@CloudKnight said in User profile migration to new Windows 11 PCs:

Hasn't Windows become a shitshow.

Always was, they just used to be able to claim that the alternatives didn't exist, even though they did. Now, the alternatives are too public and people are more aware that Windows isn't on par. But as someone who came from UNIX and discovered Windows later, Windows has never been good enough to justify, never been "good", never been anything but a joke. Just people re starting to wake up to it because MS isn't putting the resources into hiding it anymore.

We use Vultr and are very happy. We've moved away from TacticalRMM to FoxRMM, our in house product (aka SodiumSuite.)

@travisdh1 said in OVH Cloud, anyone use their VPS?:

@scottalanmiller said in OVH Cloud, anyone use their VPS?:

We use Vultr and are very happy. We've moved away from TacticalRMM to FoxRMM, our in house product (aka SodiumSuite.)

Vultr is one I've used in the past, but the pricing is on-par with Linode.

One major difference now that Linode has been bought by Akamai is the storage IOPS. I've run a couple tests, and they are using some sort of SAN instead of VSAN now. IOPS always max out at what you'd expect from a 200Gb network connection.

I might have to try out OVH Cloud. The price for 4vcorse and 8GB RAM starts at ~$5.00/month instead of the $25.00/month I'm currently paying at Linode.

Vultr is using NVMe locally for nodes as it should be. Blazing fast.

Laravel + ReactJS is a super common combination and getting it working right under an Nginx front end can be confusing. Here is a quick config to copy!

server {
    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    server_name app.myserver.com;

    # ---- React SPA ----
    location / {
    	root /var/www/myapp/myfrontend/dist;
    	index index.html;
        try_files $uri /index.html;
    }

    add_header X-Frame-Options "SAMEORIGIN";
    add_header X-Content-Type-Options "nosniff";

    # ---- Map /api/* to Laravel public ----
    location ^~ /api/ {
        root /var/www/myapp/myapi/public/;
	index index.php;
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$query_string;
    }

    # ---- PHP under /api/* (MUST use fastcgi.conf, not the snippet) ----
    #location ~ ^/api/.+\.php$ {
    location ~ \.php$ {
        root /var/www/myapp/myapi/public/;

        # Split PATH_INFO (rarely needed by Laravel, but safe)
        fastcgi_split_path_info ^/api/(.+\.php)(/.*)$;

        include fastcgi.conf;                # <-- NOT snippets/fastcgi-php.conf
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.4-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;

	fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
    }

    # Block dotfiles anywhere (SPA + API)
    location ~ /\. { deny all; }
}

Works fine, doesn't need to be in a Dell.

@dave247 said in Moving off VMware Hypervisor to something else - need input:

Looking at Nutanix VS Proxmox and surface level perception is that Proxmox could be better

I would quite literally place one as the worst possible option and one as the best. VMware would be close to Nutanix on the bad side. Nutanix, VMware and Hyper-V these days I don't know any argument for how to use them in production.

I like ProxMox and XCP-ng for pricing, licensing, experience, etc. There are loads of KVM systems out there, ProxMox is far from the only player. But I think you'd need a pretty incredible argument to use one given that most or all will be closed source (that means "not production ready" to us) and few have the experience, track record, support, industry knowledge and internal support of ProxMox.

@dave247 ProxMox has its own built in backups, too. Not as powerful as Veeam, but enough for many environments. We have a LOT of ProxMox out there and none use any third party backup.

@dave247 said in Moving off VMware Hypervisor to something else - need input:

@scottalanmiller just out of curiosity, could you provide any arguments against using Hyper-V?

We are 99.9% Windows PC & Server shop where I work so naturally some might suggest us using Microsoft's Hyper-V. I have used it a handful of times in the past but it didn't seem very user friendly and seemed to have issues at the time, granted it was over 8 years ago.

Sure...

1. Microsoft no longer has faith in it, it would border on insane to trust as your core platform something that even its own vendor gave up on. The only production style deployment was removed and now only the dev / hobby style is still available. People argue "they didn't discontinue it" and no, not technically, but they did discontinue it from anything that could be argued to be a production methodology. Using HyperV means defining your virtualization infrastructure as a "hobby" environment where uptime and reliability don't matter.

2. It doesn't have the knowledge, development or care of a production system. Never did, but now its a tiny fraction of what it once was. So if you thought it was bad back when MS still pushed it, image how bad it is now!

3. No support. It's an MS product, that means you are left to your own devices and the third party support world is essentially entirely resellers, not skilled engineers. No serious support engineer works with HyperV, so you are depending on the market of somewhat technical salesmen to be your support network.

4. Licensing. Pure and simple, if your infrastructure product requires a license, it's a joke. Nothing causing outages like a license. That's why no serious business will touch that stuff. Risk for no reason is literally a form of sabotage.

5. Confusion. While someone, somewhere installed HyperV and knew what it was, you'll never find that person. Everyone who recommends and implements it does so out of thinking it is something that it is not. Many swear it is a Type2 (and then think that that is a good thing.) Almost no one can actually identify what is virtual and what is not when using it. Especially if you have a Windows show, the chances that anyone really will know HyperV is zero. Only very senior UNIX shops ever have the knowledge to really understand it and they avoid it based on that knowledge.

6. Cost. HyperV isn't free anymore and while someone might argue that you are SO tied to Windows that you'll never be able to make decisions based on what's best for your business, that's a horrific financial mentality to take. Again, risk without benefit, even if small, is very bad. It's what IT pros should be paid to protect against, not recommend. It's a product that only works against your interest, not for them.

7. Management. Like most Windows products, Hyperv's management is a sh1tshow and a completely joke compared to ProxMox and XCP-ng as examples. Not even in the game. If you thought VMware was bad, HyperV is the only thing that gives it serious competition for being so bad.

8. Source and Security. HyperV is closed source and from a notoriously unstable, insecure vendor. You might be stuck with Windows servers, but there's no reason to extend those problems into other arenas without benefit. One mistake does not justify another. Saying "we didn't care about price, security, auditability, performance, stability, etc. with our servers, why should we care now" is the antithesis of our jobs. It's worth noting that all those things clearly aren't top priority, so there might be other factors that we can weigh more heavily. But HyperV lacks ANY benefit (not even familiarity or ease of use!) to Windows admins (ProxMox is literally easier and more straightforward out of the box) so even the seemingly obvious factors work against it. So while giving low weight to production factors is okay, lacking other factors to outweight them doesn't change the outcome.

9. You'd never be able to feel proud of your environment or tell anyone what you run on without feeling embarrassed.

10. Backups, remote support, remote monitoring, etc. all harder. ProxMox and XCP-ng shine at how easy they are to automate, to manually manage, to manage from anywhere. HyperV falls flat in all those areas.

11. THis is a cheat benefit (IT should NOT consider this as it is cheating the company) but HyperV is a valueless skill. You don't want to have that on your resume instead of something of value. So every single person in your IT department should be up in arms at the idea because nothing about it makes their lives easier, and nothing about it is good for their personal careers. Everyone loses, no winners. Again... as IT pros, we should be taking the value to the business first and not making decisions based on what is good for us personally. But this is a care where those two things align.

12. Performance. Haven't checked this recently as HyperV is abandoned in production so it doesn't matter, but historically KVM was the performance leader for Windows workloads.

Most importantly, I can't think of any reason someone would give for even considering HyperV. The utter lack of upsides, being the sole product that EXISTS that's actually worse than, rather than better than, VMware is really something.

@dave247 said in Moving off VMware Hypervisor to something else - need input:

I had looked at this comparison matrix which shows that Proxmox does fully support shared storage, so I'm unclear on the exact specifics and if it really matters in my situation. We basically have an iSCSI storage controller for VM storage and then our ESXi hosts for compute (mentioned in my original post).

SOmeone likely doesn't know what shared block is and thinks that VMFS is special or new rather than just VMware's version of something that's been standard a LONG time.

@gjacobse said in UNRAID: Did it improve since 2017?:

Co-worker came

UNraid was a scam. Now they just resell stuff. No value.

As they said... UNraid takes something you don't need and makes it seem nice and pretty. But back up and answer.... why would you want something in the CATEGORY of UNraid? You have to have a purpose. Otherwise we're just pointing out its an untrustworthy product that you should never evaluate because of who they are - storage you can't trust. Like TrueNAS, a vendor built on lies and scams is a bad place to be for your storage. When you can't have trust, you can't use as storage.

But before you get to vendor trust, what value would the product potentially have? I've never had a situation where I said "If only I could trust these guys, this would meet my needs." It just doesn't come up. It's a product without a purpose.