@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

HCI or disaggregate with Hyper-V and SOFS S2D are they way we're deploying now. So, the whole conversation is essentially moot.

Not really HCI as described with the DataOn. That's just a software RAID version of the non-HC model.

HC has always meant physical convergence.

I believe I referred to the DataON setup as "Converged" or sometimes "Asymmetric" not Hyper-Converged which is what Storage Spaces Direct is when running with both Storage Spaces and Hyper-V on the nodes.

Disaggregate is where we have two clusters. One running SOFS (could be a similar to DataON setup as was done in the past or S2D in SOFS only mode which is our way forward) and the other running Hyper-V.

In both S2D and disaggregate setups we run with RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) via Mellanox kit for our ultra-low latency fabric.

@scottalanmiller We add two more units and indeed we have enclosure resilience.

Hyper-Converged with nested resilience in Storage Spaces Direct takes care of all of these single-points of failure in a neat package.

The shared SAS setup is now considered legacy with the only place we're deploying them now being archival storage with up to eight 102 bay JBODs loaded with 12TB drives being stacked with three nodes and full resilience across the board.

HCI or disaggregate with Hyper-V and SOFS S2D are they way we're deploying now. So, the whole conversation is essentially moot.

The converged setup in the blog post is about three years old now. It was the best bang for the dollar as far as insurance against downtime at the time.

@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@DustinB3403 said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday.

What about all of the server maintenance able to be done without having any down time? Or didn't they use it for that, strictly redundancy?

In a cluster setting (SOFS) this is a moot point since nodes can be patched and rebooted without any downtime.

Including the SOFS nodes, you mean. That's the important part. It fixes the single maintenance point of the SAN.

You'd need S2D (or similar tech, like SW vSAN) to get around the single maintenance point of SAN / DAS.

This is the 2-node shared SAS Hyper-V/Storage Spaces cluster mentioned above that runs a 15-18 seat accounting firm.

There are two types of virtual disks set up on Storage Spaces. One with a 64KB interleave with the storage stack similarly configured while the other is the standard 256KB interleave with the defaults for storage stack. There are six to eight server based virtual machines and at least two or three desktop virtual machines running on the cluster at any given time.

EDIT: There are multiple virtual disks set up as Cluster Shared Volumes.

@PhlipElder cool cool. . . so what happens if that dataon unit fails to the 9's?

Your client would be dead in the water, no?

yeah, sounds like a traditional IPOD. Maybe we missed something, are there two DataOn units?

What is the purpose of the DataON there? Why have that extra hardware? With just two nodes, you get WAY higher reliability without having it at all.

We call that Storage Spaces Direct.

@DustinB3403 said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday.

What about all of the server maintenance able to be done without having any down time? Or didn't they use it for that, strictly redundancy?

In a cluster setting (SOFS) this is a moot point since nodes can be patched and rebooted without any downtime.

Including the SOFS nodes, you mean. That's the important part. It fixes the single maintenance point of the SAN.

You'd need S2D (or similar tech, like SW vSAN) to get around the single maintenance point of SAN / DAS.

This is the 2-node shared SAS Hyper-V/Storage Spaces cluster mentioned above that runs a 15-18 seat accounting firm.

There are two types of virtual disks set up on Storage Spaces. One with a 64KB interleave with the storage stack similarly configured while the other is the standard 256KB interleave with the defaults for storage stack. There are six to eight server based virtual machines and at least two or three desktop virtual machines running on the cluster at any given time.

EDIT: There are multiple virtual disks set up as Cluster Shared Volumes.

@PhlipElder cool cool. . . so what happens if that dataon unit fails to the 9's?

Your client would be dead in the water, no?

The unit is fully redundant all the way through to the disk. If we have a complete system failure we have Veeam and the ability to spin the VMs up on short order.

@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday.

What about all of the server maintenance able to be done without having any down time? Or didn't they use it for that, strictly redundancy?

In a cluster setting (SOFS) this is a moot point since nodes can be patched and rebooted without any downtime.

Including the SOFS nodes, you mean. That's the important part. It fixes the single maintenance point of the SAN.

You'd need S2D (or similar tech, like SW vSAN) to get around the single maintenance point of SAN / DAS.

This is the 2-node shared SAS Hyper-V/Storage Spaces cluster mentioned above that runs a 15-18 seat accounting firm.

There are two types of virtual disks set up on Storage Spaces. One with a 64KB interleave with the storage stack similarly configured while the other is the standard 256KB interleave with the defaults for storage stack. There are six to eight server based virtual machines and at least two or three desktop virtual machines running on the cluster at any given time.

EDIT: There are multiple virtual disks set up as Cluster Shared Volumes.

@Obsolesce said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

It's like that IPOD situation I dealt with yesterday.

What about all of the server maintenance able to be done without having any down time? Or didn't they use it for that, strictly redundancy?

In a cluster setting (SOFS) this is a moot point since nodes can be patched and rebooted without any downtime.

We deploy traditional RAID in standalone settings not Storage Spaces.

@scottalanmiller said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

@PhlipElder said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

Contrary to the naysayers we've done quite well and so have many others including Tier 1.

The naysayers NEVER suggest that the issues will happen to everyone, that's not how risk works - so there is no contrary here. This exactly the "it works for me" issue that had already been mentioned. Stating that it "does work for some people" highlights a misunderstanding of risk.

https://mangolassi.it/topic/14750/ask-your-mom-to-explain-risk

If you understand how risk works, and understand that for production storage we need things like seven nines durability or higher, than you know that even knowing hundreds of companies where it works tells us essentially nothing. And it is Microsoft themselves who said it wasn't really ready and wasn't being used by a statistically useful number of production installs.

We've had this discussion before on many different topics and at this point I am of the opinion that we shall need to agree to disagree.

We have six to seven years of deploying Storage Spaces, Hyper-V, and now Storage Spaces Direct clusters. I'd be more than happy to chat about the what/where/how of what we do. @Emad-R DM me.

I just saw an Eaton flyer on their UPS line based on Lithium-Ion batteries.

First thought: "BOOM"

APC, the company we usually run with, has a line too now.

Has anyone deployed them into production or lab setups yet?

I've not logged in to Disti to check price variances over the standard sealed lead-acid units yet. It seems to me that we should save a few dollars on shipping since the larger units are on a pallet and freaking heavy.

@Emad-R said in Should I bother to learn Windows Storage Spaces and what about Glances export?:

I know 2 unrelated topics, but wanted your feedback.

1. hearing good stuff about Windows Servers with Storage lately which is weird, should I bother installing and learning, its making buzz lately on 2016. Or should I stick with my gluster knowledge, I like to learn but i hate wasting time, and is it reliable and what filesystem does it use by default ?

2. Anyone is using glances system monitoring tool with exporting and where do you export and do you have easy guide cause I am loving it, but there is many options to export too and tie too, so what is the better one with good web dashboard. (but you can run glances -w, okay but I would lose the data if i am not looking at it)

thanks in advance

1: We've been building clustered Storage Spaces converged (asymmetric) clusters with two or more compute nodes and one or more shared SAS JBODs since 2012 pre-release bits and have had great success with them.

Our smallest asymmetric cluster client is a 15-18 seat accounting firm while our largest that uses a disaggregate Scale-Out File Server (SOFS) cluster that runs on Storage Spaces and a Hyper-V compute cluster that runs VMs into the thousands for their tenants/customers.

Lately, we've been deploying Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) in both Hyper-Converged (HCI) and SOFS only deployments.

Contrary to the naysayers we've done quite well and so have many others including Tier 1.

2: Not here.

This is pretty amazing as LAPS is not that uncommon:
https://akijosberryblog.wordpress.com/2019/01/01/malicious-use-of-microsoft-laps/

@DustinB3403 said in VM Suggestions? Best Practice?:

@PhlipElder said in VM Suggestions? Best Practice?:

Hyper-v is built-in to the Windows Desktop operating system. It's there, so why not use it?

It isn't built in, it's available to be installed to the hardware and lift the Windows environment up to a Dom0 status.

Different and not at all the same as "built in".

In my mind it is built-in as it's available for use once it's installed without having to head out somewhere to download something for the install. The changes made to the host OS are besides the point IMNSHO.

Hyper-v is built-in to the Windows Desktop operating system. It's there, so why not use it?

We have a number of machines that are beefed up with solid-state drives and 64GB of RAM or more to test setups, deploy pre-release bits, test client's setups for blow-outs, and more.

Windows 10 introduced automatic snapshots. Keep this in mind if setting up a lab, working it, and leaving it running as the differencing disks will continue to grow. The snapshots can be used to step-back if something does indeed blow up.

And, it's a great way to learn the PowerShell needed to set up, manage, and tear down Hyper-V based virtual machines.

EDIT: We set up the labs on a Private Virtual Switch to keep the VMs isolated. If they need Internet access we set up a VM with two vNICs and install Server 2008 R2 along with RRAS to act as a NAT for the lab subnet. We can tweak DNS to allow for access to Internet facing services in the lab with the appropriate rules set up on RRAS. There are freebie edge software setups out there that could be used in place of Server 2008 R2.

@NashBrydges said in Windows Server 2016 or 2019:

Setting up a new server and new VM for a client and need to buy a new Windows Server license. I would usually go to the most recent but wondering if anyone here has had any experience that would suggest sticking with a previous version instead? The VM will host an application that only runs on Windows so any mention of Linux isn't an option.

We've been running Windows Server 2019 since GA with nary an issue. There are a lot of under the hood improvements in 2019 so I suggest running with it.

@scottalanmiller said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@Pete-S said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@travisdh1 said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@Pete-S said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@JaredBusch said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@Pete-S said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

Take your finger or a pen and wave it under the light source.
If you see more than one finger/pen then it's flickering.

I can wave my finger in front of my face outside in daylight and see that.

Nope, you can't. You need a stroboscopic light source for that. And the sun ain't that.

If you can see individual fingers it's because the light is going on and off and on and off etc. If you try under the sun you will just see one blurry finger.

Unless someone is getting a headache from the things, who cares?

I am, so I care. Some people (most?) don't notice.

It was the same with CRTs. Some people could work fine with 60 Hz refresh rate. I though it was freaking horrible.
With LCDs it's the backlight that might be a problem on some monitors. Not so much anymore though.

I'm in the group with you. I can see the flicker at 60Hz and it is horrible. Most people can't see it and think it isn't there. I can hear lots of electronics that other people can't hear either. I often walk into a room and wonder why everyone has left on electrical equipment that I can hear the instant I am there, but no one else can tell is powered on.

That reminds me ... we moved into our acreage about six years ago.

The folks that lived there prior to us had these mouse tweeters all over the garage and house. Sonic deterrents I think they are called.

They drove me absolutely nuts as they seemed to tie right nicely into the tinnitus I have.

The kids wanted kittens. I'm highly allergic. A trip to Vegas for client work a few months after moving in and when I came back there was a box by the door into the house that was not there before. Three little kitten heads popped up. They had picked them up that day or the day before I don't remember.

I was not pleased as I knew the ordeal that was to come for me to get at least moderately tolerant to their presence so the jury was out on whether we would keep them or not.

When I came out to head in to work on Monday morning there were seven, yes 7, dead shrews strewn about the man door and the porch obviously killed by the kittens.

We kept the kittens and all of those fake sonic tweeters went into recycling.

It was a fair trade.

Oh, and here we are into our second batch of cats six years later and they still don't eat the shrews. They'll eat everything else such as field mice, Richardson's Ground Squirrels, and even Pocket Gofers but they won't touch the shrews. Weird.

@Pete-S said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@travisdh1 said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@Pete-S said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@JaredBusch said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

@Pete-S said in Flicker-free LEDs?:

Take your finger or a pen and wave it under the light source.
If you see more than one finger/pen then it's flickering.

I can wave my finger in front of my face outside in daylight and see that.

Nope, you can't. You need a stroboscopic light source for that. And the sun ain't that.

If you can see individual fingers it's because the light is going on and off and on and off etc. If you try under the sun you will just see one blurry finger.

Unless someone is getting a headache from the things, who cares?

I am, so I care. Some people (most?) don't notice.

It was the same with CRTs. Some people could work fine with 60 Hz refresh rate. I though it was freaking horrible.
With LCDs it's the backlight that might be a problem on some monitors. Not so much anymore though.

Same boat here. My wife, Monique, is ultra-sensitive to flickering and light hue that heads into the ultra-white/daylight. My sensitivity comes and goes with my migraines.

We have swapped almost all bulbs in the house for Phillips LEDs of varying types with no flicker anywhere to be found.

There are a few that buzz which is really annoying. We'll need to take them back and get them swapped for new ones at some point.

The new Edison style LEDs are da'bomb! Their light is very gentle and warm with a nice even glow from whatever they are installed in. We like them a lot. So, we're starting to flush out the standard style LEDs for Edison in larger fixtures in the house.

Oh, and we saved a lot of coin swapping all of the 75 Watt halogen pots to LED floods. The electricity bill drop was very noticeable.

@fuznutz04 said in Intel NUC:

Any model recommendations for the intel sticks?

Make sure it has the 64GB storage setup as the smaller 32GB setups across all platforms are running into problems getting updates.

With the shorty Celeron NUC we keep a set of extra long screws that allows us to use the NUC VESA mount over the monitor arm/post mount. We use a 30cm/6" HDMI cable from the NUC to the monitor. WiFi or a cable works for network. If using a bluetooth (which is built-in now) mouse and keyboard the only cables running up there are power for both the NUC and monitor and the network cable.

One such setup: http://blog.mpecsinc.ca/2014/04/intel-nuc-wall-mount-monitor-and-nuc.html

@scottalanmiller said in Windows 10 vs Windows 7:

@PhlipElder said in Windows 10 vs Windows 7:

@scottalanmiller said in Windows 10 vs Windows 7:

@PhlipElder said in Windows 10 vs Windows 7:

There is no reference on my part for a SMB to have their own lab.

Whether an SMB's IT department has a lab, or their MSP's has a lab on their behalf, the cost of the lab is the same. The overhead, needs, and value all remain the same.

Yes, numbers wise for the equipment but in a MSP setting that lab is paid for across their clients that pay them to manage their infrastructure. Different kettle of fish.

That's what I was explaining - you can't do that. That's what Microsoft is doing already. So we have one of three cases...

1. You have an MSP that enforces hardware and software uniformity amongst all (or a lot) of their clients. While these exist, they are rare and don't apply to the normal world. It's a super rare customer that can let their IT "pool" dictate their setup. If you don't, then your lab isn't testing for them and is just duplicating Microsoft's own lab.
2. You have a lot of hubris and believe our labs are way better than Microsoft's.
3. You truly believe Microsoft is incompetent to a degree that it's unthinkable that you'd use them.

So I assume you are in group 1. That's great. But your experience applies to essentially no one. No ITSP, no internal IT, and no normal MSP can do that and call it a testing lab. It's a lab, technically. But it's not a lab in the sense that we are discussing here where you can test patches for the customer's unique environments which is the point of testing after Microsoft has already done the generic testing in vanilla environments.

I see your point to some degree and yes, there will be threads not covered by our testing. But, the bulk of the systems we manage would be. And, we do find value running through the testing as we do indeed find problems or bugs that we can then be prepared for when it comes time to either patch or skip until things are fixed.

That's what www.patchmanagement.org is for. It's a great resource.

I suggest watching those general statements though. They come across as pontificating at times.

@scottalanmiller said in Windows 10 vs Windows 7:

@PhlipElder said in Windows 10 vs Windows 7:

We also have a lab set up in the cloud for the same reasons for those that do not have any on-premises gear.

You have customers with cloud and an MSP but not computers to use? Do you mean that they all work from phones or iPads? Or they all use their home equipment and don't have it managed?

This one is tough to answer as we have clients that run in our cloud, public cloud, or hybrid mode that use a wide variety of devices to connect to their services/apps/whatever. It really depends on the way they are set up.

But yes, we can manage things for them as well. Ever try? Especially with a plethora of cloud services being delivered to one client across many devices/sites/places? Ugh ...

@scottalanmiller said in Windows 10 vs Windows 7:

@PhlipElder said in Windows 10 vs Windows 7:

There is no reference on my part for a SMB to have their own lab.

Whether an SMB's IT department has a lab, or their MSP's has a lab on their behalf, the cost of the lab is the same. The overhead, needs, and value all remain the same.

Yes, numbers wise for the equipment but in a MSP setting that lab is paid for across their clients that pay them to manage their infrastructure. Different kettle of fish.

@scottalanmiller said in Windows 10 vs Windows 7:

@PhlipElder said in Windows 10 vs Windows 7:

There's no excuse for any IT company to not have a lab to work with whether provided for by their partner vendors or built-out on their own. None. Nada. Zippo.

Completely untrue. This is myopic and out of touch with reality. I can take you through the math time and time again with real world customers and show how crazy this is.

Companies with five desktops, no servers... and question whether to have IT at all... and you think they should have labs built somewhere? Even a single desktop lab is a 20% hardware lift over their stock environment. That's crazy for testing that might... might save them 5% cost.

Nothing in IT is an "always". Nothing. Not even backups, although they come close. Once you lose site of that and start having templates that everyone has to conform to, crazy things start happening.

This does not line up with the point made. We have the lab. Not our clients. Plus, the clients we lab for on-premises have our on-premises gear in place. We also have a lab set up in the cloud for the same reasons for those that do not have any on-premises gear.

Apples to Apples please.

There is no reference on my part for a SMB to have their own lab.