@hobbit666 said in Air Gap Backups:

How would people define this?
Just send a backup to the cloud, or only achevied by backing up to tape (or other media) and store somewhere?

We're looking to backup 4-5 VM's on a vmware host. 1TB max.

I have done it with the S3 Vault Lock feature, you can use it in conjunction with Storage Gateway (effectively emulating tapes), or using objects directly.

Once put in compliance mode, there is no way to delete the objects before the compliance period ends. It's also very cheap.

@rjt said in KVM or VMWare:

@francesco-provino Amazon Web Services may have a slight disagreement with you on whether KVM or XEN is suitable for business.

KVM and XEN are suitable for the business case of an hyperscaler of course, but the question of @WLS-ITGuy was literally "We're getting ready for our server refresh and along with that our license is up for renewal for VMWare. I am curious to the benefits of KVM over VMWare." -> so they are a small shop already using VMware.

It totally makes no sense to switch from VMware to KVM or Xen-based solutions in his business case.

@rjt said in KVM or VMWare:

@francesco-provino Amazon Web Services may have a slight disagreement with you on whether KVM or XEN is suitable for business.

LOL

@olivier said in KVM or VMWare:

Maybe you lack the understanding of scale.

Ok, this is definitely the best one

@olivier I know you have to sell it, but it's foolish to propose Xen in 2021.
Xen has been a phasing-out hypervisor (and platform, considering the ecosystem) in the last 5-6 years.

Develop solutions based on Xen does not makes any sense, even big player with huge investments on Xen have abandon it or are actively retiring it.

@WLS-ITGuy I haven’t been in this forum for years, and after years I still see similar questions and the same arguing…

The answer is simple, stick with VMware for anything business related. The other arguments are really mental masturbation.
Yes, VMware licensing is worth it and vSphere us not going away. The KVM ecosystem is for builders, not for sysadmin.

Do yourself a favor and learn something useful like Terraform to automate VMware or similar stuff, the real deal today is not wasting your time reinventing the wheel and doing manual operations, not saving a few bucks on hypervisor’s license.

Nice, but why use this when we have the real PowerShell for Linux?

Hi @gjacobse , consider something like a tiered approach to the problem. 1Pb are a lot of data.
Maybe 5-10Tb of fast SSD for caching, 50-100Tb of spinning disks for caching/capacity and the rest will go to the cloud.
For instance, a single AWS Storage Gateway appliance could be the solution if you have good internet uplink.
Another solution could be Azure Stack.
Feel free to contact me if need advices about that kind of setup.

@dave247 you can use storage snapshot for fast and very efficient backups. Your backup software should be connected to the SAN of course… trigger a snapshot after hypervisor quiescence, and then just retrieve the backup data from the snapshot. At the end pf the backup job, the snapshot will just be discarded. That’s what any tier-1 software does today in dense and high-performance environments.

@scottalanmiller you don’t want a GUI on the virtualization host, ever. Just spin a VM with virt-manager and launch it on your local machine with xming or one of the other solutions in the other comments.

@DustinB3403 obvious. That’s exactly what Xming+virt-manager provides.

You can use Xming and just leverage the regular virt-manager via X11, no needs to use different clients. Be careful, virt-manager is on its way on being deprecated. Use virsh and spice-client or a VNC client to access the VMs virtual consoles.

@mroth911 I don't consider self-hosted email as a viable and cost-effective alternative anymore.
My advice is to go with a managed service like G Suite or O365, like everyone else is doing. Consider mail like any other istante messaging like Whatsapp and Telegram, just like a service. If you can't spend 3-4€/month per user, ehm... maybe you have other issues.

Meh, I don’t see the issue. Those are just standard Dell servers, oldie in truth. Sell it in bundle and buy a new R740 with mission critical support. You can get a very convenient quote that include VMware and Veeam. The latest Veeam (9.5u4) can do native S3 (and S3-like) archive tiering and support direct restore to both Azure and AWS.
If we’re talking about steady-state workloads, on-premise or colo is always cheaper than IaaS. Oh, don’t forget that with the new iDrac/iLO you can treat the server effectively as a colo machine with all the good stuff like remote KVM, proactive support, remote automated installation etc., all with good html5 interface. Yes, that crappy activex/java is gone.

@scottalanmiller no. Single strand single mode can carry 40+Gbps today.

For 100m, singlemode fiber simplex is 12$. Transceiver are like 7€ each. You can’t beat it with copper.

No reason NOT to use fiber. For that distance, fiber is cheaper, faster, more reliable.

Autofs.

No, it won't work, I've tried several methods but they are neither functional nor supported. I know it's a shit, but I usually RDP in a domain-joined jumpbox and do all of my work from there.

Any opinion on Dell all-sfp switches? The "S" series...