Continued from the other thread... I'm an enterprise guy. Sometimes its hard to put my mind back at a SMB level when I'm talking with certain people. Also, I'm a VMware guy.. never got into Hyper-V or the other virtualization solutions. I've been using it close to 10 years now, so its just one of those things that just "worked" for me and I never looked into other solutions. No desktop virtualization where I am, only servers. Although I hear Xen is good for desktop virtualization?

A fucking borring one

Enterprise, Educational.

Easier question to answer would be what kind of servers are we NOT running...

VMware all day.


I use OVH personally to host some of my VPS'. They run on Xen. It's convenient as hell, but I still prefer VMware for maximum configuration.

Friend of mine, however, swears by Hyper-V.

All of us agree... Server 2008 and Win 8 suck.

Server 2012*. Excuse me. I have my own problems with Server 2008 R2 EE, but it gets the job done. 2012 is horrendous.

Developer in small company but work with large customers, we work on an enterpirse level DBs for asset management. We develop on windows machines, but luckily, I don't have to tinker with the inner workings of my PC anymore, I only care if springsource tools and JIRA work.

I work in a 40 company hedgefund. Long ass hours, but users are a bit more challenging than your average person, always give me some interesting problems. We have about 50 servers all virtualized save for our spam firewall appliances and some other misc appliances. We run our virtual environment on Vmware vSphere/ESX, its the most mature solution without a doubt still. Almost exclusively all Windows shop, with 3 Exchange Servers in a DAG with a primary datacenter onsite and a passive failover datacenter in another colocation.

That should read 40 person hedgefund lol.

Shoutout to another confluence / Jira user.... though I also have to deal with Salesforce and ZenDesk.

Our SQL guys use Hyper-V to virtualize their servers. I believe there is some benefit there, but I haven't looked into it yet? Not a fan of Windows 8 and I haven't given Server 2012 enough time to hate it just as much. This might be a catalyst to push people to the "core" version of Windows server (at least that's what we're thinking internally).

Do you host your own VMware clusters or is it all managed by a cloud provider?

Host and Manage.

Im in an SMB we run a website, traffic is about 15-20K ppl a day.


Damn am i the only Hyper-V guy here? I never liked the VMware interface way back when i was testing it out, thats kinda what pushed me to Hyper-V.

All windows 2012 and Windows 8 desktops here. I LOOOOOOOVE the new Server Manager in windows 2012, you can manage everything across multiple servers from one console.

Once you get oveer the "Ugh why is this different" its pretty much the same ish.

They actually streamlined a bunch of stuff, move your mouse to where the start menu used to be, right click, and you get a really nice menu with most things you would access.

I'm not sure about other products, but VMware is going all web-based with their management consoles. The web-based console for vCenter in 5.x is much improved over older versions (4.x and earlier). Plus, the interface for an ESX host is different than what you get in vCenter. Not trying to sell you on it or anything... just sayin.

I tend to mistrust any new Microsoft product. They almost always have a big production bug in the first releases. Don't know how many times Exchange 2010 had a SP release just to find out 2-3 weeks after release they had an epic fail on their hands with no workaround. Trusting them to run all our servers virtually? That would be a leap of faith. Though I've heard good things in terms of performance with Hyper-V.

The biggest issue with Hyper-V I have is that it's a type 2 hypervisor rather than a type 1. But yeah.. I hear you on that with Microsoft products. I'm waiting for System Center 2012 SP1 right now before we upgrade from 2007.

Had to look that up ^^.......from wiki:


Note: Microsoft Hyper-V (released in June 2008)[6] exemplifies a type 1 product that can be mistaken for a type 2. Both the free stand-alone version and the version that is part of the commercial Windows Server 2008 product use a virtualized Windows Server 2008 parent partition to manage the Type 1 Hyper-V hypervisor. In both cases the Hyper-V hypervisor loads prior to the management operating system, and any virtual environments created run directly on the hypervisor, not via the management operating system.

First rule of Enterprise Computing: Never Early Adopt.

SMB
ESX Server with 7 virtual servers
vMware vSphere.
Server 2008
no exchange (google apps)

+1 for Google Apps.

calendaring was a nightmare a few years back, but it's gotten better.
75% of my users use the website for email while others (older folks) prefer outlook.

Was? It still is, lol. Especially when integrating with Thunderbird (or worse... Outlook users).

Oh ok. Still stickin with VMware though. lol

Enterprise - network support..



Since the notion general on this forum is that PC's suck, a better question would be who here uses macs & OSX at a enterprise level :)

*sticks head in to look around*

*turns around and leaves...*

Watchwww.youtube.com

I hear this sentiment from a co-worker when I got into the field - but it turns out she was just lazy, takes a long time to do stuff and is always on facebook instead of doing her duties - so management doesn't let her do anything beyond her basic duties.

I'm a systems admin for my 200 person company but my company was bought out two years ago by some big ass corporation. Needless to say I'm slowly losing the battle to keep my kingdom.

I use to be the ruler, God, the savior, the prince, the almighty. Next year I will be just another number, a Peon.

Currently I manage our servers and storage arrays. It's a mix of physical servers and VMWare 4.1 with about 50 or so production and development VMs built on about 4 iSCSi arrays. I also handle Cisco call manager shit (4.1 yeah we are OLD), am the domain admin that handles all the active directory environment, do some very basic admin Cisco networking stuff (VLANs, configuring ports.

I USE to admin our Exchange 2003 servers and Acronis/Veritas Backup Exec (thank god I don't handle backups anymore. That shit is fucking tedious nonsense) but that went bye bye once the evil mothership took over that. Next month I won't be doing Call manager shit as we are getting a new Call Manager managed by the mothership.

End of next year I'll probably lose my domain admin rights to admin our legacy domain and probably have all the VMs sucked over to the evil mothership. So yeah, end of next years when I hand over the keys to the kingdom (aka datacenter), I'll be twiddling my thumbs or at home in my boxers eating cereal with no job.

But hey, look on the brightside, I'll have plenty of time on my hands to compete with Bezzle with the most useless posts on this board!!!!!!!

We used to run all Apple equipment and OS's. But then Apple decided to stop making the xserve's and then talked about sandboxing their environment. Needless to say we bailed and went to windows.

I currently manage 26 servers (mostly VM's). It's a mixed bag of windows 2008r2 servers. I also manage our Cisco Callmanager, Unity, and CUP servers. Finally I just finished switching our T1's to private/public 10x10 fiber and Cisco routers running OSPF. I am totally in geek heaven. I have the funding of a very large corporation with the position of what our company used to be before we were bought out. It's the best of both worlds.

I work for a small company. We have a dedicated Apple OSX server and 12 Mac Minis. Easiest server and network to install. no issues whatsoever since I installed everything and it took me a very short time to get everything up and running. Granted, we are not a huge company but this serves us well and we have never had issues.

Nice thread you guys sounds like geeks...lol

Actually its kinda boring....everyone just pulled out, measured, then bounced no one debating anything..JM thread was better :)


Sixxx that sound more like a home network - especially when you have only 1 do-all-tasks server running..

Nothing wrong with that... that's where everything starts sometimes.

Exactly. That's all we need. We don't have traffic to website. It is managed by the parent company. And believe me, 15 years ago when I arrived to this company they were using a jazz drive as a "server" lol

WAN/Security guy here but I've opened plenty of ports, optimized plenty of WAN traffic flows and helped troubleshoot a bunch of funky misconfigured VM/ESX/ISILON/NetBackup issues from a LAN/WAN-side perspective.

You got THAT right....

What is that version 1.0?

Nah son....

We're about 65% PC's 35% macs and only 3 or 4 macs running only OSX.
I myself use a mac with parallels so I can troubleshoot both os's on one machine.

What HR management/time keeping system do you guys use.
We currently use Big Time (Edison's Attic) and it integrates great with Quickbooks, but were looking to move on to something different.

I have no clue what's out there or good that let's you create custom reports and integrates with Quickbooks.

Oracle Peoplesoft..

Thanks

SharpOwl over here. I believe we will be moving to Vanguard next year.

Used that at my last job... allow me to just say that I do not like PeopleSoft.

For the most part we're running:

IBM Series 7 w/ OS 400
IBM 7000 series SAN
HP Bladeservers - C class

We do have some pizza box servers, but we try to keep them to a minimum.

We're deploying VDI on ESX on a pair of blades and using the 7000 series as the back end storage.

I spend most of my time working on the network and phone system these days though...

Enterasys C5G's at the edge along with some D2's
N7 in the core but we're getting quotes to upgrade to their S series
Siemens Wireless - using controller based access points

We're using a Siemens 4000 series phone system...

Right now I have about 2500-3000 ports I'm supporting and about 600-700 phones including a call center.

We're mid-planning to move to AD across the enterprise for single sign-on... even to the IBM.

Multiple instances of SQL, and everything from Windows 2000 to Windows 2012 - though most is 2008r2.

Strange thing? Our organization has 2 Macs and one is on my desk. ;) Along with an HP thin client and a new DC I'm building...

Oh also I should note that thanks to my company, I run Serato on their laptops. I got multiple backups too! LMAO

but I have to give props to my buddy who spins on his MAC which says on the laptop:

"Property of LAUSD" (Los Angeles Unified School District)

Which HP blades are you using? We have mostly BL460Cs in a bunch of C7000 enclosures.

We're using HP C7000 chassis with Cisco FEX modules on the data center side. HP C3000s and Cisco 3120 switch blades on the smaller remote site ends.

A few of our older enclosures have Cisco 3125 interconnects, but now we mostly use HP's Flex-10 interconnects in our enclsoures. Mostly to utilize virtual connect to carve up the 2 onboard 10 Gb NICs into multiple virtual NICs to separate traffic from our ESX hosts. This also frees up the PCI slots in our blades for HBAs in case we want to multi-home our ESX hosts to our EMC storage along with our NetApp storage (NFS).