@thwr said in Vmware Audit:
Xen
The cost of System Center with VMM isn't much cheaper at scale, and it also comes with a yearly audit call from a 3rd party in India who doesn't understand virutalization which leads to hilarious conversations. A Microsoft EA does not simplify auditing requirements.
@scottalanmiller said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@John-Nicholson said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
@donaldlandru Cuts licensing for VSAN in half (single CPU)
Can you fill in the background on this comment for the rest of us?
He said he only had single sockets deployed on one of his clusters. VSAN is licensed by socket (well, among other options but this would be the most common in his case)
@dashrender said in Is Most IT Really Corrupt?:
I'm trying to find the name of the job that supports the technical stuff in a company without being a decision maker - because according to you, IT= the business, basically makes them a C level part of the company along with CEO and COO, etc. So what do you call the people in the trenches doing the work after the decisions are made?
Going from a typical oil/gas major 3 tier's of fun...
Architects make design decisions, engineers do the implementations, operations keep things... running.
Ran into the same issue. Ended up just buying a shelf.
@bhershen said in ZFS Based Storage for Medium VMWare Workload:
Hi Scott,
Donald mentioned SM and referenced generic ZFS (could be Oracle, OpenIndiana, FreeBSD, etc.) solutions which have uncoordinated HW, SW and support. Nexenta is packaged to compete with EMC, NetApp, etc. as primary storage in the Commercial market.
If you would like to get an overview, please feel free to ping me.
Best.
Weird I've seen it packaged as software only (as a virtual NAS piece to run on top of HCI).
@scottalanmiller said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@tim_g said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@scottalanmiller said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@tim_g said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@wrx7m said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@scottalanmiller said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@wrx7m said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@scottalanmiller said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
SMB is all the same two jobs.... generalist or generalist manager. All comes down to seniority, experience, market, etc.
This is where I am, currently. What do you think national average is?
No idea about national average, nor would it likely be meaningful in any way. Pay is so dependent on the job, job role, company, level, and location that an average would be kind of meaningless. Imagine asking "what's the average pay of a business person" or "how much can you expect to earn as a business owner?" An average in anything like those would be totally meaningless.
Hmm... Oh well. I hit 6 figures this year.
That doesn't seem like an easy thing to do in the the typical SMB as a regular generalist employee.
Actually SMB is one of the highest paying categories. But it is misleading. It's larger and very focused SMBs that might be small in people, but big in profits. They tend to behave like enterprises, even with relatively few people. Nearly all $300K+ jobs I know of are in the SMB range. Whereas the enterprise tends to dominate the $200K+ range.
These must be the F100 SMBs then, because I've never seen anything anywhere close to that in real life... not personally and not advertised.
If one were to search those types of jobs on indeed for example, you will not fine that role and that pay, nowhere close. Maybe you do, because you know someone who knows someone.... but I'd never find an offer like that, even if I'm worth a billion dollar salary.
That's because high end roles aren't advertised
You work through headhunters. People who place people at that level, have them vetted, and such.
Many of them are SaaS providers for niche industries. You can have 20 employees running a platform with 50K customers. Tech heavy jobs. As Scott mentioned if you lack the skills (and don’t run in the right networks) you’ll never find out about them.
I work in storage which while a relative large field, still feels small when you get to the 200K+ tier.
@stess All the changes (VMWare, terminal, VDI, SAN/NAS, switch, etc) he is proposing I once think of doing the same thing. However, at the time (last year) I did not deem it necessary and overkilled. We grew from 45 people company to 80ish people company within one year. If I have to reconsider those option now... I still think it is overkilled.
VDI is more about what it offers you (Unique desktop experience, anywhere at any time). I've seen companies with 12 people VDI make sense for. I've also seen companies with 500 who it didn't. If you have aggressive security/compliance needs and a highly mobile workforce then some type of remote end user compute solution is a better deal. Don't focus on "We are a SMB" focus on the important IT can have in delivering solutions and value. If these solutions mean you can increase productivity for field or operations by 10% that's 10% less staff which may be a cheap ROI for instance... As Scott Mentioned, learn what the business need is. That said if your doing VDI on VMware at that scale I'd argue a SAN/NAS isn't necessary (horizon Suite Includes VSAN).
@mroth911 said in Scale HC3 cluster for sale:
Hc1150 3.38tb raw storage/1.74tbu 64gb ram
Support ended need to renew support contract
I have more resources in my NUC cluster on my desk. I think I'll pass to avoid the thermal/power overhead this thing would draw.
@travisdh1 said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@scottalanmiller said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@jmoore said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@tim_g said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
If one were to search those types of jobs on indeed for example,
It could just be me but I am thinking the jobs on Indeed are on the verge of fraudulent. There are so many in the tech fields that seem unrealistic. Again it could just be me and when I was looking, but there were many IT jobs that wanted at least 5 years experience in a networking, system admins, sql expert and so on with 5 years experience in each category.
Each job was different but it was some combination of skills that just seemed unrealistic such as jobs with 15 years experince in both Linux and Windows admins. When I would try to contact about these jobs to see if they would entertain a person with less experience I could never get in touch with anyone, ever. I'll never use Indeed again because I think many or most of those IT jobs are just fraudulent but maybe thats just my experience.
Remember that I said 85% of job listings anywhere are fake .... and that was back when people had to pay to post them!
Do you know of any good headhunters accepting new people? Some of us could really use good help.
We don’t use headhunters at our company and everything is posted on our jobs site. (VMware.jobs)
I’ve posted my referral link before for gigs. Something like 2/3 of our hires come internal references.
General advise is:
Get to know employees of the company you want to work for. I was referred by the chief technologist in the BU. That likely went a ways towards making sure I got a call back.
I wrote some blogs that he liked, and met him at a conference. Go to conferences.
We hire all over the place for Field SEs. We have to staff weird regions or accounts (Like Kansas City) all the time.
We hire for PSO all the time. Be willing to fly anywhere and travel 80% and you can get a job.
@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:
@John-Nicholson said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:
said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:
His changes may cost $100-200K in the span of 2-3 years.
To be clear, That's 30-60K a year. Less than a FTE for an IT position. Spending that on an infrastructure refresh in the grand scheme of things isn't that much money for an environment with more than 1 IT person...
It's not bad at all in that sense. The question really isn't "is this too much for a business to handle" but should be "what are we getting for that cost?" If there are good reasons for it, it's probably well justified.
Of course, probably the bigger question would be... "why so many IT people for a company of just 80 people?" Might be good reasons there too, but that is likely too many IT people per employee. At least for an average business.
I used to think this, then I met a demolition and recycling firm that the CEO told me IT was the most important part of their business. While I hate Gartner/IDC's terminology the "Digital transformation" where every business must ingrain IT functions in their company is having interesting impacts on IT staffing. Now You are right that a lot are over-hiring (or building massive development teams in house, rather than getting someone to build this stuff cheaper) but its crazy seeing guys who sell "rocks" for a living having a SaaS and micro bidding site that allows them to "Crush" their competition. I"ve seen a boring fleet management consulting company turn into an IT company when they realized they could take their process's they consulted on, turn them into apps, and host them and make that be the end game for their consulting engagements (develop hosted customers).
@nerdydad said in Company Benefits:
HOLY TOLEDO!! Where does your wife work and are they currently accepting applications? (Not because of your wife, because of the benefits of the company, of course.)
I'd like to point out that benefits at large companies can easily be anywhere from 50-120% of the compensation depending on your role, and field. This is an area where a lot of small companies just suck (especially for IT practitioners). They MIGHT get close to paying comparable salary. Once you remove all the benefits they just become laughably low on compensation.
@travisdh1 said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@scottalanmiller said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
If you'd like a local address, I have a house for sale, though!
Yeah, and with no income I doubt I'd be able to buy a house, even a dirt cheap house.
Sigh, NiNJa (No income No Job) Loans are not a thing anymore...
@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:
@stess said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:
@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:
Your big challenge here, if you decide to pursue a counter to these recommendations, will be in properly assessing business need (if you feel that his designs are not in the best interest of the company then you should, in theory, be able to not just put that into words but be able to put it into numbers) and then communicating that effectively to the powers that be. This is where the average IT person fails hard - IT tends to attract people who struggle to be able to quantify, qualify and communicate IT in business terms. Maybe you are not one of these people, but if you work in IT the chances are extremely high that this is an area where you feel a particular challenge.
Thanks for the insight. I'll gather more information before making any decisions. These changes are estimated to take 6-8 months at least. I got time.
I will look at the link you posted and make a better judgmental decision. I am 110% against SAN and know there are alternatives that could deliver results with fraction of the cost. *cough starwind virtual SAN *coughI'll see if I can have a quick talk with the management to give my input about all these changes. Obviously I am not going in empty hands.
Some strategies to have at the ready for your personal growth and/or leveraging of opportunity:
- Get VMware running at home and learn it inside and out. Make the new guy implementing your wheel house if he gets what he wants. That's only an example technology, apply this to all stated technologies. Your position gets stronger the better you are with his position.
http://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/
https://vmware.stanly.edu (Add yourself to the waitlist, you can get your VCP for $250 with the book, and under 200 w/o, normally a 3-5K priced class.
@scottalanmiller said in Company Benefits:
Common tactic for start ups is to offer stock that isn't public so can't be traded (or traded easily.) It sounds great but often leaves you with stock worth nothing. Have to be very careful with this. What is great in a large public company can be a totally bad move in a small one
It's worse than that. You may get options that when you exercise them to generate a tax event. So you PAY money to the IRS for something that ends up worthless!
@networknerd said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
I was wondering why no one mentioned Pre-Sales or Technical Marketing until now. And there's also Product Management too, but I'm not sure if many sysadmins can make that leap.
Pre-Sales is easy (most are former Sysadmins), Technical Marketing (there's just not a lot of positions in the industry open, but starting pay (See link for a lower level position) isn't that bad. Note vendor to vendor the "technical" and corresponding pay can vary quite a bit. For a lot of companies, this is just a "mildly more tech-focused" marketing while for others they want high levels of technical capability.
Product marketing is something that some can make the leap (Allen Renouf is a good example) but many are MBA, or ex-engineers.
@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:
@John-Nicholson said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:
@scottalanmiller said in New IT manager making changes... should I be concern?:
If your business turns into a hosting business, then you have the challenge of deciding when IT stops and operations begins. That gets complicated quickly.
The opposite I see more often, and frankly more dangerous to your employment. IT focus's so much on what's in their immediate view (Risk Management and Cost Control) and don't focus on delivering things Ops needs (Agility). This is where Shadow IT comes from. If I have a terminal server that's slow to the point of being unusable, but its backed up and cheap because its still running windows 2003, IS it really available?
What happens when ops got a credit card and contracted a 3rd party citrix farm? I'd be more worried in a rapidly growing company with delivering the tools they need than trying to keep costs down (unless truly the capital expense doesn't deliver any value).I've seen that a bit, as I was the head of shadow IT for a Fortune 10 once upon a time
I feel bad for our internal IT people......
The coolest blocker of shadow IT i've seen is having a SSO portal that you can register with major SaaS vendors (SAML etc). If someone tries to go buy something with a credit card and an email from our company it will redirect the request back to our internal. It lets you lock down services, but also lets users self provision and request them internally. It strangely makes me feel empowered, while at the same time stopping me from using Box or Slack without someone signing off that I need it and the charges getting routed properly.
@travisdh1 said in Company Benefits:
@tim_g said in Company Benefits:
@john-nicholson said in Company Benefits:
@tim_g said in Company Benefits:
@jaredbusch said in Company Benefits:
The owner pays out bonuses to all the employees twice yearly, but it is simply profit sharing.
Basically he keeps cash banked to handle XX months of payroll. Then as long as we have that he pays out the overage as a bonus to us based on full time / part time and how long we been here.
Yeah, and bonuses get taxed like crazy. If you get a 5k bonus, you get less than half of it in your pocket.
I'm not sure if your serious but...
...then I would tell you your wrong, way, way wrong!
about 3.5x more CA and FITW taxes taken out, than on a regular income check that's even more than the bonus.
Calculate the percentages already. I bet that "bonus" check is a lot more than you normally get in a single pay period as well. The only way the percentage is larger is if you hit a higher tax bracket (which is really easy to do.)
It's common to tax it at your marginal rate. Normal income averages all of the brackets over the year for taxes. Because bonuses are not part of this blending they get hit with marginal. Now nothing stops you from adjusting this mix, but it's really HR doing most people a favor.
@mike-davis said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
@storageninja said in What are the highest paying IT careers?:
Get to know employees of the company you want to work for. I was referred by the chief technologist in the BU. That likely went a ways towards making sure I got a call back.
I wrote some blogs that he liked, and met him at a conference. Go to conferences.good advice here.
Here's his (the guy who referred me) advice on how to advance your career.
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2015/02/24/how-do-i-get-to-the-next-level/
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2016/05/26/get-next-level-part-2/
@scottalanmiller said in What is the Upside to VMware to the SMB?:
Sorry, I keep misquoting the price. It's not $500/year. It is about $1,000 per year to get Basic support. Double what I was thinking.
Its only like $180 more to go from basic to production (24/7) for essentials plus.
There are other tiers of support that exist also that don't get as much attention...
BCS (Business Critical Support) Gives you a dedicated team (common in larger enterprises) among other benefits (TAM I think generally bundled at this level). Its like a co-pilot in that you'll have a team who knows your name (and you theirs). Only get a few people who are allowed to interface them on your side to keep it close. These guys don't sit in the normal queues and tend to be tied to a specific customer and maybe help with escalations in between things if I understand how they work. I don't think you ever see L1 people ever.
And the rare but prized "Mission Critical Support". Think this is a 250K minimum add-on, but it cuts your SLA from 1 hour to 30 minutes. I think you can also make people work non-production impacting cosmetic issues 24/7 and other crazy stuff.
VCAN also gets its own support perc's (Straight to L2).
For Oracle BCA Customers there is a secret hotline as Oracle gets weird on virtualization issues, and they will provide support to the app level or something crazy to keep Oracle at bay.
I think there might have been a special support org just for healthcare or something crazy also (Where every ticket can mean people dying, and applications like EPIC have bizarre needs).
Like all companies I assume there is a special federal queue for compliance/legal reasons etc.
@nerdydad said in Company Benefits:
@travisdh1 said in Company Benefits:
@jaredbusch said in Company Benefits:
@travisdh1 said in Company Benefits:
@john-nicholson said in Company Benefits:
@wrx7m said in Company Benefits:
@john-nicholson said in Company Benefits:
@tim_g said in Company Benefits:
@scottalanmiller said in Company Benefits:
Bonuses aren't even a real thing to the IRS, it's literally just part of your pay. At least that's how it has always been where I have gotten bonuses. It's just a paycheck with a larger amount in it that normal, the IRS doesn't have a "this is a bonus" checkbox to even know that it is a bonus to be taxed differently. At the end of the year, your bonus is just part of your pay, it can't be taxed differently because there is nowhere for it to show up.
Yeah I get that, it's all just "income", and you get taxed on it all just the same at the end of the year. And if they take too much, you get more back.
I'm talking about what you get in your pocket then and there.
While I'm all for not giving the IRS an interest-free loan! It helps offset dealing with estimated tax payments (horay, extra quarterly payments!)
Even if you owe them money at the end of the year, at least you had some interest while you had it.
Except that I'll owe them penalties.
The problem is if you underpay, then you owe them interest (it's up to 4%, so not a huge deal honestly as you can beat that with a decent portfolio but it's something to think about).
https://proconnect.intuit.com/proseries/articles/federal-irs-underpayment-interest-rates/
Did you really just quote an Intuit article? That alone should tell you that you've completely misunderstood something. They do not charge interest till you are actively late on a payment.
Seriously? Are you just being stupid for no reason? The URL matters not because tax law doesn't change no matter what site you read about it on.
Besides do you know another clean link with a straightforward table showing the information?
This is how little I trust anything coming from Intuit, yes, seriously.
Pretty sure this is just Intuit regurgitating information from the IRS. So, if anything, the reference should be of the IRS.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-drop/rr-16-28.pdf
https://www.irs.gov/uac/interest-rates-remain-the-same-for-the-first-quarter-of-2017
Note, you owe taxes on a quarterly basis was my point. My point is that it's stupid to think you can just under withhold and make it up later and not have a cost basis. You effectively owe the taxes as you earn them. Even more annoyingly, if you MIGHT make a lot of money at the end of the year they want you to cost average and make the payments quarterly (Which is what makes things annoying for me in that I have to factor money I MIGHT make in Q4 on a sale of an asset that might double in price, or be cut in half).
Mint is good for basic budget/cash flow Tracking. personalcapital.com is a bit better for long term wealth tracking as it can handle 2FA accounts with eTrade etc that Mint can't.
As far as hating on Inuit. They are fine for basic 1099-EZ type stuff. If your stuff is more complicated pay a professional. $500 in tax prep saved me 8K in taxes vs. what TurboTax reported.
