Category: News

SystemCenter Solutions 2012 Beta avaiable for download!

Posted Oct.27, 2011 under News, Servers

System Center solutions help you manage your physical and virtual IT environments across datacenters, desktops, and devices. Using these integrated and automated management solutions, you can be a more productive service provider for your business. As a result of feedback we have gathered from all around the IT Pro universe, some great changes have been made to the System Center Evaluation experience.

With the release of the System Center 2012 beta evaluation in the TechNet Evaluation Center, you can now download and evaluate the most current versions of System Center 2012 products with a single registration.  This includes all of the following pre-release products:

  • System Center Virtual Machine Manager RC
  • System Center Configuration Manager Beta
  • System Center Operations Manager Beta
  • System Center Orchestrator Beta
  • System Center Data Protection Manager Beta

However, if you aren’t ready to evaluate all the System Center products you can select the specific products you want to evaluate, again with only one simple registration as opposed to the multiple registrations previously required.

Head over to the System Center 2012 Evaluation Center and check it out

Source: http://blogs.technet.com/b/uktechnet/archive/2011/10/25/download-microsoft-system-center-2012-pre-release-products.aspx
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SCVMM? errr…System Center Virtual Machine Manager and HyperV whining :)

Posted Jun.10, 2011 under News, Servers

Couple of days ago I installed SCVMM  in order to test it out, since we are developing our IAAS solution. Everything seemed great until I found out that SVCMM doesnt have any API which can be used to create/turn on/off  new machines.  Yes, I know everything can be scripted thru Powershell, but it sucks that we need to create separate applicatons that will give us that feature. Imagine a solution where PRTG, Nagios or any other tools monitors your server… sees that the CPU load went up ( or any other condition) and starts up a new virtual machine  using API?

Its funny how the guys at MS fails to see the basic requirements for a modern cloud solution; do I have to mention that after years of HyperV being RTM-ed, we still dont have an option to limit a machines uplink speed!? Come on guys…SERIOUSLY!?!?

 

I know that you already have this  little piece of software created, release it…pretty please!? I know that Microsoft sees HyperV in some giant corporation where they dont have a need to limit the uplink of a virtual machine, but IMHO, hosters are having a bigger “market” share  than big corporations, think about us, pretty please with sugar on top :) .

Oh, what about promiscous mode for network cards? You  have no idea how much would I like to use SNORT on my HyperV virtual switch, but…I cant :(

What about the limit on only 4 cores per virtual machine? This is a VERY limiting factor. I’m in a situation where i have a 2x six core, 48 GB ram server which I want to turn into ONE virtual machine ( live migrations, scaling, etc…), but I cant…I can only turn it into a 4 core, 44 GB machine, effectively, wasting other 8 cores!?

I would really love to get in touch with someone from Microsoft Virtualization team and send them a list of must-have changes :D Someone knows some insiders? :D

Let me make one thing clear, I love Microsoft, but lets face it, there is lots of work that needs to be done. Admit it or not, the guys at the “Linux Camp” have much more options and features regarding virtualization. I really, really love HyperV, but some limitations are just plain unlogical/stupid.

Sorry for a bitter post, but I had to throw out my frustrations :)

 

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Bit Rate Throttling? – HELL YEAH!

Posted Oct.15, 2010 under IIS server, News, Servers

Fact number one: If you have a streaming server, you must install this extension!

Great, now that we’ve got this fact covered, we can move on.

IIS site says:

Bit Rate Throttling, an IIS Media Services extension, saves money on network costs by metering the download speed of media and data files. For media, Bit Rate Throttling accomplishes this by automatically detecting the encoded bit rates of 11 common media formats, such as Windows Media Video (WMV), Flash Video (FLV), and MPEG 4 (MP4), and then throttling the response to the client. For any other file or MIME type, Bit Rate Throttling allows administrators to configure custom throttling rules.

Now, lets explain the same thing in a bit simpler way.

If you have a server which streams any kind of media files, Im sure you have noticed extremely high bandwidht usage on that machine. In my experience, over 40% of the bandwidth is wasted! WAIT! WHY, HOW?

Read More »

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Windows hosting cluster anyone?

Posted Oct.04, 2010 under IIS server, News, Servers, WebSitePanel Fixes, Windows and Powershell

Since cloud hosting has become very popular today :) I have decided to try creating windows cluster for plain old hosting service. Since we are already using WebSitePanel as our main control panel for windows server, the goal is to leave everything running the way it is now, but with the possiblity to add new servers to the server pool without affecting current customers and “fooling” WebSitePanel that it thinks its running on a single machine, so that it isnt aware of the cluster at all.

How did it all start?

Well, to be honest, I was very interested to migrate all of our customers from WebSitePanel to Enkompass when I saw that they are offering cluster based hosting. By going a bit deeper into the scheme of their solution I saw that its basically very simple;  ARR and a big hog of a storage server which even doesnt have to run on windows!!!

Ofcourse, I would LOVE to try Windows Storage Server and give Microsoft money for it, but…since I’m not an OEM manufacturer, I can only dream about it :(

Since I work at a hosting company which offers linux and windows hosting, we got to an idea to serve all clients from a cluster of storage servers, rather than having 2 separate clusters of storage servers, one for each hosting type ( Windows and Linux ) .

I have the entire thing “visualized” in my head…and some paper, so  I’m hoping that in month-two I will have a WORKING solution of my idea :)

Im already seeing some blade servers :) hihihihi…

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The website is down, Episode 4 :)

Posted Oct.27, 2009 under News, Servers

This episode requires a special blog post for it :) hehe..awesome!

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