If it's not too difficult to keep extracting, I would grab data for the C-levels for sure + maybe upper management. Basically, everyone who might ask you about missing data afterwards because they didn't fully understand the idea of data loss, and who might be able to cause trouble for you once they realize the data they want is gone. If it turns out they really did need something later, you can stride in and be a hero which is always a good time.

If it's going to take hours just to grab the C-level data then it sounds like your boss decided it wasn't worth the time commitment. Make sure that's confirmed through email to CYA in case of disaster and you should be okay!

I believe Hyper-V converts the "Host OS" into a virtual machine that has easy access to the hypervisor management tools.

If that's true, then you are going to want to stay far away from Hyper-V, VMWare or any other type 1 hypervisor as GPU passthrough on these sorts of things can be tricky.

I would rather play it safe and go with VirtualBox as @MattSpeller suggested, having one main OS that is used for GPU intensive projects and provisioning VMs for other things as needed.

Bonus - Vagrant works extremely well with VirtualBox which should be nice for your web development needs!

As someone using Office 365, I'm open to the idea of buying it through a partner because there have certainly been times where some extra support outside of MS would have been nice to have.

The question is whether or not I would expect GoDaddy to provide consistent, quality support on a part of my infrastructure as critical as Office 365. The answer for me personally is... very no. Not at all.

Do they mention how much it will cost you after the first year?

@thecreativeone91 said:

I will say going to college for any creative field is the worst idea ever. You can't teach creativity. You'll be paying a lot for nothing. You just need to learn to use tools, and the best way to do that is from people in the field and owning your own equipment (which can be much cheaper than college). A creative college professor is the worst person to learn from, becoming a professor/teacher is normally a sign they failed at being an artist, filmmaker, music producer so they decided to teach. Full Sail University is the top school for creative degrees yet, is the biggest rip off of any college I know. Many of the graduates have hunderdes of thousands in debit (it's a very expensive school), and end up working min wage jobs. Having a degree, especially that expensive of one in the creative world is seen as a negative as firstly the students think they are worth more than they are because full sail says it's real world experience but, it's not. No one wants a stuck up brat on set who thinks they know everything while having done nothing. And secondly creative types are expected to manage some of their budgets for the respective departments, going to college like this show a lack of business sense.

Agreed on most counts. I will say that I was doing some graphic design stuff for one of the school groups I was involved in when I started taking some art history classes, and found that the analysis of classical works was extremely helpful for me. I tried to frame what we learned in those classes as finding the reasons why these pieces of art, out of all the art in the world, had withstood the test of time and become regarded as "important". It helped me learn how to use form, coloration and contrast to more intentionally guide a viewer's eye throughout what I was making so they could pick up the important bits at a glance. This also helped get me on the path to UX when it came to web design instead of just stuffing content down users' throats.

The straight-up art classes were better for teaching specific skills like sketching, pigment mixing, etc... but I feel like the people that went to my school to learn that sort of stuff were making the best of a silly choice their high school selves made.

I left college with a degree in Psychology. While I was there I got my first IT job working at the school's help desk.

In some ways I think the psych degree helped me in IT more than a computer science degree would, at least for the level I'm currently at.

It taught me good research practices, how to critically analyze statistical data and determine whether or not it was still relevant. IT moves quicker than psychology but there are definitely similar principles at play when it comes to citing good sources to make your point. It also helped cement the idea that people make mistakes with surprising regularity, but will go out of their way to avoid acknowledging that fact. It taught me the importance of wording when it came to crafting surveys, which has translated nicely into asking the right questions about a user's current predicament. I hated learning most of this stuff at the time but now that I have it's very helpful. In other words, college helped me learn the skills I lacked the intrinsic motivation to learn on my own. Plus, it would have probably been more difficult to get a job/references in the field outside of school since I didn't have any certs or job experience.

I went into school thinking I would want to eventually get my PhD and become a psychologist. By the time I graduated I realized I had done enough formal schooling... if I were to do it all over again, knowing I would be going into IT, I would have probably looked for an IT-based technical school or a local mentor instead. But as it is, this crazy twisting road I've taken has taught me some pretty useful stuff and helped me get some good clients on the side so I can't complain!

@creayt said:

@scottalanmiller said:

@creayt said:

Thus, when the datacenter peeps created the RAID 10 it removed all partitions from all drives and used the full capacity of the drives for the RAID.

So this is a process question.... but what are people in the datacenter doing System Admin tasks? I've seen places do this before, but it seems like a bad idea. There is no need for a NOC / DC tech to be doing this and the SA always has to double check it anyway and there is a lot of room for error. And when you want to tweak things, like this, the process gets broken and it doesn't hold up anyway.

Why not let the DC do the physical work and leave the system's configuration to the systems people?

I actually don't know what any of those acronyms are LOL. I'm a web developer and this is my new server and it's colocated in a datacenter a few states away and at this point they have to do any and all non-remote desktop tasks, there's just no other option. It's got a DRAC card but I'm new to servers and learning this as I go and that's not set up ( yet ).

NOC = Network Operations Center
DC = Data Center
SA = System Administrator

Someone correct me if I'm wrong!

Starting some robocopy jobs, adding to my list of IT pipe dreams and making plans to enable all of Goverlan's features on our network before the trial runs out.

Oh and watching the clock get closer to the weekend while waiting for the traditional Friday IT User Disaster to happen, of course...

Makes sense - Mainly for now I just want the ability to tell potential clients that it's not just me and my configurations making sure their data is backed up automatically, and I really like the idea of my backup application testing itself regularly. I will probably have both hypervisors running once I can snag another test server and do some side-by-side feature comparisons.

@scottalanmiller said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

@WingCreative said:

It sounds like it might be feasible to run a free Hyper-V host without any sort of Windows VM involved... As I am a fan of irony, I may just have to try it and see what I can do with ManageEngine's Hyper-V configuration tool (the best free option Google has found for me so far).

It would be an odd & rare choice though, if you're only going to use linux. You'd likely get better preformance out of other hypervisors and better management.

It sounds more odd than it is. Yes, Xen will beat anyone at that workload. But SMBs just don't have a need for performance. They all think that that matters, but it doesn't. Losing 1% to overhead is not noticeable to 99.99% of SMBs. And even fewer of the ones using only one server. And if that really is a factor, you can overcome it with a few dollars of additional hardware on that one server.

What HyperV brings to the table that XenServer lacks is free backup utilities that are end user friendly like Unitrends and Veeam. These are lacking on XenServer. Nearly everyone needs backup, almost no one needs the extra performance. So in those rare cases where you are an SMB, have only one server and need everything to be Linux, there is actually a reasonable chance that HyperV might make more sense.

Of course, XenServer should be more stable there, a tiny bit faster, easier to manage and if you are 100% Linux you can probably figure out backups on your own since XS supports that. But it stills leaves space for HyperV to play nicely.

This is pretty much my reasoning @thecreativeone91 - I'm tired of checking out things like Veeam B&R and realizing that I can't use it on my current hypervisor of choice because they only support "all major hypervisors"... AKA VMware and Hyper-V.

@thecreativeone91 said:

@WingCreative said:

Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people on medicaid are against the idea of taxpayers paying for others' healthcare....

I think you got that backwards most people on medicaid are wanting it free. They are the ones that have been getting reduced cost items for years.

@Dashrender said:

@thecreativeone91 said:

@WingCreative said:

Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people on medicaid are against the idea of taxpayers paying for others' healthcare....

I think you got that backwards most people on medicaid are wanting it free. They are the ones that have been getting reduced cost items for years.

Medicaid is for the poor, Medicare is for the retired (generally) - so I'd agree that those on Medicare don't want to see taxpayers paying for other's healthcare - because the believe is that they've paid into Medicare their whole working lives and are now receiving the benefit of their payments.

Oops - removed the incorrectly assigned snarkiness. Let these quotes stand as a testament to me being the latest one to get them confused

It's a weird time to be alive.

Netflix may be cheaper than cable, and "unlimited minutes" is standard for cell phones instead of being an unbelievable sales pitch nowadays, but a 15 minute ambulance ride can cost $1770 versus $0 thirty years ago.

For me it's not about whether or not we're "entitled" to receive healthcare or whatever. When a large part of my income goes directly to our defense budget in order to build tanks we don't need and ensure other nations don't ruin our lives, I'm left wondering why we can't collectively scrounge up enough to make sure an ambulance ride or getting a bachelor's degree can't do the same thing to someone living paycheck to paycheck.

I'm hoping that 10 years from now, there will either be major changes to the healthcare and educational systems in America or I will be an expat. It doesn't seem right for me to raise my children in one of the few developed countries where either one of these necessities can financially decimate them.

It sounds like it might be feasible to run a free Hyper-V host without any sort of Windows VM involved... As I am a fan of irony, I may just have to try it and see what I can do with ManageEngine's Hyper-V configuration tool (the best free option Google has found for me so far).

Since you have that thread about testing out Vultr...

They don't explain it very well there but you can spin up a VM with OwnCloud already installed and ready to go.

It runs on CentOS 6, but still very handy!

@thecreativeone91 said:

I don't care for books, Everytime I've tried them they were outdated by the time it was published to some degree. Blogs and youtube will give you quality information if you know how to curate it.

That's fair, I tend to browse for books that are actively being updated with new information or provide a general enough overview that nothing substantial should change. Otherwise I apply a more extreme version of the same rule I had when I was finding psychological research sources for essays... anything over 3 years old is probably outdated in some aspects but might still have some useful information in it, just need to make sure nothing more recent directly contradicts it after reading.

Interesting to hear about the DHCP issues you had, I have been running about 7 VMs through them over the past few months - 5 CentOS, 2 Debian - and haven't had any issues myself. It sounds like I'm very lucky to not have needed support so far!

One thing to note - they put a hard limit on the number of VMs you can spin up at first... I think it's around 4 or 5 VMs? Once you hit that limit you just need to submit a ticket asking your limit to be raised. Annoying but I suppose I can understand the need for it...

The more I look at virtualization options, the more I'm drawn to Hyper-V. It seems to have a nice niche where it's free like XenServer but with more support for some really handy things like Veeam and Starwind vSAN.

The main thing keeping me from going into the deep end with it right now is that, based on my current understanding, it sounds like you need a full version of Server 2012 running to have easy configuration through a GUI. I guess it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to learn how to manage it from Server Core's CLI, but right now I'm happily doing what I need to with XenCenter so it's hard to justify the switch.

Is that an accurate representation of the state of Hyper-V management or is that another myth?

@MattSpeller said:

Lots of that stuff (especially VM's) can be done hands on for cheap or free. Highly recommend that, nothing has helped me learn faster.

I know Scott buys lots of books from something or other site - I dunno, he'll probably chime in.

True enough, I got to show some of my friends the magic of VirtualBox a couple months ago and it made me realize how much I had learned just from fiddling with it in my spare time. I also have a spare server running a couple of Linux VMs off of XenServer ... I guess I'm just hoping there's an awesome book out there that describes how it works so I can understand the theory behind it a bit more. It's my top choice in terms of specialization right now so I'd like to be able to really understand it.

I am still in my first year of being more than a level 1 help desk tech. Google and Spiceworks get me through the break/fix issues pretty well, but I have started reading IT books on specific topics to get a more thorough understanding of the underlying technology and hopefully set my systems up for success throughout upgrades, maintenance etc. I'm also trying to learn about the basics of lots of things before settling on a specialization...

I'm hoping for some recommendations on books that help to round out a relatively green IT administrator's knowledge of how and why things work. Some examples of what I mean:

Servers for Hackers by Chris Fidao - When I'm not working as an IT admin, I develop WordPress sites for small businesses and nonprofits. This book was a huge help in acquiring the knowledge I needed to properly build and maintain Linux VMs running WordPress on nginx.

Networking for System Administrators by Michael W. Lucas - I'm reading through this right now because the details of networking have been an arcane mystery to me and I'm hoping to eventually be comfortable implementing pfSense. Since there's no concrete timetable on that, I figured I may as well learn the basics of networking itself instead of relying on tutorials or things like the pfSense Cookbook. Lucas does a good job explaining the basics of many very complex things, along with the tools to figure out which of those things is malfunctioning when there's a network problem.

So, are there any good books you remember reading that helped jumpstart your understanding on a particular IT topic? I'd love to find a good primer on virtualization in particular, but really anything that is well-written is awesome. Bonus if they're on Safari Books Online!

@thecreativeone91 said:

@WingCreative said:

True, to be honest I'm mainly just biased against Facebook as a company which discourages me from installing more of their apps.

Specifically, I really hate the way they decided to try and move people over to Messenger by showing messages sent to you via notifications without you being able to read them unless you download the app. It shows that the primary FB app still receives the messaging data and could still display it in full, but it won't. They patched their app to remove a feature but continue to download messages to serve as ads for their other app - boo to that IMO.

There's actually good reason for this. The Facebook app does not always run in the background updating this saves your battery (and data if you are super limited) Those in app notifications will not appear instantly but rather at select intervals. Facebook Messenger is a separate and more lightweight application that runs in the background and will update and notify about messages almost instantly.

Interesting, I didn't know about that difference. That does help to explain why they split things up, thanks for the explanation!

True, to be honest I'm mainly just biased against Facebook as a company which discourages me from installing more of their apps.

Specifically, I really hate the way they decided to try and move people over to Messenger by showing messages sent to you via notifications without you being able to read them unless you download the app. It shows that the primary FB app still receives the messaging data and could still display it in full, but it won't. They patched their app to remove a feature but continue to download messages to serve as ads for their other app - boo to that IMO.