http://community.spiceworks.com/people/davesampson.

@Minion-Queen said:

I really hope someone takes advantage! I don't want to be the only ML person I know there.

Well, someone in the Spiceworks community took advantage. The registration has been used.

I happen to know an individual who recently invested in a pretty nice Dell server for his business. He decided to spend a few thousand extra to get all enterprise SSDs rather than 10K SAS disks to hit an IOPs home run with his ERP system. It's OBR10 and all local storage (very nice gear). I did encourage him to get the Perc card with more cache as well. This will be a VMWare setup with the Essentials kit and a single VMFS5 datastore (nothing more than that was needed). For purposes of this thread, I am not concerned with backups.

If this individual had, for example, eight 320 GB SSDs in OBR10 on local storage with a nice Perc card to create the array, I wonder...

If you're running heavy IOP loads like SQL or Exchange (some environments are much heavier than others, of course), how much performance gain would you really get by doing thick eager provisioning for SQL / Exchange / insert application here over thin provisioning when everything is running on SSDs?

Is it best to go thick in this case if you are heavier write than read?

Do the guidelines of when to use thin vs. thick eager change because of the speed of the storage and possibly allow you to save some storage space by sticking with thin provisioned disks?

I've been thinking about it and don't have a good answer as to some guidelines for using thin vs. thick when talking about SSDs. I wanted to hear from some experts out there. Any help is much appreciated.

@JaredBusch said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Yeah, that's the big problem. Why would the financial head get financial advice from IT? Something is very wrong. You are functioning as a senior financial person to the head of finance!!

This is a point I have disagreed with you on before. He is not getting financial advice. He is getting technical advice. The CFO should not be expected to deal with the details of the hardware and determining all the IT costs involved in choosing a lease with maintenance over something without. Only a person with IT skills can know how much IT time will be spent for comparison purposes.

That is IT's role in decisions like this. Once these facts are known, they are presented to the CFO to make the business decision.

You always mix too much big business/enterprise concepts into the SMB space. No matter how "things should be," things are much different between the two.

And we (IT) are asked to approve the bills for IT services, which would include said lease agreement. I can see why the CFO would want my input in this case.

I have 6 sites in the DFW metroplex and easily 200 devices running Windows. We are on AD functional level of 2003 (which we need to change to 2012 sometime soon). After hearing the presentation on WSUS at Spiceworld, it is something I would really like to deploy. For those who have done it, what was your biggest struggle? And once you setup WSUS, do all machines need some kind of group policy to be managed by WSUS, or is that rather automatic?

I'd love to hear any feedback or tips you can offer.