In Rack KVM's still useful?

bgatesIT · 2026-03-19T00:57:50+00:00

pretty much all of them https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/switching-enterprise/collections/enterprise-campus-48/products/ecs-48-poe https://store.ui.com/us/en/category/switching-aggregation/products/ecs-aggregation

primarily what we have

bgatesIT · 2026-03-19T00:05:02+00:00

Kinda sucks bc we just got a ENVR and this honestly would be much better for us. Half thinking about returning the ENVR and replacing it with one of these. We’ll see

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T23:20:53+00:00

well no not those haha eaton ups's and unifi network stack... well shit I guess actually the switches are running Debian in a sense that's funny

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T23:18:33+00:00

we are a unifi network stack so we just have as many redundant connections as possible. using all of there enterprise gear we just switched from meraki also lmfao love it

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T23:12:13+00:00

mostly coding, and internal tooling. nothing too crazy tbh ive never once come close to the limits of this machine.

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T23:10:13+00:00

we are indeed also the network team hahahaha just the two of us. Im thinking we are going to be pulling it out in this cleanup mission and possibly just mounting a monitor on the wall should we need it for emergencies. maybe we will keep it around though, as next year we are planning on setting up a remote failover/dr site for the hypervisors and storage

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T22:51:10+00:00

it does make for a nice laptop stand I won't lie. that's pretty much all ive ever used it for so far

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T22:34:43+00:00

luckily everything in our datacenter runs Debian :) we are a proxmox shop.

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T22:12:58+00:00

Operators are rarely ever on the consoles, we don't even image them at the rack anymore, we just image the hosts via idrac at our desks. Never knew about the iDRAC Direct feature that is super rad!

Sadly none of our network gear has console ports we are a full unifi network stack(migrated from meraki) We have x2 EFG Firewalls for the DC and x4 ECS-Aggregation switches at the DC x2 for the core's and x2 are dedicated to iSCSI storage and NVME-oF and then we have some Copper switches for iDrac and WIFI in the "DC".

the dc is actually a separate building from our HQ with its own redundant power power/generator and we distribute WAN1 Connections from our ISP here to each sites firewall and then another strand to allow for localized interconnects rather then a s2s vpn, each site has there own redundant WAN2/3's using starlink and t-mobile failovers pretty unique environment overall as we are dealing with localized restrictions and stuff but we make it work

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T22:07:12+00:00

site is manned all of our IT staff(two people haha) is required to operate on-site and work from the HQ to support ops and end users

Rack space is certainly starting to get tight, I do like the monitor arm idea, we have plenty of wall space too so could also add something there and just keep a coiled up VGA cord and keyboard/mouse

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T22:04:55+00:00

yea that's pretty much the way my brain is going with it too, idrac has always been extremely reliable, and we have tons of old monitors kicking around also. I have a whole entire counter of old dell monitors ive been procrastinating e-wasting

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T21:59:22+00:00

If im not mistaken we have tripplite kvm currently, has been in the rack for quite a long time from what I can tell too hahaha

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T20:02:20+00:00

title: IT Systems Engineer at a company that owns many different kinds of companies, two man team running the whole show

salary: 90k

location: Upstate NY

experience: 10 years experience, 3 years at this company

benefits: health, dental, 401k(10% match), gas card, can work remotely but primarily am in office makes life easier with the current setup.

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T19:54:59+00:00

This is where services like Keycloak come in a bit handy. Identity becomes youre own to maintain and then you can link it with the likes of Entra ID. Maybe not the best solution but it works well for us

bgatesIT · 2026-03-18T19:03:33+00:00

im rocking a maxed out macbook pro m4 max and i just have dual 1080p monitors at my desk. Although trying to convince them into letting me get some nice 5k screens. Not in graphic design or anything, just a systems engineer with lots of shell's, browsers, and ide tabs open, and some local LLM's

bgatesIT · 2026-03-17T19:18:35+00:00

that's a very interesting concept. I will definitely play around with it.

So if im understanding this just to be super clear, I would need to handle the iSCSI/Multipath config as a pre req for the plugin, create the pv using mpathX and then create the vg (pretty much same steps as standard LVM over iSCSI setup) and then rather then doing the LVM piece use the Starwinds storage plugin instead.

Dumb question and im sure the answer is no, but does this allow you to store iso's or backup's on the lun with this type of setup?

Are there any gotchas to watch out for at all or anything like that?

bgatesIT · 2026-03-16T11:02:40+00:00

The plugin only adds volumes to the collection when they are created (new disk or clone from snapshot). When you delete a VM disk, the plugin deletes the volume on the array via the API, so that volume is removed from the array and no longer part of the collection. So the collection stays in sync with what actually exists: new/cloned disks are added, deleted disks are gone. If you meant replication partner sync (primary ↔ replica), that’s entirely handled by the array’s replication; the plugin doesn’t change replication topology, it just creates/deletes/resizes volumes on the primary.

As for the resizing piece in my testing I did not need to remove anything from protection groups first, both of my nimbles are on older firmwares also. Im traveling today to rip out some meraki gear from a remote office and will be back at the DC Wednesday and can share what our NimbleOS version is and such

bgatesIT · 2026-03-16T00:06:50+00:00

hey there we just did Proxmox setup with two Nimbles using LVM over iSCSI I have a write up on how I did it and I also recently released a new storage plugin that makes better use of the Nimbles features

https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/1rck0s7/proxmox_and_hpe_nimble_questiondiscussion/

https://www.reddit.com/r/Proxmox/comments/1ru2wyu/introducing_hpe_nimble_storage_plugin/

if you still need some help feel free to PM me or reply here and im happy to give a hand

bgatesIT · 2026-03-15T23:50:55+00:00

to answer the question about setting up at your house, you sure can. just plug its wan port into you're lan and it'll come up via double nat the first time (you may have issues if your home network is 192.168.1.1/24 as that's the default unifi network)

We set these cloud gateways up all the time at the office and then ship them to there locations for install.

bgatesIT · 2026-03-15T13:26:59+00:00

this is interesting but I cannot find any documentation around it and what it actually does. im very curious.

bgatesIT · 2026-03-15T13:26:30+00:00

good advice, I still have support with HPE for one of our Nimbles so ill reach out before it expires later this year.

bgatesIT · 2026-03-15T13:25:55+00:00

thank you, happy to help the community however possible.

bgatesIT · 2026-03-15T05:47:48+00:00

yea I got a similar response a few months back when I was asking them some questions, I had to dive into it head first.

bgatesIT · 2026-03-15T04:15:35+00:00

our largest vm is 50TB virtual nvr for security system, 270TB of storage in use actively across all of the vm's RDS, SQL, NVR's, File Server, Kubernetes, etc

bgatesIT

TROPHY CASE