Posts made by krisleslie

@jaredbusch honestly, at home I tend to mimic what I have in the office. It's nowhere near it obviously. I'm pro Ubiquiti for the office along with HP when needed and DELL for my servers

My time sometimes goes far in between before I do brand new infrastructure setups. So for me, it's just practice and learning. I typically find that I'm more entertained how I can do more with linux (depends on my caffeine intake for the day) that might have a steep learning curve but in the end its worth it.

I don't care what anyone says lol fixing my Ubuntu box with my Unifi Controller was a labor of love but I got it working and I dare not touch it But for me I plan on deleting, remaking it and going back through the whole process to hopefully learn to do it faster and better and keep the commands properly documented.

I eventually plan on doing the same with the Ubiquiti NVR.

I kinda do wish Ubiquiti made their router work on x86 that would have actually made my day but its all good I realize PFsense is kinda where I need to put my attention back on. I have installed it and used it successfully in the past.

Scott with consideration for the total amount of ram, cache, cpu power etc, why is the world still stuck on "hardware raid" ?!?! Seems to me like it needs to die lol.

I remember when I first got my feet wet with Virtualization, if it wasn't for Scott and AJ I would still be behind in times. It's not been an easy road and I definately wished I had my hand held some days but I made it though. I've basically learned how to install and administer Hyper-V, XenServer and VMWare environments. I'm not the absolute best at all of them, but I can basically deploy a small business from start to finish in about a weekend to a week. Do you know how many times I kept changing lol!

I think the most important thing I learned was the general and overall concepts, so that when time for change was upon us, I didn't have to spend a lot of time with my head spinning. I can plan effectively and move once I'm confident.

For me installing stuff on the weekends with crap, helps me. It's my time to break things or learn why I really should or shouldn't do "this" or "that". I off top know SSD's are astronomically faster than spinning rust. I think anyone in IT should by now if they have learned the difference. But for me to "SEE" why it's faster in black and white was profound.

The only time I see spinning rust to be used in my applications is where cost is crazy for hard drives. But with that in mind, I can see more love for me just buying 2 SSD's with the capacity I need and getting a 3rd for hot swap. That isn't too expensive.

I guess this Segways me into another discussion, at what point in one server would you want dual controllers? I see a benefit of tiered storage so I load my vm's on my ssds, but use my backups with spinning rust. But I realize doing that could increase the risk factor.

@dashrender said in Need to Improve Disk Utilization on XenServer 7.2:

@brrabill said in Need to Improve Disk Utilization on XenServer 7.2:

@scottalanmiller said

This is why RAID 1 + RAID 5 was generally sensible in 1997 and was insane by 2009. The factors behind the decision have changed.

Right but that is 12 years, not 12 hours.

Well, Scott did only change to Fedora within the past two years (I think really the past year). For many years before that he was preaching CentOS.

Now of course, at some point he switch, and there would be the 12 hours.. but at least he's been on Fedora for over 6 months for sure, and likely more like a year.

I think to help with that, maybe Scott could produce a quarterly report explaining his thoughts on OS, hardware and software changes that he is using. I trust Scott and his experience. But one thing he made sure he told me is to READ and DO MY OWN RESEARCH

@brrabill I think the issue we have had in the past was that by the time something changed, the effect of it had to trickle down and that was a big random thing...

By the time something changes now, short of a complete infrastructure having to be done over, people can adapt quicker. i'm still living and dealing with Non Profits that don't have a server, never heard of virtualization, never heard of voip, and the list goes on.

In some cases, it's better for me to get them completely on Google for Non Profits and work on the infrastructure later. The allotments that Google, Microsoft and other tech companies throw at Non-Profits makes it entirely hard NOT to splurge when funds are available.

@brrabill
I'm doing my research to get on KVM. I might go with Ubuntu for my home use. I'm still semi-noob.

Scott how will the migration from XenServer to KVM go?

@scottalanmiller

Scott I think many of us have it implanted in our head with spinning rust to continue to use RAID 10 as it felt the most safe and easy to scale

Honestly, I'm still trying to debate if RAID 5 is worth it vs RAID 1 with SSD's in mind. It's an extra cost, what benefit does it bring? I've only had to deal with RAID 5 on my old server, and I nuked it and never looked back, went with RAID 10 on spinning rust.

@scottalanmiller

Little value I think, but the NVR still needs to be tuned. We keep running into errors but it seems that UBNT NVR is a ram hog, so in theory just slapping an additional 16 GB of RAM to it will make it perform better. We have about 3-4 people simultaneously getting into the system. It's but with 4 cores, 16 GB RAM, 1 TB of space. I find we are just at 500 GB of space of usage.

@jmoore
In short, yes RAID 10 in SSD would be astronomical faster. I think looking at it like this,
4 spinning rust HDD's at 7200 RPM will only net you a max of 400 IOPS, you can keep adding more HDD's in pairs and keep improving the speed. I assume that doesn't include overhead. I mean if you got a server and just want pure storage first, then speed, then sticking with RAID 10 allows you to keep incrementally improving.

But when I took that into context in what Scott is saying, its like I would have use like 10 arrays of hard drives to equal the performance of 1 SSD! But this also increases risk, what if a drive fails! That's a lot of drives to baby sit!!!!

I did my digging around 550 MB/s is roughly where most consumer ssd drives and I assume some enterprise drives that don't use nve cap off at. That's with a conservative base of 10,000 IOPS and goes up to 2 Million IOPS!!!!!!!

[https://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/16376/~/sandisk-ultra-ii-ssd-specifications](link url)

I guess looking at it from a different perspective, I would find little need for many small companies to ever want to go past 4 SSD's with RAID 10.

To get the equivalent of that speed, you would have to stuff so many internal and external RAID controllers, you would have paid well more than needed to! Even if you went 15K SAS!

@scottalanmiller
Hey Scott, I'm going to switch my SATA 7200 RPM spinning rust probably tonight. I'll go ahead and switch to a SSD (luckily I have a bunch sitting around). With that in mind, I'm trying to wrap my head around the performance impact per machine with SSD vs a HDD. I realize the RPM's drop per "vm" I have with spinning rust. Does my IOPS drop per vm with SSD?

Also just to give some context, on my two Dell R530 @ work (thank God remember those oldy goldy days SAM I had haha), I went with SAS 7200's with my H700 512 MB Cache. The thing runs like a champ with just my four 2 TB HDD's in Raid 10. I have literally no IOPS problems that I've experienced. I have about 30 VM's running. With that in mind, does it make sense at work to consider the swap to full SSD?

The only server i have that takes pure storage is a Ubiquiti NVR, short of that nothing else runs slow or has even blimped at me wrong. No startup sprawl either which when I look back at my old craptacular Dell Tower T110 i, it died from sprawl.

Scott I knew it was vast difference but not 100x!!!! Dude a 4 ssd raid 10 is Basiclally all you need !!!

@tim_g what would be the comparison speed of a raid 10 off spinning rust to 1 ssd in iops?

@scottalanmiller well like they say all good things come to an end XS

I like XO I hope he considers porting to KVM.

Just more reason I like open source I think I’m gonna switch to kvm at home

@scottalanmiller
So it sounds like I would do an install of Fedora as a server not desktop, to strip away the GUI. Then install kvm? What about management tools?

@scottalanmiller wow if Amazon is moving away that’s HUGE. What’s that going to do to XO?!?!

Yes I could pop in a second drive.

@jaredbusch My apologies, I meant QoS!

@jaredbusch VPN performance is better than my SonicWall. It's obviously better than my old linksys too lol. But with a 300 (up to 400) Mbps and 20 (up to 30) Mbps internet, I want as much bandwidth as I can get.