CAWJames

4 was a bit meh, they did gloss over the whole "lets hook up a species we freely admit to having never seen before to some computers and hey presto satnav super computer" explaining it away with the Glen already solved that one! Although cool spinny ship! Not sure I like the new Klingons, they remind me of romulans/remans from the reboot movies. They seem more calculating than war like, I like my Klingons to slam down flagons of blood wine, and make a decision on a whim, because glory of war.

the new san... Quote was for 2 servers AND 1 san, not just upgrading, but replacing, as Equalogic doesn't have 10Gbe and they won't support it, unless we pay them ooddles.

We had a quote to upgrade our 2 node cluster. I gave our supplier a pitifully small budget to get 2 hosts with hundreds of gigs of RAM, dual Xeons etc, and 20 odd TB of useable storage. I was expecting 2 servers loaded with local drives and some plan to Storage space them or at least some compromise, but, and I still don't see how, they came back with 2 suitable servers, a SAN with 21TB of useable after RAID storage, including a tiering licence and the required SSD's in the SAN to use said licence, plus all the 10GBe cards needed to create our various networks(DMZ's, LAN ,DPM, Replication etc). All this for under £20k! All Lenovo kit. Could have knocked me over with a feather!

If you are referring to the first episode of the new series, I agree, "interesting" If you are referring in general, then yes quite enjoyable in a turn your brain off, weird ball of zombie kind of way

3rd episode Star Trek Discovery, begrudgingly liked it. Thought it was going to be "monster of the week", but turns out it's an arc, which is nice. Much prefer the treks when they hit big story arcs, big fan of DS9 and the Dominion War arc

To be honest, the Klingons from TOS and the Klingons from TNG were worlds apart(no ridges, never quite explained, although tribbles...) Liked it too, and I am quite a fan of ST as a whole. Seems first 2 were a prequel, "hey we've got some big name actors, but we are going to kill them, then next week we will turn into a new kind of show with new known actors" Time...will...tell

Bad moon rising can't beat the Winchester boys, quite literally!

Halfway through second season of Colony, really good watch. High praise from Stephen King himself too. The only "problem" is I can only think Taub when Snyder is on screen!!

You aren't running anything like proxies or any other filters? Your given DHCP gateway on the machines is the sonicwall box? It sounds like something else is providing them with internet and not the SW

We ran sonicwalls for a few years using SSO, and found as long as the SSO agent talked to the unit, and it passed the tests back to AD on the controller, it all worked fine. I believe we used DC and Exchange agents. I would log a support call with SW with a high priority, I found they actually weren't bad at finding and sorting little problems.

Any news on this? Only a month away and I am getting cryptic emails from suppliers with "Coming soon" and a brief list of changes that could mean anything!

Just finished "Killjoys" series 3, really good, just binged it as it was gripping with a good windy story line. If you haven't watched any of the series, I wholeheartedly urge you to start. Series 1 starts with some standalone episodes, introduce the team, etc, but pretty soon gets into an arc that spans all 3 series and is very engaging!

We have a DR site at another centre where all our DPM backups are collected by a secondary DPM system, where we can spin up all the VM's in the case of the main site going dark, then we have round robin on our DNS for all our external IP's. That's the 1 working day RTO. Restore from backup and reprogram watchguard to point all the external IP's to the "new" servers, as at the moment, they all point to the main site, so round robin doesn't give us nothing found 5 times out of 10

I think so, and then my old SAN and cluster will become my DPM backup environment, probably only one of the hosts though, and probably forgo the switch and hard wire straight to the iSCSI optimized NIC card in the server(or 2 4 port cards for both controllers). then a 10Gbe link from the newly crowned DPM server to each of the new hosts to create a dedicated backup network. It will replace the MD1000 driveshelf and its aging 2950 dell head. Just need to sort some quotes and then go have a word with finance although as I've just spent high 5 figures on a Horizon VDI environment, I might have to grovel or wait till it was actually planned, which is easter next year...

Our standard DR RTO is a working day. I've read around and people are getting 7-8 Gbps on 10Gbe after tweaking and disabling broadcom NIC's and other twiddles, so that means circa a gig proper a second if I got my maths right, so 16 minutes per TB, I can live with that most of my VM's are a lot less

wow, even on a 10Gbe link? I need to do some more reading!

Right, been doing more of this reading up on things malarkey. My main concern is being able to still operate if a node goes down and the ability to move Vm's to another node to do maintenance. To get the storage size I want in a 2-node cluster is still going to cost an arm and a leg, be it local, DAS, SAN etc and be complicated. So it seems that there is an option for Share Nothing Live Migration, which sounds interesting, ie the ability to move running VM's between non-clustered hosts. The last R730XD I bought with 12TB of storage came in at around the £5k mark, dual Xeons, 96GB of RAM. That was at the end of last year, and I know pricing is severely wobbly at best these days, but I could get 2 of these with more RAM and more storage with 10GBe cards, use one port on each to my 10GBe core and the run the other between the servers for a migration network. This wouldn't give me HA, but it would give me the option of migrating all to one for maintenance windows(depending on storage capacity on a single unit) and we could live with the downtime on a 4hr prosupport contract for things breaking(although the VM's could be retrieved out of DPM storage to the one running server in the meantime)and be very very budget friendly. Does anyone have any real world anecdotal on SNLM and how it deals with transferring big VM's live, ie file servers with TB's of storage(no drives bigger than 1TB at the moment)? Thanks for the replies so far.

@NB9457 that's what I'm thinking, 2 matched servers with some kind of replication/3rd party offering in software, 10Gbe'ed together, load balancing in normal mode and 1 node able to take the load of both nodes if needed. SSD based would be good, with the savings. Then the old PS6100x will do on-site backup duty, replacing my aging PE2950 and MD1000 driveshelf

I am basically looking to see if we need a SAN going forward, for whatever reason, lack of redundancy, price, etc etc. I am not really worried about a single point of failure, that is just one of the arguments being banded around for ditching them. I believe it is a lot of money to spend on something that we may not need in these days of SDS and hyper-converged. Yes SAN may be the best bet, and we will replace ours if needed, but I am after other options and opinions. Original question reworded, 2-node hyper-v cluster, 20TB after RAID, what would you do? and by you I mean everyone not just you @geezersoft The price of renewing support on the current SAN has just pushed this quandary to the forefront, do we pay and keep going another year, or do we take that £5k and put it towards new infrastructure now. Fag packet maths, I can do 2 servers with enough storage for say 15-20k, or double the cost and have 2 hosts but with a SAN and switches. ie in this day and age, should we be shelling out 20k plus for a shiny SAN in such a small environment. (By the by,We have a whole room 10K UPS with about half an hour of uptime, so barring a long power cut, power is sorted, 10 GBe dual switch core with enough spare to run on a single node if needed(albeit a manual wire pull and push to get going again))

The Fujitsu and Nimble are both SAN's, I'm looking for alternatives to having a single point of failure(barring buying 2 of them!). ie no SAN infrastucture. Although thanks for the recommendations if in fact we do go the SAN route after all

Yes looked at nimble a while ago, and couldn't quite find the £50k they wanted down the back of the sofa for 24TB!!

It's a college environment, but we always run it as if its a enterprise and invest in our infrastructure, and we keep support up on mission critical systems. Saying that, I can count the amount of time I've had to call support(on servers and associated bits and bobs) on both hands in the 7 years I've run the system, and that's been the odd HD or PSU or the above mentioned 365 day error in the firmware. We already run DPM to our DR rack at one of our secondary centres, where we aim to be back up in a day if our main centre goes dark. Warranty would help in that they would replace the box, rather than us having to buy a new one, but yes the 4hr in that situation means we would be down to our day restore time whatever happened. Dell only allow ProSupport for 7 years, so our hosts have to be replaced next year whatever happens, but this cost for the equalogic support may push that timetable up, as even the next day support is nearly 4k inc the VAT! I am assuming if I go for a "hyper-converged" 2 node in the starwind style, I need the same amount of storage on both nodes, which means a hefty price in hard drives, especially if I want pure SSD..

Evening all, Following on from my post in the "annoying" thread, where Dell have quoted £7k for 1 years support on our EqualLogic P6100X(this is for top of the range "Plus" 4hr but even the normal 4hr was £5k!). It looks like I may be moving the SAN to non-mission critical backup duties quicker than I thought! So currently we have 2 R710's and the P6100x with a dedicated Dell iscsi switch to link them all up, about 14TB of RAID, 21TB raw. 2-node cluster primarily running hyper-v based virtual servers I want to replace everything, so new hosts, new storage, new switch etc. Now all I need is HA for our VM servers and failover in case of failure of a host(technically same thing, but you get the idea), and on a 2 node cluster, compute is covered, but a san is a single point of failure for storage. So normally, I'd be off to a vendor for new everything, but I am thinking there must be a better way to do this other than blowing tens of thousands on a SAN. I've had multiple SAN vendors through the door, with very large quotes that make me shudder! All well and good for oodles of nodes with redundant replicating SAN's, but our needs are simple! I've been reading about storage spaces and Starwind(i've read the white paper on a 2 node cluster, but can't work out if it just replaces a SAN or does the Hyper-v functions as well, so hosts become the SAN) and other weird and wonderful linux products, but I do need some support(don't we all ) So what options do I have in day and age for a system where my servers will always be up even if a node goes down(or I take it down for updates etc)? 20TB after RAID would be nice, and as fast as is possible No budget set, as we try and fit money to projects, rather than projects to money, if you get my meaning, it has to be right for the job not for the vendors monthly target(sorry for the cynicism!) I also like fit and forget, see below: As a side note, I do love my EQ SAN, it has given me zero problems in nearly 5 years, bar one incident when it had been up for 365 days and it shut itself down which turned out to be a firmware bug, solved by upgrading the firmware! Thanks James

Do they actually have any volume licencing....

2 words: Pickle Rick!!! Most amazing episode ever