Yea, by John @sysadmin11.

tumbleweeds

Reading about LVS persistence, sigh. Stupid third party app.

@Warner: Is the "stupid" one the Windows app that you posted about needing to scale horizontally?

Yes.

I'd push back on the vendor if there wasn't a deadline that takes priority.

So it really should be stupid deadlines right :)

If the app had architecture considering proper high availability, the deadline would be irrelevant.

Any cPanel experts around?

I'd love some advice with:

since I don't use cPanel i can't help you besides suggesting asking cPanel if they have a dev license available for cheaper (alot of companies do this)

@Zypher Well they have trial licenses, but that means I'd need to have a different server... I suppose that's a possibility

Part of my goal is to test existing sites with the new apache version. I suppose a server which NFS mounts the production server's drive could do that

Today I appear to be earning more rep on SuperUser.

@sysadmin1138 Sometimes that happens :-)

@Josh i wouldn't directly mount production data, i'd rsync it off somewhere and test against that. @sysadmin HAHAHA slow day on SF huh

heck even the chat room is slow today

@Zypher Good point. Issue is, we're talking a production server with >50 sites...

Ayep. Slow all around.

@Josh, yea that would be a pita the first time ... but after that you'd have a good test enviroment ... which i think is worth just about any amount of initial pain

hello, what would you recommend as VM for personal use (I own a dual core laptop with 3GB RAM, I want to run linux (CLI - LAMP mostly) on it), Laptop's Vista

yea, really was looking for something to kill time since I gave my notice (last-two-week-itis ?)

Good advice @Zypher, thanks!

@John I'm a fan of virtualbox (the sun version if you need USB pass-through) or VMWare workstation ($)

LOL

@JohntheSeagull I can recommend VMWare Workstation also, that's what I use

@John I second VirtualBox. It has its own limits (can't expand disk sizes for one) but it'll get you there.

And if you can afford it, VMWare Workstation. It does allow resizing of drives, and is what I use daily at work.

I use VM Workstation now, but it slows down the machine a lot, even if I'm only using 512 MB for the VM

That's not likely to change much by using other platforms.

@JohntheSeagull you're pushing it with your setup...

Unless I ditch this Vista bitch and use something saner

@sysadmin is right ... what kind of disks do you have have in the laptop @john

@JohntheSeagull You might want to consider dual-booting Linux

I agree with @Zypher and @sysadmin1138 -- disk subsystem is a huge factor

yes, disk is SATA 5.4k

You can get a few more percentage points of performance by using the right file-system on Linux. But your biggest gain would be to upgrade to a faster HD.

so I'm doomed

Oo, yes.

:/

On my Core 2 Duo iMac, moving VMs to an external RAID0 array greatly improved performance of both guests and the host.

ESATA or USB?

@JohntheSeagull Not necessarilly -- got Firewire/SATA?

Firewire

would be my guess

@JohntheSeagull 800 or 400?

Firewire is good... FireWire 800 is better.

Agreed

@John you can get decent 7200RPM laptop drives for like 200$

might be your best bet

Or just practice patience

and open a few less tabs on the browser

:)

@JohntheSeagull LOL

haha ... no no i'm never an advocate of either of those things :)

@JohntheSeagull What I ended up doing was getting a ~$500 PC and putting VMWare Server on it

Now the entire office can access VMWare VMs for testing

okay, so virtualbox would only save me the VM license, but will not at all make it snappier in any way

just confirming

yep

But that's not a cheap solution... Had to buy some extra 1TB drives and set up a RAID5 aray

@JohntheSeagull Probably not much faster than VMWare

@josh you probably could have gotten a low end server for about the same, and run esxi on it

I like VMWare Workstation's run in background mode

@Zypher From where?? I would have preferred that!

That is /really/ nifty.

Dell/HP both have low end servers in the 700-1k range ... that probably would have been very capable

@Zypher Rats, why wasn't I in chat 2 months ago!? ;-)

S'ok, this dell machine is doing pretty well

lol ... i'm pretty sure it wasn't up

@Zypher Yeah, I know :-)

haha

as i sent that i started worring that more time had passed than i thought :)

that happens a decent amount to me

I once bought two HP servers. The dealer said they were sent by mistake to Dubai, so he bought some IBM SystemX to give us instead. Those are some pretty fine machines.

Sweet

We have a lot of HP here in the office, pretty solid machines. Never had the chance to work on an IBM.

Every company I've worked with say DELL sucks and HP rocks.

Personally i think at this point in IT they are all about the same

just pick one vendor and stick with them for a while

I thought so too, but more than two people (working at different places, all owning lots of machines) have said that DELL machines fail much more often than HP ones and that tech support is worse.

From what I've heard, if you need cheap and don't mind replacing the odd server (say... horizontal scale-out) Dell is the way to go.

yea I mean i've only dealt with either while on large (multi-million dollar) support contracts

sooo on the lower end it may be different

I can sell you support for multi million dollars, if you want

lol

nah i'm good :) wouldn't be around my current company long enough to enjoy it anyway

A lot of one-man IT shops end up with Dell simply on price grounds.

Which is not unreasonable, given that they mostly work.

That's my feeling on Dell, @sysadmin1138. And I've bought /a lot/ of Dell servers. I also scale out using OSS HA solutions. HP is better on the high end but not on the commodity side. Also, HP's online ordering system is tedious at best.

I am not sure I really like the feed ticker, I kinda liked the questions inline. Am I the only one?

@Zoredache You're not -- I agree 100%