Church IT Podcast Discussions Episode 18 November 1, 2007
Jason:
Good Afternoon Everyone! This is the church IT Podcast Episode 18, every 1st and 3rd Thursday of each month at 2:00 pm EST. Welcome all.
We’ve got some SharePoint training updates, some transcription news about the podcast, Tony will do that, we’ve got Albert Martin may show up here to talk about his Iworship Presentation Software that has been developed in-house here at Granger Community Church and we’ve been using it since January and it rocks! We’ve got some folks coming in from the Vmware webinar; we’ve got Ryan Klevinger from Northpoint Church in Atlanta, he is on their IT staff and he will talk to us about some cool happenings and some history of the Northpoint IT infastructure, they are an all-Mac shop so that’s curious.
So, first up, Tony I’m gonna let you say whatever you want to say about the transcription stuff.
Tony:
Ok, I’ll try to jump in real quickly. Going back in history, I have loved listening to the podcasts but I always find that months later I say, “Wow, didn’t we have a podcast about something? When was that?” And the only way to figure that out is to go back and listen to them all again and I’m not willing to do that. Sorry, I like you guys but I just don’t want to hear you over and over that much. Ha-ha. So I have had this wish for a long time to have this stuff transcribed so that I can search for it and then I can figure out what I want to look at and then we can go forward from there. We bounced that around and I looked for some automatic stuff and it became clear that the automated stuff wouldn’t help us a bit and I agreed with that, even though I didn’t want to hear that answer. So after searching and searching, we stumbled across one of our former Perimeter staff members who is in Kentucky now, Margaret Salyers. She was always a wonderful person but she has just gone up in my esteem [Transcriber note: Thanks Tony! I could transcribe stuff like that all day!! J] She has taken on doing this, she just bought some equipment that gives her good ol’ dictation foot pedal equip to do this and she is transcribing the podcasts as Word documents and drops them on zoho wiki. She now has access to our zoho wiki podcast so that pretty soon it will be linked in so that anybody who wants to find something, search on it…if you can remember whatever that great phrase that Jason said, you can go find it and figure out which podcast it was in. That’s what I’m hoping for and expecting to get out of it, and if you’re not happy with what we’re getting out of it, say so, because she is there to please and to make it right. One thing we’ve noticed, and this is not surprising, is that Margaret doesn’t recognize everybody’s voice, so we need to get better at saying, “Hey this is Tony” and then going into it, using your own name of course. Or everybody can go back after the fact and say, “Oh yeah, I said that,” and stick your name on it. Since it is a wiki, everybody can edit. That’s the theory. I think that’s all I need to say.
Jason
Very Cool. I’m very excited. Margaret sent me a couple of examples of what she’s done and it’s incredible and she’s even doing a great job with all the jargon and phrases we throw around, and if she’ll give us permission, and she’s going to be transcribing what we’re saying right now anyway, I’d like to post what she emailed me recently.
Tony
Oh go ahead and do it, I’m sure she would agree.
Jason
The other thing I thought was funny, I think it was the last one she transcribed, she put a couple of transcribers entries in there, she made a couple of remarks on her own, like “is it possible that IT people would notgo to the SharePoint training without their own laptops?” So she adds a little humor, which was cool. One of the suggestions I made to her was to insert a Time Stamp into the transcription so that if somebody is reading the transcription and they see something that should have a URL attached to it, or the product wasn’t written down correctly, so that they could quickly go back and find that segment of the podcast. So that will soon be up on the www.ChurchITPodcast.com searchable and I think it would be a huge win for us. So great find Tony!
Tony
And let me push back here, I’m hoping this can be a great benefit to everybody else too. If everybody finds it to be a total waste, tell us that too. Because we don’t want to spend a lot of time and effort if it’s not useful. But I can’t imagine how it would not be useful.
Jason
Exactly. I read back through some of the transcriptions and there was a couple of things that I had forgotten about, so good stuff.
SharePoint Training update – the location is still not set yet, it may be here at Granger or a possibility it will be at Northwoods over in Peoria , Illinois, so we’re still trying to determine the location but it is a go, so Jan 7-11 it’s gonna be happening. We’re also still figuring out the cost because we don’t know catering costs because we don’t know exactly how many people will come. So we’re working on a registration page, where is Jason Lee, what else did we want to put in there.
Jason Lee
Really we need to figure out how many people are interested in the sense of not just “maybe” but really true commitment to wanting to come; and then just getting the registrations up and running and we are getting closer to that so I would expect maybe in the next 7 days we’ll have that online but primarily right now we’re just trying to figure out the cost of food, etc and that’s really the only cost that will be whatever it takes to feed people for five days and whatever else. Travel costs will be up to the attendees. This is a cool thing that Bill English is offering us and how much of a freebie for us it is.
Jason
So one of our questions to everybody is, say the registration cost was like $100 or $150 bucks, is that gonna be a show-stopper for people. You’re getting $3200 worth of SharePoint training for free so, in my mind, that’s not too much, but after you pay for flight and hotel, is adding another $150 on top of that, is that gonna be an issue or not? Any feedback?
Speaker
Travel costs are the main thing.
Jason Lee
JP and I were kicking around today, what can we pick on our vendors for to have them help out with it during different parts of the week, maybe there are things they would help with too, so all that is still up in the air. Once we figure all that out, we can start to nail the rest of it down and communicate that stuff.
Jason
What we’ll try to do is get another blog out there with more of the details, we’ll try to get the registration up as soon as we can, which is tough to do without having a price for the registration, so more to follow. This is for church employees. If you’re a volunteer, send me an email about what you’re doing and we’ll see how that would work, but for now church employees, and we’re limiting it to two per church and we’re tyring to open the slots up to 70 slots available. We can chat more about that at the end if you have questions.
Jason Lee
I think the big thing to clarify from what Bill said is that if you are making a profit off the stuff you’re going to be learning in the class, then he would strongly urge you to take the class in a paid environment. If you’re not making a profit, that’s where he’s drawing the line. We need to respect him, he is giving us this for free.
Jason
Cool. Let’s switch gears, Ryan has to split in a few minutes. I want to introduce Ryan Klevinger to everybody. Ryan’s gonna give us some background history on Northpoint and where they’ve been, where they’re going, what they’re doing. They’ve got hundreds of Macs and an Xsan and all that good stuff.
Ryan
Thank you guys for caring and listening to what I have to say. I apologize that I’ve not been a part of this. In the last couple of weeks, my time has freed up, I’ve recently hired a new guy. I’m really excited about what you guys are doing and I like the idea of this collaboration stuff, so I will hopefully be attending more often and learning from you guys. Anyway, just to give you guys a little background, and feel free to stop me if you have any questions, I started here at Northpoint in 2002 and the church has been in this building for about 10 years. Just one guy started the IT department and did a really good job of building it from nothing to what we became. The way our staff is set up has changed probably 800 times, it changed again a few weeks ago, but originally our of our heads were in the sand and we did things that people can and asked us to fix us, so we came up with the ticketing system, we basically used OTRS Open Ticketing Response System, and it’s not great but it’s free, it’s easy to manage and to back up, and we basically managed everything through there and large portion of our congregation is managed through there so like there’s some small group leaders that use that system to manage some questions and stuff. So there was a core of 3 of us that went through that period of growth. The way we are organized today is I have Sean Strickland who is my boss, is the Director of IT; myself, this week they call me the Director of Enterprise Systems, so that means I’m in charge of all the network and all the systems, and then I have two people under me, one person is only focused on the physical and other person is only focused on the applications, servers, and stuff. In the meantime, we’ve built this Xsan. We went with Xsan, Version 1.0, consequently we have lots of problems with it because we have grown with it and we’re working through those issue. We just upgraded, I think we’re sitting at like 80 parabytes (??) of raw storage and 60-65 usable. We started an RFP process in February of this year with several different companies to come up with a storage management solution for us, cause just like you guys, we’ve got department has 150 gigs on hard-drive with crucial data on it, plus how do you back up all this data, how do you make it redundant, that kind of stuff. We narrowed it down to two, both of which offered a storage virtualization product, Data Core is one of them, the other is Cloverleaf, which is in partnership with Apple. They started in Israel, they’re the people who manage all the data for the Israel defense, Time which is kina cool, one is a hardware solution, one is a software solution. The question you had talked about was open directory, active directory, etc, when we first moved to OS 10 which was a struggle, we immediately jumped on the bandwagon of what Apple had to offer and used Open Directory and managed of all our Macs through that, but the problem we find ourselves was we were constantly asking ourselves what is the Apple solution for this problem. Now Apple offers great solutions but not all over the place, they will tell you they are not focused on the Enterprise, we made the Enterprise products but not focused on Enterprise. So that’s what led us to migrating to Active Directory, simply because the big thing is everything supports Active Directory, whether it’s VPN or wiki, it all supports Active Directory, some of it supports Open Directory, so we’re like, let’s just go with the one that it always works with. And the same thing with support, I could find an Active Directory engineer by just saying it loud enough outside on the street where with Open Directory, that’s a little more difficult so that’s what we did. The problem we had, all through testing, everything was great and we tested the heck out of this thing and everything was fine but once we migrated about 200 users, we kept hearing these reports of long boot times and stuff, so we thought maybe we should stop the migration and see what’s going on, and sure enough boot times averaged at 25 minutes and that’s not an exaggeration, so that was in March or April and Apple just gave us a fix about three or four weeks ago and it’s still not an official fix, it’s been a rocky time in our relationship with Apple. `Time Stamp00:20:55 They basically had to re-write a portion of Directory services for us to get the boot down to a decent level. So that’s where we are now. Does anybody have any questions about any of the other things we’re doing?
Jason
What’s your policy just on software installs, like do you guys manage that or is it a free-for-all, do you have standards, what’s your refresh cycle look like?
Ryan
I’ll start with the software piece, we use a package called Filewave, it does Mac and Windows, we don’t give people admin rights, so they can’t install software, they have the base package installed, just the stuff they need to do their job, and then as people need software they send in a request and we do it all through Filewave. And the refresh cycle we are all laptop, the only desktops in the building are production machines, we went back and forth with that for a while, then we settled on laptops, and because we have 3 campuses, there is a legitimate need, so we do it, they like it. Our current refresh cycle is 3 years, so every 3 years you get a new computer but that started sorta at the front of the whole Macbook thing, they’re pretty solid computer. So they’re still gonna be pretty good computers after 3 years, but that’s our current guideline about that.
Jason
Somebody asked if you guys run any antivirus solution
Ryan
Not for Macs. We have never had any AV on Macs. For the Windows piece, we just use AVD.
Jason
Any other questions?
Speaker
Is this the guy that was on the webcast this morning?
Jason
No
Jason Lee
Ryan, I asked the question about the antivirus, is that because you don’t have a lot of PCs in your environment, you’re not worried about the Macs being carriers to your PCs and is that the reason, and are you doing parallels or dual-boot for those Mac users and has that become a concern for you related to antivirus?
Ryan
We have never seen a virus transmitted from a Mac or had a Mac get a virus, now certainly it is possible, that may be an ignorant stance on our part but we are like why invest in antivirus when we’ve never seen it. Now to answer your question about the parallel thing, that does open up a new worm we are managing, we’re trying to figure out what to do with that because there are a whole lot of people running parallels, we have a lot of people who use the Logos software for Bible software and they invest $10,000 or however much that costs nowadays and for us to tell them they can’t use it, well, you see. So a lot of people are getting parallels and right now we are just doing our license on it but at some point that doesn’t scale well, we’re trying to work through it.
Speaker
I have an interesting question. We’re mainly PC and we’re going toward Mac because they Senior Pastor wanted to and we are actually using Vmware Fusion and Centrify (sp) to integrate into Active Directory. We been working on it for almost a year, and you said the boot time was 25 minutes, do you mean for the Mac to boot up or what.
Ryan
If a Mac was bound to Active Directory and Open Directory, which is what they call the Magic Triangle, which is what we do, then it would take 24 minutes. If it was only bound to AD or only to OD it would be a standard boot time. We still don’t know what is specific to our environment that causes this problem.
Speaker
This is something we discovered on our own, we were a dot local domain and we went to a dot net domain and the Macs actually bind Active Directory better when it’s not dot local. Have you heard that?
Ryan
No we have all of our own internal so we don’t have a dot local currently, but I have not heard of that.
Speaker
When you build Active Directory, what is your domain name?
Ryan
NorthpointMinistries.net
Speaker
Ok, so I see how you won’t have that problem. We were dot local forever.
Speaker
Can Ryan talk a little bit about how Xsan has impacted his infastructure, if there have been any struggles there, things to think about?
Ryan
What do you mean by impacted infastructure?
Speaker
Assuming that with your Xsan, there’s a lot more IT traffic going on with the amount of storage you have, is it an issue with all the video people you have. We’re looking at more storage for our video people also and that’s one of the options and I’m just wondering if there’s anything we should know about.
Ryan
We keep that video stuff really isolated. So there’s not a lot of traffic that goes outside of their switch, they have a pretty decent switch in the engineering room where all this equipment is, and then we have fiber ran directly to each one of the editing stations, about 10 of them, so all the traffic is isolated today, however, once we make the decision on Data Core or Cloverleaf then that changes things consider, we’ll probably set up some vLans and stuff to try to keep it by itself as much as possible. One of the biggest problems we’re dealing with now is we have all these things we call strategic partners which are churches that aren’t a campus but they got a lot of content from us, so all that content comes from the san (??) so I’ve got people in this other department that have to get the content to the strategic partners and they’re just on a laptop with a gg connection but this content is huge, so that’s a big thing we’re trying to figure out.
Jason
I know you gotta split Ryan, thanks so much for sharing with us. We’d love to have you back!
Ryan
I’ve got it on my Goggle calendar so I’ll get reminders about it.
Thank you guys for listening.
Jason
Ryan’s off to a phone conference with Apple. Good stuff! We will have him on again next time. Interesting that they are looking at Data Core. We got a quote from them, very intriguing. More to come on that.
Albert Martin is here. What Albert has done, he is an intern here at Grange Community Church, and he has been here about 5 years, he is going to give us some background on his involvement and some of what were we using in the past and why you wrote what you wrote.
`Time Stamp00:32:26
Albert
I started volunteering here 3 years ago, getting trained on some of the video cuts and stuff and did my first video and kept volunteering and then I started working with Spyder which runs our screens, the media station which puts the words to the screen, announcements and stuff like that, and as I got more involved with that I got more and more frustrated with the program we were using, which was ProPresenter, it’s probably one of the best Mac software out there for worship presentations but is was crashing during services constantly and just some of the quirkiness of it. It does stuff the opposite way of what you are used to. So just being able to train volunteers and running it gave us a headache. So last year around December, I started writing some software to replace it, so that’s been going on for the past year or so. Just moved into Beta last month. The name of the software is Iworship.
Jason
Tell us about Iworship. Why should I choose Iworship over Propresenter?
Albert
The number one thing I started off with was making it really easy to use. You look at it and you can tell exactly what to do. You don’t have to get trained by somebody, you just know how to do it be looking at it. The other thing is the stability, during the beta testing, it hasn’t crashed during our services at all. Those are the two things Iworship has going for us.
Jason
Questions on Iworship?
So feature-wise, there is a song database, does it pull from other databases?
Albert
Yes, you can import songs into your library by either importing them directly from clipboard or you can import from Word document and Iworship will separate it into slides for you.
Jason
It’s HD right?
Albert
Yes. The playback monitor automatically modifies it to your screen.
Jason
What kind of hardware do you need?
Albert
You’ll need OS 10.4 later, if you’re wanting to run HD you’ll probably need a newer Intel computer, but other than that, it runs pretty well.
Jason
If they are interested in the public open beta, where do they go to check that out?
Albert
I have a quick website set up www.renobapiofw.com [Transcriber note: someone please correct this link, I could not understand what he was saying. Sorry] Register there and download.
Jason
So if people start playing with it, is there a way for them to ask questions?
Albert
Yes, we have a forum set up that has a place to post reports or whatever and I’ll look into or post whatever.
Jason
Somebody in the chat window says, “Any chance of a Windows version ever?”
Albert
Probably not, just because of my experience with the Mac, I’m able to code for it to be very reliable and some of the features, so probably not.
Jason
Someone else asked, “What’s the expected MSRP?”
Albert
I’ll be announcing that closer to when it’s released. It’s gonna be about the same price as ProPresenter.
Jason
What else? Can it do anything other than text?
Albert
Yes, it can play back video, I just updated this morning to do DVD playback as well. You can insert a DVD and hit play and navigate the menus right in Iworship without opening up a separate DVD program. It also does live video, you can hook up a USB or firewire camera and it’ll stream.
Speaker
I’m assuming it uses at least two monitor outputs, right?
Albert
Yes.
Jason
Have you played with or seen MediaShout?
Albert
I’ve seen screen shots but I haven’t actually used it.
Jason
I’m wondering if it’s the same stuff as MediaShout. Other questions? Get out there and kick the tires on it, Albert would love some feedback.
Is the video functionality similar to pro video player?
Albert
In some cases yes, pro video player lets you adjust hue and Iworship doesn’t let you do that but it does things like looping video, it does audio playback.
Jason
What about graphics overlays?
Albert
Not yet. If you can post more about that on the forum, like what do you mean by that, I’d be intrigued, I’d look into that possibility.
`Time Stamp00:40:07
Jason
Will it integrate into PCO.com? What is PCO.com?
Oh, pointing center online! OK.
Albert
It doesn’t yet. I would like to look into doing that.
Jason
Does it do DSK Downstream Keying of user-selected colors?
Albert
That would probably require more of a hardware solution I would imagine but it’s possible. So this release of Iworship doesn’t require leopard but the next version will so as I get into more of the technology of leopard, something like that may come out.
Jason
What do you see your support set-up being for it?
Albert
There will be a forum set up and you’ll be able to contact me directly and I’ll do my best to help out.
Jason
And Albert never sleeps. He is one of the few people that when I send an email at 3:00 am he replies back right away.
How does Integrity feel about the name Iworship?
Albert
I’ve been asked about that quite a bit actually, we are looking into trademarking the Iworship name and the thing is Integrity is selling that name under those audio CDs and since this is a separate category, the US trademark allows you to do that, so I don’t foresee any problems.
Speaker
One of my questions, is this basically a software version of like an eterall (sp?) playback unit?
Albert
To a certain extent yes, there will probably be some things in a hardware unit that would be better than the software but it has the live video, it has the video playback.
Jason
If you’d like to see Iworhsip in action, just go to www.gccwired.com click the media player and you can watch our on-demand weekend and midweek services. All the text you see generated up there and whatnot is Iworship doing its thing.
Question: how do you guys integrate the output from Iworship into the Spyder?
Albert
Right now we have a VGA output from the Mac that runs Iworship that goes into Spyder.
Jason
And that’s Spyder with a “y” it’s a Vista system if anybody wants to go out and Google it.
Thanks Albert! If anybody has questions, head over to Albert’s website and check out their product and leave him feedback.
Let’s switch gears here to Vmware. Anybody want to start?
Speaker
Do you know if they archived the webinar this morning?
Jason
Yes, it will be available for playback soon, Ed will put it up on his blog.
Speaker
Thanks.
Speaker
I have two quick questions. I work for a mid-sized law firm, I’m the IT Director, and we’re making a lot of changes because we want to grow really quickly over the next couple of year and I was able to convince them to bring VM Ware in, and our two issues right now are #1 we’re growing so fast that we need a Nav (??) solution for San, we want to put out VMs out there and begin dumping files and everything else out there and I want to implement DSS eventually and so I’m not sure if I want Nav or San [transcriber not sure what he’s saying on those] but I’m sure cost is going to be the big obstacle, so I’m looking for a great storage solution that’s scalable that you can begin for a decent investment and then grow from there. And then secondly, I only have one VM host right now, I’m gonna start bugging them to get another to put in a remote site, I know a lot of VM ware guys and I’ve gone to several classes and I’m part of a user group but I’m still not convinced that my VMs are everything that they ought to be on my host right now. I was intrigued when he said that some of his VMs are terminal servers, I think he even said one is an exchange server and I was particularly interested by his comment that they are running better as VMs than they would be as physicals, so I need some suggestions on how to do storage in the short term and any suggestions on how to make my VMs the best they can be.
Jason
I can jump in here. As far as hardware wise, if you can move to a San, it will make your life so much better. And Iscuzzy (??) has worked awesome for us. So unless you are doing any crazy transactions. For low cost solution, although we’ve not yet tested it in our environment, the more I talk to people using DataCore and in talking to DataCore themselves, I’m very intrigued with what they have to offer.
Speaker
I’m on their website right now and we have no hardware for this yet at all. It looks like a lot of this is software because they have a hardware device?
Jason
Right, kinda the way it works is you would have a head server than the San would sit on, and it doesn’t have to have huge guts, the processor wise it’s not anything crazy, the more RAM you can stick on it the better because basically the RAM on that physical box is your disk cache so this head network device you can attach to any storage system you want, it could be Iscuzzy, it could be FibreChannel, or both. So it’s storage virtualization is what Datacore is. So they would sell the software that you would put on a physical host server and they also sell what the back-end disks actually look like. In the quote that I just got from them recently, they’re quoting us with Promise Jbods and Rays sitting behind the san melody or san symphony software.
Speaker
What’s the price tag with that? Are you allowed to say?
Jason
I probably can’t say, but we’re looking at 50 terrabytes if that’s any indication, I’ll just say it’s low 6 figures, depending on what other add-ons you want. And you can download the trial version right off the DataCore’s website, you can put it on a PC and present the disks inside of that PC to your network so they would show up as a target and you could start playing with it, and that’s were DataCore is really trying to push our organization, to play with it and see the benefits with it. Has anybody else in here actually used the DataCore product? I think Dan Barber, who is in the IT discuss email list. Also www.Itdiscuss.org and there is an email list that a number of us non-profit guys use to ask questions.
`Time Stamp00:52:27
Jason
Nobody? Well, my suggestion would be to check out DataCore, I think their price will be hard to beat. It has taken us a while to get an idea of how this DataCore stuff works and I can give you the name of the rep we are using, great guy. Also people tell me that they use just Promise Iscuzzy stuff and the price on it is not anything crazy and that’s what the DataCore guys would implement on the back end.
Speaker
Well my search to this point has been focused on external Ethernet hard drives that support NFS (??) and my concern is to be able to present my storage array to Vmware so I can have storage-based VMs and a lot of these external Ethernet hard drives plug directly into your switch, they either don’t support NFS or they come with really weird proprietary setting users up on the device and it breaks the whole scenario. I’m just not happy with the whole low-tech deal, it feels very amateur. And I want to begin in an 8 terrabyte San but if I go back to my management and say I need 40 grand, they’re gonna laugh.
Justin Moore
Can I make a suggestion? Ned Ap (??) has spun off a new division called Store Vault and they have some pretty interesting product, they only have two in the line right now, the S300 which maxes out at around 4 terrabytes, the bigger S500 at 6 or 8 plus the price point is very competitive and from a feature standpoint, they’re very comparable to the Equal Logic stuff that I’ve seen demo of.
Jason
Now are those the ones that are using software ___?
Justin
The 3 grand one is 2 terrabytes raw but fully loaded S500 at 8 terrabytes with 500 gig disk is gonna run you around $14,000 if I remember correctly, and that’s got NFS, Iscuzzy, a direct attach port where you can put a tape-loader, and it is VM ware certified.
Jason
I’ll plug Equal Logic just because we’ve used it and it has been just solid as a rock and the set up is so simple.
Speaker
I’m spoiled because I came from a very large healthcare organization where we had millions of dollars pumped into our infrastructure every year where we had an entire team dedicated to storage to this mid-sized law firm, so to come here and not see anything like what I had, but to walk into the server room, which was 98 degrees, and there are user-class PCs running major portions of their infastructure, so the fact that we even have VM ware is a major step for this small firm.
Jason
Please make sure all screen savers are disabled. What else? We went from two processors to one on almost all of our VMs, and that actually gave us a performance increase. We’re using the VM ware server products, are you using the full-blown ESX?
Speake
Yes, we’re VI3 so it’s ESX 3.0.2.
Jason
Ok, so you might actually be able to select multiple processors, but in the VM ware server thing, we found that by limiting the VMs to one processor, we got better performance out of them.
Tim Larson
This is Tim Larson with Mission To The World, we’ve been running sequel exchange on ESX for a couple years now with single processors because we found that dual-processors just killed the system, but this year we upgraded a couple of our boxes to have quad core dual processors and that has made a huge difference with the ESX. You effectively now have 8 processors but you’re only paying for two processor licenses. And now that we’ve got effectively 8 processors on the box, we’ve put one of our sequel servers up to via quad processor and I think we put our exchange as a dual processor and it’s working great now. But if you only have single core processors, I wouldn’t recommend dual or quad core VM.
Jason Lee (I think)
One to mention too is that within the next two weeks VM ware is coming out with small business pricing and I’m not sure how that’s scaled to the for-profit side but it does scale to the non-profit side for sure and the price point for ESX is much lower than it was before.
Speaker
But in terms of ESX nitty-gritty, there are things like shares and balloon drivers, and all that jazz. Any tweaking or anything?
Jason
With VM server products you don’t have much of that. You can disable virtual floppy drives and CD drives and turn off all the virtual hardware, you can adjust the RAM, adjust the CPU, that’s about it.
`Time Stamp01:02:46
Jason
I know some of you guys out there are using ESX, what kind of tweaks do you do?
Speaker
Is there a difference between server and ESX?
Jason
Oh yes. VM ware server is free. ESX is not. The functionality is different, ESX is bare metal where VM ware server rides on top of either a Windows or Lennox operative system.
Speaker
ESX was the product before VM ware server came out, what they’re calling now is VI Virtual ??
Jason
Tim did you say you guys are using ESX?
Tim
Yes, and we also have the Equal Logic san that you mentioned. Rock solid, no problems.
Jason
What you get for the money, I’m convinced it’s very cool. Do you guys do any special tweaking on your ESX servers?
Tim
Not really, not as far as performance, we’ve set up stuff to deal with time synchronization, that’s been an issue on a Windows domain, but as far as performance, no, we haven’t.
Speaker
What about training? I have a friend that studied for the VCP exam and he said it is really hard.
Jason Lee (I think)
We’re using server and there really wasn’t any training to it, we just looked at the interface and it tells you what you need to know.
Jason
Definitely download the free VM ware server product and you may be surprised that you can get away with not needing to go anywhere else. We were running our exchange with 130-some users, 80-some gigabytes on a dual Pentuim 3 physical box.
Speaker
Remember you can still buy support for VM ware servers, they have VM ware certified support, you can call them and pay fee for support.
Speaker
It’s about $400 but that’s 24/7 and you have to put in which hardware box you’re licensing but they’ve never questioned any one of the 4 VM hosts that we have, and that for us became the non-issue on training for us because I’ve called and asked some absurd questions and they walk you through it and their support in incredibly good support and the cool thing is they don’t push the buck to anybody when you’re calling for support. They could blame it all on Microsoft most of the time but they will walk you through just about any problem to find a resolution.
Speaker
Just a plug for Equal Logic, our Equal Logic people partner with VM ware and they’ll tell you that 70% of all their calls that come in are actually VM related and since we have an Equal Logic san, they told us to call them first.
Jason
I didn’t catch your name, the gentleman from south Illinois
Greg
I’ve read your blog and have been listening in on conversations for a while now and I was at the webcast this morning and this is right where I’m at today, my company wants me to find a storage solution right away. And I want to find it because we have legal documents and case evidence and multimedia and I want to put VMs out there so everybody wants a piece of this.
Jason
Yeah, you want a san.
Speaker
Regarding learning about VM ware, one of the biggest pieces is just getting your mind around what is a virtual machine and what is virtualization. The only thing you can do is get your hands dirty, run a couple of small VMs, something non-critical, and just run it to get a feel for it.
Speaker
I’ve been fortunate to be involved in some big-hitting technology. I don’t know if you guys know John McCormick, he’s a mid-states rep, he’s a great guy, he was technical for most of his career and then became sales, he is one of their shining stars because he can explain VM ware back and forth and talk about it all day. Also Jason Compania (sp) is big into VM ware, he asked why we bought so much memory and I said because as we go along and dedicate so much RAM to each VM, it helps the VMs run better.
Jason
Definitely check out the free VM ware server. It runs everything.
Hey Tony, you guys run Citrix inside virtual machines right?
Tony
Yes, sort of. Yes we are running a majority of our Citrix on physical machines, we have found that it doesn’t virtualize as nicely as nicely as other things, so basically we are running 40 users on a dual processor physical box and 10 or so users on a virtual box. But what found is that we can increase the number of virtual boxes with 10 users each and go beyond the 40 users per box but we can’t increase the number of users per virtual, increase the number of servers with a few users each so you gotta pay for a few Windows licenses. They’re not so bad in the charitable world.
Speaker
My day job we run all Citrix and we’re actually looking at virtualizing so it’s interesting to hear that.
Tim
We have just this year moved over to having our terminal servers as VM, we don’t use Citrix, just Microsoft terminal services, and we’ve tried that before and we got lousy performance, but I think this comes back to having multi-core processors in there, we’ve been able to assign dual processors to each of our terminal servers and we’ve got 30 people on each one, we have 4 virtual terminal servers and about 30 people on each one and no complaints about performance. We are running the Enterprise version
Speaker
Do people RDP to a desktop session?
Tim
We have a tool called Provision Networks in place that does a proxy for it, but effectively they are just using RDP to connect in and they connect to the server. But if you have terminal servers set up right now, what you can do is set up one virtual terminal server and add it in and see what kind of load it can take compared to the physical boxes you have. That way if you can only get 5 people on there, you’re not going to bring anything down, you can take it out if it causes trouble.
Jason
Let’s go back to the storage chat. What other storage options are out there? Obviously DataCore is something to check out. Now that I’m hearing more about Promise, I have a little more confidence at suggesting people look at it. Of course Equal Logic is huge, Lefthand, Intel now has some sweet storage solutions, and then the NetAp stuff but last time I looked at it it was all software rays. Any other options?
Speaker
I’d be careful about Promise products. I’ve some problems with them. I’ve had problems with their hardware and their software class controllers, their performance is not as good. I would wait before doing much with them. We have a Direct ___ storage box here that has worked well for us if anybody needs any of that type of stuff for around $3,000 we got about 5 terrabytes scalable to 10 in a box that just users scruzzies with 20 channels for our video editing station, so that’s another option, that included disks for that cost. And it’s been excellent. There’s a small Internet company I got it from, I’ll have to dig it up. Do you have an email address?
Speaker
Yes, it’s gfkern@hotmail.com and anyone else that has any suggestion for how I can do my environment, that would be great.
Jason
That’s what these podcasts are about, just trying to help each other.
Speaker
What’d you have on the switching end?
Speaker
We have a stack of 3 HP ProCurve 25 12 or 25 24, just your basic up to a gig on each port switch. We’re also implementing voice-over IP.
Speaker
Have you looked at multiple vendors for voice-over IP? There are a lot of good options.
Speaker
We have. I read a document comparing 24 vendors. I think the one we are inclined to go with is Suretell.
Speaker
Have you looked at Switchbox (?)? I have had the best support experience ever with software and hardware vendor with them. They are a small growing company. Their licensing is extremely cheap, I paid $499 a year for unlimited phone support, it’s not 24/7 but that covers all equipment I buy from them, they do all the configuration, I just add or delete extensions.
Speaker
Has anyone tried to do a virtual PBX?
Speaker
We were using Junction at on point to test things out, I had a version of Asterisk inside of a virtual machine using Junction and that worked well, it’ll pay for itself in about a year or two.
Jason
Justin is a big Asterisk proponent.
Speaker
We looked at doing Asterisk but I’m one guy, we have two campuses plus a mobile campus and I am not an Asterisk guru.
Speaker
I’m in a similar situation. I’m the IT department for a mid-sized company, we’ve got about 26 remote offices, we’re only using it in our corporate office right now amongst 12 users but I am pushing out IP phones to all these remote offices, it’s a lot of fun really, I’ve even considered looking at Asterisk business edition which up front it’s about $1000 but you get access to their support staff so it’s a safety net.
Speaker
I would put Switchvox in the same bucket, I just call them, say I want a phone, comes preconfigured, I can have it shipped it my user at some other location, they plug it in, it will work, for $1000 I can put a server at my second location and it’ll tier between the two areas, direct dialing extensions at another site anywhere around the world if I want to and it just works.
It’s actually Asterisk and Switchvox has added on some source code to give you more user-friendly management tools. I’m not familiar with Lennox and with Switchbox they do all that for you. It’s a turn-key system.
Speaker
What’s their website?
Speaker
www.switchvox.com
Speaker
And if you’re looking for middle ground there, Switchvox is a fairly closed platform in the fact that you don’t have access to the configuration files, and Asterisk is wide open, but there is something else called Asterisk Now, which has a nice web- that makes it easier to configure and manage as well as you can get your hands dirty with the config if you want.
Speaker
Has anyone messed around with Trixbox?
Speaker
We’re running an old version of Trixbox at home, we’ve been running it for about two years, it’s running really well. They also have an appliance now that comes preconfigured as well. It’s easy to configure and you can still get into the code and play with it if you want to.
Speaker
The reason we went with Switchvox is because their licensing cost was gonna be less for us and I had no reason to want to dig into the code.
Speaker
If anybody has any questions about any of this stuff, feel free to talk to me.
Jason
Where were all you guys two years ago when we were looking at this phone stuff?
We looked at Asterisk about two years ago for Granger.
Good stuff!
Speaker
That was the one reason we picked it, because we wanted to be able to call someone.
Jason
Yeah, I want to have a phone number to call and somebody and do whatever and we can continue on, which is why I was Novel before coming here, so when I showed up here, they were like how do you get Novel support around here? It was a great product, very stable, but in the four years I’ve been at Granger, I think I’ve maybe run across one person with Novel background, so if I had made that choice way back then, we’d not be in such a great position today, because today even Ryan at Northpoint is all Mac because everybody can do that. All about support.
Justin
One other quick thing about Suretell (?sp?) Jeffrey Thompson has been looking into it for First Baptist Atlanta and I think he’s been looking away from that now because of the price, it went through the roof.
Speaker
I pay a flat fee per phone and that does not change my monthly support cost. As long as I buy the phone from them, they will support it free. Talking about Switchvox.
Jason
We are at the 1:32 minute mark. Great discussion today. Next time let’s bring in the Google Ap chat and discuss why people should think about switching to Google, why they shouldn’t. Anything else? Ed will put up the slides from his VM presentation. Next one will be November 15th 2:00 EST. Until then…feel free to continue to chat with each other.
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