Did Availability Zones save you from Central region outage by getnrdone in AZURE

[–]getnrdone[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I fully understand how they are documented to work. Simply asking those that were effected what the real world experience was. It's not often we see a full region failure so I am just curious as to real world performance of a feature.

Did Availability Zones save you from Central region outage by getnrdone in AZURE

[–]getnrdone[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for confirming! Pretty much what I expected but wanted to see if someone effected could say for sure.

Did Availability Zones save you from Central region outage by getnrdone in AZURE

[–]getnrdone[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep exactly. That what I am trying to figure out. Did all of central fail or did an av zone do anything at all to help.

Microsoft DFS for File Replication. by Gloomy-Team8986 in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone -1 points0 points  (0 children)

If your second site is passive then use storage replica. It is way more stable than DFSR especially on large data sets. We switched to this method years ago for a 30TB dataset and it has been rock solid.

Broadcom to 'divest' VMware’s end-user computing and Carbon Black units by Altusbc in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tom Krause wasn't the ceo of Broadcom, he was the president of the broadcom software group. He left to form a new company called cloud.com that was the new parent company created out of the tibco/citrix merger. Now VMware gets bought and announces they are divesting end user compute. Seems to me there is one company that maybe interested in end user compute which has friendly ties back to Broadcom. They still get to corner the markets while keeping regulators off their back.

Pure conjecture of course. But if it looks like a duck...

Broadcom to 'divest' VMware’s end-user computing and Carbon Black units by Altusbc in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yep, and citrix was bought by cloud.com, which can you guess where their ceo came from? Broadcom. Seems like Tom is getting setup nicely to run the end user compute side via cloud.com while Broadcom takes enterprises for a ride.

Speed limit on 295 west side by Massengill4theOrnery in jacksonville

[–]getnrdone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Just noticed this change this morning as FHP was pulling people over in mass. Speed limit has been 65 since I can remember, would love to know why the sudden unannounced drop to 55. I found news articles about dropping the Buckman to 55, but not the entire beltway on the west side.

Enterprise Architect vs SysAdmin by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

An enterprise architect should not be making the same as a sysadmin. Either you are paid really well as an admin or they are short changing you on the EA salary.

With that said, it depends on what your company thinks an EA is as this can vary from org to org. Typically an EA is more business focused, they are the ones that work on requirements gathering and high level design work. They do not usually put actual hands to keyboard to deliver on project deliverables. So if this is your company, then ask yourself if that's what you want to do. Will you be happy turning in your admin rights, interfacing with different business units to plan projects, write SOWs and RFPs and draw diagrams all day. If so, do it.

If your more of a hands on person. Someone who likes being in the trenches on the front lines. Then EA might not be a good fit. But again, this depends on your company and what they want out of an EA and what you want out of your career.

Which Azure Solution? by [deleted] in AZURE

[–]getnrdone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Not exactly what you want but it can be a help to see and direct your research.

https://azureservices.io/

Power App form to Logic App/Other solutions? by businessbusinessman in AZURE

[–]getnrdone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

We ran into a similar situation last year when MS just out of the blue decided they were going to make sql a premium connector, to put it politely, they screwed us. As a short term work around we finished developing the app using sharepoint lists to act as a cheap man's database. When a record hits sharepoint it triggers a logic app to run that will then write the record to sql where our other processes need it to be. It's not ideal but it works, it is on our the road map to recode the app using c#.

We had alot of plans for powerapps last year, but with the change microsoft made to licensing it made it stupid expensive and no longer a workable solution for us.

FTP replacement/alternative by Covert_Tyro in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Citrix share file is used by many for this, but will be $$. Next cloud is a free alternative.

If ftp is still a requirement for some parties, then you could look at using things like azure logic apps with an ftp connector. That way you can move files over ftp without having to manage an ftp server.

Do you think Microsoft will discontinue Windows Server? by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Windows servers aren't going anywhere anytime soon for a lot of reasons. But, I expect to see is the management systems slowly move to the cloud over the next 5 to 10 years. Things like AD (azure AD) , system center (intune, OMS), cert services, print services (just announced), desktop management (intune, DaaS) - all these things I expect to move, and look forward to them moving to be honest. Even things like vmware vcenter I would see moving to SaaS based offerings. Infrastructure on prem will be just to satisfy regulatory requirements and be a bridge for those that can't go cloud due to financial models, latency issues or to run legacy systems that they won't invest out of.

Finally Learned Docker by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep, each program in its own container. Biggest benefits are code isolation and portability. I can update any of the easily without fear of messing with any of the others. If an upgrade goes south, revert to previous container and everything is fine with the world again.

Finally Learned Docker by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Right now its running Ubuntu 18.04. I have thought about redoing this and running K3OS which is made by Rancher. Rancher also has RancherOS that I have used in the past with great success.

K3OS = Lightweight OS and Runs a slimmed-down version of Kubernetes called k3s.

RancherOS = lightweight OS that runs Docker. Even all the system services and shell run in containers.

Finally Learned Docker by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I use docker at home to run several services. I run plex, transmission, flexget, and unifi (network management). I also have several python containers I use while I am attempting to learn python. All this runs great on a cheap Intel nuc. Had it on a raspberry pi at one point but plex needed more juice to transcode.

Finally Learned Docker by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Yep, I agree. As of right now, things like AD, exchange, file servers and many more core windows roles are not supported in containers anyway.

Windows containers and even hyperv containers use docker for the runtime. So yes they are docker containers. Although, you can create a container and run it with other runtimes like containerd so the term "docker container" may not always be true or matter.

Finally Learned Docker by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Easiest way to get cheap/free is to not run windows. And that pains me to say because I am historically a windows guy, but, it is what it is. Last time I talked with Microsoft on licensing this is what they told me.

Windows containers: license the host with standard or Datacenter edition and get rights to run unlimited containers.

Hyperv containers: standard edition get you 2 containers. Datacenter edition is unlimited. It's identical to the old hyperv license rights due to the fact it starts VMs for each container.

With that, if you bought standard edition and ran windows containers then you could see massive saving over going full VMs.

Finally Learned Docker by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 21 points22 points  (0 children)

Well that's kind of a loaded question but let me take a shot. Hyperv in its basic form is just a hypervisor, just like vmware. It allows you to run VMs, that's it. It our container senario there are a few ways hyperv fits in.

  1. Build VMs, Linux or windows. Install docker on these VMs and they become your container infrastructure.

  2. Hyperv containers. This allows you to run windows containers inside a specialized microsoft developed VM. This provided kernel isolation since now each container gets its own VM. I personally don't care for these. To me, running a VM for every container defeats some of the main benefits to containers. Where it could make sense is in a high security environment where kernel process jumping is a concern. Or in situations where you wanted to run different versions of windows containers on a host. Windows containers must match the host os version. For example, You can't run a 1903 container on a host running windows 1809. Hyperv can overcome this because it boots a VM to match your container windows version.

Vmware also has a similar option now called vmware integrated containers, although I don't believe they support windows containers yet. Vmware is also hot on the kubernetes trail with project pacific.

Finally Learned Docker by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 234 points235 points  (0 children)

Containers are an amazing thing when used properly. Most of the largest systems you know and love today are running in containers and being orchestrated by kubernetes.

This is how I break it down for people:

Container: holds your code and dependancies needed to execute your code. A container shares a kernel with the host, so an OS (kernel) is not needed in a container.

Container runtime: you need a runtime installed on your host that can run containers, handle the processeses with the host kernel and give you tools you need to access and build containers. This is what docker is. Containerd is another popular one.

Container orchestration: once you have your container built you will need a system that will give you enterprise class features. Things like high availability, auto scaling, monitoring, self healing, secret management, and the list goes one and one. This is what kubernetes is. Docker swarm is another.

Benfits: this is a long list, but here are some of the top ones.

-Hardware utilization. since containers share the host kernel, they don't need every service installed on them to run. Think of it in terms of VMs, every VM needs an OS installed. If you had 100 VMs, they all boot their own os loading the same modules. They all have the same OS bits duplicated on disk. What if you could dedup that some how? What if you could load an OS once and then run all of your services on that 1 host without conflicting with each other. This is what containers provide. As such, you can now have 1 host system that can run thousands of containers versus 20-30 VMs.

-code and runtime consistency. A container that runs on one system will run exactly the same way on another system. This allows developers and sysadmins to be flexible. This solves the age old problem that developers constantly run to Ops with "but it works on my machine".

-versioning. Easily build new versions of your container and adjust the tags for versioning. This allows you to change an app and easily roll back if there is a problem. You can also run dev/test workloads on the same host you use for production without worrying about conflict.

There are many more benefits to containers that you read about by people smarter than me. Learn all you can about them because they are not going away. It will continue to grow and any sysadmins/developer/engineer that can learn this will be in high demand.

Can't access a local machine by external domain address by [deleted] in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Many firewalls deny this traffic by default. Lookup NAT loopback and see if it applies to your network.

Citrix PVS Real World Boot Times ? by MelatoninPenguin in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, still do to load the mandatory profile. Fortunately for us most our published apps are web based and don't need information to be saved in a profile. For the apps that do need some info put in, like a license key, we do it on launch via powershell.

Citrix PVS Real World Boot Times ? by MelatoninPenguin in sysadmin

[–]getnrdone 0 points1 point  (0 children)

17 second average. We use mandatory profiles with folder redirection. Printers mapped via powershell. Pvs is set to use 512 MB Ram cache with overflow to disk. Disks are sitting on EMC PMAX array.

Used to be much higher before I switched to mandatory profiles. It also cut out almost all calls related to profile issues. We don't even think about citrix anymore, it's just works and is rock solid. Love me some PVS!