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15 hours ago
Due to the amount of spam coming from China, I’ve had to disable comments on my blog. Live Spaces does not require anything more than you are logged into Live to be allowed to comment on a blog. This leaves it open to bots to post like crazy. The result has been an ever increasing number of spam comments to sites in Asia, advertising and selling all sorts of crap. I’ve been spending more and more time trying to clean up this rubbish but now I’ve had enough of it. I’ve complained to Live, Microsoft, anyone, and nothing has been done. The solution would be simple: place a “captcha” on the comment site to prevent bots from submitting a comment. Instead, MS Live is forcing its users to either leave Live or disable the 2-way communication of a blog. I am researching the possibility of leaving Live Spaces completely. My main requirement is being able to take my content with me. Until there’s a solution or I’ve migrated I won’t be able to re-enable 2-way communications on this ...
2 days ago
Trying to make a decision on which type of disk to use in your Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V deployment? Have a look at this independent performance study. The author set up his own lab and did a comparison of the performance of the three types of disk you could use in a production Hyper-V deployment. He concludes with saying that if you need the very most from the disk then go with a pass through disk. However, you lose very, very little by going with dynamic VHD’s.
2 days ago
I hate when people talk about disk being cheap. I want to just smack them. Disk for laptops and PC’s is cheap. Disk for fault tolerance server computing is far from cheap. If you’re running a Hyper-V cluster then you know that you can’t just go out and buy some cheap storage. You’re looking at shared storage with cluster support. That means either a Fibre Channel or iSCSI SAN. And then there’s the disk. You could go budget and use SATA or worry about performance and go with SAS. Odds are it will be the latter which provides less storage for a higher price. Add in fault tolerance and you’ve use more expensive HBA’s, doubled your switch port requirements, etc. At work we’re using a HP EVA with fibre channel connections via dual port HBA’s and 15K disks. We had to worry about the ability to scale. We’re a hosting company so unlike most virtualisation projects we had no end point. I couldn’t say “we have 20 machines to virtualise”. As a hosting company, 20 VM’s wouldn’t ...
3 days ago
At 11pm GMT last night, we put our new Windows Server 2008 R2 cluster into production. We use Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 R2 to migrate the first machines from our W2008 cluster to the W2008 R2 cluster. We’re a hosting company so we had to do this at times that suited the customers and we had to do some other steps so their “sites” were not unresponsive. The VMM moves ran pretty well. One of the machines failed to install the updated IC’s in the job so I reran the IC upgrade by itself. Once each machine moved over to the new cluster (on the CSV) I tested live migration. These were all web servers so the tests were simple – RDP into the machines via VPN, run a continuous ping from them to their respective default gateways and refresh websites from a browser while the migration was running. RDP didn’t have a disconnect or a hitch, ping didn’t miss a packet and none of the IE refreshes failed. All worked well. The real test would be what would happen over night. As ...
5 days ago
I’m happy enough now with our W2008 R2 Hyper-V cluster that I’m putting it into production tomorrow night. We’ll be migrating some of our production machines from the old W2008 cluster to the new cluster. Today I deployed OpsMgr agents onto the hosts and did some more testing. OpsMgr and VMM don’t synchronise their maintenance modes. I submitted feedback suggesting that this would be good. I also noticed that even if both System Center products had a node in maintenance mode, the VMM management pack would alert when that node rebooted. Ouch. That’s a bit painful. I also submitted feedback on that. So far, I haven’t had any problems with CSV or Live Migration. Everything has worked fine. One tip I’ve picked up on is to set a static MAC on Linux guests. SUSE 10 SP2 binds the IP configuration to the MAC address and a change due to any sort of VMM/Hyper-V migration can screw it up – I’ve seen this with an export/import. So 11PM tomorrow, the first production machine ...
