Hyper V Replication and Failover

hello again as you know I am Eli the computer guy and today we're going to be talking about hyperv failover so what we're going to be doing is uh I have set up two servers so that if one server fails one hyperv server fails then you can start up the virtual machines on a different hyperv server very easily so the idea is you have two hyperv server so hyperv is the virtualization software then you install the instances of operating systems onto that right so the question is what happens if a power supply fails what happens if a CPU fails one one of those types of things that's why you have failover so basically you have two hyperv servers they're synchronizing the data and if one server physically fails for some reason you can bring up the virtual machines on the other uh server licky split uh very easily and keep uh going on with business having a business continuity now it's very important that you understand a few things uh when I'm going to be talking about this today so again one of the things you have to understand whenever I'm going to be talking about technology a lot of times I talk about highlevel Theory I don't talk about the specific uh operating system a lot so depending on what hyperv version you're using and server version you're using this may be a little bit different so I'm kind of explaining how this works uh if you are going to be setting this up and especially trying to use it in a production environment make sure you do the Google searches and you know exactly what's going on what I am showing you guys today I'm using the hyper the current hyperv uh on Windows 2012 R2 so that is what I am using today and if you go you can download a trial version of Windows Server uh 2012 R2 and do everything that I I am doing today now the big thing that you have to understand uh whenever you're dealing with Microsoft hyperv is the thing that Microsoft is Scar the the most worried about is something called split brain split brain and this is something that you have to be very worried about because split brain can be absolutely and utterly devast ating to your environment devastating devastating to your environment especially if you're dealing with a large environment so be very careful about split brains so what am I talking about what I'm talking about split brains so we set up this replication this hyperv replication so when we're doing hyperv replication what is happening is we are making identical functional copies of these servers is not going into a back file that we then have to restore we are literally having two clones of uh this instance sitting on your infrastructure well how hyperv works is if you have two hyperv servers and they can see each other you have you may have that clone but you are not able to actually start the Clone you get an error right so you have hyper you have a an instance on This hyperv Server let's say Ubuntu so I've got a couple of servers I'll show you in a second but let's say on This Server you have the instance of Ubuntu and it's replicated over to this other server so on the first server Ubuntu is running well on the second server where it's been replicated to if you try to start the Ubuntu Server it will fail out because that second hyperv server can see that Ubuntu is already running on the first server and therefore it goes this is a clone and we sure as hell don't want clones running on the same network especially once you start getting into using like Windows Server so you're talking about active directory servers and database server you can run into all kinds of problems because these clones have the exact same IP address they have the exact same security policies they have the exact same everything so if you have the if you have both clones running at the exact same time the issue is is especially with routing and how information gets sent through your infrastructure some data may go to This Server some data may get go to This Server some data may get pulled from this server some data may get pulled from this server and then all of a sudden you have two servers that are providing the exact same services and data is going to one but not the other and to the other but not the one and all of a sudden it gets really nasty and now if you're just thinking about like a file server that's not horrible that's recoverable from you know if you've got split brain on a file server or web server it's a pain in the ass I mean it'll slow things down for a little while but that's probably recoverable but if you have a DAT imagine if you have a database server and you now have two literally ident iCal database servers that you're pumping data into active directory something like that the exact same IP addresses the exact same security policies the exact same everything you change a you change a password and goes to this active directory server he changes a password it goes to this active directory server you change your permission on something it goes to this active directory server they change your permission now goes on this active directory server and now your database you know what I'm saying is getting split and gnarled and all horrible so what you have to be very very very careful about in the Microsoft world with hyperv is do not get split brain now you may be sitting there and you may be thinking well Eli how would I get split brain right you know if this server fails if server one fails the power supply fails the CPU fails whatever that obviously will crash all the instances on that hyperv server and so I can bring them up on the second hyperv server and there's no way you can have split brain well as I've talked about before in troubleshooting classes is remember that that uh these servers uh can only talk to each other and only know they exist through networking right so this server is connected to your network and this server is connected to the network all this server knows the second server knows is it can now no longer talk to the first server that may be because of CPU failed that may be because the hard the hard drive failed or the power supply failed or it may be because somebody unplugged the wrong Cable in the server cabinet or it maybe because a switch failed or it maybe somebody was screwing around with routing protocol and mucked something up well think about that if somebody screws up with your networking This Server may not be able to talk to this server but can talk to a lot of other client computers on the network This Server may not be able to talk to that server but it cannot talk to another lot of other client computers on the network so if you get a call and you get told that the hyperv server the Ser these instances are down and you try to go in and you try to remote control and you try to remote control this this first hyperv server and you can't get to it cuz you're on this side of whatever that that Network screw up is and you go oh no hyperv server one is down okay so what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring up the all the instances on the hyper V2 server well that is now where we have split brain because whatever is going on with that networking now all those instances because basically when you try to bring those instances up on the second server it will try to communicate with the first server that communication will fail because whatever's going on here with the network layer uh so it will say okay I'm able to do that it will then bring those servers up these servers are now providing services for all these clients these servers are doing all the the things for these clients and now what happens when the routing is fixed you now have I what were identical servers that now have different information in them that's got to be horrible I can't even explain like I say a lot of you noobs I know a lot of you noobs are just sitting there like oh that's not that bad oh my God can you imagine that can you can you imagine that in like an environment of a thousand people that would be horrible I can't even explain you guys how horrible that would be so what I'm saying when we start talking about um hyperv replication and failover be careful of split brain look at me when I laughing look at me look at my face right now and understand exactly how much pain you would be in if this happens so if you want to start doing a hyperv failover it's actually relatively easy to do um that's one of the things I I like about the Microsoft world again I like Server 2012 as much as I complain about Windows 8 Server 2012 it's actually very nice so if you're going to be setting all this up it's for hyperv replication it's actually rather easy uh on both servers that you're going to be replicating uh you have to install hyperv obviously then on both of those servers on the host operating system you set up replication so basically you say This hyperv Server is allowed to replicate and you say This hyperv Server is allowed to replicate okay then within the individual instances you set up the replication for those individual instances so you may or may not what individual instances to be able to replicate so that's what I've shown you what I have set up today is I have two uh instances that are able to replicate and then one instance that's not allowed to replicate why would you do that I don't know that goes to Art and Science you know what I'm saying just because you can do something doesn't mean you want to do something you've got to figure all that out so let's go over to the computer right now so I can kind of show you what's going going on and like I say this is this actually is really really really cool as long as long as you don't get split brain I know a lot of you a lot of times you know I say things you guys get irritated with how often I say them you're like yeah Eli I get the point I will bang this one into your head if you get split brain in any kind of decent sized environment I cannot explain to you how horrible that would be I I can't even like yeah so anyways let's go over to the computer and it can kind of show you what's going on oops nope that's not as my computer let's go to the computer there we go there we go so this is the computer so right now I am using remote desktop and we are looking at my two 2012 servers so I have these 2012 servers set up on different physical boxes and on them I have hyperv installed so we can see the hyperv manager if you guys guys can see so this is server 192.168.1.3 and this is server 192.168.1.2 so the way that I've set this up is the 19216 6 8.1.2 this is the main server so this has my main instances so we can see Fedora Server 2012 and Ubuntu and then what I'm doing is I'm using the second server 192.168.1.3 just as that failover server for right now just Fedora and just Server 2012 so that's an important thing to understand you don't have to replicate all your servers if you don't want to uh you can only replicate you can you can just replicate one or or you know multiple or whatever so the first thing that you need to do in order to start doing replication is you need to go over here and you need to select your host so these are instances this is the host so the host is this physical box This Server 2012 box and here we need to go into settings so we go to hyperv settings and we need to go down and we need to do replication configuration so replication configuration is what allows you to do replication if you don't set up replication you can't do replication pretty simple uh then you go in here and you do enable this computer as a replica server and then it's going to ask you the Authentication so I would say use how the hell do you say this Kos you guys understand k r b r oos so if you use this this is kind of like the Standard Security for Windows servers in order to make this work this has to be part of a domain so I actually I do have to say when I set this up I have an active directory domain controller DNS and DHCP and so in order to do this uh that was the easiest way so basically in order for this to communicate with the other server they need to use a security an authentication style and so if you have a domain set up that makes your life a lot easier you can do certificate-based authentication um and I looked into that and that's a complete pain in the ass uh so you can do that you can in fact do that um maybe I will do a class on that later but I am telling you it's a hell of a lot easier just to do this within a domain so you set up your active directory domain you set up your hyperv and then you come in here you do enable this computer as a replicate server you use kubos uh then you go down here uh authorization and storage allow a replication from any authenticated server or allow replication from the specified servers so you have to decide I would just do you know in this kind of testing phase just from any authenticated server and then of course you click okay you then have to make sure you go over to the other server that you're going to be using for failover and replication you go over to hyperv settings and you set up the exact same thing replication configuration enable this kubros however you say it allow replication from many uh authenticated servers and you do okay so the one thing you do have to remember is for this replication you have to set that up if you don't set that up it's not going to work and you're going to run into problems so then past that what you have to do is you have to do you go in and you actually set up the replication uh for the uh the server so as we can see I have an instance of Fedora here that's getting replicated in Server 2012 so all we have to do is we go down and so for Ubuntu if we say okay okay I now want to replicate uh Ubuntu so what I do is I right click here I can go down and I can do enable replication I click on enable replication and then we just go through this process next so what do I want to uh replicate to this is my server server 2. etcg dolc I hit next it verifies uh replica server replica Port use this authentication do I want to compress the data that is being transmitted over the network um that's a checkbox I'm not really sure why you wouldn't uh that may be something if you in a real production environment you want to take a look at as far as I'm concerned you would always leave that checked but you know they give you the option so maybe there's a reason you want to do it virtual hard disks that you want to deal with and you click next uh then the question comes to how frequently do you want the data replicated again this is one of those really important things to be thinking about because the more often the data gets replicated that means the more bandwidth you are going to use this may or may not matter in your environment if everything's connected to a gigabit per second switch and you're not using much bandwidth then it's fine uh if you have a congested Network already that may be may may suck so basically it's either 30 seconds 5 minutes or 15 minutes so the first thing you have to think about is how much do you care about uh with your bandwidth if you don't care about your bandwidth I would say just synchronize it every 30 seconds the other thing to realize though and this is important thing to realize is this is again this is not real time replication even if you set this down to 30 seconds it replicates every 30 seconds that still means there's a 30 second Gap uh when every kind of when the replication happens so there's a 30- second Gap where if one of the if the hyperv server fails and then you bring uh the instance up on a different hyperv server there will be 30 seconds of information missing why that's important for you guys to understand is again if you're dealing with a a file server uh it doesn't really matter if you're dealing with a read only do read only no write read only domain control it probably doesn't matter but if this is again a database server where information is being written to it 30 seconds of downtime 30 seconds of failed rights may be very important again that's one of those art science the whole nine yards figure it out just think about it that is one thing you may want to look for with a different um uh virtualization uh solution is if you need real time virtualization but anyway we got 30 seconds here and then we click on next uh maintain only the latest recovery point or create hourly recovery points you can actually create different uh recovery points uh if you need that for some reason I'll just leave that maintain only the the latest hit next uh send the initial copy over the network so depending on how large your initial copy is right is this a server This Server is like I don't know five gigs or something so it doesn't really matter but is your server four terabytes again do you want to pump that entire darn thing over the network or do you want to export it to some kind of external hard drive and manually move it that's important imagine because you can do this hyperv replication between different sites so if I have a main headquarters office uh and a remote site let's say the remote site I have my hyperv servers running and I replicate them back to the headquarters office well um basically do I want that initial replication to go all the way through the the the ISP connection my 30 megabit per second internet connection or do I just want to pick up an external hard drive and actually mail it to the headquarters that's that's one of the things you can think about uh start replication immediately or start the replication at a specific time again these are different things that you just have to figure out depending on what you want hit next and then hit finish and so once you've hit finished uh replication enabled uh successfully so we can go in and we can look at the settings um so we go down here and we've got the replication and we can see the replication Creos every 30 seconds so on and so forth so right now you can go up here and you can see UB on to and it's sending the initial uh replica and so that's what's happening so that's so once you've set up your hyperv servers in order to do replication uh then all you have to do is set up your individual instances and again it's individual instances so this is for only for Ubuntu Server 2012 was set up differently Fedora was set up differently so every single instance you have to go in once you've done that uh you can just highlight whichever uh instance you want to take a look at you can go into settings uh and then you can just see what the replication strategy is uh for that particular instance so I can look at this and since this is off since Fedora is off I can go in here and play with it so you know every 30 seconds do I want to compress the whole nine yards do remember if you want to make any modifications to the settings of your virtual machines you do have to turn the virtual machine off also for the failover that I'll show you in a second you have to to turn the virtual machine off so there we go and we just click uh beyond that we can go um and we can take a look at what we want to look at is the view the replication health so this is a very important right so we're going to be sending we're going to be creating exact clones well the plan it's always the plan it's always the plan right what is reality the plan is to create identical clones what is the reality right is that replication happening is there a problem with firewalls is there a problem with anti virus is something just screwed up you want to make sure that the replication at least the the hyperv servers think the replication is happening so what you can do is again all you do is you rightclick whatever instance you care about you go to replication and then you do view replication health so when you click on this this will then show you the health of the replication is it in fact replicated so I can come down here replication health is normal so that I know that the the copy on the other side should be healthy I can go over here just to verify I can highlight I can do replication I can see view replication health and again I can go in make sure it's normal so if this is if there's going to be a planned failover the best thing to do is make sure that both copies are are happy and healthy and there's no other issue you also see now since I started the replication uh with Ubuntu Ubuntu is now here so that all happened rather easily okay so now the next thing that we're going to be taking a look at is the whole failover process so the important thing to understand is you cannot fail over a running machine so this is not an automatic failover process you actually have to manually fail over you have to turn off uh the uh the the virtual machine on your first hyperv server before you can fail it over to the other hyperv server so you'll see here Fedora Server 2012 and Ubuntu the state is all off because those are off and over here we can see that Server 2012 and Ubuntu are actually running so in order to do the failover what we then have to do is we have to turn off the machine over here so what I can do is I can right click on this and I can simply do a turn off of Ubuntu and I'm just going to turn it off now that it's off what I can do is I can rightclick it I can do replication and I can do a planned failover so the planned failover means I know this failover is going to happen and I want to do it so I just click on the plan failover then it's going to ask me a couple of questions start the replica virtual machine after failover so I'll say yes just to show you guys what's going on and reverse the replication Direction after failo so once the failover is done do I want the replica to come back to this hyperv server so I will just click that just to make my life easier and then I can do fail over so now it's going through and we're getting green green green green Green start the replica and it has been started so now we go over to that second uh machine and we can now see that Ubuntu has failed over and it is now in fact running over here so this is the failover process so you have two identical clones you fail this is how you fail over then all you have to do um is we can do the replication and we can do uh we can uh remove uh replication we can pause the replication view Health uh so on and so forth so what I can also do is I can just take this I can turn this off and then I can just uh fail it back over um plan fail over fail over and now it's going back so if we go over here it is now Ubuntu and it is running again now I these These are actual servers and these are actual live servers so I I can uh I can go over here and I can double click this uh just to show you and we'll get a window of it um so you do have to be careful so I when when I just rightclick and turn this thing off that is not what you should do normally you should do a normal controlled uh shutdown of the system I'm just showing you guys this uh because it's pretty easy but that that's really all there is to it beyond that you then can have the unplanned failover I don't know if it'll give me the option uh now but basically if the other machine has failed uh what I can do is I can do an unplanned failover and bring these machines online again if for some reason this server can no longer see the other hyperv server you can do an unplanned failover and bring these machines online you cannot do it now the issue is though is if the other machine if the other hyperv server is not in fact turned off it is simply some kind of networking error that is when you get what do you call it yep that's right that's when you get split brain and then everything goes to hell uh very very very quickly but this is just the basic idea behind hyperv replication and hyperv failover and uh and like I say it's it it's pretty good and it's pretty nice and the good thing is this is already built into Server 2012 you know a lot of people you know we talk about um you know which version which which uh hypervisor solution should we use do we use esxi do we use hyperv do you use Citrix and one of the things that always comes up is everybody complains about the price of Microsoft Microsoft is too expensive I'm not going to argue whatever but one of the things you have to be thinking about is if you already bought Server 2012 R2 for whatever reason right you already own uh that license then you already own this product if you don't need a very robust failover uh strategy you already own this so you don't really have to spend any more money uh to make it work right so if you buy uh at least right now right now this second it may change later but if you buy Server 2012 R2 you are allowed to to create two virtual instances of 2012 R2 within hyperv so if you want a really rather inexpensive backup solution or failover solution you can buy a another physical machine right another $1,000 server $1,500 server install Windows Server uh with hyperv on that again another $600 and then you can have those two physical servers replicating if one server fails you can just bring up the instances on the other and fix the first one and then once that's fixed then you can put them back kind of get what I'm saying you don't have to go out and spend $3,000 or $2,000 on esxi if if you don't actually need it so that is something to think about the more I play with hyperv the more I like it but again are some quirks and you really do have to be concerned this whole idea of split brain I know I've said that about 50 times but it's really nasty so in order to make this work as I've done it today I would argue the easiest way is just to set up an active directory domain so on the first server I have active directory installed I have DNS installed and I have DHCP installed the reason is do remember uh active directory prefers Windows DNS and DHCP again you can set up some other DNS and DHCP but that's its own can of worms for your level install active directory install DNS install DHCP and then install hyperv create the domain so on and so forth go over to the other server that server number two make that a member of the domain that you just created using server one then install hyperv once you have done done done that for the host host not instances host on both Ser both server enable replication using Cur Bros uh then once you have done that on the first machine go to your individual instances you want to replicate uh right uh go to settings uh then do the replication and then do your configurations um allow the replication to happen and then from there you can fail over from one to the other to the other to the other to the other to the other so again it's it's all pretty easy all pretty simple and again if you guys want to play with this Windows Server 2012 R2 180 day trial uh you can just download it for free and install it whatever you want um the what I showed you guys today this test um I literally have one laptop with 8 gigs of RAM and an i7 processor uh running server number one and I have a crappy old uh desktop computer with 16 gigs of RAM and a solid state drive that's server number two uh so again remember you don't need a lot of resources to to make this work you you you can spin up like three Ubuntu servers that need very very few resour ources just to kind of play around with us don't think you need some 64 gig ram thing in order to make this work but yeah that's about it um again if you want any more um in the description below I will give you guys more uh uh I'll give you links to more specific instructions about how all this works I just kind of want to give you the overview here uh so you have an idea so there you go hyperv failover pretty good thing as long as you don't do anything stupid nerds we can fix that.com if you're thinking about starting your own computer services company but you don't want to have to worry about coming up with a logo and copyright and 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pixir has a free piece of software called scrutinized scrutinizer is a free netf flow Network traffic analysis tool so if you want to play around with netflow if you want to see what's going on with the network layer and you have Cisco equipment take a look at pier.com click on the link below this video it'll bring you to this page where you can download scrutinizer the free netflow network traffic analys analysis tool alo.com a t o.com if you're dealing with virtualization in a hyperv environment so we're talking about Windows Server 2008 R22 12 and 2012 R2 take a look at alo.com they have a number of hyperv backup solutions they have the free version which will back up up to 2 VMS for free forever they also have the unlimited version starting at only $400 per host I think this is a very good value so if you are dealing with hyperv virtualization and you need a backup solution take a look at alo.com spiceworks dcom these guys have the free network management software the free mobile device management software the free community with Millions ions of users so if you need if you're an IT professional and you need support spice works is a great place to go all their stuff is basically free and just an absolutely great thing again if you have any questions that I don't answer in the show that are technical in nature you know we're talking about active directory synchronization between sites in remote areas uh if you click on the link below this video that will take you to the spice Works Community they have millions of users there that will be able to help you out so take a look at spiceworks dcom total seminars total.com if you're looking for your A+ your net plus your Security Plus certification they have video training practice test exam vouchers and more if you are on the comp Tia track and you are looking for study prep material study guides that type of thing take a look at total seminars total sim.car to figure out how to back them up they have solution soltions for esxi they have solutions for hyperv and as you guys like they have free stuff so if you are dealing with a virtualized environment and you're trying to figure out a backup solution take a look at vm.com add axis.com if you're dealing with active directory on a large scale so you have hundreds of users to add hundreds of users to disable so on and so forth you may want to take a look at ad access.com this is active directory management and automation software so this tries to automate and simplify the active directory workflow so if you are in a large scale active directory INF structure take a look at ad access.com schoolly mitchell.com if you're trying to find better internet or telephone service or if you're trying to find less expensive internet or telephone service give schoolie Mitchell a call basically what these guys are these guys are Telecom Consultants you call them you say what you need for yourself or your client and they figure out the best option they'll examine your existing services and review your bills to make sure there are no errors then they'll keep an eye on your services moving forward so that everything remains optimized because schoolie Mitchell is objective and independent they have no ties to vendors you know know they are always your best interests in mind the best part is there is no fee for their services the only cost is a portion of the share to savings over up set period of time if they don't find savings there is no cost to you schoolie Mitchell so the Hands-On review for today is the Bluetooth what is it Instinct speaker from reactive so this company called rea active sent me their nice little Bluetooth speaker and I do have to say it is a pretty nice thing so let's go over to little demonstration table so I can show you what's going on with it and I think you guys will probably like it so uh so when you order the Instinct it comes in a nice nice pretty little box here uh and this is the speaker so uh so it's nice uh it's all plastic and all that but one of the the the things with it is they actually use a very very good quality plastic so it actually it feels good so uh so yeah there you go so basically all this is is a Bluetooth speaker uh if you go over to the side you can see that you can input audio into it if you want so it's got the the uh the the stereo the uh whatever the speaker Port if you want to put in uh sound you know nice little onoff switch it's got the the power recharger the whole N9 yards you can plug this into the wall and you can play it or it has a battery in here that lasts about 8 hours uh I do have to say the the music sound on it is very nice uh it has the uh the base or whatever so I had this on my table here and it vibrated the table uh pretty decently when I was playing some different music again I am not a music offici a so I don't know if this is the perfect thing out there but for an Eli the computer guy it's pretty nice it's got the little uh the the uh the hard buttons up here for uh for the volume going up and down and so on and so forth so that's basically all there is to the reactive speaker um I have to say it is pretty nice like I say what I like about it it is is it's built well and one of the things I like uh being a Bluetooth speaker is that it's actually directional uh so many of the Bluetooth speakers nowadays are omnidirectional so the sound goes out everywhere uh which is a real problem if you just want to put uh your speaker like up against the wall and be able to listen to it because the the music kind of gets muffled and all that so one of the nice things that is uh uh directional so you can put this again up against the wall up against in a bookshelf and you don't get any uh distorted music or any of that but it's pretty decent little thing now if you're interested in taking a look at reactive uh all you do let's go over to the the website and you can take a look at it here uh so they have a they have a God awul oh my God they have a horrible domain name um this this is like this is a tragic tragic domain name for a good product it's a good product horrible domain name r e a c t i v v s o u n d.com so it's not reactive as in the entire world it's not re e a c t i v e sound it's re e a TI I vs o u n d.com so what I will tell you guys is if you want to learn how to manufacture good uh Bluetooth speakers go over and talk to these guys if you want to find out about buying a domain name stay the hell away from them but anyways if you can get through the domain name if you don't screw it up uh you can come here and you can see it's it's 99.995 with free shipping which seems about normal so again I I have a lot of different speakers Logitech JCL all kinds of stuff and I mean it it it Stacks up to them uh very nicely it Compares very nicely so it's good it's got the nice little battery in here it's built well I mean I mean that's you know what I'm saying and it's it's fine and the nice part it doesn't really scuff or anything which is good so uh so I like it this is the Instinct speaker from reactive if you've never heard of reactive before uh they make good products from what I can tell so go take a look at their website reactive noes sound.com and then again since I'm I'm trying to teach you guys how to do stuff in the real world never buy a domain name like that that is like the worst domain name I've ever heard in my life it's just horrible it's just like you're setting yourself up for failure with a domain name like that but anyways but they do good speakers so take go take a look at them if you're looking for a Bluetooth speaker give them a thumbs up so this question comes from Alex M I've recently been offered a side job as a web artist and I'm seeing this as an opportunity to start uh start building experience my goal is to one day do this professionally with being able to host the websites myself yeah um I was just wondering if you could recommend any good books that will further uh break me into the basics of building a website um no not really basically if you want to go out there and you want to start building websites the best thing to do is just start learning and see where it takes you again building websites um is kind of like computers when people talk about it I want to do computers I want to build websites and for us professionals we kind of just rub our temples and go you know that's a little bit bigger than your you know what I'm saying like and that's where you come into like with building websites because the question is is when you start talking about building websites what does that what does that mean you know that could mean any any number of different things do you want to be building websites that are very graphically intensive so uh so the actual infrastructure of the site isn't that important but all of the pictures and the graphics and the movies and the animation that is what really makes it snap well if you're going to be doing things like that then you want to learn uh stuff like Adobe Creative Suite again Adobe Creative Suite um is far more expensive and far more complicated than 99.99 9 9% of the population needs but for that 0 1% of the population that's actually creating incredibly crisp clear amazing web content uh it's very valuable so if you want to do things like the graphics you know logos and pictures and all that kind of stuff we uh basically you would learn Adobe and that takes a long time I I took an Adobe Photoshop class years ago and the introductory level was 40 hours um I I think the the entire just for Photoshop not for Creative Suite Photoshop I think I think if you went through uh all the training for it it's like a 100 hours of training just for Photoshop so if you like that then you would go down the the Adobe you know realm that's what you would do then if you get into it you're doing the design you're like well I don't really care about Graphics I'll just go to iock photo or pay somebody else and you're going to going be building the websites then there's a whole lot of questions of of what uh languages do you want to use and that's all that's all what you decide side do you want to focus on JavaScript do you want to focus on PHP do you want to focus on Ruby uh other stuff python python um All Those Questions come up and really honestly the the best way to answer those questions is to Simply start building websites uh and seeing what you personally need to know um that that's the whole path everybody has this idea in the technology world like they want to learn a CDE e FG and then get the $100,000 a year job that's not how it works you learn a and then you learn p and then you learn q and then you go all the way to Z and then you go to x and then somehow you're going to BBB and you're like how the hell BBB where is that coming from right it's all the the path to get you to where you're going um see that's what I would say really what I would say is just go out there start building as many websites as you can uh do Google searches give your I would argue give yourself a budget of a few hundred $200 or $300 and then what I would do is when you you find something new and interesting you want to learn go to Amazon.com buy a dummy's book or a beginner's B book or a visual quick start guide on that particular subject learn it see if you want to continue doing that or if you want to go over to something else then figure it out what it is you know that that is that is the best way to do it is just that's one problem I see a lot too is people will do things like they say I want to learn PHP and then around here in like the Baltimore area and a lot of other areas Ruby on Rails developers are the most valuable so you spend all this effort learning PHP or whatever else uh but then all the jobs are in Ruby you know what I'm saying whereas if you just flow maybe your area you need PHP developers or JavaScript developers or something else that would be my thought don't really worry about the specific books just follow your little squiggly ass path and you'll figure it out give yourself a few hundred bucks in a year and you'll figure it out so this question comes from Benjamin uh so he's going through here and he's talking about about uh that he started to play around with virtual private servers so Qui quick question is it necessary to have a browser loaded on a virtual SE uh server if so how is it done um depends on what you're using the virtual server for remember virtual servers are servers so if you are using your virtual server as just an FTP file server then you don't need a browser on it um you know again whenever you're dealing with servers it all depends on what the hell you're doing do you need a browser no you don't need a browser um could it be useful especially if you're using like a Windows Virtual server uh it would probably be useful so do you need one no um but you know you can also do it uh if you do want one on there how do you install it uh if you're using Windows so you're using a Windows Virtual server uh it it'll have Internet Explorer actually already already installed right so uh so you're using a Windows uh server to have uh Internet Explorer already installed um if you're using Linux and you want to use a graphical user interface uh I would have to do a class on that I'm not exactly sure how that would work but if you're using Windows as a virtual private server uh they definitely have Internet Explorer already installed uh and you should be able to use Internet Explorer to go and download and install Google Chrome and go from there if that's really what you want to do uh secondly I can't seem to accomplish UPS loading programs such as Office 2003 to my server um so on and so forth that is one thing that actually comes up a lot with virtual private servers it's one of those things you don't think about until you're sitting there with your thumb drive and you're like how do you plug this into the cloud right because this this is something to think about so normally when we're thinking about servers uh we H we have them somewhere local they may be in our our server room or our data center or sitting right beside us but they're there uh so when we when we uh spin up a server you know you can take a USB drive or connect it to your to your local network and be able to move files around rather easily the problem happens in the virtual server world uh or the the you know if you're renting a server is you just spun up that server up in the cloud and the question is is okay you have this file you know it's executable and you have to get it from you up there so that you can run it what the hell do you do uh so generally what you have to do is you have to install or set up the FTP server so you guys are used to using FTP clients you know CED FTP or file Zilla or something like this when you're dealing with a server VPS server or dedicated server many times you'll actually have to set up an FTP server component on it and then what you can do is from your computer you can upload your files to the FTP server uh and then you can you can run it from there right so so on your Linux box you install a FTP demon um I like VSS ftpd it's just what I use but there's a lot of other FTP servers you basically you you install the FTP server uh you just do pseudo appg you know whatever get it uh and install it uh and then you configure it and then you can connect and be able to upload your files uh if you're doing a Windows Server it's a little bit different uh IIs I guess has an FTP component bit of a pain in the ass uh I actually like filezilla server so if I'm using uh Windows uh whether it's a desktop computer or a server and I always want to use it as an FTP server filezilla server is very easy to use so what you can do is you can use Internet Explorer or Chrome or whatever browser you install you can go to file zilla.com or.org or whatever it is download the filezilla server install the filezilla server configure the filezilla server use your client computer to connect to there and Away you go so th those are the thoughts so if you're dealing with Windows Server uh Internet Explorer should already be installed on it and you can install a browser if you want want to or don't if you don't want to if you're dealing with a Linux server again I've never I hate to say this am I allowed to say I've never done something um I haven't I haven't uh remotely connected to a graphical Linux machine a server at least uh whenever I do servers they're all command lines so I just use SSH so I would have to figure that one out so that's its own mess uh but beyond that and again if you want to upload the files just use a a FTP server install the FTP server and Away you go so the final thoughts for today are to make sure that you are prepared to ask for help so this is one of those things a lot of people don't think about enough and it is a very important thing in the real world so that what we are what gets pounded into our head uh so often is that we need to ask help the idea that we cannot do anything alone you can never be successful alone you you have to go out there and you have to kind of find other people to help you but one of the things that never gets brought up is the question of have you prepared to actually accept the help and that's one of the issues uh that comes up a lot of times especially with new people so what I ran into very recently is I had a fellow YouTuber who reached out to me to see about doing cross promotion right so basically I would help promote his site and he would help promote my site now I do have to say I think the person has a very good uh on screen personality I think he's able to deliver material well I think he can be very successful but last time I had checked in on his channel it had been pretty small I mean like you know if I'm here it's here again nothing against it but we're we're not quite playing in the same league so I thought it was interesting that he approached me about this you know the whole idea of cross promotion because the way that I'm looking at it is if you're coming to me to ask du cross promotion it means that you have something to offer that it's not a oneway one way way thing so it's like okay if I have 300 I don't even know what I have now however many 100,000 subscribers you may not have that many subscribers but you have something else so I went over and I went to take a look at his YouTube channel and then was a bit saddened very very very saddened to find out uh that they had not uploaded a video in three months so it was three months since the past the last video was uploaded it was 5 months uh since the second one was uploaded and basically there have been a couple of uploads over the entire past year so last time this person had even put out very many videos was over a year ago so it became obvious to me that for whatever reason right now they're not being that serious about their YouTube channel so I emailed them and said I don't quite grasp what's going on and they gave the normal thing of oh I'm busy wife work again all of those things are completely and utterly normal but the thing that hit my head that that that went through my head though is I don't understand why you are reaching out to me then you obviously are are not focused that focused on your YouTube channel you're not putting that much effort into your YouTube channel so why are you going to I hate to say one of the higher ups one of the successful people seeing if you can do things like cross promotion when it's obvious you're not even putting in the time and energy it's kind of like okay you want to do cross promotion so I can send more viewers to you but even right now you're not willing to really create that many videos and do that much work how does that work out basically what I what I told this person is I said listen I have a very very very very snarky fan base if I start advertising you right now um beyond beyond whatever my personal feelings are if I start advertising you right now my fans are going to have a have a field day with that one so no so that's what what I want you guys to be thinking about right because everybody again everybody says you got to go out there and you got to ask for help well the question is are you laying the foundation so that when you go to ask for help it doesn't look like a joke it doesn't actually look a little insulting and to be honest with you that was a little insulting I mean you're coming to me to to ask for help and you haven't done a video in 3 months and five months and a year why are you coming to me so when you're going to go out there when you're going to start asking for help make sure you lay the foundation like I said if you're if you are a YouTuber since that's what I do that's what I can explain best right now if you're a YouTuber before you go out and you start pinging uh people that are successful in this and looking for for cross promotion and all that make sure you're putting out two videos a week or one very high quality video a week you know so if you come to me or if you go to somebody else and they go back and they look at your channel they can see you may not have a lot of subscribers you may not have a lot of views you may not have a lot of anything but you do have videos right the one thing that you can absolutely and utterly control is how much productivity you put out you can control how much content you create so if I go there you may not have the subscribers you may not have the views you may not have a lot of other things but I can look at it and go I can see that this person is putting a lot of effort into what they're doing therefore I know they're serious and so this goes beyond uh things like uh things like YouTube so you're looking at going well Eli I'm not a web content creator you know that's a cute story but what does it have to do with me but it goes into to the rest of the world it's one of the things I run into with with Noobs you know the the techn technology new people all the time is they say Eli I can't get a job it's like well when was the last time you picked up a book and studied PHP oh well Eli I don't have time for that you know what I'm saying you don't know how many people I have run into that way where they do and it's again it gets tiring and insulting after a while but they'll be like Eli I want to have a cup of coffee with you I want to I want to talk to you about how I get a how I get ahead and how I get a job and how I do all these things and I'll sit there and I'll listen to their life story and they'll put it all out and and I'll go okay so what you need to do is a college degree or what you need to do is grab this PHP book you know I figure out I think about it and I give them an honest to goly customize what I believe you should do and then you don't know how many times they say oh you I don't I don't have the time to do that you're like I don't I don't know what to tell you if you want to be a computer programmer you got to learn programming oh Eli you don't understand I have a kid and I have a wife and I have a job I don't have time to learn computer programming okay well then how how are you going to be a programmer you know I mean you got to learn the material before you can do it so that's one of the things I want you guys to be thinking about is are you laying the foundation so when you go and ask for help uh that you're you're not written off because that's one of the things I really do see happen a lot and I've had to deal with a lot is again people come to help and I I do a lot of people there's too many of you guys but you know people that I know personally um I do want to help and I do want to help make success F but if you come to me asking for specific advice and then the specific advice that I give you is things you're like well Eli I don't have time or whatever then what so there we go those are some final thoughts today make sure you are building a foundation for when you go out to ask for help because what I see time and time and time again in the real world is people just go out and they ask for help and they think people like me can wave a freaking magic wand and and make success happen and that's not again like I say with this guy I could send a million visitors to his YouTube channel but the fact of the matter is if he's not putting out content regularly they're going to go and leave and that's it won't do any good

Channel: Eli the Computer Guy

Views: 137,693

Keywords: Eli, the, Computer, Guy, Hyper-V, Replication, windows server, server 2012 r2

Id: 0QMrMLbBqOU

Length: 51min 48sec (3108 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 06 2014