@Jason said in Hardware refresh and Selling the Solution:

@KOOLER said in Hardware refresh and Selling the Solution:

@Jason said in Hardware refresh and Selling the Solution:

@scottalanmiller said in Hardware refresh and Selling the Solution:

@Jason said in Hardware refresh and Selling the Solution:

You can also use EMC ScaleIO for free with your own hardware if you use the community for support https://www.emc.com/products-solutions/trial-software-download/scaleio.htm (or you can buy the software or pre-configured dell servers with it).

For commercial use, too? How did I not know that they had opened this up?

Yes, the EULA has no restrictions on that. Their marketing terms of course try to convey you should " When you are ready to purchase a ScaleIO software license for full production use and maintenance, contact a Sales Associate" but the EULA has nothing requiring it.

This isn't true. Don't get yourself intro trouble with misuse! You can't use it for production and you have to let EMC know you evaluate with a prod use in mind. That's EVERYTHING but free... IMHO.

https://www.emc.com/content/terms/eula-scaleio.htm

E. “Internal Business Purposes” means an internal (non-commercial) Use for the purpose(s) of testing and demonstrating the features of the Software, and not for Customer product development, product testing, or other Customer research and development or commercial purposes.

You are reading that incorrectly. That's just definitions, not the terms. Our EMC rep already confirmed it to us.

I read everything correctly. 3A grants you rights to use sofware for "Internal Use". Internal Use means non-commercial.

I don't know what EMC sales rep verbally told you. Talk to your lawyers with EULA in hand, it's public.

@JaredBusch said in Windows Server 2016 Pricing:

@zuphzuph said in Windows Server 2016 Pricing:

Does anyone have a stupid simple breakdown of pricing? I'm still confuzzled on how this per core stuff works... Currently I work for an MS partner so this isn't something I've had to worry about for quite some time...

For Server 2016 Standard:

$882 for the minimum 16 cores means that the per core price is $55.13.

You are required to buy in 2-core packs. Each 2-core pack then should cost $110.26.

If you have a 2 proc x 10 core server, for 20 total cores, then you will buy 10 2-core packs for $110.26 * 10 = $1102.60.

It won't be easy to stay within basic Standard fee for pretty much ANY server in ±12 months from now. Reason: TOO MANY CORES!

@Jason said in Hardware refresh and Selling the Solution:

@scottalanmiller said in Hardware refresh and Selling the Solution:

@Jason said in Hardware refresh and Selling the Solution:

You can also use EMC ScaleIO for free with your own hardware if you use the community for support https://www.emc.com/products-solutions/trial-software-download/scaleio.htm (or you can buy the software or pre-configured dell servers with it).

For commercial use, too? How did I not know that they had opened this up?

Yes, the EULA has no restrictions on that. Their marketing terms of course try to convey you should " When you are ready to purchase a ScaleIO software license for full production use and maintenance, contact a Sales Associate" but the EULA has nothing requiring it.

This isn't true. Don't get yourself intro trouble with misuse! You can't use it for production and you have to let EMC know you evaluate with a prod use in mind. That's EVERYTHING but free... IMHO.

https://www.emc.com/content/terms/eula-scaleio.htm

E. “Internal Business Purposes” means an internal (non-commercial) Use for the purpose(s) of testing and demonstrating the features of the Software, and not for Customer product development, product testing, or other Customer research and development or commercial purposes.

@scottalanmiller said in EMC ScaleIO Available for Free:

@jason says that the EULA allows for production usage, just without support.

Not really...

https://www.emc.com/content/terms/eula-scaleio.htm

E. “Internal Business Purposes” means an internal (non-commercial) Use for the purpose(s) of testing and demonstrating the features of the Software, and not for Customer product development, product testing, or other Customer research and development or commercial purposes.

@dafyre said in EMC ScaleIO Available for Free:

This looks pretty interesting. It would be a competitor to say Starwind & co?

EMC competitor to StarWind? That's a compliment, Sir you made my day!!! There's a 100x gap in revenue between us so that's great.

Technically positioning is very different: ScaleIO is looking for many-many nodes to get reasonable performance (<10 is a joke) and small deployments are expensive in terms of a data witness. I mean they do have (N-1) capacity so with a 2-way replication with 3 nodes (starter kit) you'll get 1 node (1/3 of a cluster) usable capacity. That's expensive for NVMe storage! Expensive and slow. 2-way replica, no dedupe etc.

My own imho - Ceph is running circles around ScaleIO and as soon as somebody would bother to finalize a healthy ecosystem around Ceph (we need more companies and not just InkTank) ScaleIO will have a VERY strong competitor. Competitor = somebody targeting MASSIVE many nodes deployments (SMB is few nodes, that's where StarWind plays so we aren't competitor really).

@scottalanmiller said in EMC ScaleIO Available for Free:

Youtube Video

Can't be used for production, but you can do a lot of learning on it.

https://www.emc.com/products-solutions/trial-software-download/scaleio.htm

It can't be used for evaluation as well, and THAT is weird to be honest. I simply don't get WHY.

DFS-R has issues with a distributed locks (it got none actually, need expensive third-party software to do bolt-on) so I'd recommend something less complicated

@ardeyn said in Windows Server 2016 Pricing:

This might be a bit of a necropost, but has anyone actually managed to do a side-by-side comparison of TS going with
1.VMWare+VSAN
2.Hyper-V+StarWind
> 3.Something like S2D?

It would be interesting to look at prices vs features of each option.

When you'll be comparing S2D setup consider one we'll sell you as well (Yes, S2D powered HCI, with StarWind vSAN or w/out - depends on do you need your storage outside S2D cluster or not). Because I can bet StarWind spending millions on Dell servers will get a better discount to share with a customer compared to what most of the SMBs have

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-hyperconverged-appliance

@Romo said in Installing a Starwind SAN on Windows Server 2012 R2:

@FATeknollogee said in Installing a Starwind SAN on Windows Server 2012 R2:

Paging @KOOLER Will the performance of the appliances be as good or better than the native windows install?

It must be at least as good, why release an inferior product.

Nissan has GT-R cracking 0-100 in sub 3 seconds but it doesn't mean Nissan Altima doing same 0-100 in low 10s suck Every product has own target niche.

@FATeknollogee said in Installing a Starwind SAN on Windows Server 2012 R2:

Paging @KOOLER Will the performance of the appliances be as good or better than the native windows install?

Native implementations, especially ones written with a modern CPUs in mind (user-mode, polling instead of an interrupt-driven I/O, think about Intel SPDK/DPDK) will be faster to anything running inside a VM. There are some ways to "fix" this by SR-IOV network and storage hardware (RDMA-capable NICs and NVMe) right into "controller" VM but hardware partners we're working with (mellanox) have some issues with RDMA inside a VMs so FOR NOW native implementation is going to be faster.

@dafyre said in Installing a Starwind SAN on Windows Server 2012 R2:

@KOOLER said in Installing a Starwind SAN on Windows Server 2012 R2:

Thank you for this one! we're finalizing the things with our Linux-based ESXi, Xen and KVM appliances so far so no Windows install would be required

O.o Sweet! I'll help beta test!

DEAL

Thank you for this one! we're finalizing the things with our Linux-based ESXi, Xen and KVM appliances so far so no Windows install would be required

@scottalanmiller said in Cross Posting - Storage Spaces Conundrum:

@KOOLER said in Cross Posting - Storage Spaces Conundrum:

OpenIO is something I've never seen before you posted so I dunno what they do.

We have it running here They are here in ML, too.

That's interesting! Nice to see more storage startups from Europe (France?).

are they VM-running or do they have native port ?

@DustinB3403 said in Cross Posting - Storage Spaces Conundrum:

Hello Spiceheads (from here),

I am currently looking at implementing a large file server. I have a Lenovo server with 70x 1.8tb 10k sas drives attached via DAS. This server will be used as a file server. Serving up 80% small files 1 - 2mb and 20% large files 10GB+.

> What I am not sure about is how to provision the drives. Do I use RAID? Should I use storage spaces? Or should I go with something else like ScaleIO, OpenIO, Starwinds etc..?

I am looking for a solution that is scalable so if I wanted to increase the volume and I was also thinking about a little future proofing so setting this up so I could scale it out if I wanted to.

This dose need to be resilient with a quick turn around should a disk go down and it also needs to be scalable.

Looking forward to hearing your views.

StarWind assumes you use some local RAID (hardware or software). We do replication and per-node redundancy is handled by RAID. So we do RAID61 (RAID1-over-RAID6) for SSDs and HDDs, RAID51 (RAID1-over-RAID5) for SSDs, RAID01 (RAID1-over-RAID0) for SSDs and HDDs (3-way replication is recommended), and like RAID101 (RAID1-over-RAID10) for HDDs and SSDs. It's very close to what SimpliVity does if you care. ScaleIO does 2-way replication on the smaller block level and needs no local RAID (but they take away one node from the capacity equation so from 3 nodes raw you'll get [(3-1)/2] you can really use). OpenIO is something I've never seen before you posted so I dunno what they do.

@Ambarishrh said in An effort to setup SharePoint 2013 farm with streamlined topology:

@scottalanmiller said in An effort to setup SharePoint 2013 farm with streamlined topology:

@Ambarishrh said in An effort to setup SharePoint 2013 farm with streamlined topology:

@scottalanmiller said in An effort to setup SharePoint 2013 farm with streamlined topology:

@Ambarishrh said in An effort to setup SharePoint 2013 farm with streamlined topology:

Thanks, wmf1 to wfm1 please

The server names are required as is when i run the scripted installation for sharepoint. not that wmf1 won't work but just wanted to keep it standard.

Renaming done.

Thanks @scottalanmiller need the shared drive between db1 and db2 for clustering. What kind of storage do we have to do this?

There isn't a native offering for this on Scale HC3 because it is designed for production use and that is essentially a lab feature. So I have them looking into if we can get that exposed to us to enable.

Can we use something like starwind (i never tried this and so not have much info about it, but just a thought)

Yeah, OP can ping me off-line for a custom NFR if he runs out of Mango points. We'd be happy to help!

@scottalanmiller said in The SMB Two Server Dilema, What to Do:

Scaling up from this approach simply requires a storage layer that will continue to grow horizontally when needed or moving to one that will. Vendors like Starwind, HP VSA, VMware VSAN, Scale, Gluster, CEPH, OpenIO all tackle that scaling problem with this approach.

A bit late but... RDMA and NVMe are game changers really. RDMA bridged NVMe device has better overall performance and a bit (irrelevant) higher latency. This means we'll see a new generation of a Software Defined Storage soon because neither "wide striping" nor "data locality" have any sense anymore

Guys anybody having issues with a keys and slow response please don't hesitate to contact me directly. I'll be happy to bring you in touch with a proper people

@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

@KOOLER said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

P.S. It's a great pleasure to see known faces everywhere. It turns out IT is a very small world really

Amazing how much of that there is!

My petty officer in Navy was telling something like "Life is a line of a shops and people stay the same and only signboards change the text over the time".

@scottalanmiller said in Simplivity - anyone use them?:

@KOOLER My guess would be that SMB workloads have a high tendency to fit within single node storage limits and when they don't tend to be the big, low performance file servers. Always exceptions, of course, but SMB has a lot of standard patterns.

ELI5: Why should anybody buy a single node hyperconverged appliance? What value can bring HCI vendor to a Dell or HP or SuperMicro server running Hyper-V or VMware? Do I miss anything obvious? Thanks!