Posts made by ntoxicator

@scottalanmiller said:

@ntoxicator said:

I have an email and documentation to CEO/CFO & management team. Asking them what downtime is worth to them, or the cost of downtime? To the cost of having infrastructure to mitigate that.

Make them put it into calculation numbers. Meaning....

$5/minute or $10,000/hour.

It should be complex in 99% of cases, not just what I said about. It might be like this...

Timeline:

0-10 minutes: $0
10 minutes - 2 hours: $50,000
Then $12,000/hr
Until 48 hours, then $5K/hr
At one week it shoots to $500K and we are likely out of business

Thank you. I've asked for this before. For them to calculate what we make on average a day aggregate with all our clients. Or average cost for what downtime costs. Will propose this again.

@scottalanmiller

I greatly appreciate your brutal honesty in your replies. I suppose, i took an emotional response as jabs at me. But your outside view plays a key role in your driven responses.

@scottalanmiller said:

I'm not saying that HA is wrong for you, I've never said that once. What I've said is that nothing you've said has supported the idea that HA is what you need but a lot of what you have said and more that you are stating suggest that you do not.

If there is a reason for HA, it's not been mentioned yet.

Understood

I have an email and documentation to CEO/CFO & management team. Asking them what downtime is worth to them, or the cost of downtime? To the cost of having infrastructure to mitigate that. Also asked about their expectations, as well as ROI and TCO

@scottalanmiller said:

@ntoxicator said:

@scottalanmiller

CEO/CFO & management, will not purchase new hardware unless they're certain it'll last for 5+ years and handle the load of 500+ employee's by year 2020. All by company projections and their hiring needs/growth rate statistics.

better than to think of ANY financial investment in terms other than "what is best for the business." They are getting emotional and emotional C levels drive companies in the ground.

I think you made a point here and the comment around "What is best for the business". They're trying to also operate on a cash basis... also building out a new 70,000 - 112,000 sq ft. facility to house all new employee's. to be built by end of 2017. I personally doubt their timeframe. I have my doubts

I've tried to explain my case and even a new single server approach (updated hardware & specs) to hold our VM resource needs... always gets brushed off. Happening for past year.

However, have recently asked I find pricing/quotes for equipment and see what other companies of 'our size' are doing and have success with.

For HA, two nodes.

It comes down to understanding the hardware and the MTBF? Understanding the common failures of said server/generation/caveats?

Understanding risk or percentage change as to an actual hardware failure which would result in a node going down, and the need for fail-over scenerio

I see those as logical talking points and reasoning when looking at HA and if its a need or not

@scottalanmiller

CEO/CFO & management, will not purchase new hardware unless they're certain it'll last for 5+ years and handle the load of 500+ employee's by year 2020. All by company projections and their hiring needs/growth rate statistics.

Ok, why dont you come consult for us then? Explain why HA is not needed and list the negatives and upside.

I dont get why your so anti-HA?

So we get another single server, spec'd full of drives and hope that we dont have a hardware failure

What are chances of mobo dying on Dell R730? or integrated NIC card failing, etc? I suppose low percentage rate.

@scottalanmiller said:

Are you sure that all of this makes sense in your environment? This is two orders of magnitude from where you have been in the past. It isn't normal to have an LA (low availability) environment and get by for a long time and suddenly leap to HA. Why not just go to standard availability? It's a full order of magnitude safer than where you have been in the past, almost zero effort (and no risk from that lack of effort... simple is your friend) and less than half the price of doing HA.

SA is the only clear win... tons safer, tons cheaper. HA is tons safer for sure, but costs more and doesn't make sense given what was deemed acceptable in the past.

also to mention, I've been hammering HA setup for awhile to management; for peace of mind and rest-easy at night. Yes, we've been getting along with low availability type setup for now. But as the resource usages increase; i feel the need for HA setup with dual nodes.

Looking to develop hardware costs and quotes for new equipment. Company wants to grow employee's to 500+ by year 2020. Need to have reliable servers hosting VM's

If the primary xenserver host fails.. then what? We have a day + of downtime waiting for server to come back online?

Looking to future proof so can be in production for next 5 years. I may not be here with company in next 5 years, so want to leave behind a good setup.

Ok. Their documentation says the DRBD interface to be bonded from within Xencenter (per documentation). Am I wrong here?

So the ethernet link between the two nodes, im sure GigE is plenty enough bandwidth? or 10Gige not hurt?

http://www.halizard.com/images/pdf/iscsi-ha_2-node_cluster_howto_1.2.12_final.pdf

I could be incorrect on the terminology or reference. I was reading one of their posted documents.

This would be the DRBD interface / IP link between the two(2) nodes

Question

HA-Lizard HA-iSCSI interface between the two(2) servers..

bonded GigE link?

or a single DA 10Gbe cable between the hosts? I suppose, bonded GigE is plenty sufficient due to disk write speeds? (non SSD)

@scottalanmiller

Thank you for this post.. I have a hunch as to why you posted this.

@scottalanmiller
None of that was covered, though. No amount of Windows, AD or SMB covers that. Only NTFS ACLs provide that. You can do with with actual NTFS or you can do it with Linux VFS and an NTFS ACL layer. Either way, works the same. But the only device that can give you ACLs is the device providing SMB. So the Synology NAS in the example.

Understood! Thank you sir.

@scottalanmiller said:

Now, what you will likely look up often, is exactly file names. For example, it is common to find that Python 2 packages are called python and Python 3 are called python3.

This is where yum list | grep python is awesome because it will list everything called python regardless and let you see what the options are.

This!

Found this
https://blogs.office.com/2014/02/19/office-365-message-encryption-now-rolling-out/#t6DARFb5677UH2Fp.97

I was just overthinking this, rather than relying on a Microsoft solution

Gotcha. I will look into this.

Company wide we have E1 accounts. Only a few users have E3 to take advantage of the software licenses. (Cost issue).

@Dashrender said:

well, his issue of needing to be concerned if NTFS permissions was supported or not wouldn't be there if this was a Windows Server instead of a NAS appliance.

-Correct

@scottalanmiller said:

@ntoxicator said:

So in my logic and what I was trying to explain before. Is that I would 100% need a device with AD integration for an SMB setup, since this SMB share is NOT local disk on the actual windows server. Since I would not be able to to the NTFS & share permissions directly on that server....

It's not on "the" Windows server, but to everything on the network, it's on a server. I'm not sure why you keep mentioning the Windows server... what does that have to do with anything.

Your resulting information seems to be correct, but you keep mention that things are "because this isn't local disks on the Windows server" but that has nothing to do with the situation that I can see. It would be identical if this was a Windows server - nothing on the network knows that this isn't a Windows server. All the same tools, functions, processes, etc. apply.

It's still local disks. Still SMB. Still NTFS ACLs. Still AD Integration.

Ok --

"On the windows server". I meant if I create the SMB shares on the actual Windows Server VM on those disks.

now, if I create SMB shares on a NAS / network device.. That would be different and ofcourse this is not 'on the windows server'.

It has all come together for me.