@scottalanmiller Spot on. The booth work is one of the most hated positions, and generally used by Product Marketing, or SE's who were trying to find an excuse to get a pass and pay for the trip.

The more serious SME's at conferences are often in the briefing center. Schedule with your vendor before hand with your sales rep who/what you need to meet with. Briefings are not just for the F500 (although those guys spend a LOT of their conference in there I'm pretty sure).

Now note, at a minor conference occasionally you get lucky. Some of my team did some booth duty for VeeamOn, and the Gartner conference.

@scottalanmiller A lot of even small conferences have some good speakers buried in. A big thing is ignore the session topics and focus on the speakers. Look them up on linkedIn. Want technical information? Is it being given by a product marketing person with less than 6 months tenure, or is it being given by someone who's got 3 books you've read a blog you consult weekly.

At VMworld the following speakers could be have a topic called "things you didn't know about how to make a Cat5 cable" and it would be well worth going.

Frank Denneman, Duncan Epping, Mike Foley, Emad Younis, William Lam.

Frank would give you a performance deep dive on cables that would make your head explode, Duncan would somehow make it entertaining and practical even if it wasn't your core field, Mike would teach you why you don't need to be afraid of the cable but the person who plugs it in, Emad would teach you how to automate it, and William would teach you how to McGuyver your way into making the cable into a Indiana Jones Laso and fly across the ball room.

GREAT presenters can make even dry topics insanely entertaining.

For Pure storage I'd stalk Cody Hosterman. He's been doing some really cool stuff with vRA and automation recently. There's a big Russian Guy who talks about new x blade stuff who's pretty sharp and Scott the CEO has some interesting thoughts on the industry and data analytics and is worth talking to (I got locked in a room with Pure people for a few days recently). Vaughn Stewart is fun to argue with (Remember if he gets out of control threaten his hair).

The other person worth stalking while your there is Pete Flecha. He's a short guy who does the virtually speaking podcast and works for VMware. You should ask him about vVols and why you should be using it with Pure after you do your setup.

@JaredBusch

VMware's support stance on Zerto.

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2069900

Zerto corrupting data on Nutanix
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/zerto_5_u2_fixes_nutanix_data_write_bug/

While my opinions and posts here are my own, my day job is working as a Senior Architect in the VMware Storage and Availability Business Unit. My company builds and supports the API's used for replication (VADP, VAIO) as well as the product vSphere Replication (and SRM used for array and DR run book orchestration and testing).

@Dashrender said in Managing Hyper-V:

Now we come to my question.

Is there any reason to not put all the Hyper-V Hosts into a single domain to ease management?

For security and stability I've always seen at any real scale you run a Management domain. Also, given cases of Cyrtolocker hitting Hyper-V hosts I'd be damned careful with separate accounts/domains for Hyper-V hosts as someone encrypting your VM's can bypass a LOT of your protections.

@Jimmy9008 This is list price FWIW.

Also Production support (24/7) is a VERY low cost to add on and worth it for 99% of people. I know some people may not value support, but when you've got an issue at 3AM forums and Slack are not as helpful as you'd think.

@matteo-nunziati SMB's have far more diverse needs than you would think.

I worked for a 50 man call center where a missed phone call could mean someone did get a lung transplant (We did dispatching for Organ transplant). Don't assume everyone in SMB is a small retail shop who could loose their computer for 4 hours and loose $20. I'd argue larger shops often have greater tolerances for downtime than small shops in some cases because they have operational contingencies.

That said, if $1200 a year for flat rate support on 3 hosts that can easily run 100VM's is too much I'd question why the entire project of what your doing is viable. You can't get support at that pricing on any other platform I've seen.

@Tim_G It's free like a puppy

@Tim_G I'll take it. My dog requires 3 walks a day, and play time. My cats I had could be ignored for a week or more without much effort given enough food/water and fresh litter was left out.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Tim_G said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@John-Nicholson said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

@Tim_G I'll take it. My dog requires 3 walks a day, and play time. My cats I had could be ignored for a week or more without much effort given enough food/water and fresh litter was left out.

True, but they don't do anything useful without an insane amount of training, time, and money ^_^

And the last time (admittedly some time ago) that we hired VMware training, the class trained the VMware staffer because Vmware didn't know its own product. I've had a certain lack of faith in it ever since Xen and Zones folks were the ones teaching VMware how to use its own software to the "expert" that VMware had on staff.

I'm sure Vmware has loads of great people, but even Vmware stuggled to find what I'd call competent users internally whereas finding people who knew Xen was pretty easy (and still is.)

I suspect this was in the early days and you got a bad teacher. I've had pretty decent trainers for the classes I've done. I'm also helping with some of the curriculum right now. For a product (vSAN) that releases two to 3 times a year it's "fun" keeping this stuff up to date.

As far as training new employee's on the product that's a reality of any company with 20K employees. You will hire people who don't know something and train them. I've seen the NSX team hire people with no networking background but deep Virtualization/VDI just to offset the amount of hardcore networking people who lacked exposure outside of networking (it's a weird product that has to startle a LOT of vertices). Especially for SE's you tend to hire people and give them a training plan (you'll take these classes, do this self study, know these skills at this level by yyy). When you work for a 20 man firm you can hire purple squeals. When your trying to staff an 8000 man field sales force, you have to accept that you need internal training programs.

@scottalanmiller said in When to use VMWare over free hypervisors?:

In reality, AD and Windows are overly obtuse for most SMBs. But they are accessible and sold heavily so people claim knowledge and play with them.

Hmmmm For a while there I thought I was the Golden God of GPO (A skill I'm happy to have not used for 2 years now!).

@scottalanmiller

Because Microsoft has a long history of undercutting their ecosystem by...

1. Breaking API's on purpose to sabotage people (Novel admins still hold a grudge).
2. Competing with partners.
3. Locking out partner ecosystems (Azure/Azure Stack freezes out backup providers that don't run in guest VM agents).
4. Screwing with partners and customers by changing PnP to crazy pants stuff (See VDI licensing that caused MVP's to quit the program, Azure Stack pricing that will FORCE opex pricing even for private cloud deployments with your own hardware). It's like they watched VMware with vRAM and said "hold my beer".
5. Killing products that support the SMB space in ham-fisted ways.
6. Their slow attempt to break Skype and force me to use S4B that I'm still annoyed with
7. Creating products that need 3rd party ecosystems with unique requirements for hardware/software (Storage Spaces) then abandoning that product (Storage Spaces Direct abandonment of Shared SAS backplane).
8. Complete lack of quality control on the ecosystem. a 5 pack of American Light beer and a back rub will get your drivers signed.

@jfath said in Hypervisor choice:
esxi is out because of the expense and their inability to provide a fully functional Web client to replace the thick client they've killed off.

Quick thing. ESXi has a free HTML5 interface (It's what replaced the thick client). When combined with VMware Remote Console (VMRC) for managing console sessions it's pretty damn poweful.

STILL, want a full thick GUI? Fusion/Workstation will do it and manage hosts.

@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:

@wirestyle22 said in Hypervisor choice:

@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:

@wirestyle22 said in Hypervisor choice:

@jfath said in Hypervisor choice:

@wirestyle22 Until 5nine decides to change the licensing model again. They completely lost my trust with the latest change - I assumed I would at least have the free version features if they increased the price yet again. They have moved full version pricing from <$100 to $350/core to $700 enterprise and killed the free version in the span of a few years.
If XO were to fork a closed source branch, we would at least have full source for the current version.

I spoke to someone claiming to be a VP and I told him that this decision is ultimately going to lose them customers. No one is going to pay what they are asking. I'd rather switching hypervisors

5Nines probably doesn't care. Those low end customers weren't paying the bills, so they dumped them.

How many future purchases will that kind of mindset cost them?

Again, probably not many that they care about. This is the same mindset that XOA is in. They don't want the low end SMB, because supporting those people costs them money, not making them money.

Outside of a 10% license cost increase in 5 years VMware's essentials (~$500) has been pretty cheap.

As far as everyone (5 nines, XO, etc) in this space having an intro price of $500-5000? This is pretty smart as it keeps you from wasting your sales people's time talking to people with no budget, and your SE's from supporting their POC's etc.

TO be blunt, if your working in IT and $500 is considered a material amount something is wrong.

1. It's going to cost you more in labor/time/opportunity cost to replatform.

2. $500 one time purchase spread over 3 years of usefulness is 45 cents a day. 6K over 3 years is $5.40 per day. My wife spends more on Starbucks, and Scott and I average far more than that on Scotch. Assuming your IT labor has a full carry cost of 100K (Cost of benefits, cost of office space, cost of equipment). If paying for some decent management and monitoring and alerting tools save you 5 minutes a day (beyond reducing and helping remediate outages) then even paying 6K is well worth it.

3. Lastly, if this REALLY is a huge amount of money for a business that you are a FTE I'd encourage you to stop what you are doing and start applying for a new job. Either your company isn't healthy to the point that your job is at risk, or you are at risk professionally by working somewhere that would have IT people waste huge amounts of time. By the time they fail or you end up wanting to leave it may be too late. As a hiring manager, I interviewed a lot of SMB burn out's who's skills were on 10 year old operating systems, and their management process's lacked any scalability because they had never had the right tools.

Note I'm not saying don't go deploy or use free software. I'm just pointing out that is your willing to radically change your infastructure because you can't get $500 in budget that's a clear warning sign about your buiness.

@scottalanmiller said in Hypervisor choice:

@Dashrender said in Hypervisor choice:

@John-Nicholson said in Hypervisor choice:

@jfath said in Hypervisor choice:
esxi is out because of the expense and their inability to provide a fully functional Web client to replace the thick client they've killed off.

Quick thing. ESXi has a free HTML5 interface (It's what replaced the thick client). When combined with VMware Remote Console (VMRC) for managing console sessions it's pretty damn poweful.

STILL, want a full thick GUI? Fusion/Workstation will do it and manage hosts.

Right - if the OP is willing to go to bat for a $700 XOA license, why not a $500/600 ESXi essentials license? or a $750 5Nines license?

Not comparable things. In this case, none of the licensing makes sense to me from any product. It's a charity that can use the money elsewhere and none of the paid stuff is needed across the board. But if you did need to pay for it, what you get with XO and what you with Essentials are totally different.

ahhh Non-profit. VMware is 40% off for this, Microsoft discounts hugely also (80%?). SCCM-VMM might not actually be that overpriced.

@tim_g said in Microsoft Isn't Crazy:

I actually bought Vista Ultimate, but mostly because it came with a free upgrade/coupon for Windows 7 Ultimate

I got Win7 Ultimate for hosting a launch party at my house.

@bigbear I've used the platform for PBX use cases (partially because it was more robust than Asterisk back in the day when I was a VOIP guy). I know a DEV who's done some of the work on the windows builds (Old boss) is why I ask. I know a lot of call center people who've abandoned Asterisk for it.

"Large well supported, Linux is cheaper to support well, takes fewer people less time, and Linux has a denser admin to server ratio"

I think in a lot of SMB's they are just well below the threshold for automation on density having any real benefit (they don't need 200 servers!). The efficiencies of scale arguments also carry a lot of weight in other elements of deployment (People with less staff should take more serious getting same day parts support, buying from Tier 1 vendors for added support and validation vs. being their own integrator of solutions etc). Maybe you might add "If you are below the density point for Linux admins and other things making sense then maybe you should be shifting more things to MSP's, SaaS and get rid of the IT position.

The other thing is in large enterprises they often have dozens (or hundreds) of business units and Silo's and IT organizations that effectively push them down to SMB the density of systems. The Federal government and military is a huge example of this.

I do agree it's a huge gap Microsoft has in that they don't bundle support with software licensing (vs. Every other Enterprise vendor). SQL is cheaper than Oracle, but one of them will pick up my calls on Memorial Day while the other will open a ticket take my credit card number and call me back the next day.

Beard, Smug statements, Hawian shirt. UNIX ADMIN DETECTED.

@coliver said in Why Free Open Source Software Is Cheaper Than You Think:

@john-nicholson I find it funny but Linux on the workstation has been much more stable then any of our OSX laptops.

When your best app option is TuxRacer, this doesn't surprise me. I used Linux on the desktop in college because it limited hugely what I could do and that provided more stability than anything.

My OS X laptop hasn't been rebooted in 2 months so I'm not sure what your doing wrong with your mac's but stop doing it!

@Scott - OpenBSD are the guys who like singing funny songs about CARP. For this reason, I like them for firewalls, and if you want Linux on the desktop hate systemD and don't like Debian it's an option?

@stuartjordan said in Replacing FreePBX with FusionPBX:

Is there many people using Fusion PBX in production? is that much of a comparison compared to Freepbx? GUI looks slightly nicer than Freepbx.

That's the History of Asterisk. Pretty GUI's, with much less stable/scalable code on the back end

@stacksofplates said in Ubiquiti Security Gateway:

I never saw the value in the USG. Maybe if you were doing full network automation and copying configs, and then that defeats the purpose of the USG anyway. I have an ERL and an EdgeSwitch Lite at home, along with 2 APs.

The rest of my gear is manageable by Unifi. It's a bit weird my one device that does DPI and edge services isn't.