@scottalanmiller said in Going over SFF: what do you think of micro business-grade desktops?:

I worked with them a bit at T-Mobile. I like SFF a lot. If you can get what you need squeezed down into that space, it makes physically dealing with desktops so much better.

I'm specifically looking for the micro form-factor, much smaller than regular SFF.

@scottalanmiller I think we won't need discrete graphic, ever. An m2 pcie slot plus a SATA slot and 64Gb of ram with desktop-grade core i7 (mounted on socket, not soldered) is plenty.

Those machines are very powerful.

We are going through an hardware refresh, and I was thinking of replace our standard or sff desktop with micro-sized ones like the dell 7050 micro or Lenovo m910 tiny… they are likely the size of a thin client, and I've seen that they can be mounted behind screens easily. Any experience with this form factor?

Linux RemoteFX support is at the RDP8 level. This is true for every Linux thin client, because they all use a tuned version of FreeRDP. The microsoft client is at version 10.

@Tim_G I do gym at home, running and cycling in the streets; usually something by JS Bach, or baroque music in general. Sometimes modern stuff like '80s rock, '90s dance.

@bigbear said in Thin Clients for RDSH 2016:

I found a few high end thin clients I like, now looking for the basic, bare minimum thin clients for RDSH 2016 Office workers. Just running office and basic apps.

I dont want to deal with zero client boothing of an OS just to run as a thin client. Just a pure thin client.

Any suggestions are appreciated!

I deal often with thin-zero client, and I really don't like it.
They need updates less often than regular desktop, but still.
Their managing solutions are usually costly piece of software that also need to be managed etc.

Other than that, they cannot be used for anything else than "be a thin client", and usually cost as much as a business desktop of the same league.

I advice you against it, my suggestion is a micro form-factor desktop like dell optiplex micro with a locked down, read-only Linux. You can make it by yourself or use pre-made ones like thinox.

@fuznutz04 said in iMac Pro:

For anyone using an older MBP, like @JaredBusch , what is your average battery life like? Mine sucks, and have to keep it plugged in most of the time. I'm considering getting a new battery for it.

My MBP 2011 still got ~7 hours.

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

When I had the job that had the Macs, I literally asked for a Chromebook as it would have made me much more efficient. And now that I have one, my Asus C201 little Chromebook is definitely far more polished and usable than the Mac had been two years ago. Sturdier, more polished, better battery life... totally different machines of course. But one is much more well designed for its purpose, the other was just... built to be marketed.

You wrote about underpowered macbook pro… I think your workflow has changed so much. Advantages of the chromebook vs iPad pro for a devops-like workflow?

@Minion-Queen said in iMac Pro:

@Francesco-Provino said in iMac Pro:

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

Asus C201

I would trade it any day for an iPad pro with keyboard.

I LOVE My Ipad Pro. I can use that pretty much all day long 8-10 hours battery life.

Would you recommend it for remote sysadmin stuff? I found the iOS rdp client very good, and the ssh clients also.

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

@Francesco-Provino said in iMac Pro:

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

Asus C201

I would trade it any day for an iPad pro with keyboard.

Ha, only because you've not used one. SO much better.

I had an iPad air (before it was stolen) for 1.5 years and it was very great. Unbelievable battery life. Never had a problem.

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

Asus C201

I would trade it any day for an iPad pro with keyboard.

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

@Francesco-Provino said in iMac Pro:

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

@Francesco-Provino said in iMac Pro:

Of course I never need to fight against macbook hardware in mac os x. This thing alone has paid me back a lot more than the 2-300 euros of acquisition price difference.

That's nowhere near the price difference here. Here I'm getting Macs for $5K that are competing against $1K machines. The difference in cost is staggering.

"Here", where? A baseline macbook 12 or 13 should be fine for any sysadmin stuff, and much more. iMac Pro of course makes no sense as I said before.

Regular MacBook wasn't able to run our test environments, so we needed the Pros. And they weren't up to snuff at all compared to just about anything else.

Mmh, seems like a workflow issue… I don't run anything heavy on my laptop, I just use a few VMs when I need it but anything serious go to the servers (both on-permise and cloud).
The endpoint has to be stateful, my laptop can be replace at any moment without much disruption because everything run elsewhere.

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

@Francesco-Provino said in iMac Pro:

Maybe you don't like their trackpad, but let me say it's a personal preference… me and 99.9% of users consider it a reference.

I've heard lots of people say that, but never someone who had used one. Just people who had repeated it like @Dashrender mentioned a few posts up. They work, but not particularly well. So much unnecessary effort.

I use it from 2011 in many machines of my company, and my personal one. No carpal stuff whatsoever, I'm good :D.
The Dell XPS one was too small and not comparable in ANY way.

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

@Francesco-Provino said in iMac Pro:

Of course I never need to fight against macbook hardware in mac os x. This thing alone has paid me back a lot more than the 2-300 euros of acquisition price difference.

That's nowhere near the price difference here. Here I'm getting Macs for $5K that are competing against $1K machines. The difference in cost is staggering.

"Here", where? A baseline macbook 12 or 13 should be fine for any sysadmin stuff, and much more. iMac Pro of course makes no sense as I said before.

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

@Francesco-Provino said in iMac Pro:

Why mediocre? What I absolutely need in my endpoint is a good POSIX shell, the best possible RDP client, support for third party/proprietary applications (like Lightroom), and a good set of browsers. The Mac OS has all of that, paired with absolutely perfect HW compatibility and great battery life.

Or, you know, okay hardware. I'm not sure where people get the idea that Mac makes perfect hardware. I found it to be not as good hardware HP and Asus that I've used. I'm certainly not saying it was bad, but if people did say things like that it was so great, I would never guess that people even thought such things. What makes it perfect? I found it bulky, heavy, very slow, not a good value and easily damaged with the worst trackpad I've ever used.

Maybe you don't like their trackpad, but let me say it's a personal preference… me and 99.9% of users consider it a reference.
I don't know how you treat your devices, but my 2011 macbook still has just a few scratches. My company buy a lot of those and we had no HW fails at all, when other laptop usually fall apart in 2-3 years.
I had two Dell XPS, both died from GPU overheating using the best Nvidia drivers I was capable to run at that time… right before warranty expiration. Do I've to say that making Linux working good on the XPS 15 takes at least 10 hours per month and that almost any kernel upgrade broke something?
Of course I never need to fight against macbook hardware in mac os x. This thing alone has paid me back a lot more than the 2-300 euros of acquisition price difference. That's what I call ROI.
The battery on my last XPS with Linux last less than 2:30 hours. I'm using my mbp 2011 for writing this post, and two hours has consumed just 25% of charge.

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

@fuznutz04 said in iMac Pro:

@Francesco-Provino said in iMac Pro:

@RojoLoco said in iMac Pro:

@Francesco-Provino said in iMac Pro:

Cannot find a purpose.

It's too pricey to be a graphic/video workstation, still lack performance vs the many multi-socket workstation/workstation, use AMD instead or Nvidia (CUDA!!!), non upgradable, non modular design with integrated display… any high-end workstation from Dell/HP/Supermicro can easily destroy it in any benchmark for a fraction of price, and with much better ROI, also.

So it's just like every other mac in that regard. Useless unless you buy into the "coolness".

I disagree. The macbook family (in baseline config) were and maybe are still great unix machines to work with. I had Dell XPS and other cool laptops, but with my macbook I had ZERO and I mean ZERO issue in six years. Still run like a charm.

Ok, Dell precision workstation maybe are even better and with great Linux support, but… guess what? They aren't that portable. The whole current XPS line is plagued with coil whine and other issues. The Thinkpad X1 is pricey and it's Lenovo… and maybe is the better alternatives. The mac just works, in my experience. I'm not a fanboy at all (apart about Linux :D), but I recognize good products when I use it… for years, without an hiccup.

I agree fully. I'm not a fanboy in the least, but I got a good deal on a 2012 MBP, and have been using it for the past 2 years without any issues. Used all day, like 6 days a week, thrown in and out of bags, taken to dirty work areas, etc. No issues at all. However, the first thing I did when I got it was maxed the memory and put in an SSD. I don't see myself needing to upgrade for quite some time. I feel like the "older" MBPs (2011-2012ish era) were the last "IT pro friendly" ones. The things are just tanks.

When it comes time to need a new one, will I get a newer model MPB? Probably not, unless I get a slamming deal.

If they were cheap(ish) they'd be generally great buys. Pop some Linux on there and you have a great option. But the prices are crazy. It's priced like a premium but it's only a mediocre system.

Why mediocre? What I absolutely need in my endpoint is a good POSIX shell, the best possible RDP client, support for third party/proprietary applications (like Lightroom), and a good set of browsers. The Mac OS has all of that, paired with absolutely perfect HW compatibility and great battery life.
I think Linux is a far superior OS for server and desktop, but mobility is another stuff and I don't think you can easily beat the macbook/mac os experience.
I'm thinking of switching to a combination of iPad pro plus a Linux desktop system (for any "physical" stuff like dd-ing a pendrive).

@RojoLoco said in iMac Pro:

@Francesco-Provino said in iMac Pro:

Cannot find a purpose.

It's too pricey to be a graphic/video workstation, still lack performance vs the many multi-socket workstation/workstation, use AMD instead or Nvidia (CUDA!!!), non upgradable, non modular design with integrated display… any high-end workstation from Dell/HP/Supermicro can easily destroy it in any benchmark for a fraction of price, and with much better ROI, also.

So it's just like every other mac in that regard. Useless unless you buy into the "coolness".

I disagree. The macbook family (in baseline config) were and maybe are still great unix machines to work with. I had Dell XPS and other cool laptops, but with my macbook I had ZERO and I mean ZERO issue in six years. Still run like a charm.

Ok, Dell precision workstation maybe are even better and with great Linux support, but… guess what? They aren't that portable. The whole current XPS line is plagued with coil whine and other issues. The Thinkpad X1 is pricey and it's Lenovo… and maybe is the better alternatives. The mac just works, in my experience. I'm not a fanboy at all (apart about Linux :D), but I recognize good products when I use it… for years, without an hiccup.

@scottalanmiller said in iMac Pro:

@Francesco-Provino said in iMac Pro:

Cannot find a purpose.

It's too pricey to be a graphic/video workstation, still lack performance vs the many multi-socket workstation/workstation, use AMD instead or Nvidia (CUDA!!!), non upgradable, non modular design with integrated display… any high-end workstation from Dell/HP/Supermicro can easily destroy it in any benchmark for a fraction of price, and with much better ROI, also.

It's purpose is to be a Mac. If you wanted a device that does things, this isn't the place you'd be looking.

Certain Apple devices are good IMHO. Ipad is great, and the new one looks even better. My workhorse is a MBP from 2011, it works like it's new.

@matteo-nunziati said in What Are the Latest Virtualization Platform Recommendations:

@scottalanmiller I've recently looked at the SLES installer and it seems it is able to support Xen. Not sure about opensuse.
My idea was: why use XS if I can install it on a minimal suse leap? I've never used xen so I do not know if XO is able to deal with Xen over suse.
This would be a nice way to go out of the really strict/limited apporach of XS. And anyway it would be way more close to what one does with centos minimal install + libvirt/kvm.

Currently I'm using hyper-v + altaro. I've just setup a replica server using the build-in replica service and I'm going to test it (and write a little bit about the process). Altaro is great but hyper-v is really MS stuff:

• dynamic memory has frozed ALL of the VMs on my host (even win ones), leading me to go the static memory way.
• everytime I read about issues with a potential update a million of guys jump out of the blue with the wierds issues, scarrying me. I always pray when an update is to be installed.
• performance is not top notch (minor issue here)
• now and then the VM manager freezes...
• and honestly poweshell is way worst than unix-like apps + bash/sh

All in all it seems the classic lack of QA and NIH syndrome from MS. But for sure it does the job and the SW ecosystem is wide.

Using XAPI would be cumbersome as @scottalanmiller said, but you can use the very mature and IMHO better libvirt framework, like KVM do! The support for Xen is very good, you should also be able to do almost anything virt-manager support with KVM. The XL toolstack for Xen is mature and is the de facto standard outside of XS.

Ma, dato il tipo di configurazione che stai cercando di metter su, ti consiglio di usare Fedora con KVM più che provare adattamenti: la sicurezza e le features di KVM (nonché le performance) sono ormai pari e volte superiori a Xen.

Cannot find a purpose.

It's too pricey to be a graphic/video workstation, still lack performance vs the many multi-socket workstation/workstation, use AMD instead or Nvidia (CUDA!!!), non upgradable, non modular design with integrated display… any high-end workstation from Dell/HP/Supermicro can easily destroy it in any benchmark for a fraction of price, and with much better ROI, also.