Anybody bought any HP EPYC Servers recently?

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Nice work Vince, you'll have to let us know how they go in terms of performance. As for the racks and racks of desktop, that's a hell of a homelab for you now haha.

It's interesting but there are some things I have done to make life easy, every desktop will try and turn itself on if it is off between 3am and 6am, it will also automatically come on with a random delay to booting so the whole estate doesn't try to draw all the power at once. If a users desktop is an issue I have roaming profiles and a number of VM/s and also spare machines we can quickly migrate them onto. wake on lan is enabled and so is wake on power loss so no issues there. We have 24/7 remote hands at the dc and I know the guys there so am happy for them to dig around my kit if need be. Performance wise so far we seem to be cracking along nicely, the internet connection sits on a 15gb backbone so is blisteringly quick. I have RDS and also multi factor auth ssl vpn for remote users, but I also have outlook anywhere configured on my exchange 2016 servers and also have set up inbound routes for all other services such as crm, cms, intranet etc directly. In essence we are better positioned then ever to take the inbound traffic. So far I have to say that I have been more than happy with how the estate is performing. Replication from one estate to the other for example has seen fairly big increases and compression on the inbound on the vpn seems to be coping better. It's early days but I think this move is super smart for the business. When you consider everything it makes absolute sense.
 
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Doesn't surprise me with BT. I'm involved with a pilot installation for a project which if moved into production the value is few million quid. The network is outsourced to BT and they are clueless at times.

If only it was at times. I am so done with them, they left me half operational for a week as I refused to let them do any more and made them stop before they broke any more. Genuinely they are an absolute joke, one day I will write a massive post about my dealings with them over the last 10 years or more and it would read like some sort of horror story.
 
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Had that random 'oh no have i messed up here' today. Then realised... nope i just didnt do the work on zscaler. Total rookie mistake! :D
 
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That's my entire career to be fair :D

Early reports are fantastic from everybody in terms of speed into the DC. Everybody has a pair of monitors connected to a laptop and we use the -span flag on RDP sessions inbound and chop the screens up on the desktops using display fusion. For anybody with anything less and we have a few users with their own setups for example, rds inbound with multiple screens checked in RDP tends to do just fine. So far so good.
 
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Good to see our kit still sitting proudly in the upper part of your rack.

Darktrace? Everything else is hpe and the firewalls are around the back :D Got to get rid of that gen 4 (i think) at the top. No real need for it anymore but it's the disk IO on that thing I am using. Also the gen 7 i think at the bottom needs to go and is unnecessary.
 
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Darktrace? Everything else is hpe and the firewalls are around the back :D Got to get rid of that gen 4 (i think) at the top. No real need for it anymore but it's the disk IO on that thing I am using. Also the gen 7 i think at the bottom needs to go and is unnecessary.

Nope not Darktrace.

I'll give you a clue... Old logo/security bezel - hint: upgrade time :p
 
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Nope not Darktrace.

I'll give you a clue... Old logo/security bezel - hint: upgrade time :p

HP/StoreOnce If so Ive never managed to get the fibre working properly on that damn thing :p? If so I have another one :D 2 is the magic number!

Also upgrade time? Jeeez, can't you see im still running EVA, one step at a time buddy lol.
 
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I dare to ask what the issue is... :D. Copying between the two?

No sync has always been spot on but I do have to run them in nas mode using 4 ethernets. Every time I have tried to link them to vmware/veeam via FC I just never managed to get it to work. Ive read the documentation 100 times and tried as many. I'm sure there is something missing in it as it goes from where I get to to magically working in one step :p Also restore times are pretty silly pulling from them in nas mode with no FC and it's always been an issue. I even sometimes run single one off's to the qnap as it's much faster on the same config.

Other than that they are awesome. :D compression is also awesome. Probably should have taken up HP on the free install and config but I am stubborn and wanted to play myself!
 
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No sync has always been spot on but I do have to run them in nas mode using 4 ethernets. Every time I have tried to link them to vmware/veeam via FC I just never managed to get it to work. Ive read the documentation 100 times and tried as many. I'm sure there is something missing in it as it goes from where I get to to magically working in one step :p Also restore times are pretty silly pulling from them in nas mode with no FC and it's always been an issue. I even sometimes run single one off's to the qnap as it's much faster on the same config.

Other than that they are awesome. :D compression is also awesome. Probably should have taken up HP on the free install and config but I am stubborn and wanted to play myself!

Ah i thought you'd be running Catalyst! Not too sure on the Veeam side. Is it a physical server that Veeam runs on? I've got mine running in a VM, i think i've had it set up for FC connectivity in the past though, will have to double check.
 
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Ah i thought you'd be running Catalyst! Not too sure on the Veeam side. Is it a physical server that Veeam runs on? I've got mine running in a VM, i think i've had it set up for FC connectivity in the past though, will have to double check.

We have the license, and I wanted catalyst over FC but couldn't really get it to do what I wanted to :) Again should have taken up that engineer time. For what we use them for and syncing backups etc they are still perfectly good enough in the current config. Just could be quicker. :)

Veeam is in a VM, on the hosts that FC to storage, the problem comes in exposing the FC into the VM. After that it all goes pear.
 
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Soldato
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I ended up doing loads of StoreOnce training when I worked at CDW. Good product, but I am primarily a NetApp/VEEAM guy these days, would like to get back into it.
 
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I ended up doing loads of StoreOnce training when I worked at CDW. Good product, but I am primarily a NetApp/VEEAM guy these days, would like to get back into it.

Decent bits of kit tbh. We are all hp/hpe pretty much and I like their products.
 
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We have the license, and I wanted catalyst over FC but couldn't really get it to do what I wanted to :) Again should have taken up that engineer time. For what we use them for and syncing backups etc they are still perfectly good enough in the current config. Just could be quicker. :)

Veeam is in a VM, on the hosts that FC to storage, the problem comes in exposing the FC into the VM. After that it all goes pear.

Yes would definitely recommend Catalyst over NAS, *should* get better speeds with it as well.

I'll make a note to check if my Veeam server has a FC passthrough card assigned to it.
 
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Yes would definitely recommend Catalyst over NAS, *should* get better speeds with it as well.

I'll make a note to check if my Veeam server has a FC passthrough card assigned to it.

Would be interested to know :) im running esx 6.5 on those 3 10th gen Servers running 2nd Gen Epyc 7452's.
 
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@Vince Sorry bit of a late reply. My Veeam VM didn't have FC connectivity, so i just spun up another VM in my lab that i've added a FC passthrough card to. From their i can configure the backup repository on Veeam to use the FC link to the StoreOnce, and has just this second completed a test backup.

To add the FC card, i just edited the VM settings, and added a new PCI device:

YmxWHRS.png

We're running "Hypervisor: VMware ESXi, 6.5.0, 9298722"
 
Man of Honour
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@Vince Sorry bit of a late reply. My Veeam VM didn't have FC connectivity, so i just spun up another VM in my lab that i've added a FC passthrough card to. From their i can configure the backup repository on Veeam to use the FC link to the StoreOnce, and has just this second completed a test backup.

To add the FC card, i just edited the VM settings, and added a new PCI device:

YmxWHRS.png

We're running "Hypervisor: VMware ESXi, 6.5.0, 9298722"

I shall give it another bash. Not sure why I was having so many issues. I am not entirely sure I have tried again since I put the epyc servers in. Im going to the DC on tuesday so will give it another look. Thanks for giving it a bash dude. Ill let you know how i get on :)
 
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