@scottalanmiller said in Fiber VS Copper: racks interconnection in a pre-existing environment:

@brandon220 said in Fiber VS Copper: racks interconnection in a pre-existing environment:

I do this both ways but usually lean towards fiber when I can't stay far enough away from electrical conduits. A major factor with fiber is that it is immune to noise from electrical circuits and can be run very close to them. I think fiber is cheap and I don't mind working with it. Yes, you can run 10G over CAT6 and it will also work well but you are limited on distance.

Fiber is really nice, any idea what the real cost difference is going to be?

Yes, 40 euro for 4 strands of 65m preterminated, tested, labeled and joined togeter in a single jacket of 6mm.

@brandon220 I have three home lab servers with Fedora as a KVM host. They are very reliable and fast, IMHO much better than VMware/XS/HyperV. Libvirt CLI is very easy and powerful, I use it almost exclusively to manage the hosts.

You can use cockpit for the only thing that it really can’t do, visualizing the VM vga. You will need it just for fresh installed Windows VM of course, because you can use virsh console (serial) for Linux VMs.

Oh, don’t forget the automation part: I’ve never installed a Linux machine under KVM, you can use virt-builder to get almost every distro (customized with user, ssh keys etc) in seconds. I also automate it with simple script that also use virt-install… pair it with ansible, and you can recreate your environment from scratch with a single command.

@guyinpv just put in your cron a daily script that put nextcloud in maintanance mode, run borg in the nextcloud folder (that contains the DB, also) and exit from maintanance mode.

The Ubiquiti is not an UTM in any way. In that space, the leader is Fortinet. No one can beat their price/performance for what they do. I use Ubiquiti in many places, but when a real UTM is needed I choose Fortinet.

The daemom is written in python and takes forever to rebuild the db if you restart it… I had ~1Tb in 2 millions of files. The thing is, it keeps track of the file chunks of every files… sort of joins object storage and file storage together. Very bandwith efficent, but horrible on cpu and I/O. I switched to nextcloud that lacks that feature, but it’s much faster and flexible.

Any real advantage vs plain KVM?

Any opinion on Dell all-sfp switches? The "S" series...

No, it won't work, I've tried several methods but they are neither functional nor supported. I know it's a shit, but I usually RDP in a domain-joined jumpbox and do all of my work from there.

Autofs.

For 100m, singlemode fiber simplex is 12$. Transceiver are like 7€ each. You can’t beat it with copper.

@dave247 you can use storage snapshot for fast and very efficient backups. Your backup software should be connected to the SAN of course… trigger a snapshot after hypervisor quiescence, and then just retrieve the backup data from the snapshot. At the end pf the backup job, the snapshot will just be discarded. That’s what any tier-1 software does today in dense and high-performance environments.

@hobbit666 said in Air Gap Backups:

How would people define this?
Just send a backup to the cloud, or only achevied by backing up to tape (or other media) and store somewhere?

We're looking to backup 4-5 VM's on a vmware host. 1TB max.

I have done it with the S3 Vault Lock feature, you can use it in conjunction with Storage Gateway (effectively emulating tapes), or using objects directly.

Once put in compliance mode, there is no way to delete the objects before the compliance period ends. It's also very cheap.