STiCory

Simple one, how 911 calls are routed to the appropriate local police department. Not sure how this is handled in Canada, though.

10/10 will buy the D ?

Interesting for sure. I wonder how long it'll take until NVMe drives saturate the DMI3 link and at what real world speed it happens! I can't imagine of speeds nearing 4GB/s. For reference my current rig is an i5 650 on an old p55 with a WD RE500 drive ASA primary ?. Talk about old and slow haha.

Selected best answer because it's the same as the others and he was the first poster!

Ya know FWIW this forum rocks, I've posted a couple questions so far and have got nothing but awesome answers and super helpful people. Thanks for the help guys, hopefully I can eventually help the community like they always help me!

Awesome. Thank you for the help guys! Where did you guys learn this? I couldn't find that answer anywhere haha For reference this is the MOBO I'm looking at with this M.2 NVMe drive.

OK, please don't kill me, but I want to beat this horse one more time ? In all seriousness, I can't find this actual question answered anywhere! Basically what I want to know is this, do PCIe 3.0 x4 based M.2 use PCIe lanes from the CPU or the chipset? Based off of that, assuming it uses CPU lanes, that means that all FCLGA 1151 processors (being that they only have 16 lanes) can I let run a graphics card at x8 if an x4 m.2 drive is used, correct? If it goes through the chipset, is the DMI 3.0 link a bottleneck? Assuming the most badass NVME drives can read at 3.2GB/s that only leaves a theoretical 700MB for the rest of the DMI link for all other peripherals. Thoughts? School me please!

So I did try out zendesk, as well as inbox by zendesk and they were great but weren't quite what I'm looking for. I'm not really concerned with generating tickets, just a way to have multiple people work in a single email. Trying different terms I just found shared mailboxes offered by Microsoft Office 365 for work so that may be an option. I dabbled with collaborative inboxes with Google groups as well but they were kind of clunky.. I've never heard of Kayako but I will look it up.

Not sure if this is the right place to put this, but I am looking for some way to have a collaborative email, think support@mydomain.com sales@mydomain.com etc. I need a way to receive emails and either delegate emails to users or have them "claim" them. Once they are "taken" a user then sends a reply on behalf of the group, so it won't show as johndoe@mydomain.com it'll show as a reply coming from the same inbound email address. Right now we have a google apps for work account set up for them but multiple people just log in to the same email account, this works somewhat. Its clunky because updates don't propagate immediately, so it's impossible to tell if someone already replied to an inbound email. I also will need a way to send emails as the collaborative email, such as someone calls in and says "hey send me something!", I want the emails to come from sales@mydomain.com etc. We each have our own emails as well so they can be used to log in to a system if needed. What sort of options are there?

I'd say probably this GTX 1060, but it's not like your 750Ti is a bad card, that's still a very good card. Heck I still have a 560Ti and it's good enough for me haha http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1N84R84185

Alright, some updates, @leadeater and @scottyseng tagging you guys because you've been following along and have both been helpful! To recap, disk group 0 is a two drive RAID 1 array with two VDs, one is 100GB and the other is 126GB, the second disk group is a four drive RAID 5 array and is 837GB. I installed the first OS on the 100GB VD (drive letter C), formatted the 126GB (drive letter E) VD as NTFS, formatted the 837GB VD (drive letter F) as NTFS, added the Hyper V role and rebooted. I then created the first VM as a gen 2 with 4GB of RAM and assigned it 4 virtual cores, the location of it's VHD and VM is on the E drive in a folder all of it's own. This is where it starts to get interesting! I did not at this time have the DC role added, right now there are only two machines, the Hyper-V server and the VM fresh install, I did some CrystalDiskMark testing from the Hyper-V server and this is what I got: I then did a test of the new server before the DC role and this is what I got: As expected these are almost identical to the preliminary testing from earlier. I then installed the DC role on the VM, configured ADDS, rebooted a handful of times and did the tests again, this is the Hyper-V server after the DC role was installed on the VM: And this is the VM after the DC role was installed: ...no change.. at all... I was expecting a hit because Windows Server 2012 R2 disables write cache when the DC role is installed, right? Well come to find out, if the DC is virtualized, it apparently can't disable this through the host.. If you try to disable it manually you get a nice little error that says "your disk may not support this" or something like that, and to top it off if you go to Event Viewer you see a yellow warning that says write cache-ing is enabled and AD corruption may occur. Interesting. SO, here is what we did, bought a fresh new battery for the RAID card, made sure the UPS can support the server for at least 20 minutes under load and will be making sure that if there is power fault for more than a minute or so to gracefully shutdown the server. And in the event that the UPS can't support the server for long enough the battery on the RAID card will save the cache until it comes back online. Interesting findings. This is all new to me but I feel like I'm learning this really fast and aren't things that I could really find anywhere online, so in case anyone doesn't know, I wanted to share my results! Thanks for listening, I know my posts are really long and drawn out but I like to be detailed. Thanks for listening! Happy New Years All!

Alright, so I've been doing some testing and some thinking, I slightly revised my idea, how does this sound/ is this possible?: VD0 RAID 1 Array (2) 300GB Drives Raid 1 VD1 RAID 6 Array (4) 300GB Drives Raid 5 Physical Machine on VD0 Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard Hyper-V Virtual Machine 0 on VD0 Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard (VM1) Domain Controller Active Directory and all it's happy horse stuff Virtual Machine 1 on VD1 Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard (VM2) File Server Application/ Program Server This way, only things running on the RAID 1 array would be the Hyper-V role, the DC and the AD stuff. This leaves a whole separate OS install on entirely separate drives on an entirely separate RAID array to have all of the files/ applications. My only question here is, when Windows disables write back cache, is it just at the OS install level or does it somehow disable it at the RAID card level? In other words, if the RAID card has write-back cache enabled but one Virtual Machine OS install disables it, do the rest of the VM's hitting that same RAID card have it disabled as well? This is what I have created for VDs on the RAID card, what do you think? For fun, attached are some CrystalDiskMark tests. First is the small 2 drive RAID 1 array, second is a separate 4 drive RAID 5 array, third replaces that RAID 5 array with a fresh RAID 6, and lastly replacing that RAID 6 is a RAID 10 array. Pretty interesting results honestly seeing how parity arrays are so much different than simple stripes/ mirrors as well as the sequential results on RAID 5 vs. RAID 6!! Thanks everyone!!

Alright so how about this idea, being that there is six 300GB drives, what if I a did two VDs, one RAID 1 for the OS, hypervisor, and a virtual machine for just the domain controller role, and the remaining 4 drives in a RAID 6 or 10 array depending on testing for the file sharing and application virtualization machine? How does that sound?

Will do, I'll install the programs on the current RAID 10 VD and see how it fairs and then redo it on a RAID 6 VD and check, then just pick the best, it will most likely be the RAID 6 I'm thinking though just due to the higher sequential speeds. Agreed, I'm beginning to think. It is a lot of stuff but we're a small shop and I'm trying to bring it into the 21st century haha. It's my fathers company and right now we have everything running on a single 5400RPM HD Windows 10 home desktop.. ..want to talk about atrocious performance? haha Well that's at least one positive so far this RAID 10 VD has going for it Never used that program, I'll check it out, I'm not a sysadmin by trade by any means, just a 26yo having fun while learning as well as trying to upgrade what we have to something better in just about, if not all, category lol. Interesting note about the DC role and encryption, that was something that I wasn't aware of. Perhaps then use this server like you're mentioning and run two VMs instead of it all on the physical chassis. At that point though, should I keep the single VD or split the VD up into two RAID 5 arrays, one for the hypervisor and the DC server and the other for the file sharing/ application server? Or something else?

That's what I was thinking but I was curious of the general consensus, so the primary applications are Quickbooks, and Fishbowl Inventory, from what I have gathered they appeared to be random writes but not 100% sure of this, I reached out to both dev teams and am waiting clarification. This server won't have any VM's or at least not in the near future. I do want to have this server double as the domain controller as well (only 10 users or so) plus it will hold all of the file sharing, product pictures and information, stored accounting information like sales orders/ purchase orders etc. as well as CNC programs and other random stuff. Basically I want this server to be the daily driver, and then I will be building a second server that will be the backups/ archive server that will do hourly snapshots of the important stuff like the accounting databases, but then nightly backups or something. I'll cross the bridge for that one when we get to it, but this one I need to be about as fast as possible for it's use-case-scenario while still remaining relatively reliable as well, if that's possible haha