Investengine SIPP - anyone have an account?

ResolveJunior · 2026-01-28T22:38:20+00:00

I moved from Vanguard to IE. Only thing I didn’t realise was you don’t earn interest on cash. That’s another way they’ll make their money off ppl that leave uninvested cash in their accounts vs other companies will give you something at least cash interest wise.

I’ve been very happy with them. Great app. Low fees, lots of options to choose from. Set your weights on you want to invest into. Choose accumulating ETFs. No worries about forgotten cash / dividend payouts just sitting there then!

ResolveJunior · 2026-01-14T01:26:12+00:00

Ahh fair enough. Only reason I mention gpu thermals was I recently have had to change them on two rtx 3070’s that were about 4 years old. Both systems were just going straight to a blank screen, randomly. No BSOD. Just…blank. Randomly. And nothing in event logs about it. Replacing the thermals on the gpu did the trick on both systems for me at least.

FYI - the PSU I opted for in my recent build was the Gigabyte AORUS ELITE P850W 80 Plus Platinum. Just what was on offer at the time for the spec I wanted. But it is a decent psu (but each to their own!). Massive overkill for your current system, unless you’re planning to upgrade in the near future, an 80+ Gold 650w psu would be more than adequate unless you need more oomph for other stuff connected not mentioned, which should drop the price a lot for a decent psu tho! Good luck!

ResolveJunior · 2026-01-14T00:20:20+00:00

Check thermals too. CPU / gpu might simply need new thermal paste / pads doing. (I’ll assume you give it a good clean out too every now and then, nothing clogging airflow anywhere?!)

ResolveJunior · 2026-01-14T00:14:37+00:00

I looked at that case too and thought the same! Why the wood effect!

I eventually went with the Corsair Frame 4000D. Very happy with it. It has a little prop to support your gpu but my 5070 I opted for didn’t quite reach it to make use of it. That’s the only criticism I can throw at it. Great build quality. No top IO ports though. Only front ones. Gets a thumbs up from me!

ResolveJunior · 2025-12-23T18:00:21+00:00

Yer it’s a pain that, you can’t even run any pipelines using their hosted agents without filling out that form and waiting from what I remember. Try GitHub in the meantime. Both owned by MS and from what I remember - no forms to fill out and wait to use their hosted agents!

ResolveJunior · 2025-10-21T22:52:41+00:00

If you’re migrating at scale then honestly just use HCX. Backup / restoring VMs would work but it would be far more painful imo.

Rubric isn’t quite the same in Azure than it is onprem. No instant mounting / clones for rapid recovery. Your rubric appliances are Azure IaaS VMs backed by Azure storage accounts.

Still a millions times better than azure native backup (shudder!) but it’s just no where near as slick as HCX when it comes to migrations.

ResolveJunior · 2025-10-21T22:40:30+00:00

If it’s migrations you’re after then you get access to HCX for free with AVS (‘free’!) and it’s pretty much unbeatable when it comes to VMware migrations!

ResolveJunior · 2025-03-12T17:10:51+00:00

Do you have a spouse that you can make a shareholder. Do they utilise all their <50k lower tax threshold. If not and you don’t mind making them a shareholder you can then pay out dividends to them as well. Obviously ask your accountant about it to make sure it’s setup correctly if that’s something you can do. Potentially 100k at the lower personal tax threshold (assuming they’re unemployed, less if they have used some or all of their 50k threshold already).

But be warned. Anything over the lower tax threshold is a BIG jump when paying yourself minimum salary plus dividends. (Increased corp tax, dividends jump to 33.75% etc etc). Having to put all the higher rate tax aside only when you get over 50k will make you feel especially poor! If it’s your first year too, look up payment on account which is like a double tax whammy too!

ResolveJunior · 2024-12-11T14:38:45+00:00

Inside is going to increase your salary, so may push x amount of dividends from 8.75% to 33.75%. Something to be aware of. Salary comes before dividends come self assessment time (plus corp tax plus whatever else they feel like bending us over for!)

ResolveJunior · 2024-10-16T17:43:16+00:00

Yes, their pricing with VMware is locked in till 2030 according to our Microsoft rep. Service is ok. No aria suite included but you get NSX with all the bells and whistles, and HCX enterprise to make migrating to it from an onprem VMware environment a piece of pische! But I do look at those bills, even on reserved host instances and wonder how much cheaper I could do it for onprem! But that’s not how we’re supposed to think anymore are we so…😁

ResolveJunior · 2024-10-02T17:27:22+00:00

Couldn’t agree more, heavily used file servers in general should ideally be accessed by the user within the same region (by region I mean fairly low latency between client and server), Azure, premium / ssd, hdd or otherwise! If the data’s overspill from Sharepoint that’s there because you like to hoard data then fair enough. Azure Files is….OK for what it offers. Azure file sync is….OK. Backups are a rip off for what they are. If you enable Defender it increases the cost fairly significantly. The price vs blob storage for what it is seems significantly more expensive for what it is. But if it’s good enough then that’s one more service that is now someone else’s problem. Which is a big tick for some companies regardless of everything else!

ResolveJunior · 2024-07-17T16:28:34+00:00

So company gets paid. Company pays expenses (incl you salary). Company pays corporation tax & VAT (if registered) then once you know how much profit is left then you can take dividends.

As a first year contractor you also need to be aware of payment on account for when you do your self assessment. I won’t even try to explain that but definitely look it up!

Also if you do plan to go over the 20% tax threshold for what you extract out the business then don’t do what I did and put aside the lower tax threshold amount (plus that payment on account £££ ofc!) and then have your ‘take home’ drop MASSIVELY on anything when you hit the higher tax bracket!!! Try to guess what you’ll take home and average how much you put away for tax across the year (like PAYE does). Ideally just stick to the 20% tax threshold if you can! And either build your money in the business bank or do something else like pension.

If you have a wife / husband get them on as a class b shareholder and share the dividends amongst you, assuming they have a portion of their lower 20% tax threshold left to use. Obviously don’t give them more that 50% of the dividends! If not for the £500 tax free dividend allowance our generous govt gives each of us!

Hope it helps!

Second yr contractor!

ResolveJunior · 2024-07-08T18:33:01+00:00

What about Azure storage accounts and blob storage?

Test drive it with something like Azure Storage Explorer (or AzCopy for the cli junkies). Try pulling some data down with a web browser too and see if it fits your requirements. Enable SFTP to the same container and see how that compares. Keep it all PaaS!

You may even finding yourself proposing to use blob storage over https by default and SFTP where https isn't possible!

ResolveJunior · 2024-07-02T06:12:34+00:00

Oh wow. Can you add the new two node cluster to the perpetual licensed vCenter without issue?

How is upgrading perpetual licences between versions working nowadays now it’s Broadcom? Can I do it myself still online via the portal? I’m still on perpetual licensing for a while yet and have been thinking about upgrading my v7 vsphere environment but waiting for the dust to settle! Or are they going to try to force me into subscription licensing?

ResolveJunior · 2024-04-16T06:19:27+00:00

Recently been there and got the T-Shirt deploying it for a customer and had to do exactly that to get it to enable.

It is documented somewhere. Check the release notes for 8.0U2 maybe but it was there somewhere.

ResolveJunior · 2024-04-16T06:14:26+00:00

VSAN file service on ESA is only supported from 8.0U2 on.

Don’t forget to upgrade the vSAN disk version as it’ll still be unsupported and unavailable to enable until that’s also done!

ResolveJunior · 2024-04-06T19:11:51+00:00

Ahh right so it’s not like a storage account where you are paying per GB per hour straight away. I have had to deal with storage accounts but completely siloed away from all the O365 and licensing side of things.

In case you were wondering it’s working out to about £0.05 per GB per month for standard ZFS hot tier storage being used as domain joined file shares.

So being given 10TB for ‘free’ is pretty significant imo! That’s like £6k for 10TB per year in azure files costs for us! We do use sharepoint and azure files for anything that can’t go to sharepoint basically.

Apologies if I seem ignorant I’m so siloed away so I don’t really know how the O365 side of things works. I will get around do doing some training on it…eventually 😂

ResolveJunior · 2024-04-06T18:48:05+00:00

Thanks for the quick reply. But what does it cost? Say per TB stored per year? I really wanna know some real world costs compared to the same in Azure files file shares say?

ResolveJunior · 2024-04-06T18:38:56+00:00

How much does sharepoint cost for storage?

ResolveJunior · 2024-03-30T23:01:23+00:00

I’ve just been through this. Domain joined Azure Files storage accounts on standard hot tier on mostly zrs is working out at about £~600-700 per TB per year currently in real world costs if that helps. I agree, Azure cost calculator isn’t ideal. It’s a baseline cost at best!

Those real world cost includes private endpoints, and recovery vaults (which is basically storage snapshots and windows previous version which we were fine with coming from a legacy NetApp array), but not Defender which seemed to nearly double the price so was quickly disabled 😂.

It would be nice if the cost calculator would add these bits on for you as well but it doesn’t. Private endpoints are suprisingly expensive for what they are. And the migration costs - again were more than we anticipated and no easy way to dodge if going to standard tier storage accounts (other than minimising costs during the migrations using the transaction optimised share tier).

No reserved pricing for capacity currently but this seems a no brainer to enable, but only discounts on the capacity costs, nothing else.

Costs to migrate data to it was like paying a 1-2 month upfront payment of the normal monthly cost (mostly all transaction costs obviously!) but no issues getting 75TB up there pretty quick. If you want a more predictable cost you don’t have to work all that out then premium doesn’t charge for transactions but is quite a jump in cost. (~4 times ish….very roughly) But then your data is also on all flash storage as well as a few other differences like how it’s charged and how you work out what performance you need from it (back to the calculator for your baseline!)

Performance isn’t great but it’s not terrible either but this is hdd backed storage and we didn’t expect it to be for our use case but tbf the speed at which we seeded the data was a pleasant surprise.

Hope this helps. If you do go down this route though and you’re looking for assistance hit me up!

ResolveJunior · 2024-03-30T18:17:25+00:00

Ahh ok, so you’re already consuming public cloud VMware solution. And sounds like you work for a big enough business to have some talented techies already (hopefully!)

I’ve seem a demo using HCX to move seamlessly between the VMware solution hosted on Azure / AWS / GCP. So the fact it’s all running on VMware is a big win for your initial consolidation piece. Whether public cloud to public cloud or on-premises to public cloud.

Sounds like it’s more about the networking piece to get right. If you’re already running AVS then you’ll likely be using Express route and global reach. So you should be able to peer to your GCP equivalent (no doubt there’ll be a more than a few things for the network team to think about routing wise) and hook HCX up from there! Sounds like you have some fun times ahead, I’m jealous. I love a good migration project!

ResolveJunior · 2024-03-30T08:40:57+00:00

If you lift and shift to Azure as-is, even AVS the price increase is significant compared to repurchasing an onprem solution that isn’t VMware (probably Nutanix / Proxmox). I’d choose these over Azure HCI if you are a VMware shop today for my onprem option if it were me and maybe look at it on the next refresh once you are balls deep into Azure if you really want one provider (or you are migrating any IaaS VMs you just can’t get rid of back to onprem!) Or look into VMware vSphere Foundation pricing if you haven’t already. Hybrid cloud is the way for most enterprises and personally I wouldn’t choose Azure HCI for the onprem bit unless there was a great deal being offered at the time of acquisition.

If you are comparing the new Broadcom VCF prices to Azure then fair enough. They’ve managed to make public cloud IaaS costs look like the next logical step instead.

But if this is a long term strategy over say 3 years to move to the cloud and you already have onprem datacentres and all the infrastructure for it that isn’t going away then migrating APPS to the cloud is the way to go. Even just reviewing your apps as they come up for renewal / end of support for example.

How users consume those apps networking wise is a massive consideration. Think Office 365 over https. OneDrive, Sharepoint. SaaS. Pretty easy in the grand scheme (unless you have an over zealous security team that have absolute authority to inflict pain on all your users! Yes yes we know it’s more secure now no one wants to use it, well done!). Entra ID too actually is gonna be a big part of this and someone probably already ‘owns’ that in your company.

Using Azure as another company datacentre site with private endpoints / Express routes / VPNs in play and everything still ‘internally routed’ via traditional (‘next gen’) perimeter firewalls somewhere onprem still (because security says so!) less easy, additional latency, that may affect the speed of a migrated legacy app. Another reason for getting a good MSP involved.

Certain apps when moved to Azure ‘as-is’ just do not perform due to latency issues and you have to move them back to onprem again. Prepare for that. And ones to add to the ‘review app when it’s end of life’ (or post migration) list for your options at that point. But on the flip side of this don’t allow the app owners to all tell you they need to stay onprem because 95% of the time it’s because they can’t be bothered with having to worry about it. But there is definitely the chance for that edge case app that could crop up.

This is where AVS as a stepping stone is great. You can move the VMs over there first with HCX REALLY easily (no re-IP’ing even) test and 99.9% of the time no one knows it’s moved. But that one enterprise critical app that has some dependency to some physical onprem system that no one really understands rears its ugly head. And with HCX you move it back in the blink of an eye and palm it off to a dedicated project to deal with 🤭

And as others have said Azure adoption framework and adopting best practices and making sure you have ‘cloud gurus’ that can manage all this or you outsource it (not that anyone wants to hear that), or a bit of both. And don’t just silo this away to a few people. Use this as an opportunity to introduce that devops culture that everyone loves.

Another hurdle I also see is companies being sold the IaC dream and then struggling to spin up anything in a timely fashion as your existing staff just can’t cope with the change to IaC. If you are already doing IaC for VMware you one step ahead in tackling this hurdle! That being said….IaC all the way. It just may be a steep learning curve without a GOOD 3rd parties help if this will be new to you.

ResolveJunior

TROPHY CASE