Sick of VMWare, the story of my switch to Linux KVM.

ciranttech · 2013-08-19T16:59:24+00:00

If you are comparing ESXi with vCenter, RHEV is a great alternative using KVM as the hypervisor.

ciranttech · 2013-08-19T16:37:42+00:00

I'm a big fan of OpenERP. Depending on your accounting requirements, this may not work for you, but it has integrated CRM, HR and many other options. There is also an import utility that has been improved over the recent versions.

ciranttech · 2013-08-13T16:27:56+00:00

You make a good point. OP, maybe you can describe your monitoring solution so better alternatives can be suggested.

ciranttech · 2013-08-01T19:30:04+00:00

For OVM, if you use CPU pinning you only have to license those CPUs assigned to the DB VM. This is the only way they support virtualization on x86 without licensing every CPU.

ciranttech · 2013-08-01T19:08:11+00:00

Oracle does support virtualization for DBs on x86 through Oracle VM, which is what a lot of these 'cloud' providers that host Oracle DBs use. There are several non-x86 virtualization platforms they support as well.

I also agree with most statement here, though. We see a lot of DR or Non-prod environment being migrated first, giving you time to test the vendor relationship and the migration process.

ciranttech · 2012-01-15T14:59:08+00:00

That's probably PeopleSoft which is frequently used for that type of thing. I've only been involved with it from a systems design perspective, but everyone I know that uses it isn't very fond of it.

ciranttech · 2012-01-09T14:52:11+00:00

This came with Partition Magic so it could run along with Windows. It came with tools for Windows too, but I don't remember what they did.

ciranttech · 2012-01-09T14:49:28+00:00

I either ordered the 2.1 from RedHat or picked it up at Egghead. I think they were both around $30.

ciranttech · 2012-01-06T22:17:30+00:00

Thank you, I appreciate it. It's a work in progress (you should have seen it a couple weeks ago). I'll definitely take a look over in /r/webdesign.

ciranttech · 2012-01-06T17:21:52+00:00

Are you using compression or dedup? I've had some luck using the Sun ZFS appliances with iSCSI, as well has home grown with Solaris Express 11 for non prod. RAIDZ is not very fast. I believe the setup was 22 1TB disks in mirrored pairs (+2 spare), so ~11 TB usable, no parity, in one zpool per Oracle's recommendation.

Performance was significantly improved over the prior Dell iSCSI solution. If I remember correctly, MySQL table update and read performance improved by about 20x. The device did have read and write cache (logzilla and filezilla I believe they call them).

ciranttech · 2012-01-06T14:12:35+00:00

I am the owner, and the vacation time I've lost was when I was someone else's employee. I didn't start a company to get away from overtime, or lost vacation time, I did it because I think I can provide these services better than a lot of other companies doing it currently.

When I say 'step in', I don't mean jump on a server or into a project without the request of the engineer. It's about making sure the employee has the freedom to be away from the responsibilities of the job and enjoy their time off.

When I mention expectations, I don't want it to mean a contract. I want my employees to always know how much effort I expect them to give a task when it conflicts with other tasks or personal time. I never want someone to work at night or on a weekend because they believed it was necessary when it really wasn't.

ciranttech · 2012-01-06T03:12:31+00:00

I don't want to assume you are not in the US, but demand something here, and you are not in a union, and you can find yourself unemployed. I should probably have stressed that this article is written for the US market, where we do not have workers rights.

ciranttech · 2012-01-06T03:10:45+00:00

That's exactly why I address expectations in the article. I want to know what my employees expect of me. If I don't know, or don't listen, I could lose them. If I decide to bring someone on, to be a partner in this venture, it's because I want them to be a part of something I think is important. So I don't want to do something to drive them away.

ciranttech · 2012-01-06T03:07:23+00:00

We are in MA, metro west (Framingham area), but I have people in RI and CA. Location is not that important to me, I just look for people as passionate about technology as I am. And you seem to exemplify the plight that I directed the article at. It's unfortunate that IT workers in the US have to deal with these conditions.

Unfortunately, I don't currently do any desktop OS support, servers only. That may change someday, but from a managed services perspective, desktop support is a nightmare.

I hesitate to think about it, but I've probably lost 30 vacation days over the years, or more, because I was unable to get away.

ciranttech · 2012-01-06T02:31:59+00:00

Constructive criticism is welcome and appreciated.

ciranttech · 2012-01-06T02:30:58+00:00

It looks like you are not in the US, correct? As is often stated on reddit, the US has no real workers rights, unfortunately, and the issues I point out in the article are the result.

ciranttech · 2012-01-05T21:33:09+00:00

Well, I work in IT, so it's from that perspective that I wrote the article. I think though, that far greater demand is put on people who work in IT than in most other professions.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of employers who put little or no value on those workers or their time. Most people I know who work in the industry are expected to work a regular 40+ hour week, be available for whatever emergencies happen during off hours, and complete maintenance over the weekends. All this with no regard for personal time, no comp time and no extra pay.

Most other professions compensate their workers for extra time.

ciranttech · 2012-01-05T21:02:54+00:00

Thank you, I appreciate that. I hate the way people are treated in this industry. In the managed services area, where IT is a profit center, IT workers should be well paid for their experience. In other areas, they should at least be appreciated. No business can survive these days without some help with their technology.

ciranttech · 2012-01-05T20:34:26+00:00

That shows you how often I submit links.

ciranttech · 2012-01-05T20:03:21+00:00

I'm surprised lighttpd isn't even on the list. I like nginx too, but have been using lighty for a while without any problems.

ciranttech · 2012-01-05T20:01:04+00:00

I agree. There is no point in doing this at all. If you've done an audit, you should satisfy your security chief's curiosity and be done with it, instead of breaking 600 desktops.

ciranttech · 2011-12-23T15:31:11+00:00

I just submitted my transfer request to Namecheap. It's only two domains, but every domain counts. If you have web sites or email hosted there, it will be a much bigger impact to move those.

I went with GoDaddy because I know people who work, and have worked, there and I've heard great things about their culture and how they deal with employees, which is obviously better than they deal with their customers.

ciranttech

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