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...
They did this for the sole reason that this was the only way to continue providing their solutions based on the legacy vendors and their lock out and lack of access.
Not sure where this information came from.
PernixData, SanDisk’s Flashsoft, and ScaleIO have all used kernel modules with vSphere...
The reason these vendors use VSA's is a combination of factors, largest of which writing kernel code is hard...
@KOOLER Limits if I recall are 1TB file size max, no virtual machines, post process only, 32KB block size (but Variable Block at least right?) 2016 should raise the limit.
Advantage to doing data reduction on the back end is you can dedupe out common applications and OS files between Virtual machines. That said flash is so cheap (~55 cents per GB for enterprise grade storage) throwing hardware at the problem has its advantages...
@Grey They may have tied it to being global offsite, meet up etc. There's value in getting large groups together once a year.
Ran into the same issue. Ended up just buying a shelf.
@travisdh1 Open Source can still require audits. The GPL has requirements (Cisco was sued over this). Redhat if I"m not mistaken can audit you for your usage of RedHat Enterprise Linux.
BSD is the only safe license 
@thwr 7 days isn't actually that hard to meet with if your a Fortune 500 who properly tracks your licensing. If you don't then you need to ask for extra time (Which even Microsoft and Oracle will give you) and assistance (VMware has licensing optimization scripts that can be run even outside of audits to make sure your in compliance).
Do you just install Office on computers, and Windows and create Windows SQL servers without tracking your usage vs. licensing or do you just use BSD licensed software?
@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 There is phone home capability in vSphere. Most people backup their vCenter DB's and hold onto that DB for the life of their environment.... If your exporting logs to some type of SIEM, or something like LogInsight those can maintain logs as long as you want to archive.
These are all normal things that F500's do (as well as many use over-archiving SAM solutions for tracking their licensing usage). This isn't something SMB's have to think or worry about (and when your at this scale you enter into these type of EA's because the cost of the added overhead for compliance is generally significantly offset by the YUUUUUUUGE discounts you get).
@scottalanmiller said in Vmware Audit:
@scottalanmiller EA's and audit requirements have huge variables depending on industry, requirements, the country its originated in, the countries it is used in. The language varies so much (and you can ask for things to be waved, changed, or added based on your needs). EA's are fundamentally driven by both parties liking the numbers, and what the lawyers will approve. There is no "standard language" as what the DOD will accept is different from a hosting company is different from a oil company.
I understand that it is very hard. It's also tough because the OP is saying that this is from a EULA, not from the EA. Hopefully he will chime in soon. It seems like crazy audit stuff.
I don't believe auditing is in the standard EULA on the website. I have NEVER heard of a non-EA customer being audited.
Depends on the agreement and your industry.
If your a service provider operating under SPLA (Microsoft) or VCAN (VMware) you have to be reporting this every 30 days. If the licensing had "per day, or per month" fee's its completely normal to require this type of information be maintained. The most favorable (granular) licensing terms require the most aggressive logging information be maintained for audit purposes.
@scottalanmiller EA's and audit requirements have huge variables depending on industry, requirements, the country its originated in, the countries it is used in. The language varies so much (and you can ask for things to be waved, changed, or added based on your needs). EA's are fundamentally driven by both parties liking the numbers, and what the lawyers will approve. There is no "standard language" as what the DOD will accept is different from a hosting company is different from a oil company.
@scottalanmiller These audits generally involve filling out a spreadsheet according to best effort, and dumping the logs in the event an auditor really wants to validate something (often times they have scripts or 3rd parties tools for this stuff).
I've read several EA's over the years and never seen this language. This sounds like a lot of hand waving over a misunderstanding...
@scottalanmiller The vCenter log will track decoms of VM's and hosts.
VMware doesn't enforce about licensing for non-VMware products (I'm not even sure if they are in the BSA, I think Microsoft dropped out and that group is largely CAD software stuff these days).
You likely are under an EA if your getting audited by VMware. A lot of these operate on true up's (IE you commit to xxx, but can install up to yyy and at the end of the period you do an audit and adjust up/down). EA's fundamentally can include anything that is legal (I've seen some crazy EA's based on customer's need for wanting to pay per socket per day etc).
ALL of the data your asking about is tracked in the ESXi logs. If you just install LogInsight (Free for hosts now) it will track all of this information and retain it for you. There's even a handy dashboard you can request that will track vMotions, VM execution location to help with Oracle compliance if you have issues with them....
This is normal in enterprise when under an EA, and VMware (to my knowledge) has never sued anyone or taken the intense legal approach your used to hearing from Microsoft. Audits are multi-factored in that they can also make sure you are using what you pay for (and paying for what you use).
If you are not comfortable paying for what you use, and complying with licensing you REALLY need to move to BSD (not Linux, as the GPL requires compliance with specific requirements).
My dog is in another fight (Clustered storage for vSphere not Hyper-V) but in this case honestly I'd trust a synology over Storage Spaces Direct. At least I have a slight clue of what black magic is going on underneath it.
@scottalanmiller Microsoft has spent 100 Million dollars hiring architects to push their solutions. They will pay thousands to MSP's on the back end per 3 node Hyper-V cluster they deploy (even if it doesn't work).
Think back to the early years of SQL. SQL 2000 WAS AWFUL. Microsoft funded startups who would build their applications on Microsoft SQL.
@scottalanmiller said in StarWind vs Storage Spaces Direct:
My take on it is that after 20 years of Windows Software RAID being totally insane to implement in production, we need to wait at least one or two server release cycles before we have enough time for Storage Spaces Direct to have collected enough reliability data to even be a remote consideration. Microsoft's track record here speaks for itself. The entire hardware RAID industry exists almost solely to tackle this one software issue with Windows. Storage Spaces was just an attempt to rename it to hopefully get out of touch Windows Admins to think that there was some hot, new feature worth putting their data on and a lot got burned.
There's some nasty @#$@ in there. Mainly write order fidelity isn't working yet with ReFS...
@scottalanmiller I went to a private religious k-12 school (The movie SAVED! with Mandy Moore is really the closest explanation of it) and we had Bob Jones history text books. The result was rather hilarious. A 2 page spread on why the Beatles were the beginning of the downfall of western civilization. Lots of anti-catholic references.
They used a 3rd grade health book to cover sex ed (or rather avoid it).
Generally 1-2 chapters of any science class were anti-evolution talking points. Somehow this stuff even crept into non-biology classes.
Honestly if it wasn't for the internet, Encarta, the library and some AP classes (That used college level text books) I would have been an idiot.
I went to public school, and it wasn't this horribly place that everyone made it out to be. The biggest issue was they taught to the lowest common denominator in the room and I ended up in the dumb kid hall (transfer mid year). Honestly the teachers were nice, they cared, and the kinds were nicer than at the private school I had attended (For the most part).
Nice! Sadly NOT the first HCI vendor to have a go to 11 option! (Although the first to put it in the GUI).