@coliver said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@wirestyle22 said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@JaredBusch said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@EddieJennings said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@coliver said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

@EddieJennings said in When You Think That You Need a Physical Server...:

I know there is a best practice that discourages an environment with only one domain controller.

Why? Do you really need two domain controllers? How many authentications are you doing? How much downtime can you afford? Would it be better to have a single domain controller on a VM that you can backup and restore in a few minutes versus having two running at all times?

Why = because a document from Microsoft said so and at the time when I made our domain I didn't know any better :).

What you're asking me is what I'm asking myself, which moves me to the conclusion that when it's time to make the VM for the accounting software, the old box should just go away. Especially since my tiny number of users would be able to log into their workstations with cached credentials until I can get the domain controller VM functioning again.

Who cares what some paper from the company selling you the licensing says.

What does your company need?

I have never used two domain controllers in the SMB space. Even before virtualization at my clients.

It is simply not something needed.

You don't think the downtime justified the cost for a SMB I'm assuming and load balancing isn't a concern

Rarely is downtime worth the cost of mitigating it in an SMB environment. They often don't actually understand what the true cost of downtime is and exaggerate it more often then not. If you're getting enough requests that you're hitting a performance threshold on the domain controller then you may be out of the SMB space.

And authentication often has a near zero impact for short durations. A DC down could easily go 30 minutes and literally have no one notice.

@Kelly yeah the HC3 Move (powered by Double-Take) is certainly easier and more direct...

if the xenserver export virtual disk file is a VHD file, you can probably skip converting it to qcow2 but simply renaming the file to match the guid of the exported empty qcow2 file (so it will still be named <guid>.qcow2 even though it's actually your VHD file.) Our import is actually using the qemu-img convert tool which will automagically detect that it's really a VHD format and do the conversion at the same time it imports it to save that extra step. (and also you can use that same "import shell" over and over... just keep replacing the guid.qcow2 file with the one you want to import)

I just write an article about that here: http://www.francescoprovino.com/2017/04/16/full-disk-encryption-unlocking-from-virtual-serial-tty-paranoia-xenserver-and-libvirt/ .

and after a lot of episodes, I've fixed the thing.

please let me state this again: I HAVE.

I.

Not the HPE support, not the reseller tech support.

I HAVE.

I = An almost idiot ex-embedded sw developer illogically cast into the sysadmin role of a non-sense company!

TL; DR:
there was a mismatch between OS version, bios version, controllers firmware version, controller drivers version. Selecting the right combination has (apprarently) fixed the issue!

how storage controllers affect reboot signals is still a mistery... but actually all was related to the smart paging I mentioned before. Moving it from the default location caused all the issues.
I have discovered the "bug" recreating a new vm with copy-pasted hdd but with hypervisor defaults... 2 twins VM one running one not... only difference: location of the smart paging file. XD

So I stopped using the text install and went to full graphical and... it started working. WTF

@WLS-ITGuy No issues. Wasn't required to fsck after a reboot.

Registered.

@wirestyle22 updates were applied only in the VM's not the host.. everything is ok, just for a vm an error about integration services

First step - determine what it is that you want to be learning.

@Kelly said in XenServer:

@Alket_tux said in XenServer:

@Kelly i have seen the feature matrix, and that's why i asked.. because there are two editions in feature matrix.. but @DustinB3403 said above that the matrix includes support.. is this correct or not?

The matrix is from Citrix, not XenServer. It is really confusing terminology.

Standard and community are the same. The only difference is standard has support from Citrix.

Enterprise and the features listed there are only available to those with a paid support subscription for that version.

The codebase may be identical, but you can't access things like GPU virtualization without the Enterprise version.

Even more confusing is that those things are add one rather than unlocks... so it isn't really xenServer doing it.

@Romo I should find out soon enough. Just finished spinning up a new VM for this.

@Dashrender said in XenServer 7.0 issues on HP Elite 8100, 6.5 Flies.:

I have a HP EliteDesk 800 G1 SFF as my XS 7.0 test box. Works great!

I don't see any issue with a lab box being PC based.

Yeah. My "oh s***" box is a Dell T3500. It stood in for the server while it got upgraded to XS7 from XS6.

KVM with Virtmanager.
Centos latest is my preferred KVM host.
And Fedora LXDE Spin is my preferred Virt-Manager choice, I use it from inside Windows using Virtualbox.

Cause it resembles the old ESXi Philosophy with Vsphere C# client
And you can do whatever you want with it, and for free. Especially when you use virt IO drivers for network and disk, you get nearly identical bare metal speeds.

But sadly its lacking other tools to allow users to connect and use the VM, you will have to do this from inside the VM like RDP and VNC.

@scottalanmiller said in Best tool to manage Centos KVM ? + Guide:

@msff-amman-Itofficer said in Best tool to manage Centos KVM ? + Guide:

but in Windows environment (virt-viewer) they dont have ssh... so how can I resolve it?

Windows has had SSH for a while now. Both OpenSSH as a server and OpenSSH as a client, plus tools like Putty, too.

That doesn't help with virt-viewer though unless you're making a tunnel. I've never used virt-viewer on windows so I don't know if it has an option for keys.

We are using this, by the way. Just deployed one this past week or so.

@Dashrender said in Windows Server 2012 R2 Licensing:

@JaredBusch said in Windows Server 2012 R2 Licensing:

@Dashrender said in Windows Server 2012 R2 Licensing:

@JaredBusch said in Windows Server 2012 R2 Licensing:

Server 2016 have a install method called Core.

Actually it doesn't. The install options are

standard standard with desktop experience datacenter datacenter with desktop experience

The ones without desktop experience are what used to be called Core installs. I think MS does have the term Core still sprinkled around inside the OS and documentation though.. just adding more to the confusion.

They changed again? I have not installed 2016 yet.

Yep. And this time I actually agree. The whole idea, I think, being that MS is moving toward a non GUI on the servers being the standard way of installing/using Windows Server going forward.

They made that very public as their goal when PowerShell was released long ago.

I was waiting to hear if HCI was based on the number 42 somehow...

Staying up to date on the updates is pretty critical for XO. They update things frequently. You'll be running this update script a lot.