Tag Archive: administration

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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WebSitePanel – MySQL problem fix – UPDATED

Posted Apr.28, 2011 under WebSitePanel Fixes

Here you can download the files for fixing mysql issues ( deleting database ) on WSP 1.0.1.0, 1.0.2 , 1.1.0 and 1.1.2

INSTRUCTIONS :

Replace “websitepanel.providers.database.mysql.dll” file in “server\bin” folder with the one you downloaded. These fixes fixed my problem on all servers EXCEPT the one running mysql 5.0.27 version….ones runing 5.1 and 5.0.77 works fine. I Will update if I get this solved too…

Currently I am getting this error on 5.0.27 server: ERROR: ‘MySQL Server 5.0′ DeleteDatabase System.Data.EvaluateException: Cannot perform ‘=’ operation on System.Byte[] and System.String.

FIX for 1.0.1.0 version can be found HERE

FIX for the 1.0.2 version can be found HERE

FIX for the 1.1.0 version can be found HERE

FIX for the 1.1.2 version can be found HERE – UPDATED!!!

Hope it will be helpfull.

If you have any questions, just let me know.

Ofcourse, these fixes are provided AS-IS . I dont guarantee it will work on your machine, and I cannot take responsibility for any damages cause by it.

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SpamBots+bad application+SQL server = PROBLEMS!

Posted Oct.25, 2010 under Servers, Windows and Powershell

So…today I had a very interesting issue. All of a sudden Nagios went red with the message: CRITICAL : – total: 232.82 Gb – used: 212.67 Gb (91%) – free 20.15 Gb (9%) on one of our SQL server. I was like..”NO! It cannot be. I clearly remember that this machine had over 150 Gb of free space yesterday!”

I log in to the machine, and automatically go to the data folder of SQL server thinking that some customer has a HUGE! log file on his database; so, right click – Select All -> Properties… only 50 Gbs of data…hmm…not here!

At that moment I notice that the server isnt “jumpy” as usual, so I start Performance monitor and see that the Avg. Disk Queue is off the chart!  That definatelly isnt right…

Since that machine is using Windows 2003, theres no too good way to see what application is using so much disk I/O ( beside FileMon ) , I start the FileMon and se that the SQL service is writing HUGE amount of data to its ERRORLOG file.

By navigating to the folder, I see that the ERRORLOG file is over 120 Gb big so opening it in Notepad, Context or some other file was out of the question, since it would kill the machine completely.

So, lets turn to powershell once more. In order to be sure to not kill the machine, since its in production , I have moved the file to an empty machine to opened it there.

Powershell : cat errorlog +ENTER :) after that powershell started to list the entire content of the file, and it took about 15 mins until it reached the end. AMAZING

By examining the log, I notice ( it was hard to NOT notice it ) litterally millions of these entries:

Could not allocate space for object ‘dbo.tblComments’.'tblComments’ in database ‘DATABASEname’ because the ‘PRIMARY’ filegroup is full. Create disk space by deleting unneeded files, dropping objects in the filegroup, adding additional files to the filegroup, or setting autogrowth on for existing files in the filegroup.

What happened here?

The site that was using that database is poorly written and was allowing everyone to post comments on the articles without any security check, so it soon reached the size limit set on the database.  By further digging on the issue, I saw that the bots are posting about 4-5 comments each second which comes to about 18000 comments/hour…multiply that by 15-16 hours it took to fill the error log to that size, we roughly come to 280000 comments…that’s A LOT of comments! :)

After disabling the site and sending the email to the customer, situation on the machine looks like this :

The big drop on the green line is the moment where I disabled the problematic web site.

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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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Cook!? Can you warm up my application? NO! I cannot!:D

Posted Oct.13, 2010 under IIS server, Servers, Windows and Powershell

In the beginning, some c/p from IIS site:

IIS Application Warm-Up for IIS 7.5 enables IT Professionals to improve the responsiveness of their Web sites by loading the Web applications before the first request arrives. By proactively loading and initializing all the dependencies such as database connections, compilation of ASP.NET code, and loading of modules, IT Professionals can ensure their Web sites are responsive at all times even if their Web sites use a custom request pipeline or if the Application Pool is recycled.

Now, ME!

At first glimse you can say : “WOW” this extension rocks!!! I dont have to wait for my application to compile! My site will load much much faster!

And, imagine, you would be completely RIGHT! This is a great extension, but ( yeah, there’s a but ), I would NEVER install this extension on a shared hosting server! Why you ask?

Biggest reason is the WASTE of resources!

By preloading some site that has 5-10 unique visitors/day ( yes there are sites like that ), you are efectively wasting resources on the server. Imagine what would happen if you had around 500-600 applications on the server, all preloaded? How much RAM would the machine need to have to keep all those applications preloaded? I guess the answer is : A LOT!

So, conclusion, when to use IIS Application Warm-Up?

Use it on your own machine! When you have a dedicated machine just for 1-2 websites.  You, and your users will benefit from preloaded applications. Everything will open more faster!

If you have a shared hosting machine, MY reccomendation is to NOT use the IIS Application Warm-Up extension!

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