Just for reference... To get StarWind VSAN you need to get here:

StarWind VSAN

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san

🙂

@TheDeepStorage said in Deploying a 2-node StarWind VSAN Free for VMware ESXi 6.5:

@hobbit666 said in Deploying a 2-node StarWind VSAN Free for VMware ESXi 6.5:

Thanks just that I might have some kit becoming available but they are all different Dell models, just wondered if the Hard Drive space/RAID matched that would be OK for a test lab,

e.g.
R610, 64GB RAM with 4x 600GB SAS
R410, 64GB RAM with 4x 600GB SAS

Sounds like it will work just fine for a test lab, anyways, once you get down to testing, DM me and I'll get you in touch with an engineer, who will review your environment to make sure everything will work perfectly.

See now I want to purchase more lab equipment to test this. . . .

Just saw this...

If you have a PSOD you generally want to take picture of it, and pull the crash dumps and open a ticket with Vmware GSS.

The other useful thing to do is check the syslog (LogInisght is part of vROPS).

I have imported all the critical VM's over with 0 issues. I only have like 3 left that aren't that big of a deal. Then I'm wiping my VMWare Host and rebuilding it from scratch and then taking my Synology NAS and redoing it's storage.

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

Registered.

From what I am reading now, it appears that the OVF uses compression level 5. It is possible to gain extra compression by using a tool like 7 zip but the gains are very minimal. On a 4GB VM you may see it drop to 3.9GB if you compress it again using 7zip. The minor gain isn't worth having to compress it twice IMO.

Cool. They seem to have really come through.

@scottalanmiller And Starwind ships their ready nodes armed with RAID https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance so i think they still keep doing RAID and i am sure it is for a reason some of them I've mentioned above.

@Dashrender said in Cost Study: 3 Node Scale vs. 3 Node VMware IPOD:

@wirestyle22 said in Cost Study: 3 Node Scale vs. 3 Node VMware IPOD:

@Mike-Davis said in Cost Study: 3 Node Scale vs. 3 Node VMware IPOD:

@Dashrender yes, I was thinking of agentless solutions like Veeam. So if it has KVM support it will work with Scale?

I wish I could help you with this. No place that I've worked at has needed something that big 😞

I came really close - I just missed the Scale boat. 3 years ago when looking at a replacement EHR I posted about some ridiculous needs. Many conversations with Scott - and Scale never came up. Looking back, I have to assume that Scale wasn't something we knew about quite yet. Instead I was looking at a $100K two server setup with something like 20 disks each (mainly for IOPs - this was pre acceptable SSD pricing). Management went with another solution (one they hate today) because the startup costs where so high.

Found my old crazy thread.
https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/310103-new-greenway-install?page=2

Yeah I was reading your thread earlier. It's interesting.

@John-Nicholson said in Cost Study: 3 Node Scale vs. 3 Node VMware VSAN:

@Dashrender said:

@scottalanmiller said in Cost Study: 3 Node Scale vs. 3 Node VMware VSAN:

VMware VSAN Support Cost: $25,440 ($1060 per CPU for each year after the first)

Wow - why even sell VSAN at that point - why don't they just do subscription and get over with it - wow that seems expensive. Is this in line with support contracts for other SAN products? I know it's hard to judge that because this is based on CPU (luckily not cores) where I'm assuming typical SAN support is more based upon capacity.

Because that's not what vSAN costs for a 3 node cluster. The capital cost is 15K List for a 3 node cluster. I'm guessing he's bundling the first 3 years of support in or something and putting zero discounting on the cost.

This cost study is also using 4TB SATA drives which vSAN doesn't certify. Also the only 1.9TB drive I"m familiar with that Dell sells (this could have changed) is a PM863 that gets awful write latency consistency and is only certified for capacity usage not write cache. Beyond that you would be better served by 2 smaller write intensive SSD's. This cost study ignores the HCL, the design and sizing guide.

Because there is no good way to an apples to apples comparison. Yes the cost of both has the support for the term built in. And the need for higher cost, lower density drives for vSAN would not be favourable to the vSAN solution - so while it could follow the HCL, it would look as if I was attempting to skew the numbers to make the vSAN look bad. Most importantly, this gives the best cost analysis advantage to the vSAN, even at the cost of not being officially on the HCL. If you want HCL'd hardware exclusively, then the cost is higher. As this is only a cost, not a design, comparison I felt that that was the more important attribute. Should have been noted, though.

Server is back online now. Bringing the files in one by one and making sure they had the right name seemed to do it.

Text:

VMware Unveils New Cross-Cloud Architecture™ to Give Customers Cloud Freedom and Control

At VMworld in Las Vegas, we announced the extension of the company’s hybrid cloud strategy with the new VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture™, enabling customers to run, manage, connect, and secure their applications across clouds and devices in a common operating environment.

VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture™ is delivered through VMware Cloud Foundation™, a new set of Cross-Cloud services™ VMware is developing, and the vRealize® cloud management platform.

VMware Cloud Foundation, a unified Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) platform that integrates VMware compute, storage and network virtualization for private and public clouds. You get the visibility and tools to see and manage resources, workloads and operations across all clouds. Cloud Foundation will be made available on-premises on certified hardware, or as a service from IBM today and VMware vCloud® Air™ and vCloud Air Network partners in the future, giving you unprecedented choice in your infrastructure decisions. Cross-Cloud services, previewed at VMworld, are in development to give you the ability to manage, govern and secure applications running in private and public clouds, including AWS, Azure and IBM Cloud. VMware vRealize Suite delivers a comprehensive enterprise-ready cloud management platform (CMP) that speeds up IT service delivery, improves IT operations and delivers end-user choice with control, across heterogeneous, multi-cloud environments (VMware vSphere® and non-vSphere).

@DustinB3403 said in RDP support for VMs or Console only Access:

Opening up RDP access (not necessarily from the Internet) but in general just opens more ports, more firewall changes etc.

Sure, but granting unnecessary access to the console does that, too. You need access to the VMs from far more places than you need it to the console.

@whizzard said in Adventures in Graceful VM Shutdown:

How does the licensing work with multiple UPS?

The answer is...it depends. If you want OpMonis to monitor multiple UPS devices and shutdown things gracefully, it can do that using a single license but will only allow one shutdown list and would begin shutting down things as soon as your predefined threshold is hit for any one of the monitored UPS devices.

The other option is to get a second license of OpMonis to monitor the second UPS and have a dedicated shutdown list just for that UPS and its connected equipment.

@Dashrender said in Free Windows Server DataCenter License with Purchase of SA of equal or greater value:

@IRJ said in Free Windows Server DataCenter License with Purchase of SA of equal or greater value:

I learned Hyper-V inside and out when I was studying for my MCSA 2012. I have given up on Hyper-V. Other Hypervisors are so much better and have less issues. I tried using Hyper-V for about a year, it just isn't as good as other products out there.

In what ways? and at what scale?

For starters the compatibility with non-Windows Machines suck.