And they sell it in 2 core "packs", which makes it very easy to buy half or twice as many core licenses as you think you are buying.

JF


On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 9:53 PM, Zorion Terrell <Zorion.Terrell@dhxmedia.com> wrote:

MS Charges purely based on Cores now Greg. It used to be per socket but now its just cores. Its super confusing!!

Zorion Terrell

IT Manager | DHX Studios

e: zorion.terrell@dhxmedia.com

t: 604-684-2363 | m: 604-562-5148

380 West 5th Ave

Vancouver, BC Canada V5Y 1J5

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com <studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com> On Behalf Of greg whynott
Sent: March 14, 2018 3:36 PM
To: studiosysadmins-discuss <studiosysadmins-discuss@studiosysadmins.com>

Subject: Re: [SSA-Discuss] Small house DHCP DNS license servers to VM or not?

If you want to dip your hand into VM things, Proxmox is free and without any drama to us for the last few years. you can choose to pay for support which you should if using it in production, but its a fraction of the cost. You can use ESXi for free on a single node as mentioned above, but there is no clustering, migration, or failover. Proxmox gives you all that for free. It also alows you to use a ceph filesystem in the backend with built in support and management of, and ZFS, which is full of win. (best FS/LVM since XFS in my opinion).

both windows and vmware have things licensed so either you pay a lot for what you actually need and get a lot of fluff you never use or should be no-charge items, With the M$ solution you may be 'forced' to only use m$ products, or pay additional costs.. the licensing language is crazy. M$ charges you both on physical sockets and cores. Its as if they think there there is a measurable difference between having 2 physical CPUs with 4 cores each or one with 8. I don't get it...

verify everything I said, my memory has eroded over time.

-g

On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 12:00 AM, Jeremy Webber <Jeremy.Webber@al.com.au> wrote:

I agree with Julians assessment. Savings with virtualisation start with your third (virtual) server and grow massively from there.

It is worth mentioning that VMware does not have to be expensive. You can run up to 3 physical hosts (2 CPU sockets/host) and use vSphere Essentials (~USD500) or Essentials Plus (~USD5000) to give a management layer. Essentials Plus has the huge advantage that you can hot migrate guest VMs around your cluster, to permit in-hours hardware maintenance of hosts. Essentials Plus also supports VMware HA, for automated recovery in the case of host failure.

The enterprise license offerings are expensive, but you probably do not need them in a small shop.

The other thing you will need is a reliable storage system, which supports either iSCSI or preferably NFS, to act as storage for your VMs. Yes, you can use disks on the host servers, but you lose the advantage of host independence in that case. I would recommend a storage system which supports snapshots (meaning storage system snapshots not VMware).

I am not opposed to Hyper-V, if you have Windows Datacenter Edition licenses then it may be a viable option. You still have to pay for the management layer, and as Julian says it cant hold a candle to VMwares, but is probably sufficient for a small shop. NFS data storage is not an option with Hyper-V, you have to use iSCSI or the bleeding edge continuous availability SMB (probably not on a budget storage system).

Jeremy

On 9 Mar 2018, at 7:39 pm, julian firminger <justdigitalfilm@gmail.com> wrote:

First bit of advice is _\\_virtualize_everything_\\_ There is zero reason to run anything but pure compute on hardware, zero. If anyone in our org wants to buy hardware for an application that is not a render or transcode box, they have to go through 8 meetings and make offerings to at least 12 gods before the request is even heard! The minor increase in complexity initially is MASSIVELY offset by the benefits. Everything becomes simpler. Backup, patch/upgrade (you can do instant roll backs), protect, DR, everything. Dont get me started on template deployment and deduplication.

I agree with some above that there are plenty of competitors to VMware for smaller shops, and at your scale I'd encourage you to look in that space. But VMware stand alone, just as a single box hypervisor, is FREE. It starts to cost money if you want to automate and or cluster. If you see your self growing, and know you wont have the budget, look at Xen, KVM, oVirt. Xen is pretty nice.

As for the anti-VMware hate: YIKES. Sorry if this offends anyone but VMware is the superior product on the market for performance, reliability, security, features, everything. Find me another product that can match NSX, vRealize Orchestrator, Horizon etc. It is however, STOOPIDLY EXPENSIVE.

If you want hate, hate Hyper-V. Avoid it at all costs. Imagine Microsoft tried to make a Linux kernel and released it unfinished. That's what Hyper-V is to ESXi. It's a poor, poor facsimile that's frankly dangerous to run in any production environment.

@Bruce: A word of caution, you cannot make crash consistent snapshots of everything. I strongly council testing anything you're relying on. AD DCs are a great example of something that might explode if you roll back to a snap made while it was running. Any kind of database is another. Especially high transaction rate MSSQL databases. They will go off like a frog in a sock if you try and roll back to a snap made while they're running.

Julian Firminger

Senior Systems Administrator

United Broadcast Facilities

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 2:09 AM, Bruce Dobrin <brucedobrin@hotmail.com> wrote:

Last week a Friend who is helping rebuild the infrastructure for a school asked me the same question.

1: if you already have a windows DC or 2, HyperV is free.

2: your hypervisor can run many very intensive servers on one decent bare metal hypervisor ( we run around 20-40 per site). If that isnt a low-power solution, I dont know what is

3: backup live, running VMs via the export or powershell: export-vm {VM_Name} -path , we do it weekly, takes minutes.

4: ability to do a live export, put it on your memory stick, take it home, import it to your windows 10 box ( hyper-V free with windows x pro and work on any issues, test installes, whatever without doing so on a live instance.

5: running hyperV on a core install can be cheap to free

6: export a master build; import to a new location with a new ID, boot it up, change its name and IP, and build to suit. New servers in less than a minute.

7: vm replication for disaster recovery: take another windows server of some sort, somewhere, set it up for replication ( basically put enough disk and memory to hold all your vms and make sure hyperv is running); choose replication period for each vm. Replication will differential snapshot each vm every 15min, 1 min or 30sec to this other machine over the network. If your other machine blows up, walk over to the running replica server, open the hyperv manager or powershell and start all the vms replicas. They will look exactly as they did on the last replication.

8: failover clustering

---

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com <studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com> on behalf of Greg Dickie <greg@justaguy.ca>
Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2018 4:32:33 PM
To: studiosysadmins-discuss@studiosysadmins.com
Subject: Re: [SSA-Discuss] Small house DHCP DNS license servers to VM or not?

Virtualization for the sake of virtualization is pointless. all the cool kids are doing it is not usually a good reason. Also I hate VMWare, overcomplicated and bloaty and crappy command line interface. Dan is correct though, VMs give you flexibility, you can move them around and swap hardware underneath them. They let you utilise your hardware to a much higher degree. That same machine running your license server can be virtualized and put on the same server as an AD server.

Whether it's worth it in any given situation is a judgement call but virtually (haha) every customer I have has at least 1 VM server to handle those utility tasks you don't necessarily want or need a full server for.

just my 2 cents,

Greg

On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 7:22 PM, Dan Mons <dmons@cuttingedge.com.au> wrote:

On 9 March 2018 at 08:33, Grant Fraser <grantf@grunt.com.au> wrote:

Now I've being told that "everyone is moving to VMware". I can't see why what with the cost and complexity etc...

Pardon the pedantry, but "VMWare" <> "Virtualisation". There are many solutions to virtualisation. VMWare is arguably the most expensive (and I'll be frank - I don't like it, personally). But Microsoft do a nice job of commoditising it into their ecosystem with HyperV, and then you've got the Linux hippies like us that use oVirt (the community version of Redhat's RHEV-M). Plus heaps of others (Proxmox, Xen, appliances like QNAP that bundle their own KVM/QEmu wrappers, etc).

Is there some huge advantage I'm missing???

I don't think there's any arguments any more to the advantages of virtualisation. I first used virtualisation in business in 2004 (Xen + SuSE), and 14 years later it's still as effective, and I'd struggle to think of a medium sized business that doesn't use it. You get hardware agnosticism (upgrade hardware or change vendor, keep software untouched), ability to migrate things without fuss (whether for redundancy when hardware breaks, or things like license servers bound to MAC addresses that are now virtual, and don't care if physical NICs break), and more enterprisey features like memory deduplication and not having all your applications living on the same server instances (with containers being the next logical step) which is nice when vendors demand all sort of standards-clobbering things and don't play nice.

With your data stores on decent storage, you also get some neat things like whole-server snapshots (as we do, with oVirt for compute talking to ZFS for storage, with storage snapshotting, which means whole VM images can be restore if something gets corrupted, deleted, or an upgrade goes awry).

Complexity? Sure. There's a downside to everything. But today even the free hypervisors give you fall-off-a-log management tools that are all GUI-clicky. Maybe not an option for a small business with a part time IT guy, although as above, today that's as easy as buying an appliance off the shelf if you don't want to build your own.

It's been well over a decade since I last provisioned non-compute type workloads to bare metal.

-Dan

Thisemailis confidential and solely for the use of the intended recipient.If you have received thisemailin error please notify the author and delete it immediately. Thisemailis not to be distributed without the author's written consent.Unauthorised forwarding, printing, copying or use is strictly prohibited and may be a breach of copyright. Any views expressed in thisemailare those of the individual sender unless specifically stated to be the views ofCutting EdgePost Pty Ltd (Cutting Edge). Although thisemailhas been sent in the belief that it is virus-free, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that it is virus free. No responsibility is accepted byCutting Edgefor any loss or damage arising in any way from receipt or use of thisemail. Thisemailmay contain legally privileged information and privilege is not waived if you have received thisemailin error.

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just a guy

514-983-5400

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Jeremy Webber
Senior Systems Engineer

T: +61 2 9383 4800 (main)
D: +61 2 8310 3577 (direct)
E: Jeremy.Webber@al.com.au

Building 54 / FSA #19, Fox Studios Australia, 38 Driver Avenue
Moore Park, NSW 2021
AUSTRALIA




Check out our awesome NEW website www.animallogic.com

CONFIDENTIALITY AND PRIVILEGE NOTICE
This email is intended only to be read or used by the addressee. It is confidential and may contain privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, distribution, disclosure or copying of this email is strictly prohibited. Confidentiality and legal privilege attached to this communication are not waived or lost by reason of the mistaken delivery to you. If you have received this email in error, please delete it and notify us immediately by telephone or email.

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MS Charges purely based on Cores now Greg. It used to be per socket but now its just cores. Its super confusing!!

Zorion Terrell

IT Manager | DHX Studios

e: zorion.terrell@dhxmedia.com

t: 604-684-2363 | m: 604-562-5148

380 West 5th Ave

Vancouver, BC Canada V5Y 1J5

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com <studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com> On Behalf Of greg whynott
Sent: March 14, 2018 3:36 PM
To: studiosysadmins-discuss <studiosysadmins-discuss@studiosysadmins.com>

Subject: Re: [SSA-Discuss] Small house DHCP DNS license servers to VM or not?

If you want to dip your hand into VM things, Proxmox is free and without any drama to us for the last few years. you can choose to pay for support which you should if using it in production, but its a fraction of the cost. You can use ESXi for free on a single node as mentioned above, but there is no clustering, migration, or failover. Proxmox gives you all that for free. It also alows you to use a ceph filesystem in the backend with built in support and management of, and ZFS, which is full of win. (best FS/LVM since XFS in my opinion).

both windows and vmware have things licensed so either you pay a lot for what you actually need and get a lot of fluff you never use or should be no-charge items, With the M$ solution you may be 'forced' to only use m$ products, or pay additional costs.. the licensing language is crazy. M$ charges you both on physical sockets and cores. Its as if they think there there is a measurable difference between having 2 physical CPUs with 4 cores each or one with 8. I don't get it...

verify everything I said, my memory has eroded over time.

-g

On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 12:00 AM, Jeremy Webber <Jeremy.Webber@al.com.au> wrote:

I agree with Julians assessment. Savings with virtualisation start with your third (virtual) server and grow massively from there.

It is worth mentioning that VMware does not have to be expensive. You can run up to 3 physical hosts (2 CPU sockets/host) and use vSphere Essentials (~USD500) or Essentials Plus (~USD5000) to give a management layer. Essentials Plus has the huge advantage that you can hot migrate guest VMs around your cluster, to permit in-hours hardware maintenance of hosts. Essentials Plus also supports VMware HA, for automated recovery in the case of host failure.

The enterprise license offerings are expensive, but you probably do not need them in a small shop.

The other thing you will need is a reliable storage system, which supports either iSCSI or preferably NFS, to act as storage for your VMs. Yes, you can use disks on the host servers, but you lose the advantage of host independence in that case. I would recommend a storage system which supports snapshots (meaning storage system snapshots not VMware).

I am not opposed to Hyper-V, if you have Windows Datacenter Edition licenses then it may be a viable option. You still have to pay for the management layer, and as Julian says it cant hold a candle to VMwares, but is probably sufficient for a small shop. NFS data storage is not an option with Hyper-V, you have to use iSCSI or the bleeding edge continuous availability SMB (probably not on a budget storage system).

Jeremy

On 9 Mar 2018, at 7:39 pm, julian firminger <justdigitalfilm@gmail.com> wrote:

First bit of advice is _\\_virtualize_everything_\\_ There is zero reason to run anything but pure compute on hardware, zero. If anyone in our org wants to buy hardware for an application that is not a render or transcode box, they have to go through 8 meetings and make offerings to at least 12 gods before the request is even heard! The minor increase in complexity initially is MASSIVELY offset by the benefits. Everything becomes simpler. Backup, patch/upgrade (you can do instant roll backs), protect, DR, everything. Dont get me started on template deployment and deduplication.

I agree with some above that there are plenty of competitors to VMware for smaller shops, and at your scale I'd encourage you to look in that space. But VMware stand alone, just as a single box hypervisor, is FREE. It starts to cost money if you want to automate and or cluster. If you see your self growing, and know you wont have the budget, look at Xen, KVM, oVirt. Xen is pretty nice.

As for the anti-VMware hate: YIKES. Sorry if this offends anyone but VMware is the superior product on the market for performance, reliability, security, features, everything. Find me another product that can match NSX, vRealize Orchestrator, Horizon etc. It is however, STOOPIDLY EXPENSIVE.

If you want hate, hate Hyper-V. Avoid it at all costs. Imagine Microsoft tried to make a Linux kernel and released it unfinished. That's what Hyper-V is to ESXi. It's a poor, poor facsimile that's frankly dangerous to run in any production environment.

@Bruce: A word of caution, you cannot make crash consistent snapshots of everything. I strongly council testing anything you're relying on. AD DCs are a great example of something that might explode if you roll back to a snap made while it was running. Any kind of database is another. Especially high transaction rate MSSQL databases. They will go off like a frog in a sock if you try and roll back to a snap made while they're running.

Julian Firminger

Senior Systems Administrator

United Broadcast Facilities

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 2:09 AM, Bruce Dobrin <brucedobrin@hotmail.com> wrote:

Last week a Friend who is helping rebuild the infrastructure for a school asked me the same question.

1: if you already have a windows DC or 2, HyperV is free.

2: your hypervisor can run many very intensive servers on one decent bare metal hypervisor ( we run around 20-40 per site). If that isnt a low-power solution, I dont know what is

3: backup live, running VMs via the export or powershell: export-vm {VM_Name} -path , we do it weekly, takes minutes.

4: ability to do a live export, put it on your memory stick, take it home, import it to your windows 10 box ( hyper-V free with windows x pro and work on any issues, test installes, whatever without doing so on a live instance.

5: running hyperV on a core install can be cheap to free

6: export a master build; import to a new location with a new ID, boot it up, change its name and IP, and build to suit. New servers in less than a minute.

7: vm replication for disaster recovery: take another windows server of some sort, somewhere, set it up for replication ( basically put enough disk and memory to hold all your vms and make sure hyperv is running); choose replication period for each vm. Replication will differential snapshot each vm every 15min, 1 min or 30sec to this other machine over the network. If your other machine blows up, walk over to the running replica server, open the hyperv manager or powershell and start all the vms replicas. They will look exactly as they did on the last replication.

8: failover clustering

---

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com <studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com> on behalf of Greg Dickie <greg@justaguy.ca>
Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2018 4:32:33 PM
To: studiosysadmins-discuss@studiosysadmins.com
Subject: Re: [SSA-Discuss] Small house DHCP DNS license servers to VM or not?

Virtualization for the sake of virtualization is pointless. all the cool kids are doing it is not usually a good reason. Also I hate VMWare, overcomplicated and bloaty and crappy command line interface. Dan is correct though, VMs give you flexibility, you can move them around and swap hardware underneath them. They let you utilise your hardware to a much higher degree. That same machine running your license server can be virtualized and put on the same server as an AD server.

Whether it's worth it in any given situation is a judgement call but virtually (haha) every customer I have has at least 1 VM server to handle those utility tasks you don't necessarily want or need a full server for.

just my 2 cents,

Greg

On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 7:22 PM, Dan Mons <dmons@cuttingedge.com.au> wrote:

On 9 March 2018 at 08:33, Grant Fraser <grantf@grunt.com.au> wrote:

Now I've being told that "everyone is moving to VMware". I can't see why what with the cost and complexity etc...

Pardon the pedantry, but "VMWare" <> "Virtualisation". There are many solutions to virtualisation. VMWare is arguably the most expensive (and I'll be frank - I don't like it, personally). But Microsoft do a nice job of commoditising it into their ecosystem with HyperV, and then you've got the Linux hippies like us that use oVirt (the community version of Redhat's RHEV-M). Plus heaps of others (Proxmox, Xen, appliances like QNAP that bundle their own KVM/QEmu wrappers, etc).

Is there some huge advantage I'm missing???

I don't think there's any arguments any more to the advantages of virtualisation. I first used virtualisation in business in 2004 (Xen + SuSE), and 14 years later it's still as effective, and I'd struggle to think of a medium sized business that doesn't use it. You get hardware agnosticism (upgrade hardware or change vendor, keep software untouched), ability to migrate things without fuss (whether for redundancy when hardware breaks, or things like license servers bound to MAC addresses that are now virtual, and don't care if physical NICs break), and more enterprisey features like memory deduplication and not having all your applications living on the same server instances (with containers being the next logical step) which is nice when vendors demand all sort of standards-clobbering things and don't play nice.

With your data stores on decent storage, you also get some neat things like whole-server snapshots (as we do, with oVirt for compute talking to ZFS for storage, with storage snapshotting, which means whole VM images can be restore if something gets corrupted, deleted, or an upgrade goes awry).

Complexity? Sure. There's a downside to everything. But today even the free hypervisors give you fall-off-a-log management tools that are all GUI-clicky. Maybe not an option for a small business with a part time IT guy, although as above, today that's as easy as buying an appliance off the shelf if you don't want to build your own.

It's been well over a decade since I last provisioned non-compute type workloads to bare metal.

-Dan

Thisemailis confidential and solely for the use of the intended recipient.If you have received thisemailin error please notify the author and delete it immediately. Thisemailis not to be distributed without the author's written consent.Unauthorised forwarding, printing, copying or use is strictly prohibited and may be a breach of copyright. Any views expressed in thisemailare those of the individual sender unless specifically stated to be the views ofCutting EdgePost Pty Ltd (Cutting Edge). Although thisemailhas been sent in the belief that it is virus-free, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that it is virus free. No responsibility is accepted byCutting Edgefor any loss or damage arising in any way from receipt or use of thisemail. Thisemailmay contain legally privileged information and privilege is not waived if you have received thisemailin error.

To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

--

Greg Dickie
just a guy

514-983-5400

To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

--
Jeremy Webber
Senior Systems Engineer

T: +61 2 9383 4800 (main)
D: +61 2 8310 3577 (direct)
E: Jeremy.Webber@al.com.au

Building 54 / FSA #19, Fox Studios Australia, 38 Driver Avenue
Moore Park, NSW 2021
AUSTRALIA




Check out our awesome NEW website www.animallogic.com

CONFIDENTIALITY AND PRIVILEGE NOTICE
This email is intended only to be read or used by the addressee. It is confidential and may contain privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, distribution, disclosure or copying of this email is strictly prohibited. Confidentiality and legal privilege attached to this communication are not waived or lost by reason of the mistaken delivery to you. If you have received this email in error, please delete it and notify us immediately by telephone or email.

To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

MS Charges purely based on Cores now Greg. It used to be per socket but now its just cores. Its super confusing!!

Zorion Terrell

IT Manager | DHX Studios

e: zorion.terrell@dhxmedia.com

t: 604-684-2363 | m: 604-562-5148

380 West 5th Ave

Vancouver, BC Canada V5Y 1J5

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com <studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com> On Behalf Of greg whynott
Sent: March 14, 2018 3:36 PM
To: studiosysadmins-discuss <studiosysadmins-discuss@studiosysadmins.com>
Subject: Re: [SSA-Discuss] Small house DHCP DNS license servers to VM or not?

If you want to dip your hand into VM things,   Proxmox is free and without any drama to us for the last few years.    you can choose to pay for support which you should if using it in production,  but its a fraction of the cost.  You can use ESXi for free on a single node as mentioned above,  but there is no clustering,  migration, or failover.    Proxmox gives you all that for free.   It also alows you to use a ceph filesystem in the backend with built in support and management of,  and ZFS,  which is full of win.  (best FS/LVM since XFS in my opinion).    

both windows and vmware have things licensed so either you pay a lot for what you actually need and get a lot of fluff you never use or should be no-charge items,  With the M$ solution you may be 'forced' to only use m$ products,  or pay additional costs..  the licensing language is crazy.  M$ charges you both on physical sockets and cores.  Its as if they think there there is a measurable difference between having 2 physical CPUs with 4 cores each or one with 8.  I don't get it...

verify everything I said,  my memory has eroded over time.  

-g

On Mon, Mar 12, 2018 at 12:00 AM, Jeremy Webber <Jeremy.Webber@al.com.au> wrote:

I agree with Julians assessment. Savings with virtualisation start with your third (virtual) server and grow massively from there.

 

It is worth mentioning that VMware does not have to be expensive. You can run up to 3 physical hosts (2 CPU sockets/host) and use vSphere Essentials (~USD500) or Essentials Plus (~USD5000) to give a management layer. Essentials Plus has the huge advantage that you can hot migrate guest VMs around your cluster, to permit in-hours hardware maintenance of hosts. Essentials Plus also supports VMware HA, for automated recovery in the case of host failure.

 

The enterprise license offerings are expensive, but you probably do not need them in a small shop.

 

The other thing you will need is a reliable storage system, which supports either iSCSI or preferably NFS, to act as storage for your VMs. Yes, you can use disks on the host servers, but you lose the advantage of host independence in that case. I would recommend a storage system which supports snapshots (meaning storage system snapshots not VMware).

 

I am not opposed to Hyper-V, if you have Windows Datacenter Edition licenses then it may be a viable option. You still have to pay for the management layer, and as Julian says it cant hold a candle to VMwares, but is probably sufficient for a small shop. NFS data storage is not an option with Hyper-V, you have to use iSCSI or the bleeding edge continuous availability SMB (probably not on a budget storage system).

 

  Jeremy

 

On 9 Mar 2018, at 7:39 pm, julian firminger <justdigitalfilm@gmail.com> wrote:

 

First bit of advice is _\\_virtualize_everything_\\_  There is zero reason to run anything but pure compute on hardware, zero. If anyone in our org wants to buy hardware for an application that is not a render or transcode box, they have to go through 8 meetings and make offerings to at least 12 gods before the request is even heard!  The minor increase in complexity initially is MASSIVELY offset by the benefits.  Everything becomes simpler. Backup, patch/upgrade (you can do instant roll backs), protect, DR, everything.  Dont get me started on template deployment and deduplication.

 

I agree with some above that there are plenty of competitors to VMware for smaller shops, and at your scale I'd encourage you to look in that space.  But VMware stand alone, just as a single box hypervisor, is FREE.  It starts to cost money if you want to automate and or cluster.  If you see your self growing, and know you wont have the budget, look at Xen, KVM, oVirt.  Xen is pretty nice.  

 

As for the anti-VMware hate: YIKES.  Sorry if this offends anyone but VMware is the superior product on the market for performance, reliability, security, features, everything.  Find me another product that can match NSX, vRealize Orchestrator, Horizon etc.  It is however, STOOPIDLY EXPENSIVE.  

 

If you want hate, hate Hyper-V.  Avoid it at all costs.  Imagine Microsoft tried to make a Linux kernel and released it unfinished.  That's what Hyper-V is to ESXi.  It's a poor, poor facsimile that's frankly dangerous to run in any production environment. 

 

@Bruce:  A word of caution, you cannot make crash consistent snapshots of everything.  I strongly council testing anything you're relying on.  AD DCs are a great example of something that might explode if you roll back to a snap made while it was running.  Any kind of database is another.   Especially high transaction rate MSSQL databases.  They will go off like a frog in a sock if you try and roll back to a snap made while they're running.  

Julian Firminger

Senior Systems Administrator

United Broadcast Facilities

Amsterdam, The Netherlands

 

On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 2:09 AM, Bruce Dobrin <brucedobrin@hotmail.com> wrote:

Last week  a Friend who is helping rebuild the infrastructure for a school asked me the same question.

 

1: if you already have a windows DC or 2,  HyperV is free.

 

2: your hypervisor can run many very intensive servers on one decent bare metal hypervisor ( we run around 20-40 per site).  If that isnt a low-power solution,  I dont know what is

 

3: backup live, running VMs via the export or powershell: export-vm  {VM_Name} -path ,  we do it weekly,  takes minutes.

 

4: ability to do a live export,  put it on your memory stick, take it home, import it to your windows 10 box ( hyper-V free with windows x pro and work on any issues,  test installes, whatever without doing so on a live instance.

 

5: running hyperV on a core install can be cheap to free

 

6: export a master build; import to a new location with a new ID, boot it up,  change its name and IP,  and build to suit.  New servers in less than a minute.

 

7: vm replication for disaster recovery: take another windows server of some sort,  somewhere, set it up for replication ( basically put enough disk and memory to hold all your vms and make sure hyperv is running); choose replication period for each vm.  Replication will differential snapshot each vm every 15min, 1 min or 30sec to this other machine over the network.  If your other machine blows up,  walk over to the running replica server, open the hyperv manager or powershell and start all the vms replicas.   They will look exactly as they did on the last replication.

 

8: failover clustering

 

 

 

 

---

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com <studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com> on behalf of Greg Dickie <greg@justaguy.ca>
Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2018 4:32:33 PM
To: studiosysadmins-discuss@studiosysadmins.com
Subject: Re: [SSA-Discuss] Small house DHCP DNS license servers to VM or not?

 

Virtualization for the sake of virtualization is pointless. all the cool kids are doing it is not usually a good reason. Also I hate VMWare, overcomplicated and bloaty and crappy command line interface. Dan is correct though, VMs give you flexibility, you can move them around and swap hardware underneath them. They let you utilise your hardware to a much higher degree. That same machine running your license server can be virtualized and put on the same server as an AD server.

 

Whether it's worth it in any given situation is a judgement call but virtually (haha) every customer I have has at least 1 VM server to handle those utility tasks you don't necessarily want or need a full server for.

 

just my 2 cents,

Greg 

 

On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 7:22 PM, Dan Mons <dmons@cuttingedge.com.au> wrote:

On 9 March 2018 at 08:33, Grant Fraser <grantf@grunt.com.au> wrote:

Now I've being told that "everyone is moving to VMware".  I can't see why what with the cost and complexity etc...

 

Pardon the pedantry, but "VMWare" <> "Virtualisation".  There are many solutions to virtualisation.  VMWare is arguably the most expensive (and I'll be frank - I don't like it, personally).  But Microsoft do a nice job of commoditising it into their ecosystem with HyperV, and then you've got the Linux hippies like us that use oVirt (the community version of Redhat's RHEV-M).  Plus heaps of others (Proxmox, Xen, appliances like QNAP that bundle their own KVM/QEmu wrappers, etc).

 

Is there some huge advantage I'm missing???

 

 

I don't think there's any arguments any more to the advantages of virtualisation.  I first used virtualisation in business in 2004 (Xen + SuSE), and 14 years later it's still as effective, and I'd struggle to think of a medium sized business that doesn't use it.  You get hardware agnosticism (upgrade hardware or change vendor, keep software untouched), ability to migrate things without fuss (whether for redundancy when hardware breaks, or things like license servers bound to MAC addresses that are now virtual, and don't care if physical NICs break), and more enterprisey features like memory deduplication and not having all your applications living on the same server instances (with containers being the next logical step) which is nice when vendors demand all sort of standards-clobbering things and don't play nice.

 

With your data stores on decent storage, you also get some neat things like whole-server snapshots (as we do, with oVirt for compute talking to ZFS for storage, with storage snapshotting, which means whole VM images can be restore if something gets corrupted, deleted, or an upgrade goes awry). 

 

Complexity?  Sure.  There's a downside to everything.  But today even the free hypervisors give you fall-off-a-log management tools that are all GUI-clicky.  Maybe not an option for a small business with a part time IT guy, although as above, today that's as easy as buying an appliance off the shelf if you don't want to build your own. 

 

It's been well over a decade since I last provisioned non-compute type workloads to bare metal.  

 

-Dan

 

 

This email is confidential and solely for the use of the intended recipient.  If you have received this email in error please notify the author and delete it immediately. This email is not to be distributed without the author's written consent. Unauthorised forwarding, printing, copying or use is strictly prohibited and may be a breach of copyright. Any views expressed in this email are those of the individual sender unless specifically stated to be the views of Cutting Edge Post Pty Ltd (Cutting Edge). Although this email has been sent in the belief that it is virus-free, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that it is virus free. No responsibility is accepted by Cutting Edge for any loss or damage arising in any way from receipt or use of this email.  This email may contain legally privileged information and privilege is not waived if you have received this email in error.

 

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just a guy

514-983-5400

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Jeremy Webber
Senior Systems Engineer

T: +61 2 9383 4800 (main)
D: +61 2 8310 3577 (direct)
E: Jeremy.Webber@al.com.au

Building 54 / FSA #19, Fox Studios Australia, 38 Driver Avenue
Moore Park, NSW 2021
AUSTRALIA

       


Check out our awesome NEW website www.animallogic.com

CONFIDENTIALITY AND PRIVILEGE NOTICE
This email is intended only to be read or used by the addressee. It is confidential and may contain privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, distribution, disclosure or copying of this email is strictly prohibited. Confidentiality and legal privilege attached to this communication are not waived or lost by reason of the mistaken delivery to you. If you have received this email in error, please delete it and notify us immediately by telephone or email.

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I agree with Julians assessment. Savings with virtualisation start with your third (virtual) server and grow massively from there.
It is worth mentioning that VMware does not have to be expensive. You can run up to 3 physical hosts (2 CPU sockets/host) and use vSphere Essentials (~USD500) or Essentials Plus (~USD5000) to give a management layer. Essentials Plus has the huge advantage that you can hot migrate guest VMs around your cluster, to permit in-hours hardware maintenance of hosts. Essentials Plus also supports VMware HA, for automated recovery in the case of host failure.
The enterprise license offerings are expensive, but you probably do not need them in a small shop.
The other thing you will need is a reliable storage system, which supports either iSCSI or preferably NFS, to act as storage for your VMs. Yes, you can use disks on the host servers, but you lose the advantage of host independence in that case. I would recommend a storage system which supports snapshots (meaning storage system snapshots not VMware).
I am not opposed to Hyper-V, if you have Windows Datacenter Edition licenses then it may be a viable option. You still have to pay for the management layer, and as Julian says it cant hold a candle to VMwares, but is probably sufficient for a small shop. NFS data storage is not an option with Hyper-V, you have to use iSCSI or the bleeding edge continuous availability SMB (probably not on a budget storage system).
Jeremy

On 9 Mar 2018, at 7:39 pm, julian firminger <justdigitalfilm@gmail.com> wrote:
First bit of advice is _\\_virtualize_everything_\\_ There is zero reason to run anything but pure compute on hardware, zero. If anyone in our org wants to buy hardware for an application that is not a render or transcode box, they have to go through 8 meetings and make offerings to at least 12 gods before the request is even heard! The minor increase in complexity initially is MASSIVELY offset by the benefits. Everything becomes simpler. Backup, patch/upgrade (you can do instant roll backs), protect, DR, everything. Dont get me started on template deployment and deduplication.
I agree with some above that there are plenty of competitors to VMware for smaller shops, and at your scale I'd encourage you to look in that space. But VMware stand alone, just as a single box hypervisor, is FREE. It starts to cost money if you want to automate and or cluster. If you see your self growing, and know you wont have the budget, look at Xen, KVM, oVirt. Xen is pretty nice.
As for the anti-VMware hate: YIKES. Sorry if this offends anyone but VMware is the superior product on the market for performance, reliability, security, features, everything. Find me another product that can match NSX, vRealize Orchestrator, Horizon etc. It is however, STOOPIDLY EXPENSIVE.
If you want hate, hate Hyper-V. Avoid it at all costs. Imagine Microsoft tried to make a Linux kernel and released it unfinished. That's what Hyper-V is to ESXi. It's a poor, poor facsimile that's frankly dangerous to run in any production environment.
@Bruce: A word of caution, you cannot make crash consistent snapshots of everything. I strongly council testing anything you're relying on. AD DCs are a great example of something that might explode if you roll back to a snap made while it was running. Any kind of database is another. Especially high transaction rate MSSQL databases. They will go off like a frog in a sock if you try and roll back to a snap made while they're running.

Julian Firminger

Senior Systems Administrator United Broadcast Facilities Amsterdam, The Netherlands

On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 2:09 AM, Bruce Dobrin <brucedobrin@hotmail.com> wrote:

Last week a Friend who is helping rebuild the infrastructure for a school asked me the same question.

1: if you already have a windows DC or 2, HyperV is free.

2: your hypervisor can run many very intensive servers on one decent bare metal hypervisor ( we run around 20-40 per site). If that isnt a low-power solution, I dont know what is

3: backup live, running VMs via the export or powershell: export-vm {VM_Name} -path , we do it weekly, takes minutes.

4: ability to do a live export, put it on your memory stick, take it home, import it to your windows 10 box ( hyper-V free with windows x pro and work on any issues, test installes, whatever without doing so on a live instance.

5: running hyperV on a core install can be cheap to free

6: export a master build; import to a new location with a new ID, boot it up, change its name and IP, and build to suit. New servers in less than a minute.

7: vm replication for disaster recovery: take another windows server of some sort, somewhere, set it up for replication ( basically put enough disk and memory to hold all your vms and make sure hyperv is running); choose replication period for each vm. Replication will differential snapshot each vm every 15min, 1 min or 30sec to this other machine over the network. If your other machine blows up, walk over to the running replica server, open the hyperv manager or powershell and start all the vms replicas. They will look exactly as they did on the last replication.

8: failover clustering

---

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com <studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com> on behalf of Greg Dickie <greg@justaguy.ca>
Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2018 4:32:33 PM
To: studiosysadmins-discuss@studiosysadmins.com
Subject: Re: [SSA-Discuss] Small house DHCP DNS license servers to VM or not? Virtualization for the sake of virtualization is pointless. all the cool kids are doing it is not usually a good reason. Also I hate VMWare, overcomplicated and bloaty and crappy command line interface. Dan is correct though, VMs give you flexibility, you can move them around and swap hardware underneath them. They let you utilise your hardware to a much higher degree. That same machine running your license server can be virtualized and put on the same server as an AD server.
Whether it's worth it in any given situation is a judgement call but virtually (haha) every customer I have has at least 1 VM server to handle those utility tasks you don't necessarily want or need a full server for.
just my 2 cents, Greg
On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 7:22 PM, Dan Mons <dmons@cuttingedge.com.au> wrote:

On 9 March 2018 at 08:33, Grant Fraser <grantf@grunt.com.au> wrote:

Now I've being told that "everyone is moving to VMware". I can't see why what with the cost and complexity etc...

Pardon the pedantry, but "VMWare" <> "Virtualisation". There are many solutions to virtualisation. VMWare is arguably the most expensive (and I'll be frank - I don't like it, personally). But Microsoft do a nice job of commoditising it into their ecosystem with HyperV, and then you've got the Linux hippies like us that use oVirt (the community version of Redhat's RHEV-M). Plus heaps of others (Proxmox, Xen, appliances like QNAP that bundle their own KVM/QEmu wrappers, etc).

Is there some huge advantage I'm missing???

I don't think there's any arguments any more to the advantages of virtualisation. I first used virtualisation in business in 2004 (Xen + SuSE), and 14 years later it's still as effective, and I'd struggle to think of a medium sized business that doesn't use it. You get hardware agnosticism (upgrade hardware or change vendor, keep software untouched), ability to migrate things without fuss (whether for redundancy when hardware breaks, or things like license servers bound to MAC addresses that are now virtual, and don't care if physical NICs break), and more enterprisey features like memory deduplication and not having all your applications living on the same server instances (with containers being the next logical step) which is nice when vendors demand all sort of standards-clobbering things and don't play nice.
With your data stores on decent storage, you also get some neat things like whole-server snapshots (as we do, with oVirt for compute talking to ZFS for storage, with storage snapshotting, which means whole VM images can be restore if something gets corrupted, deleted, or an upgrade goes awry).
Complexity? Sure. There's a downside to everything. But today even the free hypervisors give you fall-off-a-log management tools that are all GUI-clicky. Maybe not an option for a small business with a part time IT guy, although as above, today that's as easy as buying an appliance off the shelf if you don't want to build your own.
It's been well over a decade since I last provisioned non-compute type workloads to bare metal.
-Dan

Thisemailis confidential and solely for the use of the intended recipient.If you have received thisemailin error please notify the author and delete it immediately. Thisemailis not to be distributed without the author's written consent.Unauthorised forwarding, printing, copying or use is strictly prohibited and may be a breach of copyright. Any views expressed in thisemailare those of the individual sender unless specifically stated to be the views ofCutting EdgePost Pty Ltd (Cutting Edge). Although thisemailhas been sent in the belief that it is virus-free, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that it is virus free. No responsibility is accepted byCutting Edgefor any loss or damage arising in any way from receipt or use of thisemail. Thisemailmay contain legally privileged information and privilege is not waived if you have received thisemailin error.

To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

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just a guy 514-983-5400
To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

--
Jeremy Webber
Senior Systems Engineer

T: +61 2 9383 4800 (main)
D: +61 2 8310 3577 (direct)
E: Jeremy.Webber@al.com.au

Building 54 / FSA #19, Fox Studios Australia, 38 Driver Avenue
Moore Park, NSW 2021
AUSTRALIA




Check out our awesome NEW website www.animallogic.com

CONFIDENTIALITY AND PRIVILEGE NOTICE
This email is intended only to be read or used by the addressee. It is confidential and may contain privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, any use, distribution, disclosure or copying of this email is strictly prohibited. Confidentiality and legal privilege attached to this communication are not waived or lost by reason of the mistaken delivery to you. If you have received this email in error, please delete it and notify us immediately by telephone or email.
To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

On 9 Mar 2018, at 7:39 pm, julian firminger <justdigitalfilm@gmail.com> wrote:
First bit of advice is _\\_virtualize_everything_\\_  There is zero reason to run anything but pure compute on hardware, zero. If anyone in our org wants to buy hardware for an application that is not a render or transcode box, they have to go through 8 meetings and make offerings to at least 12 gods before the request is even heard!  The minor increase in complexity initially is MASSIVELY offset by the benefits.  Everything becomes simpler. Backup, patch/upgrade (you can do instant roll backs), protect, DR, everything.  Dont get me started on template deployment and deduplication.
I agree with some above that there are plenty of competitors to VMware for smaller shops, and at your scale I'd encourage you to look in that space.  But VMware stand alone, just as a single box hypervisor, is FREE.  It starts to cost money if you want to automate and or cluster.  If you see your self growing, and know you wont have the budget, look at Xen, KVM, oVirt.  Xen is pretty nice.  
As for the anti-VMware hate: YIKES.  Sorry if this offends anyone but VMware is the superior product on the market for performance, reliability, security, features, everything.  Find me another product that can match NSX, vRealize Orchestrator, Horizon etc.  It is however, STOOPIDLY EXPENSIVE.  
If you want hate, hate Hyper-V.  Avoid it at all costs.  Imagine Microsoft tried to make a Linux kernel and released it unfinished.  That's what Hyper-V is to ESXi.  It's a poor, poor facsimile that's frankly dangerous to run in any production environment. 
@Bruce:  A word of caution, you cannot make crash consistent snapshots of everything.  I strongly council testing anything you're relying on.  AD DCs are a great example of something that might explode if you roll back to a snap made while it was running.  Any kind of database is another.   Especially high transaction rate MSSQL databases.  They will go off like a frog in a sock if you try and roll back to a snap made while they're running.  

Julian Firminger

Senior Systems Administrator United Broadcast Facilities Amsterdam, The Netherlands

On Fri, Mar 9, 2018 at 2:09 AM, Bruce Dobrin <brucedobrin@hotmail.com> wrote:

Last week  a Friend who is helping rebuild the infrastructure for a school asked me the same question.

 

1: if you already have a windows DC or 2,  HyperV is free.

 

2: your hypervisor can run many very intensive servers on one decent bare metal hypervisor ( we run around 20-40 per site).  If that isnt a low-power solution,  I dont know what is

 

3: backup live, running VMs via the export or powershell: export-vm  {VM_Name} -path ,  we do it weekly,  takes minutes.

 

4: ability to do a live export,  put it on your memory stick, take it home, import it to your windows 10 box ( hyper-V free with windows x pro and work on any issues,  test installes, whatever without doing so on a live instance.

 

5: running hyperV on a core install can be cheap to free

 

6: export a master build; import to a new location with a new ID, boot it up,  change its name and IP,  and build to suit.  New servers in less than a minute.

 

7: vm replication for disaster recovery: take another windows server of some sort,  somewhere, set it up for replication ( basically put enough disk and memory to hold all your vms and make sure hyperv is running); choose replication period for each vm.  Replication will differential snapshot each vm every 15min, 1 min or 30sec to this other machine over the network.  If your other machine blows up,  walk over to the running replica server, open the hyperv manager or powershell and start all the vms replicas.   They will look exactly as they did on the last replication.

 

8: failover clustering

 

 

 

 

---

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com <studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com> on behalf of Greg Dickie <greg@justaguy.ca>
Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2018 4:32:33 PM
To: studiosysadmins-discuss@studiosysadmins.com
Subject: Re: [SSA-Discuss] Small house DHCP DNS license servers to VM or not?   Virtualization for the sake of virtualization is pointless. all the cool kids are doing it is not usually a good reason. Also I hate VMWare, overcomplicated and bloaty and crappy command line interface. Dan is correct though, VMs give you flexibility, you can move them around and swap hardware underneath them. They let you utilise your hardware to a much higher degree. That same machine running your license server can be virtualized and put on the same server as an AD server.
Whether it's worth it in any given situation is a judgement call but virtually (haha) every customer I have has at least 1 VM server to handle those utility tasks you don't necessarily want or need a full server for.
just my 2 cents, Greg 
On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 7:22 PM, Dan Mons <dmons@cuttingedge.com.au> wrote:

On 9 March 2018 at 08:33, Grant Fraser <grantf@grunt.com.au> wrote:

Now I've being told that "everyone is moving to VMware".  I can't see why what with the cost and complexity etc...

Pardon the pedantry, but "VMWare" <> "Virtualisation".  There are many solutions to virtualisation.  VMWare is arguably the most expensive (and I'll be frank - I don't like it, personally).  But Microsoft do a nice job of commoditising it into their ecosystem with HyperV, and then you've got the Linux hippies like us that use oVirt (the community version of Redhat's RHEV-M).  Plus heaps of others (Proxmox, Xen, appliances like QNAP that bundle their own KVM/QEmu wrappers, etc).

Is there some huge advantage I'm missing???

I don't think there's any arguments any more to the advantages of virtualisation.  I first used virtualisation in business in 2004 (Xen + SuSE), and 14 years later it's still as effective, and I'd struggle to think of a medium sized business that doesn't use it.  You get hardware agnosticism (upgrade hardware or change vendor, keep software untouched), ability to migrate things without fuss (whether for redundancy when hardware breaks, or things like license servers bound to MAC addresses that are now virtual, and don't care if physical NICs break), and more enterprisey features like memory deduplication and not having all your applications living on the same server instances (with containers being the next logical step) which is nice when vendors demand all sort of standards-clobbering things and don't play nice.
With your data stores on decent storage, you also get some neat things like whole-server snapshots (as we do, with oVirt for compute talking to ZFS for storage, with storage snapshotting, which means whole VM images can be restore if something gets corrupted, deleted, or an upgrade goes awry). 
Complexity?  Sure.  There's a downside to everything.  But today even the free hypervisors give you fall-off-a-log management tools that are all GUI-clicky.  Maybe not an option for a small business with a part time IT guy, although as above, today that's as easy as buying an appliance off the shelf if you don't want to build your own. 
It's been well over a decade since I last provisioned non-compute type workloads to bare metal.  
-Dan

This email is confidential and solely for the use of the intended recipient.  If you have received this email in error please notify the author and delete it immediately. This email is not to be distributed without the author's written consent. Unauthorised forwarding, printing, copying or use is strictly prohibited and may be a breach of copyright. Any views expressed in this email are those of the individual sender unless specifically stated to be the views of Cutting Edge Post Pty Ltd (Cutting Edge). Although this email has been sent in the belief that it is virus-free, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that it is virus free. No responsibility is accepted by Cutting Edge for any loss or damage arising in any way from receipt or use of this email.  This email may contain legally privileged information and privilege is not waived if you have received this email in error.

To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

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Greg Dickie
just a guy 514-983-5400
To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

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Julian Firminger

Last week a Friend who is helping rebuild the infrastructure for a school asked me the same question.

1: if you already have a windows DC or 2, HyperV is free.

2: your hypervisor can run many very intensive servers on one decent bare metal hypervisor ( we run around 20-40 per site). If that isnt a low-power solution, I dont know what is

3: backup live, running VMs via the export or powershell: export-vm {VM_Name} -path , we do it weekly, takes minutes.

4: ability to do a live export, put it on your memory stick, take it home, import it to your windows 10 box ( hyper-V free with windows x pro and work on any issues, test installes, whatever without doing so on a live instance.

5: running hyperV on a core install can be cheap to free

6: export a master build; import to a new location with a new ID, boot it up, change its name and IP, and build to suit. New servers in less than a minute.

7: vm replication for disaster recovery: take another windows server of some sort, somewhere, set it up for replication ( basically put enough disk and memory to hold all your vms and make sure hyperv is running); choose replication period for each vm. Replication will differential snapshot each vm every 15min, 1 min or 30sec to this other machine over the network. If your other machine blows up, walk over to the running replica server, open the hyperv manager or powershell and start all the vms replicas. They will look exactly as they did on the last replication.

8: failover clustering

---

From: studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com <studiosysadmins-discuss-bounces@studiosysadmins.com> on behalf of Greg Dickie <greg@justaguy.ca>
Sent: Thursday, March 8, 2018 4:32:33 PM
To: studiosysadmins-discuss@studiosysadmins.com
Subject: Re: [SSA-Discuss] Small house DHCP DNS license servers to VM or not? Virtualization for the sake of virtualization is pointless. all the cool kids are doing it is not usually a good reason. Also I hate VMWare, overcomplicated and bloaty and crappy command line interface. Dan is correct though, VMs give you flexibility, you can move them around and swap hardware underneath them. They let you utilise your hardware to a much higher degree. That same machine running your license server can be virtualized and put on the same server as an AD server.
Whether it's worth it in any given situation is a judgement call but virtually (haha) every customer I have has at least 1 VM server to handle those utility tasks you don't necessarily want or need a full server for.
just my 2 cents, Greg
On Thu, Mar 8, 2018 at 7:22 PM, Dan Mons <dmons@cuttingedge.com.au> wrote:

On 9 March 2018 at 08:33, Grant Fraser <grantf@grunt.com.au> wrote:

Now I've being told that "everyone is moving to VMware". I can't see why what with the cost and complexity etc...

Pardon the pedantry, but "VMWare" <> "Virtualisation". There are many solutions to virtualisation. VMWare is arguably the most expensive (and I'll be frank - I don't like it, personally). But Microsoft do a nice job of commoditising it into their ecosystem with HyperV, and then you've got the Linux hippies like us that use oVirt (the community version of Redhat's RHEV-M). Plus heaps of others (Proxmox, Xen, appliances like QNAP that bundle their own KVM/QEmu wrappers, etc).

Is there some huge advantage I'm missing???

I don't think there's any arguments any more to the advantages of virtualisation. I first used virtualisation in business in 2004 (Xen + SuSE), and 14 years later it's still as effective, and I'd struggle to think of a medium sized business that doesn't use it. You get hardware agnosticism (upgrade hardware or change vendor, keep software untouched), ability to migrate things without fuss (whether for redundancy when hardware breaks, or things like license servers bound to MAC addresses that are now virtual, and don't care if physical NICs break), and more enterprisey features like memory deduplication and not having all your applications living on the same server instances (with containers being the next logical step) which is nice when vendors demand all sort of standards-clobbering things and don't play nice.
With your data stores on decent storage, you also get some neat things like whole-server snapshots (as we do, with oVirt for compute talking to ZFS for storage, with storage snapshotting, which means whole VM images can be restore if something gets corrupted, deleted, or an upgrade goes awry).
Complexity? Sure. There's a downside to everything. But today even the free hypervisors give you fall-off-a-log management tools that are all GUI-clicky. Maybe not an option for a small business with a part time IT guy, although as above, today that's as easy as buying an appliance off the shelf if you don't want to build your own.
It's been well over a decade since I last provisioned non-compute type workloads to bare metal.
-Dan

Thisemailis confidential and solely for the use of the intended recipient.If you have received thisemailin error please notify the author and delete it immediately. Thisemailis not to be distributed without the author's written consent.Unauthorised forwarding, printing, copying or use is strictly prohibited and may be a breach of copyright. Any views expressed in thisemailare those of the individual sender unless specifically stated to be the views ofCutting EdgePost Pty Ltd (Cutting Edge). Although thisemailhas been sent in the belief that it is virus-free, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that it is virus free. No responsibility is accepted byCutting Edgefor any loss or damage arising in any way from receipt or use of thisemail. Thisemailmay contain legally privileged information and privilege is not waived if you have received thisemailin error.

To unsubscribe from the list send a blank e-mail to mailto:studiosysadmins-discuss-request@studiosysadmins.com?subject=unsubscribe

--


Greg Dickie
just a guy 514-983-5400
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Last week  a Friend who is helping rebuild the infrastructure for a school asked me the same question.

1: if you already have a windows DC or 2,  HyperV is free.

2: your hypervisor can run many very intensive servers on one decent bare metal hypervisor ( we run around 20-40 per site).  If that isnt a low-power solution,  I dont know what is

3: backup live, running VMs via the export or powershell: export-vm  {VM_Name} -path ,  we do it weekly,  takes minutes.

4: ability to do a live export,  put it on your memory stick, take it home, import it to your windows 10 box ( hyper-V free with windows x pro and work on any issues,  test installes, whatever without doing so on a live instance.

5: running hyperV on a core install can be cheap to free

6: export a master build; import to a new location with a new ID, boot it up,  change its name and IP,  and build to suit.  New servers in less than a minute.

7: vm replication for disaster recovery: take another windows server of some sort,  somewhere, set it up for replication ( basically put enough disk and memory to hold all your vms and make sure hyperv is running); choose replication period for each vm.  Replication will differential snapshot each vm every 15min, 1 min or 30sec to this other machine over the network.  If your other machine blows up,  walk over to the running replica server, open the hyperv manager or powershell and start all the vms replicas.   They will look exactly as they did on the last replication.

8: failover clustering

On 9 March 2018 at 08:33, Grant Fraser <grantf@grunt.com.au> wrote:

Now I've being told that "everyone is moving to VMware".  I can't see why what with the cost and complexity etc...

Pardon the pedantry, but "VMWare" <> "Virtualisation".  There are many solutions to virtualisation.  VMWare is arguably the most expensive (and I'll be frank - I don't like it, personally).  But Microsoft do a nice job of commoditising it into their ecosystem with HyperV, and then you've got the Linux hippies like us that use oVirt (the community version of Redhat's RHEV-M).  Plus heaps of others (Proxmox, Xen, appliances like QNAP that bundle their own KVM/QEmu wrappers, etc).

Is there some huge advantage I'm missing???

I don't think there's any arguments any more to the advantages of virtualisation.  I first used virtualisation in business in 2004 (Xen + SuSE), and 14 years later it's still as effective, and I'd struggle to think of a medium sized business that doesn't use it.  You get hardware agnosticism (upgrade hardware or change vendor, keep software untouched), ability to migrate things without fuss (whether for redundancy when hardware breaks, or things like license servers bound to MAC addresses that are now virtual, and don't care if physical NICs break), and more enterprisey features like memory deduplication and not having all your applications living on the same server instances (with containers being the next logical step) which is nice when vendors demand all sort of standards-clobbering things and don't play nice.
With your data stores on decent storage, you also get some neat things like whole-server snapshots (as we do, with oVirt for compute talking to ZFS for storage, with storage snapshotting, which means whole VM images can be restore if something gets corrupted, deleted, or an upgrade goes awry). 
Complexity?  Sure.  There's a downside to everything.  But today even the free hypervisors give you fall-off-a-log management tools that are all GUI-clicky.  Maybe not an option for a small business with a part time IT guy, although as above, today that's as easy as buying an appliance off the shelf if you don't want to build your own. 
It's been well over a decade since I last provisioned non-compute type workloads to bare metal.  
-Dan

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On 9 March 2018 at 08:33, Grant Fraser <grantf@grunt.com.au> wrote:

Now I've being told that "everyone is moving to VMware". I can't see why what with the cost and complexity etc...

Pardon the pedantry, but "VMWare" <> "Virtualisation". There are many solutions to virtualisation. VMWare is arguably the most expensive (and I'll be frank - I don't like it, personally). But Microsoft do a nice job of commoditising it into their ecosystem with HyperV, and then you've got the Linux hippies like us that use oVirt (the community version of Redhat's RHEV-M). Plus heaps of others (Proxmox, Xen, appliances like QNAP that bundle their own KVM/QEmu wrappers, etc).

Is there some huge advantage I'm missing???

I don't think there's any arguments any more to the advantages of virtualisation. I first used virtualisation in business in 2004 (Xen + SuSE), and 14 years later it's still as effective, and I'd struggle to think of a medium sized business that doesn't use it. You get hardware agnosticism (upgrade hardware or change vendor, keep software untouched), ability to migrate things without fuss (whether for redundancy when hardware breaks, or things like license servers bound to MAC addresses that are now virtual, and don't care if physical NICs break), and more enterprisey features like memory deduplication and not having all your applications living on the same server instances (with containers being the next logical step) which is nice when vendors demand all sort of standards-clobbering things and don't play nice.
With your data stores on decent storage, you also get some neat things like whole-server snapshots (as we do, with oVirt for compute talking to ZFS for storage, with storage snapshotting, which means whole VM images can be restore if something gets corrupted, deleted, or an upgrade goes awry).
Complexity? Sure. There's a downside to everything. But today even the free hypervisors give you fall-off-a-log management tools that are all GUI-clicky. Maybe not an option for a small business with a part time IT guy, although as above, today that's as easy as buying an appliance off the shelf if you don't want to build your own.
It's been well over a decade since I last provisioned non-compute type workloads to bare metal.
-Dan

Thisemailis confidential and solely for the use of the intended recipient.If you have received thisemailin error please notify the author and delete it immediately. Thisemailis not to be distributed without the author's written consent.Unauthorised forwarding, printing, copying or use is strictly prohibited and may be a breach of copyright. Any views expressed in thisemailare those of the individual sender unless specifically stated to be the views ofCutting EdgePost Pty Ltd (Cutting Edge). Although thisemailhas been sent in the belief that it is virus-free, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that it is virus free. No responsibility is accepted byCutting Edgefor any loss or damage arising in any way from receipt or use of thisemail. Thisemailmay contain legally privileged information and privilege is not waived if you have received thisemailin error.

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