Posts by Trevor_Pott

Re: So, it has happened. Thinking is now a crime.

Lying under oath in a court of law is a crime. Where's the crime in lying for a job interview, hmm?

Re: Bloody replicants getting everywhere

Actually, it does. See, there are warm deserts and cold deserts. Desert just means that precipitation is slim to non-existent. Large parts of Canada's arctic, for example, are deserts. They just aren't the "hot Nevada sun" kind of desert. So which desert matters, as it gives me an idea of what is plausible to see at my feet, and I can then infer what the first thing I'd see might be by using my knowledge of flora and fauna statistical distribution for the various world deserts.

For that matter, why be limited to Terran deserts? Most of our solar system is desert. That's a lot of different things I could see at my feet. There's some interesting geology out there!

Re: lead gen campaign

"Really who has 4 bare metal servers in their home lab that meet these requirements?"

I do.

Most vExperts do. Pretty much every EMC elect or Cisco Champion does. A goodly chunk of the MVPs. Not folks that will buy Nutanix, but folks who influence companies who might, or who write about it. It's called "thought leadership". Given that John Troyer has been advising Nutnaix on things community related, I wouldn't dismiss the whole "reaching out to thought leaders" thing. Troyer has a proven track record.

This is exactly the right move for Nutanix as it comes under threat from an increasing number of competitors: build a loyal cult following amongst the sorts of people who themselves have decent followings. Of course, the "thought leaders" aren't easy to influence. Everyone is trying to influence them, so they become pretty immune pretty quick. You can only really convince them if they have whatever it is you are trying to sell to hand, and can bash on it.

Nothing succeeds with thought leaders like getting your gear into their labs.

Like it or not, it's how the game is played. More to the point, Nutanix has been building this strategy for some time, after having talked to the best of the best at influencing those who influence the rest. The community edition isn't for the hoi polloi. Hell, it's barely aimed at me, and I have been spending rather a lot of time and money putting together a lab.

It's aimed at the Howard Marks and Steven Fosketts of the world. The Stuart Minimans and the Hans de Leneers. Big names with 10x the influence someone like me has. VCDXes, high participating enterprise admins and top 50 bloggers.

The rest who want to play with the toys will be supported. They will be tolerated, but they are not the key target. Welcome to IT. I hope you enjoy your stay, but it's a hell of a lot more fun if you just let your grip on sanity go and start thinking about social dynamics like M.C. Escher thinks about architecture.

Re: Print Button

http://m.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/01/bits_on_a_disk/

Re: 10m files?

I am not talking about the ability to store the files, but rather the approximate point at which file access performance starts to degrade significantly. With NTFS this absolutely is 10M files. With ReFS, you can push that a little higher. ZFS, EXT3 and EXT4 all start to see some pretty big drop offs between 10M and 15M files. NetApp's more recent files (past three years or so) are some of the better setups; I've seen 30M files before the access starts to degrade.

Note: you can put more files on these file systems. That doesn't mean that doing so will allow accessing files on a 100M file-populated system is anywhere near as fast as accessing a file on a 10M file-populated system. Especially if the system stores these files for more than just cold archival.

If these files are accessed even semi-regularly. (Let's say 2M files a day are read or written of 10M) then the system is spending all it's time faffing about with the index. The more files you touch, the more time the system cranks away on the index rather than the data blocks.

Different file systems handle it differently, but the rule of thumb is that you have to start paying very close attention to your file server designs once you surpass 10M files. (Dramatically upping RAM, for example, or considering using a file system that can offload the index to SSD, etc...)

Re: @Vimes

"It might make a useful article, how to chose & set up a router and NAS + few machines so you can VPN in and access your data or desktop with tolerable risk?"

http://www.teamdrive.com/

Problem = solved.

"Make NAS visible to outside world".

Um hmm. And do you want to to wager how long it would take me to crack your off-the-shelf NAS with 13 pending updates and 50 known vulns...only 35 of which the vendor has patched?

Hell even I have black vulns for most of the major NASes. DO NOT EXPOSE NASES TO THE INTERNET. EVER. DO NOT DO.

If CSIS or CESC dig into my data, they must answer to a judge. Or, if not, then at the very least I cannot be sued in a Canadian court for their misdeeds.

If I am complying with Canadian law and our security services decide to break that law, my clients cannot win in court against me: they have to fight the spooks.

Ah, but if I host my data elsewhere...can I really say that I am obeying Canadian law? The data is not subject only to Canadian law if it's outside Canada. What's more, it may be impossible to know whose laws it is subject to (large cloud providers move data around the globe as part of routine maintenance).

So, unless I have a crackerjack legal team, why take the risk? Keep my data in Canada, let my customers duke privacy concerns out with our government.

American legal attack surface > 0 = bad.

"More than 30% of all ODM output is purchased by the large cloud vendors. Anybody still doing premise installations is a small customer in comparison."

Sure, but 70% of all ODM output is on premises. It's not like cloud displaced on premesis entirely. It became a supplement; CAGR for the past few years was in the cloud, but on premises purchases have stayed pretty flat.

"You have this backwards. Customers stampeded toward the cloud and left Microsoft standing in the field."

No. Wrong. Absolutely wrong. Cloud adoption is a supplement to on premises purchasing. It is not a displacement. Clouds are being used tactically, for specific workloads that work well in teh cloud. They are not a bulk replacement for all workloads, and only a handful of businesses are treating them as such. Almost every single startup that starts in the cloud goes hybrid/on-premises within 18 months simply due to cost.

"UX != GUI"

Certainly not for those who keep their pee in jars, nope. But a substantial percentage of the human race is visually oriented. So let's agree to disagree, hmm? There's the niche of people who do quadratic equations in their head for fun, then there's the entire rest of our species. For the overwhelming majority UX = GUI.

I haven't seen much OpenVZ in production, nor heard of it used in more than some niche cases. It's out there, to be sure, but like all container tech it's not yet ascendant. Try this series of 4 articles for my look at containers, including OpenVZ:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/28/docker_part_1_the_history_of_docker/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/01/docker_part_2_the_libcontainer_evolution/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/02/docker_part_3_containers_versus_hypervisors/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/04/docker_part_4_prognostication_microsoft_and_the_red_wedding/

Re: Why Hyper-V is a non-starter in all situations

@Getmo Ah, but don't forget the first rule of brand tribalism: compare the latest, greatest from your favourite brand to something several years out of date by the competition. Don't do things like "compare the most deployed version of your favourite brand versus the most deployed version of the competition", or even newest to newest. Cherry pick!

Re: Privacy and security in cloud management

Hey Clopy,

The think about Mist.io is that the whole "it's in the cloud" is a huge seller. It would be really cool if you could set up partnerships with companies in different geos and license the full version out to them. They could then run a Mist.io cloud service for geolocal customers and still be within their legal framework. Those customers get the full advantage of the Mist.io cloud offering without the lengthy setup.

Now THAT arrangement...that would be worth some damned good money, because Mist.io is a great product. :)

Re: Why Hyper-V is On Top?

I don't recall saying Hyper-V server is "part of Windows Core". I recall saying the difference between Windows Core + Hyper-V and Hyper-V server is functionally non existent, so long as you leave Windows Core at a minimal install.

Except, you know, the part where Windows Core costs money, isn't completely fucking WONTFIX broken and can be turned into a real server with a few commands. But if you're doing everything remotely, then the difference between the two is "licensing" and "Hyper-V server is slightly more miserable to get connected and set up than Windows Core".

As for "learn some PowerShell", I know lots of PowerShell. Knowing PowerShell and liking it are completely different things. I also am aware of how people actually use their tools in the real world. Survey after survey, study after study.

You'll find "people who use PowerShell for day to day management" are a pretty small subset. most administrators are just fine using PowerShell for automation. Only the "pee in jars" types use it for management.

And to be perfectly blunt, if I was going to go full "pee in jars" on something, why the metric fnord wouldn't I just go full Openstack? It doesn't cost me my left testicle, and is so modular and open I don't get locked into anything. Openstack is superior in virtually every way to Microsoft and their wretched ecosystem.

And holy pants batman, they even recognize that real human being need proper GUIs to work with tools on a day to day basis without going completely batshit bananas bonkers. That's right, ladies and germs: it's the open source community are the ones who have embraced ease of use and Microsoft and their fanboys are the ones telling us to manage every little thing from a command line.

So yeah, take your brand tribalism and go right back under your bridge. You can come back out when Microsoft gives enough fucks about their community to bring back Technet subscriptions and not a moment before.

Just buy a subscription from Azure! What do you mean you don't want to pay every month forever? And what do you mean "data sovereignty" and "foreigner rights"? Now you're just being difficult.

"Considering how bloody awful VMware's GUI tools actually are, for that statement to be true then Microsoft's must truly be beyond abysmal."

They are. Read the whole bit about the fustercluck you have to go through just to mount an ISO to install a VM. Microsoft gives negative fucks about their user base. If Windows 8 didn't teach you that, well...nothing will.

Re: Admin tools, management tools, monitoring tools, APIs, instrumentation and documentation

"AWS is a direct competitor"

Fucking Americans. there ate 7 billion of us that don't live inside your Orwellian nightmare and who don't want to. Your yankee-run public clouds aren't a competitor at all. Not for us. If we're going to use cloud computing it needs to be from companies run in countries that acknowledge that we have rights. And no, a foreign datacenter isn't enough. Ask the Irish.

Re: Why Hyper-V is a non-starter in all situations

"Limited PoS that you have to CODE SCRIPTS!!! in RUBY!!! to get it to do what you want. Utterly inferior in pretty much every way to SCCM and Opalis. We binned it long ago and never looked back."

So you don't actually know at all what you're talking about. Congratulations. You have proven your ignorance. Now why don't you attach your name to your words and own them, or are you the coward your tickbox says you are?

Re: Why Hyper-V is a non-starter in all situations

"Versus Hyper-V Server:

Install it - and it's secure and auto updated by default."

From this you are implying that Linux is insecure and does not auto-update by default. You're wrong.

CentOS is secure by default. You have to add things to it if you want to more easily manage it, or you want to make it more usable whilst staying secure. This is no different than Hyper-V.

Hyper-V needs to be joined to a domain controller to be actually usable. Then it gets it's config from the domain controller. CentOS needs the puppet agent installed, then it pulls down it's config from puppet. No real difference.

What is different is that CentOS isn't completely fucking broken if I need to work on the node individually without the primary management tools. Hyper-V is.

As virtually nobody uses Hyper-V server - stats are very clear on this, they use Windows Server - both OSes can grow from a "core" install containing not bloody much of anything to complete OSes capable of doing anything. By default, they install very small, very secure and with not bloody much to them.

Oh, and I'll take my unpatched CentOS with SELINUX on by default over the unpatched Windows any day. There's a gap between "installed" and "fully up to date" while the systems are doing their update thing, and Linux is a hell of a lot less likely to be pwned during that time. (Always assume your network is compromised!)

Meanwhile, I only have to reboot once after install with CentOS. Puppet goes on, configs it all, updates download, it reboots once and it's ready to rock. Secure the whole time, and actually usable, from console, remotely, what-have-you.

And I don't need a domain controller! I'm not locked in to an ecosystem by one vendor that will just turn the knobs on pricing whenever they feel like it! In fact, I don't even have to pay for licences for my production systems at all. I only need support for my test & dev systems, where we'll actually be prototyping workloads. I can run entire datacenters off CentOS (or derivatives) as the production distro for free...just like tens of thousands of other companies.

And no, there's no real difference between the "free" version and the "support included" version. The delta between Microsoft's "free" Hyper-V server and the full Windows Server is so big that Hyper-V server's adoption is limited to a handful of hyper-scale deployments and some real die hard Microsoft fans.

But if you know Redhat then you know CentOS. They're the same goddamned thing. For that matter, there difference between SuSE and RedHat isn't that big anymore, and the skills cross over (and the default configs are so close) that it is less of a jump than going from Server 2003 to Server 2008 R2.

Microsoft has a great hypervisor. But they've fucked up every aspect of the ecosystem, from pricing and limitations to management tools to chasing away all their partners in the name of getting their hostages moved to Azure.

Put your fanboy goggles down and actually look at the bloody ecosystems as a whole, will you? It isn't about "company A has this feature" or "company B can do this, if you beat them properly". It's about the whole of the experience. And it's about the experience over years.

How is actually setting up an environment from scratch? How is maintianing that environment over time? What are the long term costs? The time commitments? The training requirements? What is lock-in like? How does the vendor - and/or the community - treat customers/users/administrators?

Are they trying to push you away from running your own infrastructure and towards paying even more to run your workloads on their American public cloud where they're beholden to a sociopathic government that doesn't' recognize the basic rights of it's own citizens, let alone the citizens of other countries?

If I pick a hypervisor ecosystem what can I expect for myself (as the administrator) and my company over the next decade? The next two?

Right from the installation of the "free" server through to "how you are treated over the course of decades" Microsoft is consistently "only just acceptable enough to not get binned, if you are already locked in to them." "They do the bare minimum and not one iota more" is not a great recommendation. It works if you're a monopoly, but it's worth nothing where there's actual competition.

Microsoft will never learn that lesson. I can only pray VMware does. In the meantime, there are alternatives, and they're damned fine alternatives. Finally. they took long enough to get that way.

Microsoft has a WONTFIX-class broken freebie version of Hyper-V server that is nothing more than a crippled version of Server Core + Hyper-V role. Congratulations. Free ESXi is *still* better, and KVM is a better choice than both. OOooooOOooOOooooo.

Of course, nobody actually uses it. If you look at the adoption stats, much to my great dismay, virtually everyone using Hyper-V as their hypervisor is doing so not only with full versions of Windows Server...they do it with the GUI installed.

Now, why might that be? It's because of the management tools, and because they want ease of setup. Management tools are important. I know that's something you are terrified to discuss - because it's where Microsoft looks like der lumpenfools - but it's true. Real people and real sysadmins in the real world actually give fucks about ease of use.

Hyper-V server is broken. Server Core + Hyper-V is a miserable bitch to work with if something's gone wrong. So virtually everyone deploys full fat Windows as a hypervisor. Study after study after study finds this.

What's interesting is that in terms of total deployed nodes, hyper-v server manages to almost equal Windows Server /w GUI deployments because a handful of really large deployments use it.

Now, what's more interesting is that despite installing the full-GUI version of Windows Server, virtually nobody deploying more tan two nodes uses the Windows Server native Hyper-V tools. Hyper-V in practice for virtually every deployment means the full fat GUI to run the nodes and SCVMM to run the clusters.

While 5nine has cult-like status amongst the SMB market they have only recently made any sort of break through into the midmarket and they are functionally absent from the enterprise. This means that small clusters can be - and increasingly are - run by 5nine, but large (or multiple) clusters are run by SCVMM.

So when discussing Hyper-V in any practical sense you have the following:

1) Full fat Windows installed in order to run VMs and have an actual GUI to configure the underlying hypervisor.

2) 5Nine for small deployments.

3) A drop-and-cut upgrade to SCVMM after you reach the magic pumpkin point with 5Nine.

More critically, 5Nine's uptake has been dramatic in the past, oh 18 months or so. The last 8ish months have in really been the part where the name has spread and it is discussed openly. (Which is critical, because before about 8 months ago people treated using 5Nine as a point of shame.)

What's not happening is people installing the broken Hyper-V server, fighting with each node and then using Windows 8 to remotely manage it with Microsoft's frustrating remote management tools. (Which is the other part of this that you always ignore. Only truly ill people want to use Windows 8 for anything, which has really suppressed the uptake of Hyper-V server.)

So a discussion about Hyper-V is a discussion about Windows Server. Like it or not. Cheers.