@scottalanmiller said:

vCloud is a product that you buy, it's not a service. VMware has a cloud service, but that isn't it. This is for on premises clouds. Amazon and Rackspace are hosted products only. Rackspace's on premises name would be OpenStack.

I would definitely not choose them. [VMware] Small time. Amazon is the top player for a reason. Rackspace is by far the best for the SMB market. And I mean by far.

The reason to use VMware's public cloud is so that you can transparently move workloads from a local VMware cloud to the public one. Not really a great idea anyway, this means you've not understood cloud and screwed up already.

Thanks, that clears that up.

This is for trading systems. It is not for anything that a normal SMB or even a normal enterprise would face. This is very specialized. Normal workloads need throughput optimization not latency optimization. So this would be the opposite of what you would want.

@scottalanmiller said:

@Dashrender said:

Understood, but you can grow/shrink partitions in VMWare as well

No partitions here. We are talking about a file, not a partition.

THINKS - aw yes.. you're right - I see my missing logic.

@scottalanmiller said:

Awesome. I really need to join the NYC VMUG. Have not had a chance to get around to that yet.

Yes, you really do need to join VMUG. The content even at just regular meetups is often very valuable. Sometimes they talk about technologies that would not apply to SMBs, but it really is interesting to learn about them. Overall, I find the content very good if you have a good VMUG leadership group.

@art_of_shred said:

@NetworkNerd said:

@ajstringham said:

@NetworkNerd said:

Maybe I could use the HP DL 385 G5 I have with the MSA 70 and run something like FreeNAS on it for another datastore option?

That's one option. Something that would be good for, to be honest, would be your StorageCraft server, if you go with that.

I was thinking use it as a NFS datastore and a place to store the VM files for my current physical machines like was mentioned above. That saves money on a secondary backup solution.

Actually, that would be a tertiary backup solution, as you have Veeam and BE already. The original decision seemed to be "buy hardware or buy another backup solution". It seems that utilizing current hardware like that could avoid both?

I'd get rid of BackupExec with the P2V of the physical boxes and be able to use Veeam. That eliminates cost of software. But, I cannot avoid some investment in increasing backup storage. So this does not completely eliminate a need for more hardware but does decrease the cost of the hardware needed by a large factor.

@scottalanmiller said:

Nothing compares to actually attending. It's held in Barcelona, my favourite city ever.

Favourite? What are you? British?

Nothing for true cloud is actually useful in the SMB market.

@thecreativeone91 said:

The only real reason I would see for not going with thin provisions would be poor planning and then running out of space. otherwise I don't see a issue or reason not to go with it if it's planned well.

That is a surprisingly common fear that I have heard.

I've never used it. I think the max servers I've had is 10 hosts. but some of those were free version and some the paid version so it's never really been feasible for me.

That works for the web interface, we were hoping for the SSH interface.

That's an easy fix. As long as you have the foresight to have SSH enabled.

I had my PCOIP setting incorrect, after putting in the correct settings everything is working great.

Jump on the HOL material—

To accommodate time constraints and workload, first understand your peak learning time. Carve that time out and make it sacred.

Awesome to see more job postings going up here. And welcome to the community too! Great to see new people.

@DenisKelley said:

@PSX_Defector said:

Yeah, one.

A zip != an ISO. 🙂

Yeah, yeah. 🙂 I think the mention of the ISO tab was a mistake, since I don't have an ISO tab. Just Product Downloads tab.

Mine specifically says Custom ISO - that's why I had the hang up (and the lack of reading)

@JaredBusch said:

I will look into it @katieunitrends. As always you are awesome.

Thanks so much!

Thanks @scottalanmiller and @psx_defector

IOPS are the biggest concern really. But without anything like a database which really needs them, RAID 6 might be more than enough. Exchange wouldn't be a big concern as it is not IOPS heavy. RAID 10 is far better tuned for heavy writes, but if reads are the vast majority, RAID 6 will keep right up.