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sanchez
Feb 26, 2003

kiwid posted:

Well for example, we were looking at the Dell Precision T3610's (for the RAID-1 motherboard) and we can't configure additional hard drives.

Get a premier login, I see options for a mix of 1-4 2.5/3.5 bays and whatever mixture of drives you prefer. The public website is not the greatest.

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dotalchemy
Jul 16, 2012

Before they breed, male Mallards have bright green/blue heads. After breeding season, they molt and become brown all over, to make it easier to hide in the brush while nesting.

~SMcD
"It's 2014, and while I have no problem with you running your intranet server on Windows 2003, at least keep the fucker updated with available patches. It's not hard, you click update, you reboot, you're done. Stop making me work harder."

Out of 450 servers, at least 50 are failing on the SCCM 2012 agent install because no-one bothered keeping them up to date - BITS2.5 being a prereq.

Now, apparently, this has become my problem, because it's me that wants to put the agent on them.

It's only 11:30am and I already want my whiskey soaked pacifier.

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

The pricing on our premier site for Dell is always beyond bullshit. Sure its convenient, but when they're selling a similarly configured E6440 on their public facing website for 400 dollars less than their premier page is generating your quote at, you still have to engage your sales rep to beat the price down to a reasonable level. That or just pay them the extra...

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
We have a Dell reseller we go through. I normally just configure what I want on their website, print the specs and send them to my reseller.

One time they came back with higher than the web price (which was on the PDF I sent with the specs). I emailed my Dell rep about it, they spoke with the vender, and I had a new quote within a few days that was cheaper.

Everything at my current gig was all HP for servers, we are slowly switching to Dell. I have never had an issue with their support.

CLAM DOWN
Feb 13, 2007




kiwid posted:

The process usually goes like this: Request quote > 1 business day later > Receive Quote > Modify Quote > 2 business days later > Receive incorrectly modified quote > Note errors > 2 business days later > Get quote. If you add any complexity at all then it get's even worse.

That's like my problems right now, but we're a pretty big company so it's our internal purchasing giving me a headache rather than Dell. I had to use their support last week to replace a dead-on-arrival 10GbE PCI card, and they were fast/helpful/accurate, it was like night and day compared to loving IBM's support which makes me want to drink.

kiwid
Sep 30, 2013

sanchez posted:

Get a premier login, I see options for a mix of 1-4 2.5/3.5 bays and whatever mixture of drives you prefer. The public website is not the greatest.

I emailed our Dell rep about this, he just replied:

quote:

Hello kiwid,

We are having some updates on the Premier site and not able to give new access at the moment. Please check again after July and we should be able to set you up

Thank you

skipdogg
Nov 29, 2004
Resident SRT-4 Expert

Ever since the buyout Dell is going way downhill. Part scarcity, lacking support, it's very clear they're cutting every cost possible internally.

sanchez
Feb 26, 2003

kiwid posted:

I emailed our Dell rep about this, he just replied:

That is amazing. We do see our share of general weirdness with the site, they seem to redesign it every month or so and break all of the internal links for a few days.

The Diddler
Jun 22, 2006


kiwid posted:

Anyone here use HP servers? We are currently using Dell which we've never had any issues with except when it actually comes time to buy Dell hardware. We've gone through like 10 Dell reps in 5 years, each one taking several business days to respond to us which usually leads to getting perfect quotes a two-week ordeal. On the other hand, our CDW rep who deals mostly with HP is wonderful and is near instant contact. We're considering switching to HP hardware for this reason alone. Anyone have any comments regarding the two? The only downside to HP that I know of is their brutally awful website and their 100 model loving lineup, I never know how to choose hardware.

We're running entirely HP servers. The only issue I have is the need to carry support on them for firmware updates. We're looking at other options, but we get them really cheap because we're education.

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


kiwid posted:

I emailed our Dell rep about this, he just replied:

I just got a Premier account activated today, so...

kiwid
Sep 30, 2013

Caged posted:

I just got a Premier account activated today, so...

Nice... looks like we're going HP.

Demie
Apr 2, 2004

kiwid posted:

Anyone here use HP servers? We are currently using Dell which we've never had any issues with except when it actually comes time to buy Dell hardware. We've gone through like 10 Dell reps in 5 years, each one taking several business days to respond to us which usually leads to getting perfect quotes a two-week ordeal. On the other hand, our CDW rep who deals mostly with HP is wonderful and is near instant contact. We're considering switching to HP hardware for this reason alone. Anyone have any comments regarding the two? The only downside to HP that I know of is their brutally awful website and their 100 model loving lineup, I never know how to choose hardware.

We decided not to stick with Dell when it was time to buy 3000+ desktops, along with servers and laptops. It's for the exact same reason you mentioned, their sales division went to poo poo overnight, and I don't care to figure out why. Dude, we are not getting a Dell. We instead bought lots of Proliants from CDW, and have been running them for about 3 years.

iLO is awesome, though I'm sure every OEM has their own management modules that compare well. Only thing is, you have to buy licenses for the really good features.

Only thing that's been a consistent problem, is the fact that all of our servers had defective 1tb Seagate hard drives installed, and we've been having to order replacements one-by-one as they fail. Unfortunate coincidence, but still a pain when 50 sites have them.

At first, we had problems with the overseas helpdesk people, typical script readers that wanted you to jump through hoops before they did anything for you. They would have us bring down production servers to build diagnostic reports for them, or else we didn't get any replacements. My first experience with them involved staying on site until midnight, going through 3 shifts of support people, and losing all of the data anyway. But I have been pretty satisfied ever since I learned how to push them around. Nearest warehouse is 45 minutes away during rush hour, parts easily come within the 4-hour window. Doesn't get much better.

We're looking at new servers and I would vote for re-upping with HP. Lenovo, IBM and Nutanix have been considered.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Demie posted:

My first experience with them involved staying on site until midnight, going through 3 shifts of support people, and losing all of the data anyway. But I have been pretty satisfied ever since I learned how to push them around.

This would be a huge negative hit in my book. Over the years I have learned to not care and continually ask for escalation until I am with someone who knows what they are doing. I have a environment a fraction the size of yours though.

Demie
Apr 2, 2004
Right, that was my first experience having to support a server hardware issue. Not a good day. HP's support is not the best, you have to be experienced to get what you want out of them.

Sacred Cow
Aug 13, 2007
We use HP servers and Dell laptops at my company. Sure Dell's sales department sucks donkey dick right now but gently caress if I'm going back to HP's "change docking station compatibility every year" business model.

vanity slug
Jul 20, 2010

We used to have Lenovo laptops but didn't like the amount of customization. So we're back to being almost 100% HP (servers, SAN, laptops, desktops) again. We throw lots of money at them and they support us pretty well. And sometimes the engineers bring pastries and cake :)

kaynorr
Dec 31, 2003

Demie posted:

We decided not to stick with Dell when it was time to buy 3000+ desktops, along with servers and laptops. It's for the exact same reason you mentioned, their sales division went to poo poo overnight, and I don't care to figure out why.


It's nice to know that we weren't the only ones to have an almost inexplicitly bad sales relationship with Dell. RFPs basically blown off, salespeople dropping off the face of the map for months at a time....I had a very good experience with Dell at my last company but was shocked at how little they appeared to want our business in the last year.

AlternateAccount
Apr 25, 2005
FYGM
So I am looking over the SOW and a plan to install SCCM, Ops Manager and some other items for my new company. The big focus is on fault tolerance for Exchange, primarily. I noticed this item:

quote:

Orchestrator will be utilized to automate failover of The Company's Exchange environment if an unplanned outage is experienced in their primary data center.

I can't think of any example where Orchestrator is required to do anything for failover. Exchange 2013 can even failover to a second site without any user intervention. What am I missing here?

MyLightyear
Jul 2, 2006
A blindness that touches perfection,
But hurts just like anything else.
Nothing, sounds like bullshit to me.

vanity slug
Jul 20, 2010

I guess you could do some failover stuff in Orchestrator. But why would you want to do that when Exchange or SCVMM are perfectly capable of handling that?

kiwid
Sep 30, 2013

Speaking of Dell, here is an email I got this morning from our Dell rep.

quote:

Hello kiwid,

I am moving into a new role within Dell and Bruce copied above is going to reach out to you in the next 24-48 hours (Bruce is taking over many of my accounts, and might be a little overloaded, please bear with us). He will be your new rep moving forward. Please send him all future requests. Rest assured you are in great hands!

Thank you for all the support

Hi Bruce, see new request below

I sent that new quote request two business days ago and this is the first reply and I still don't have a quote. gently caress.

edit: oh also, this Dell rep was just assigned to us on Tuesday, he didn't even last 3 days with us.

AlternateAccount
Apr 25, 2005
FYGM

Jeoh posted:

I guess you could do some failover stuff in Orchestrator. But why would you want to do that when Exchange or SCVMM are perfectly capable of handling that?

That's why I was kind of lost, but hey, it's my first week and I didn't want to say that the boss was about to get fleeced by this group of folks.
That said, I think they might be backdooring a lot of things in using this initiative, so while Orchestrator might not be strictly required to accomplish some of these objectives, it's something that could certainly be useful going forward and this is the easiest way to get it without a huge justification hassle.

I would just be concerned that anyone that sees the proposal and the substantial dollar figure would immediately make the same conclusions I did.


edit: There's also been absolutely zero discussion of using a virtualized platform to run everything, which seems like an absolute no brainer to me. Never mind, it's all going onto a proper virtual platform.

edit 2: Doing the math, the cost of the upgrade from 2007->2013, including designing things out in a far more HA structure and minimizing points of failure, comes in at well past $200 PER USER before hardware. That sounds monstrous to me.

AlternateAccount fucked around with this message at 15:11 on May 23, 2014

kaynorr
Dec 31, 2003

AlternateAccount posted:

That's why I was kind of lost, but hey, it's my first week and I didn't want to say that the boss was about to get fleeced by this group of folks.
That said, I think they might be backdooring a lot of things in using this initiative, so while Orchestrator might not be strictly required to accomplish some of these objectives, it's something that could certainly be useful going forward and this is the easiest way to get it without a huge justification hassle.

In my limited experience, Orchestrator is one of those things that doesn't seem terribly useful when you're just taking a look at it, but once you have it set up in your environment and go crazy with integration packs, you think of a new runbook that you could use almost every day.

Just try some. Just one sip. You'll love it, we promise.

AlternateAccount
Apr 25, 2005
FYGM

kaynorr posted:

In my limited experience, Orchestrator is one of those things that doesn't seem terribly useful when you're just taking a look at it, but once you have it set up in your environment and go crazy with integration packs, you think of a new runbook that you could use almost every day.

Just try some. Just one sip. You'll love it, we promise.

Haha, yeah, I have no doubt that we could use it, I just don't think it can be justified as part of an Exchange migration.

Due to some historical events prior to my hiring, there's definitely a great opportunity to setup a way overbuilt and awesome infrastructure and I think they're running with that.

rahm emmanuel posted:

You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.

peak debt
Mar 11, 2001
b& :(
Nap Ghost
You could just learn Powershell instead of paying a bazillion dollars for what's basically a fancy click and play game design software.

Da Mott Man
Aug 3, 2012


peak debt posted:

You could just learn Powershell instead of paying a bazillion dollars for what's basically a fancy click and play game design software.

Orchestrator is much more than that. Its just another tool that you can use to make work easier. Sure you could probably do 90% of what it does with Powershell but its not just a fancy click and play toy.

vanity slug
Jul 20, 2010

Most of my runbooks feature a heavy amount of PowerShell anyway.

ghostinmyshell
Sep 17, 2004



I am very particular about biscuits, I'll have you know.
We purchase our SPLA agreements through Dell and they dropped the ball on that poo poo for the last 6 months. They weren't turning over the paperwork to Microsoft which almost flagged us for an audit. If HP and others weren't so bad we would have dropped Dell.

Then again with the BYOD mentality infecting my company like herpes I may just stop giving a gently caress about hardware/support standards if no one else is...

ghostinmyshell fucked around with this message at 01:46 on May 26, 2014

Swink
Apr 18, 2006
Left Side <--- Many Whelps
Does anyone use Owncloud in any kind of business context? Thoughts?

It's in my radar as a file sharing service for our staff to send large files to clients. It's features look good but how does it stand up to the rigours of actual usage by a bunch of people?

MC Fruit Stripe
Nov 26, 2002

around and around we go
What is the best way to create a deployable GPO? A simple GPO that you could import into any environment that you're standing up. I tried to create a GPO in GPMC and export it, but it maintains so much identifying information for the domain it was created in that it couldn't be used in any other environment, but there has to be a way to accomplish this.

Jadus
Sep 11, 2003

Does anyone have good learning materials for Microsoft DPM in it's latest version? We're evaluating it since the licensing is already purchased by our parent company, and need to quickly get up to speed on it's inner-workings.

Loten
Dec 8, 2005


MC Fruit Stripe posted:

What is the best way to create a deployable GPO? A simple GPO that you could import into any environment that you're standing up. I tried to create a GPO in GPMC and export it, but it maintains so much identifying information for the domain it was created in that it couldn't be used in any other environment, but there has to be a way to accomplish this.

What are you trying to get the GPO to do? You could script the creation via Powershell, then take that script between environments.

Something like this or this.

AlternateAccount
Apr 25, 2005
FYGM

Da Mott Man posted:

Orchestrator is much more than that. Its just another tool that you can use to make work easier. Sure you could probably do 90% of what it does with Powershell but its not just a fancy click and play toy.

Funny you mention, since this has become a huge personal priority for me at this job. Basically, every admin task I do I try to do in Powershell if I have time to figure it out. If I don't, I still try to go back and figure out how it could have been done in PS. I wish I had started a long time ago.

zapateria
Feb 16, 2003
Is Microsoft 365 licensing crazy expensive or am I just totally wrong about what we need?

Right now we have on premise Exchange, SharePoint and Lync with Enterprise Voice, so we pay about $140 in Enterprise CALs per user.

The server licenses are pretty insignificant, something like $1500 for each server.

If we want to move to hosted services, we need an E4 plan, which is $264 per user, but we either need to keep all ECALs or buy a "CAL bridge suite" which is $1000 per user??

How do you guys license users for hybrid deployments?

Thanks Ants
May 21, 2004

#essereFerrari


Apologies if you've seen this, but does it answer some of your questions?

http://blogs.technet.com/b/volume-licensing/archive/2013/10/10/licensing-how-to-using-office-365-user-licenses-to-meet-cal-requirements.aspx

Dans Macabre
Apr 24, 2004


zapateria posted:

Is Microsoft 365 licensing crazy expensive or am I just totally wrong about what we need?

Right now we have on premise Exchange, SharePoint and Lync with Enterprise Voice, so we pay about $140 in Enterprise CALs per user.

The server licenses are pretty insignificant, something like $1500 for each server.

If we want to move to hosted services, we need an E4 plan, which is $264 per user, but we either need to keep all ECALs or buy a "CAL bridge suite" which is $1000 per user??

How do you guys license users for hybrid deployments?

I think you need to keep your Lync server and license but that's it, and that's only because o365 can't do enterprise voice without the premise server. I think.

Yaos
Feb 22, 2003

She is a cat of significant gravy.
Question about resolving to domainname.local in Server 2008. At some point domainname.local (not the real domain name, just an example) on clients would always resolve to a local DC server for the site. However, at some point after adding a few DCs, DNS suddenly started doing round robin so if we ping domainname.local it would return DC 1, then pinging it again returns DC 2, and so on through all of our DCs. When this occurred everything still worked normally. DFS shares appear to use sites and services to select the correct targeted folder, authentication also uses sites and services and looks like it resolves the actual DC name. As far as I can tell this only effects being able to bring up a local DC by resolving to the domain name. Does it actually matter what DC domainname.local resolves to?

Joshie
Oct 29, 2001

MAYOR OF PIGTOWN
I'm pretty sure it only matters for devices on subnets that aren't configured in sites and services, or anything that you might have doing LDAP queries to the hostname-less A records for your DCs rather than a specific address.

Loten
Dec 8, 2005


How do you guys feel about big drives on file servers? The main file server at my work has an 8TB drive which has pretty much everything on it. Everything in this case being user home drives, departmental shared drives, assorted public folders.

I'm in a position where I now need to migrate this data elsewhere and can choose to redesign how it's done.

What do you guys consider best practices?

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CLAM DOWN
Feb 13, 2007




Loten posted:

How do you guys feel about big drives on file servers? The main file server at my work has an 8TB drive which has pretty much everything on it. Everything in this case being user home drives, departmental shared drives, assorted public folders.

I'm in a position where I now need to migrate this data elsewhere and can choose to redesign how it's done.

What do you guys consider best practices?

Historically I've kept each disk to 2TB max but something tells me that was originally done because of a VMware limitation in <5.0. I don't see a problem with large single disks provided they're LUNs on a SAN so you get that redundancy and performance.

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