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I'd love to take the time to change the way our IT department functions. They don't automate anything. They don't virtualize. They don't believe in rack mounted
by skyyler 10y ago
I'd love to take the time to change the way our IT department functions. They don't automate anything. They don't virtualize. They don't believe in rack mounted servers. We have 30 tower servers sitting on a specially built shelf, taking up most of a room. It's absurd but I have so much other shit to do that I can't justify completely disrupting their entire workflow
- jordanwallwork 10y agoOh man I feel this
- SonicSoul 10y agothe way we solved it was getting the COO to approve us taking ownership of infrastructure and transitioning into AWS. That way we have a pretty flexible license where we can spin up servers and manage them ourselves. Certainly time overhead but at least now we don't have to email and pray. This also sends a strong message that if they don't try hard enough they can lose projects and therefore their worth at the company
- wslh 10y agoI wonder how the organization puts limits to the AWS usage. For example, do you need approvals for increasing the AWS usage? Is there a limit for those approvals that require a new contract with Amazon?
- SonicSoul 10y agowe're not a huge company so don't need to worry about that too much. Also we're migrating our production servers from Sunguard to AWS which is 4x cheaper, so we're well ahead on expenses
- nurettin 10y agoNeccessity is the mother of invention. Do you have a need to distribute your job queues to multiple servers? Do you need multi-master db replication? Do you load balance? Do you need to instantiate db backups to recover/inspect data? Do you backup snapshots of every server? The more these things happen, the more likely is your IT to yield and buy rack servers
- digitalsushi 10y agoI left a place a year ago where I ran the lab. I remember the satisfaction of my replacement converting all the VMs into "real computers", and then triplicating the VLAN network I had with layer 1 replacements. I'm pretty sure if he could have unspooled cat5 to everyone's home, he would have gotten rid of the VPN server.
- konradb 10y agoWow. Did they have a rationale behind this? On the face of it, it sounds like they didn't understand VM's.
- ajford 10y agoSo what's the benefit of VMs? I mean, I understand the underlying benefits of isolation and such, but for things that easily fit on small servers (i.e. single/double core small procs with <4GB RAM), why is it better to virtualize instead of having a physical server for that task? Assuming said task isn't vital enough to have several redundant systems? I've gone both ways before, but I seem to be on the other end of the spectrum and prefer small cheap hardware over VMs when possible. Not trying to argue or anything, just curious for someone else's point of view.
- pythonaut_16 10y agoThose small things are actually the ideal use case for VMs. Imagine wanting to spin up a new server so you go and buy that small tower, bring it back, and hook it up. Now imagine using a VM where you literally go onto a webpage and click a button to provision the same amount of resources. Additionally, most hardware sits idle most of the time. When you're using tons of towers, it's likely that most of them will sit under 50% load 90+% of the time. With a VM setup, the hypervisor can balance that better so you can get better utilization of your hardware.