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evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Bring a book?

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Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

evil_bunnY posted:

Bring a book?

It's web base, and sadly a lot of the advice is incorrect or probably not good advice for anyone experienced in VMware. In one video it says cloud is great because "you don't have to have long meetings with the IT to spec out servers you just give exactly what you want!" that was almost word for word. I wouldn't say it is flat out wrong but any competent in Virtual infrastructure would argue some of these points. They also push a separate program, rather than talk about writing PowerCLI scripts and Vspheres logging to do reporting. Oh well guess that is why it is a sales cert

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Corvettefisher posted:

It's web base, and sadly a lot of the advice is incorrect or probably not good advice for anyone experienced in VMware. In one video it says cloud is great because "you don't have to have long meetings with the IT to spec out servers you just give exactly what you want!" that was almost word for word.
VMware wants you to sell things. In this sense, you really don't need to spec out much, just scale up as needed and charge on capacity actually used.

As for whether people actually do this in practice, that's a whole other story. Most people prefer predictable cost models within an organization.

quicksand
Nov 21, 2002

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Corvettefisher posted:

It's web base, and sadly a lot of the advice is incorrect or probably not good advice for anyone experienced in VMware. In one video it says cloud is great because "you don't have to have long meetings with the IT to spec out servers you just give exactly what you want!" that was almost word for word. I wouldn't say it is flat out wrong but any competent in Virtual infrastructure would argue some of these points. They also push a separate program, rather than talk about writing PowerCLI scripts and Vspheres logging to do reporting. Oh well guess that is why it is a sales cert

I told you the VSP is a bunch of worthless used car salesman bullshit. :(

The VTSP isn't as terrible. The best part about both of them is that you can start the course, refresh the partner university page, and click "Take Exam" or whatever, then just search through the slides using their handy dandy search feature, and write the test with them open!

It's how I did the VSP because seriously, gently caress sales.

Maneki Neko
Oct 27, 2000

Alctel posted:

How big is 'bigger?' We probably have about 3-4 TB of data (most of it on 2 file servers).

We don't use it for any servers over 100GB, that seems to have gotten rid of most of our problems.

I haven't had super sassy support, but overall most of our support experiences have not been great, I end up figuring things out at a higher rate than the Veeam people do, and god help you if you have an issue you can't 100% repro.

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

quicksand posted:

I told you the VSP is a bunch of worthless used car salesman bullshit. :(

The VTSP isn't as terrible. The best part about both of them is that you can start the course, refresh the partner university page, and click "Take Exam" or whatever, then just search through the slides using their handy dandy search feature, and write the test with them open!

It's how I did the VSP because seriously, gently caress sales.

Yeah but someone has to get them to be a professional partner might as well be me... Oh well 2 NFS vCenter enterprise licenses for 250 is worth it. Do the practice tests even count for anything on the VSP they seem to have no grading scale and constantly gently caress up in chrome

quicksand
Nov 21, 2002

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.
You have to pass them all 10 with an 80 to qualify as a VSP.

I'm trying to get our CEO to hook us up with the NFR licensing to test and play with, and he apparently has them according to the portal. But he has no idea what I am talking about.

The Internal Use Only licensing is also sweet, but I can't get them to fork out for the Enterprise Plus stuff (All that they seem to offer us), even at only ~1200/socket, which is practically stealing them.

Kachunkachunk
Jun 6, 2011

Misogynist posted:

Everyone's had their bad support experiences, and I don't want to color the company unfairly with my impressions -- lots of other people have had fairly decent experiences with Veeam, and I don't want to sway anybody's opinions away from what might be a good solution for them. But the amount of time I'm likely to invest in making it work correctly in our environment far outweighs the cost of switching to another vendor right now.
It's alright, I actually have to remain very much vendor-neutral and avoid colorization. I wouldn't be able to tell someone of your experience (as entertaining/shocking as it may be), even if I wanted to.

With that said, we once had someone flip out on a demanding, but very rude, customer. The tech literally fold him to gently caress off and that he was ungrateful (maybe some other nice things too). He was obviously let go very soon after, but I can't help but wonder if his colleagues still secretly agreed with his sentiments/response.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

complex posted:

Use vmfstools to examine any locks on the volume, break lock if necessary.

How would I do this?

It is an empty folder on an empty datastore. The only switch that gives me feedback for datastores with vmfstools is --queryfs, and that doesn't bring back anything on locks (from what I am seeing).

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

quicksand posted:

You have to pass them all 10 with an 80 to qualify as a VSP.

I'm trying to get our CEO to hook us up with the NFR licensing to test and play with, and he apparently has them according to the portal. But he has no idea what I am talking about.

The Internal Use Only licensing is also sweet, but I can't get them to fork out for the Enterprise Plus stuff (All that they seem to offer us), even at only ~1200/socket, which is practically stealing them.

Maybe I am not seeing them until after I fully complete it, all it has are practice quizzes(in the videos, with no identification of your score.

Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 20:05 on Mar 14, 2012

Jadus
Sep 11, 2003

Regarding the Veeam chat last page, I just saw an ad that Veeam v6 supports Hyper-V. I know Hyper-V isn't too popular here, but does anyone have experience with this side of Veeam?

Right now I'm using Symantec BackupExec with the Hyper-V agent direct to tape, and I'm looking at potential improvements to that situation.

Syano
Jul 13, 2005

Jadus posted:

Regarding the Veeam chat last page, I just saw an ad that Veeam v6 supports Hyper-V. I know Hyper-V isn't too popular here, but does anyone have experience with this side of Veeam?

Right now I'm using Symantec BackupExec with the Hyper-V agent direct to tape, and I'm looking at potential improvements to that situation.

I am backing up a 3 node hyper-v cluster with veeam, currently running 18 VMs. So far it just works. Backup window is about 3 hours nightly. Pretty happy with it so far. You can't do instant recoveries with it but oh well no worry. It runs a LOAD better than backup exec.

Only thing I wish it could do: I have a couple vms that attach to iscsi storage directly. Veeam of course does not follow the iscsi path and back up that storage so we still have to keep backup exec installed and licensed for those couple machines. Other than that, its a been a great solution for this little cluster I run.

Jadus
Sep 11, 2003

Syano posted:

I am backing up a 3 node hyper-v cluster with veeam, currently running 18 VMs. So far it just works. Backup window is about 3 hours nightly. Pretty happy with it so far. You can't do instant recoveries with it but oh well no worry. It runs a LOAD better than backup exec.

Only thing I wish it could do: I have a couple vms that attach to iscsi storage directly. Veeam of course does not follow the iscsi path and back up that storage so we still have to keep backup exec installed and licensed for those couple machines. Other than that, its a been a great solution for this little cluster I run.

How big are your VM's, to get that 3 hour window? I've got a slightly smaller cluster than you've described so I'm thinking this might be a good solution. The problem is I've got one VM that has about 1.9TB worth between 2 VHD's that is our primary DFS folder target.

Being able to use dedupe and reverse incrementals sounds very attractive.

adorai
Nov 2, 2002

10/27/04 Never forget
Grimey Drawer
if you guys have HA VMware clusters and are having trouble backing up large fileservers in a timely fashion, it may be worth your while to spin up a VM that provides CIFS or samba with a snapshotable filesystem (such as ZFS). You could avoid the veam backup and just use the built in functionality of the filesystem to perform your filesystem backups.

quicksand
Nov 21, 2002

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

Corvettefisher posted:

Maybe I am not seeing them until after I fully complete it, all it has are practice quizzes(in the videos, with no identification of your score.

Go back into the course itself under your enrollments in the Partner University.

It should look like what I have attached, and click Module Test.

Only registered members can see post attachments!

quicksand fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Mar 14, 2012

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams
Anyone uses Zmanda for backing up VMs?

Diet Butcher
May 2, 2005
Worst Song, Played on Ugliest Guitar.
Had an AppAssure demo for VM Backup last week, much preferred it to the Veeam demo. They were acquired by Dell a couple of weeks ago so their future looks pretty bright. Instant restore was awesome! Anyone working with AppAssure?

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug
:v: hmm let's check my Open filer DRBD active/passive test build

WHAT DID I DO!?!?

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

Corvettefisher posted:

WHAT DID I DO!?!?
add a horizontal scrollbar to my browser window

FISHMANPET
Mar 3, 2007

Sweet 'N Sour
Can't
Melt
Steel Beams

Corvettefisher posted:

:v: hmm let's check my Open filer DRBD active/passive test build

WHAT DID I DO!?!?

Uh, you have 64 Zettabytes?

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

FISHMANPET posted:

Uh, you have 64 Zettabytes?

I wish, I would open up a data hosting business ASAP, no this is a 4 (10GB) disk array, and for some reason this happened when I was waiting for stuff to sync.

Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 06:28 on Mar 15, 2012

madsushi
Apr 19, 2009

Baller.
#essereFerrari

Misogynist posted:

add a horizontal scrollbar to my browser window

Trying to flush out all of the posters with small monitors.

Vulture Culture
Jul 14, 2003

I was never enjoying it. I only eat it for the nutrients.

madsushi posted:

Trying to flush out all of the posters with small monitors.
24" monitors in portrait orientation are for poors :(

Syano
Jul 13, 2005

Jadus posted:

How big are your VM's, to get that 3 hour window? I've got a slightly smaller cluster than you've described so I'm thinking this might be a good solution. The problem is I've got one VM that has about 1.9TB worth between 2 VHD's that is our primary DFS folder target.

Being able to use dedupe and reverse incrementals sounds very attractive.

No single VM gets near 2tb. I am thin provisioning the VMs so reported use size is low. That being said my shared volume is consumed about 500 gigs on the LUN at the moment.

Even 1.9tb probably wont be a huge backup window unless you have tons of daily changes.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT

Moey posted:

How would I do this?

It is an empty folder on an empty datastore. The only switch that gives me feedback for datastores with vmfstools is --queryfs, and that doesn't bring back anything on locks (from what I am seeing).

Meh. Had a maintenance window last night so I was able to reboot all the hosts connected to this stupid datastore. Still couldn't delete the folder. After that I realized that since that was the only thing left on that entire NAS, why the hell didn't I reboot that first. A reboot of the NAS and the folder was gone!

Alctel
Jan 16, 2004

I love snails


PHD Virtual Backup users - The more I've been reading up on it the better choice over Veeam it seems - esp since it uses a virtual appliance as opposed to Veeams windows machine.

The only thing is that apparently Image level backup restores are pretty clunky in PHD and not that great, while in Veeam you can boot up a 'trial restore' straight off of the backup store and then vmotion it across which is miles better.

The thing is is that the version of PHD being review was 5.0 while the latest version is 5.4 - can those who use it let me know if the image level backup restores have been improved?

some kinda jackal
Feb 25, 2003

 
 
From a guest's perspective, should it be able to discern a difference between being powered on in (for example) VMware Fusion versus VMware Workstation versus ESXi 5?

I mean that in the sense of installing a VM on Fusion 4 with compatibility set to the latest featureset, then copying the vmdk, vmx, and subsequent support files to a Linux machine running Workstation 8, should the power on on the new platform be seamless for the guest OS or can I expect some hardware changes to be detected? And I guess I'm talking about a sterile environment, and things like machine-specific USB devices won't be passed to the guest OS.

At first I thought maybe all three ran the same virtualization engine, but then I thought maybe small product specific patches could put it out of sync? I don't know. I'm not asking for any specific reason yet, just something I'm curious about.

I've got a pretty okay grasp of how vSphere works on the high levels now, but on the low level I'm still sort of in the muck.

some kinda jackal fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Mar 15, 2012

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug
Anyone else getting crashes with installing vmware tools on Windows Server 8 beta? I totally lost the GUI and it locks up shortly after boot.

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Corvettefisher posted:

Anyone else getting crashes with installing vmware tools on Windows Server 8 beta? I totally lost the GUI and it locks up shortly after boot.
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2012/03/14/workstation-and-fusion-tech-previews/

Dilbert As FUCK
Sep 8, 2007

by Cowcaster
Pillbug

Oh sweet thanks

necrobobsledder
Mar 21, 2005
Lay down your soul to the gods rock 'n roll
Nap Ghost

Martytoof posted:

From a guest's perspective, should it be able to discern a difference between being powered on in (for example) VMware Fusion versus VMware Workstation versus ESXi 5?

I mean that in the sense of installing a VM on Fusion 4 with compatibility set to the latest featureset, then copying the vmdk, vmx, and subsequent support files to a Linux machine running Workstation 8, should the power on on the new platform be seamless for the guest OS or can I expect some hardware changes to be detected?
The virtual hardware is different (no VMXNet 3 on Fusion or Workstation) and VMX files are different slightly across the hypervisors with the VM loaders checking that you didn't just copy-paste VMs around. The disk modes available are not the same as on ESX either for VMDKs, particularly if you're doing stuff like RDMs (say, boot camp VMs with Fusion). For the sake of correctness, I'd use Converter each time even if I knew all the differences off the top of my head.

some kinda jackal
Feb 25, 2003

 
 
I just outed myself as an idiot by forgetting converter even existed. Thanks for the clarification though.

Rhymenoserous
May 23, 2008

Martytoof posted:

I just outed myself as an idiot by forgetting converter even existed. Thanks for the clarification though.

Don't blame yourself. Most people only use it to virtualize that 10 year old win2k box running mission critical software installed by the vendor who is out of business who gently massaged each registry entry in with their dicks, and now no one can replicate the install.

Beelzebubba9
Feb 24, 2004
I've got a question about vMotion and RAM Disks:

We have a two node cluster running ESXi 4.1 with a vCenter Advanced license and vMotion enabled that runs our production mail and media servers. In order to get our email throughput up for our service, we've added ten email servers running XMS. Since XMS hooks into our database, it's very IO intensive when we're trying to send out massive quantities of email and our SAN with its lone 1Gb link per host became a bottleneck. We are going to do what we can to improve that bottleneck in the long run, but in a moment of extreme duress we moved created a 1GB RAM drive on one of the mail servers and moved the XMS spool on to it.

Much to no one's surprise, we saw our throughput increase by something like 700%.

Our application team is well aware of the risks of working with a RAM disk and they're fine with losing the data contained therein in case of a crash or shutdown (the data doesn't matter to our application until it's written to the database - worst case is we'd send out a few duplicate emails).

So my question is how would this be effected by vMotion in case of a host failure? I assume ram states are persisted in case of the failover, and the worst case is there might be a brief loss of synchronicity between all of the parts of the database. Is there anything I should be worried about other than that?

Lastly, any VMware gurus in the NYC area looking for a possible consulting gig? Our System Engineer left us a few months back, and we haven't been able to replace him so I'm filling in and that's less optimal. As we expand our service, I feel like we could really use an expert's eyes on our infrastructure. Obviously you'd be compensated. :)

evil_bunnY
Apr 2, 2003

Beelzebubba9 posted:

So my question is how would this be effected by vMotion in case of a host failure? I assume ram states are persisted in case of the failover, and the worst case is there might be a brief loss of synchronicity between all of the parts of the database. Is there anything I should be worried about other than that?
With 1 link per host you'll never get to vmotion the ramdrive VM. vMotion works by scooting vRam contents from one host to the next.

Beelzebubba9 posted:

Obviously you'd be compensated. :)
This is usually how professional services work.

fatjoint
Sep 28, 2005
Fatjoint

Beelzebubba9 posted:

So my question is how would this be effected by vMotion in case of a host failure? I assume ram states are persisted in case of the failover, and the worst case is there might be a brief loss of synchronicity between all of the parts of the database. Is there anything I should be worried about other than that?

If I understand the question correctly, you're misusing terminology here. Failover doesn't use vMotion - failover is a feature of HA (high availibility), or fault tolerance. vMotion is technology that allows you to move a virtual machine from one running host to another.

In the case of HA, when a host fails, vmware will boot the vm to another host if you're configured to (by default it does on shared storage). In the case of a HA failover, it's a cold boot, not a migration of memory contents; It's a crash consistent boot of a virtual machine whose host failed, and it isn't fool proof as crash consistent boots can have corruption.

However, in the case of Fault Tolerance, if a host fails the "lock-stepped" virtual machine takes over exactly where the other left off as it's a seemless translation, the contents of memory and disk writes are shadowed in the "lock-stepped" virtual machine.

fatjoint fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Mar 17, 2012

Beelzebubba9
Feb 24, 2004

fatjoint posted:

If I understand the question correctly, you're misusing terminology here. Failover doesn't use vMotion - failover is a feature of HA (high availibility), or fault tolerance. vMotion is technology that allows you to move a virtual machine from one running host to another.

You're right - I was misusing the term. Thanks for reading through the lines and answering the question I meant to ask.

Moey
Oct 22, 2010

I LIKE TO MOVE IT
Has anyone here converted pRDMs to VMDKs? What is the timeframe on something like this? Same as a normal storage migration?

Seems very straight forward. Just do an offline storage migration and it will copy all the data from the RDM and create a VMDK. My old boss setup a few production servers with RDMs that have no business being RDMs, so I am trying to straighten poo poo out.

One of the machines has about 500gb of scans (17 million files), so that is the one I am most nervous about.

Aniki
Mar 21, 2001

Wouldn't fit...
I'm not sure if there is another thread suited for this question, but we're looking at setting up some virtualized servers at work. We would be using and there would probably be 3 or 4 virtualized servers at the onset. Two would be running Windows Server 2008 R2 (phone server and call logging software), another would be a Fedora install running LAMP, and there may be a dedicate Oracle server running on Fedora.

How I do figure out what type of server/hardware would be appropriate to run the virtual servers that I need? Ideally I'd like some sort of dual server setup for loadbalancing and some degree of redundancy, but would I want to look at blade servers or are there other options that I should consider? I am talking to NetApp today about a SAN for the VMs, but I'm a bit unsure of what direction to go with the actual server.

Sorry if this is a basic question. I'm normally good with hardware, but I'm just having difficulty wrapping my head around what sort of equipment I'll need to run the 3-4 VMs that I need.

Aniki fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Mar 19, 2012

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Internet Explorer
Jun 1, 2005





Moey posted:

Has anyone here converted pRDMs to VMDKs? What is the timeframe on something like this? Same as a normal storage migration?

Seems very straight forward. Just do an offline storage migration and it will copy all the data from the RDM and create a VMDK. My old boss setup a few production servers with RDMs that have no business being RDMs, so I am trying to straighten poo poo out.

One of the machines has about 500gb of scans (17 million files), so that is the one I am most nervous about.

If you have the extra storage space you could also do an online file sync using something like RichCopy, then just cut over at night one night and have minimal downtime.


Aniki posted:

I'm not sure if there is another thread suited for this question, but we're looking at setting up some virtualized servers at work. We would be using and there would probably be 3 or 4 virtualized servers at the onset. Two would be running Windows Server 2008 R2 (phone server and call logging software), another would be a Fedora install running LAMP, and there may be a dedicate Oracle server running on Fedora.

How I do figure out what type of server/hardware would be appropriate to run the virtual servers that I need? Ideally I'd like some sort of dual server setup for loadbalancing and some degree of redundancy, but would I want to look at blade servers or are there other options that I should consider? I am talking to NetApp today about a SAN for the VMs, but I'm a bit unsure of what direction to go with the actual server.

Sorry if this is a basic question. I'm normally good with hardware, but I'm just having difficulty wrapping my head around what sort of equipment I'll need to run the 3-4 VMs that I need.

You'll definitely want 2 servers, otherwise it is kind of silly to virtualize. I would highly suggest 1u or 2u servers over blades, especially since you're not really hurting for density with only 3 VMs. Unless you are planning on a ton of growth, I think anything NetApp would offer is probably way overkill. I would look at Equallogic, specifically the PS4100. I will admit I do not know much about NetApp, though. This thread will probably be more helpful for SAN-specific advice - http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2943669&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1

[Edit: Oh, to see what you would need for virtualization you'll want to run Perfmon for a day or two on all the servers, measuring pretty much everything you can. There is also VMware's consolidation tool or capacity planner, but I am not sure if that is still in use. Bit behind on my VMware knowledge. Probably overkill for 3-4 VMs.]

Internet Explorer fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Mar 20, 2012

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