Posts made by KOOLER

@thanksajdotcom said in Need a Good Bottle of Scotch:

So I wanted suggestions from people on here for a good bottle of scotch. I'm looking for something in the $100 price range, maybe even a little more. Was just looking for any ideas people might have. Thanks!

Glenmorangie (company re-launched single malts into user space)

Glenlivet 12-15-18 (I actually prefer 15) <-- I you don't like one of those go get some Pepsi, I'm serious

Macallan - expensive Glenlivet

...

(these are classic)

You can read some of my reviews here:

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1085003-whiskey-lovers-thread

What do you guys think if I'd create a whiskey thread here on MangoLassi as well?

AK

@aaronstuder said in Surveillance DVR System?:

Anyone on have a recommendation for a Surveillance DVR System? I have very little experience with them and I just got work that we need to order one shortly.

We only worked with BOSCH. Deutsche qualitat. Expensive

@MattSpeller said in Looking for a Dashcam with ODB II:

Can't say enough positive stuff about getting an OBD2 reader, they're freaking fantastic.

I drive my poor car so freaking hard and I've had a bad misfire when it gets up to temp that no one has been able to diagnose. In less than 24h owning this widget I discovered it was misfiring on all 4 cylinders when it got hot on a low tank of gas. My theory is that the turbo is boiling the gas return line and it's heating up the tank. When the fuel pump goes to work it's not sending enough pressure (because hot gas / insufficient lube in the pump (gas lubes the pump)).

TL;DR epic little widget.

Throw in some wideband O2 sensor and gas pressure gauge and you'll know for sure. For me what you say sound like fuel pump issues.

@JaredBusch said in Server and Storage Redundancy:

I disagree with how everyone here pushes starwind as this wonder answer. It is a great product, but Hyper-V replication works quite well for the SMB that only needs a single server compute node, yet wants to have some failover redundancy. It is simple, baked in, and no third party tools required.

I'll cross-post from SpiceWorks as I've been writing a Veeam Vs Hyper-V replica wrap up post recently and it's mostly what OP is asking here as well.

-->

You come up with a set of numbers:

1. RTO (how much downtime you can afford?) and RPO (how much data you can lose?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_time_objective

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recovery_point_objective

2. Budget

So...

...if you can't afford much of a downtime and you can't afford to lose data you do implement some BC strategy: Windows failover cluster, HA VMs, FCI with SQL Server if you don't do AAG paying huge $$$ for SQL / Enterprise version etc and these would need HA storage (physical or virtual). Then you probably need some of our stuff (or some competitors, HP VSA is a good option if you care, upcoming Windows Server 2016 will have similar storage technology also if you'll go Datacente all-around and increase amount of licensed nodes). Most of these options are paid expect maybe self-made ones (you pay with your own labor), free 1TB HP VSA and also you can get free hyperconverged StarWind as well on a special request (search this forum there's a SpiceWorks path for that). This approach may add some $$$ requirements (+CapEx) and also for sure will make you work more to setup and support the final solution (+OpEx). <-- Do only if you REALLY NEED THIS !!

...if you can afford reasonable downtime (minutes, half of hour, hours maybe - time to recover your VM from some backup, depends on amount of data your VMs hold) and you can lose some data on manual failover or replication increment (again, some minutes typically) go w/out shared storage, run VMs from DAS but always use some good VM backup. Obviously Veeam is a good candidate for that. <-- Do this ALWAYS !! You can't run production w/out a backup solution !!

+ you need some backup storage and I don't see you mentioning you have one. You can't backup to yourself so cheap two-disk NetGear or maybe some off-site cloud space should help.

I don't recommend using Hyper-V Replica because it a) doesn't play nice with some apps officially (Exchange, SQL Server some scenarios, any VMs depending on each other) and b) steals IOPS from your system (twice as many writes now are needed, RAID10 is already half on writes so you get 1/4 of your disks so far, close to RAID5 write penalty now), and c) has dangerous "autofailover" option implemented with PowerShell script (see link below in P.S.), you really don't want to do that as there's no brain split issue protection, orchestration site should be a separate, say running in Azure but that's more $$$ and labor) d) make you think you're safe with VM replication while you really need a BACKUP. <-- Use Veeam Backup & Replication for both VM replication and VM backup, this money definitely pays you back.

That's it

TL;DR: Don't buy StarWind unless you really need to and buy Veeam always.

P.S. In case you'll decide to implement a crazy "two Hyper-V hosts replicate to each other and here's my poor' mans pseudo-HA system" scenario here's a link for you:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/keithmayer/2012/10/05/automated-disaster-recovery-testing-and-fa...

Again, I don't recommend doing that and there are reasons above why exactly.

<--

@travisdh1 said in Server and Storage Redundancy:

@DustinB3403 said in Server and Storage Redundancy:

Scott you had a conversation with your self...

I do that all the time. It doesn't get really confusing till me, myself, and I are all talking at the same time

That's how Ethernet (original one) was invented ;))

@DustinB3403 said in Server and Storage Redundancy:

Scott you had a conversation with your self...

What's wrong with that?

zroot is #1 reason to love ZFS !!

@scottalanmiller said in Server and Storage Redundancy:

You should have no switches. Even if you needed external storage, which is totally out of the question here, it would be DAS and DAS doesn't use switches.

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/08/choosing-a-storage-type/

So we can totally eliminate the switches and the SAN or external storage from this discussion.

There are DAS switches but for somebody who a) was smart enough to deploy Clustered Storage Spaces and many JBODs and servers and b) not scared on f a lock-in vendor (LSI makes them and maybe 1 or 2 more companies)

@BBigford said in Solus 1.1 Linux on Scale HC3:

@KOOLER said in Solus 1.1 Linux on Scale HC3:

They will catch up definitely! ARM is getting a very good kick now. Raspberry Pi is somehow underpowered by current "modern" means but Banana Pi solves most of the business cases AFAIK. That's NOT thin client if you care.

I haven't looked at RBP 3 vs. BP. Sounds like you've tried them both, what'd you find?

We got a bunch of both as a gifts to employees (you know, hardware company we actually gave Pis away to people who did MUCH more complex things themselves LOL) and I also kept few to feed video to old LCD TVs (rented apartments where I live now don't have USB ports and I like stream video on demand from IP directly). Raspberry Pis are OK never had any issue with those but both of my Banana's M3 are dead now and sent back for replacement. In theory Banana is better because CPU cycles / $ ar higher, R-Pi is still quirky when playing back video, also B-Pi has more OSes available incl. Android and some cool stuff I don't even remember now (I;m using Raspbian everywhere now).

@Dashrender said in KVM Backups:

You're right.. I have to keep reminding myself of that. But SMB's don't want to be chasing down dozens of little pieces all over the place to make these pieces work.

It's one thing or a larger company to have a team who's job it is to do just that - Scott's been talking about using Xen for decade plus. I have to assume that Scott the one man who is equal to nearly 10 normal mortals, has managed to collect and put together all of those parts.

The simplicity of XS and XO are what really give Xen any teeth in the SMB market, a la Windows style, everything in one place.

The bad thing about these groupings though, as we found out with the use of VHDs in XS, are the limitations those packages place upon us.

This is exactly correct. They want some hardware on-site (if they can't move to public cloud for some good reason) and they want somebody who owns the hardware also babysit it. Playing LEGO game with hardware and software isn't what most of the people can do EASILY (and one of the proves I'm right is why products like vRanger and AppAss still exist).

@scottalanmiller said in KVM Backups:

@JaredBusch said in KVM Backups:

Also, Starwind (good product, but) is a waste in the SMB. Very few need more than a single server. The few that do, can then just get by with Hyper-V replication for their pseudo fail over needs.

I totally agree with the idea that most only need one server and the others can use the Hyper-V replication. My thought there is that Starwind is free at that scale and does it better than the Hyper-V replication model, so is worth using. Not required, but still valuable.

Most who need only one server don't really need any server at all: they can go AWS, Azure or just local VM hosting and cut huge OpEx on servicing even their single server. Laptop (BYOD), VPN and some public WiFi. Bingo!

@JaredBusch said in KVM Backups:

When XO grows up to be more fully functional, then I will consider replacing Hyper-V with XS.

The potential in XO is awesome, but it is too much work for not enough of a return still.

Hyper-V + Veeam is solid, well known, and handles everything needed.

Ignore the "confusion" comment @scottalanmiller made because it exists with all hypervisors in the SMB.

> Also, Starwind (good product, but) is a waste in the SMB. Very few need more than a single server. The few that do, can then just get by with Hyper-V replication for their pseudo fail over needs.

W/out knowing RTO and RPO whole phrase above is a pure speculation and IMHO. Size of the business is a very flaky indicator of an uptime requirements and how much data can be lost: there are 500+ seat Enterprises who can live with their production servers down and they keep going (one of our customers is outsourcing company here, devs have their own copy of source code locally so can keep coding with a source trunk and file services down for a few hours, they can also tolerate data loss because they can a) re-implement and b) recover from local copies) and there are small "Mom and Dad" shops with only 4 employees (not even SMBs, these are uber-small-B's) who don't do well even with a few minutes of downtime (another customer of us, 3D printing and laser cutting facility, these guys live from what they do today). Either way: make your decisions being driven by NUMBERS and not by EMOTIONS and OPINIONS or you'll get yourself DOOMED.

P.S. Also people who recommend Hyper-V Replica for uptime improvement usually never used one for more then a couple of VMs (if used at all). Using DR instead of a BC is LOL.

I'll definitely share! ))

They will catch up definitely! ARM is getting a very good kick now. Raspberry Pi is somehow underpowered by current "modern" means but Banana Pi solves most of the business cases AFAIK. That's NOT thin client if you care.

@scottalanmiller said in KVM Backups:

It's very basic. Just full images and automated exports. Nothing extensive. But for firms needing a basic, free backup mechanism, it gets them that. In most cases you would still want something more robust, like StorageCraft, Unitrends or the like. A Veeam product for it would be awesome. But it is enough to get automated data protection in place.

See Inbox

@scottalanmiller said in KVM Backups:

@KOOLER said in KVM Backups:

@scottalanmiller said in KVM Backups:

I was under impression they license somebody's else technology, don't they?

For their basic backup, no it's all internal. For more advanced features they work with third parties but don't license it, it's sold separately.

Do you use their agentless backup? How do you find it against say Unitrends or Veeam? thanks!

@scottalanmiller said in KVM Backups:

@KOOLER said in KVM Backups:

Aren't there any agent-less KVM backups available? Anything like Veeam?

None that I know of. Scale does an agentless backup but you have to have a Scale cluster, not just KVM.

I was under impression they license somebody's else technology, don't they?

Aren't there any agent-less KVM backups available? Anything like Veeam?

@wirestyle22 said in Azure Outage... Again:

@scottalanmiller said in Azure Outage... Again:

The loss of knowledge of concrete was such a big deal that until the mid 1700s, we had gone over a thousand years without any idea of how concrete was made. So Rome was making concrete builds for hundreds of years longer than we've known about concrete in modern times.

That means that for well over a millennium... humans had to look upon the structures of the Roman Empire and say... that's so neat, what the heck is that material that they used?

It's interesting what history lost. Archimedes made steam engines 2000 years before we figured it out as well but it was useless at the time because slave labor was so cheap.

The only reason why some empires f.e. Russia did exist so long (and keeps existing BTW).

Very nice! I want it or something derived from it on my Raspberry and Banana Pis