Posts made by Shuey

@PSX_Defector Right, and I've already stated that this was all built and deployed by the jackasses that ran IT way before I started working here! I hate it more than anyone :D.

@NerdyDad I have, but that takes me back to the situation with upper management: Anything I consider implementing will involve asking them to shell out money they don't wanna shell out :-S. Another thing I've considered is building out two "new" VMware hosts (one bigger/better hardware) and leveraging the free version of StarWind VSAN, then migrating all of our data to the new servers. That of course would be a huge undertaking since I've never done anything like that, and I've never used or read up on SW VSAN.

@NerdyDad That's one of the reasons I want to build out this nice brand new DL380 Gen9 (local storage which will be more dependable than the old crappy MSAs, and I can put 256GB or more of RAM in it). And if either of the existing hosts takes a dump, I have backups of every guest VM that I could easily restore if need be. The existing hosts are a DL360 G7 and a DL360 G8.

@JaredBusch @NetworkNerd The RAM slots are maxed out on each of these servers (192GB each, and they can't be upgraded any further), and as NN eluded to, the storage is where we would not have enough resources. To make things worse, the storage on these two existing servers is an MSA60 (which are super old, way out of support and prone to issues). The third server I'm wanting to add is something that we already own; it just needs more RAM and more local storage added.

@JaredBusch @NerdyDad Jared is absolutely right. This is the scenario I read about in multiple posts online (including a separate thread on Mangolassi). Because SharePoint (WSS 3.0) was installed on a DC, demoting the DC would break the SharePoint functionality :(.

Good deal - sounds like the original three-host idea is the way to go then (no Essentials Plus needed ).

@NerdyDad The problem with this option (which has prevented me from doing that all along) is the fact that this server was promoted to a DC and then had SharePoint installed. If we demote the DC, SharePoint will stop working :(.

@PSX_Defector I've never done a cold P2V :-/... do you have any extra info on how to do this?

I have no need to deploy a new DC; I already have another one in this same ADSS site. I totally realize the way it's currently setup is seriously jacked up, so I'd be happy to get it all fixed up.

The two major road-blocks to getting this accomplished are:

1. Upper management doesn't want to spend what it would cost to either get us out to the cloud (via O365)
2. We don't have anyone on our team with the necessary skills to do the migration, so we'd have to pay someone to do it for us (and it would have to be migrated to the same version to keep the cost as low as possible).

One of the possible benefits to do the P2V is that, if we ever run into an issue where the virtual server takes a dump and it can't be restored, upper management would likely be forced to pay for a more modern replacement.

I'm not sure how our current SharePoint is setup or used :-/... I didn't setup and I don't manage it.

@Tim_G Thanks Tim! : ) It's honestly been super simple. Once I lost all the weight, I leveled off at around 145-150lbs and have been sitting there ever since month 3 of my journey. I never count calories or anything like that. I just eat every time I'm hungry, and I eat until I'm full. I didn't even think about losing weight, although I was sure I would, when I first started this journey. And since living this way, I've not tried to do anything other than eat "good" food (while trying to get organic as much as possible, and avoiding gluten and processed stuff). And as far as fresh vs processed goes, if I DO eat "processed", I try to eat things that I know are a much safer bet than the majority of the crap that you find in the boxed or freezer section at the grocery store (example: "Amy's Kitchen" gluten-free, dairy-free, vegan meals, like the Tofu Scramble, or something like the "All Natural 'Path of Life' Southwest Quinoa" freezer bag meal). One of the things I enjoy about this lifestyle is that I naturally HAVE to eat more often because my body is eating cleaner foods and able to process them more effectively, and that's a good thing for naturally maintaining a faster metabolism.

I was a string bean my whole life, and then when I turned 30 and stopped getting exercise, I started putting on pounds. I went from being 120lbs with a 29" waist at age 22 to being 200lbs by 2014.

I had researched food and health for years, and actually tried to do things to help (eating less fast food and meat, and eating more fruit and vegetables), but I couldn't lose the weight at all, no matter how hard I tried.

In Oct/Nov of 2014, I decided I was going to be a gluten-free vegan. One of the reasons I made that decision is because I had thyroid issues for years, and was told that I would have to take medication for the rest of my life (gluten is just one of the things in food that can cause major issues for thyroid function because our bodies can't process gluten, so they create anti-bodies in an attempt to fight it off; but that ends up causing health issues for various organs in our bodies).

I started off by doing a "natural cleanse" for the first 3 days (all I ate was bananas; as many as 30 per day). Then after the cleanse, I started eating nothing but a plant-based diet.

I lost 25lbs the first month, and 20lbs the second month. The third month I shaved off an additional 5lbs and have been floating at 145-150lbs ever since (2.5 years now). Another thing that shocks most people about this progress is the fact that I don't exercise at all (other than casual 20 minutes walks at lunch now and then).

I have more energy than I've had in years, I don't take any medication since being a gluten-free vegan, and I feel great.

Granted, I'd really like to start exercising so I can tone up and add some muscle to my frame, but that's another level I'm not capable of reaching yet (I just became a father again after raising my first child for nearly 17 years).

UPDATE So, so sorry, I said 300Ibs instead of 200lbs, major typo on my part! 50-55lbs total weightloss all within the first 3 months -sorry about that.

@NerdyDad As far as I know, we'd have to have an Essentials Plus license for that (which would be about $6000, and upper management doesn't wanna pay for that).

@NerdyDad Yep, we're currently running two hosts, each with 2 physical sockets, so we have 2 licensed sockets that aren't currently in use.

@NerdyDad Cool, I've already done a successful V2V of another server months ago and it was pretty slick (as well as some P2Vs of other servers). I've never run into any problems and can see this as being a good way to go.

We currently have a paid VMware Essentials license and we're only using two physical ESXi hosts. As far as I can tell, I should be able to add one more ESXi host in our environment and also add it to our vCenter server.

Reason I ask about this is because I'm considering this train of thought: If one of our existing two hosts ever dies, I don't wanna be scrambling to get a new server up and running, and I don't wanna be screwed on resources since one of our existing hosts wouldn't have enough to host all of the guest VMs from the other existing host if it took a dump. I've thought about building out this third host with at least enough resources (physical CPUs, RAM and local storage) so I could safely restore guest VM backups from either of our existing hosts to the third host. And in the meantime, the third host could be used as a host to do testing on (so it's not just sitting idle while waiting for judgment day to arrive, lol).

Thoughts?

I've been thinking a lot about this and have an idea:
We've been using this server for the last 5 years without any support, and without any on-site staff who know how to manage it (other than the daily backups I do). So I'm considering two options:

1. Perform a P2V of the server and host it in our existing VMware environment.
2. Build a new virtual member server in our existing VMware environment and migrate the data from the existing WSS 3.0 server to the new VM (using the same versions of everything; Server 2008 R2, WSS 3.0 and SQL Server 2008).

I'd prefer to go with option 1, but I've never virtualized a DC, so I'd like to hear some feedback on what you guys think of this and if there are any specifics I need to be aware of when virtualizing the existing DC.

I wonder if this would work as a replacement?
https://www.bitrix24.com/prices/

We could roll with the free version, but our users couldn't access it externally. Their versions that support external access though are only $99/month.

I'm a little leery about going down an alternate road though for fear that the staff will freak out from such a drastic change (although the alternative of not having SharePoint at all could be just as freaky, lol).

We're currently using WSS 3.0 (it was setup before I started working for this company; over 5 years ago). The specific version of SharePoint that we're using is v12.0.0.4518, and our SQL version is 2008 (v10.2.4000.0). The server that this is running on is a domain controller, and it's configured so all of our staff can access it from outside the network (https://intranet.lakeimaging.com).

We would like to decommission the physical host that this is all currently running on, so we've been looking into options to migrate our SharePoint data to either the cloud or to another host in-house.

If upper management doesn't approve us to go with SharePoint in the cloud, I wanna be prepared to migrate this in-house, so I'm trying to find out more info about my options.

As you can imagine, one of the hot comments that has come up from management is: "Well, So-and-so setup our current SharePoint for free, so we should be able to either use the same version we're using right now, or we could go with a newer free version". Without knowing any details, I tried to tell them "Even if we go with a newer free version, I'm not sure we would be allowed to let our 250+ users access it without some sort of licensing compliance". Can someone confirm if this is true or not?

@aaronstuder Hey Aaron - yep, I stated in my previous post that it was strictly for testing purposes (to determine if Macrium was going to work for me or not). And as Dustin stated, I ended up going with FOG anyway.

FOG ended up being just the ticket! It was easy to deploy, easy to configure, and I already had a base VM ready to go for image capture. Capturing and deploying the image was a breeze and took about 60 minutes total (not bad at all for the size of the base image and the speed of our infrastructure).

Thanks for taking me into giving it a try - it was well worth the time!

I like this, lol: (https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=New_Home_Page#Hardware)
Requirements
Hardware
FOG is best implemented on a dedicated server, any spare machine you have. We recommend that you have sufficient hard drive space as each image you make is usually between 5 and 10 GB and it's best to have a gigabit NIC with as much processor and RAM you can throw at it.

Wow, that's SO helpful of them to tell me exactly how much CPU, RAM and HD resources to throw at my server, lol!