Wednesday, November 12, 2008
It's interesting to talk to people in this business and find the religious fanaticism that revolves around the support of different hardware vendors. I've met systems people who have variously sworn by HP, Dell, and IBM. But what about the good old white box? If you look at it closely, a lot of businesses are throwing away good money for name brands when a white box machine could be built with the exact same chipset for a lot cheaper.
For example, we do a LOT of work with VMs here at 3Sharp. I built us a VM server with 2 quad-core Xeon procs (2.2Ghz), 32GB of RAM, in a 1u form factor with mirrored 500GB SATA 2 drives. This server cost about $1750 to build, a server from Dell with the same chipset, procs, RAM, and HDD costs $6911, and if I were to switch it out with Opteron procs, the price would still be $5196.
The objections to this approach to hardware generally tend to revolve around convenience and support. My take on it is that if you can save 40-70% on your hardware costs, you can then easily afford to have spare parts for every system you have on hand. That also means that you can have a better response time than the 4-hour onsite.
There are a few keys to making this work though. First, you have to have at least one IT staff member who REALLY knows his hardware. This means knowing when a 20-pin power supply will be able to power a 24-pin motherboard and not void the warranty (the answer is that if you're not going to be putting in a lot of add-in pci or pci-x cards, you should be ok). Second, pick a standard. If you're whiteboxing your servers, that means you settle on one or two motherboards to be your standards. The less variety you have, the fewer spare parts you'll need to keep around. Third, pick your vendor very carefully. The best price is definitely not always the best deal.
Other keys to success with whiteboxing include using a good system monitoring solution. We use Microsoft SCOM, but I've also used Nagios with good success. I've also seen comparable reliability to brand name servers with the units I've built here.
While it may not be practical for large organizations to use whiteboxing, small to medium sized businesses can benefit greatly from it. Their IT staff will be much more intimately familliar with the hardware, and costs will be reduced.
Friday, May 02, 2008
As you may or may not know, I love clustering. I've been working with MSCS for a very long time, and I look at it as a way to make my daily life easier. An admin with a cluster can have downtime on hardware in the middle of the day, can do patches at any time knowing that if there's a problem, all you have to do is fail back to an unpatched node. That and it makes for some really cool toys.
Up to the present. I decided to check out MSCS (now known as failover clustering) on Windows Server 2008. I'm a big fan of building your own ISCSI devices, and I like Openfiler and FreeNAS. Both provide a large list of features, and the capability of Openfiler to run a two-node failover cluster of it's own (thus providing redundant storage for your cluster) to be a wonderful thing. So, you can imagine my dismay when I discovered that faliover clustering in Windows Server 2008 requires support for persistent reservations by your iSCSI target. Unfortunately, none of the free ISCSI target solutions support this yet. When they do, I'll be sure to update with more info.
Back to a blast from the past, clustering on windows server 2003. Here's another caveat for everyone out there: We'll often build our nodes with two disks in them and mirror those disks. Be careful about what method you use, some onboard RAID solutions will use BUS0 for their volumes. If this is the case with your RAID controller, switch to software mirroring. The reason is that the ISCSI initiator also latches on to BUS0, putting it on the same bus as your boot volume. This will cause cluster creation to pop up a warning about being unable to find a quorum device (BEWARE, no warning will pop up if you use the advanced creation option, you just won't be able to add any shared disks later).
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
I was excited when I heard that Hyper-V was going to include support for VLANs. What I didn't realize was that there would be some caveats to the deal. If you plan on using tagged VLANs to get support for multiple networks from one physical port, you need to know that Hyper-V works on a one-to-one relationship with interfaces.
To make it all work, you need to create your virtual interfaces (per the software and driver for your NIC) and assign them to the appropriate VLAN. Don't bother putting in any static IP information because as soon as you create a network in Hyper-V to accomodate your VMs, Hyper-V will create another connection on top of the VLAN adapter you've already created. Once this new interface is created, you can enter any static IP addresses there. Additionally, if you don't take into account the extra caveats below, you will have no network connectivity.
EXTRA CAVEATS:
1. Make sure you specify the correct VLAN number in the virtual network.
2. Make sure you specify the correct VLAN number in the network settings for the virtual machine.
Friday, October 19, 2007
As you may or may not know, 3Sharp played a part in the UC launch. The keynote demo given by Eric Swift was implemented and supported by Peter Kelly and myself. The launch event itself was amazing, and if you ever get a chance to attend one I highly recommend it. A few notes on the keynote demo though: The audio quality of the webcast didn't do justice to the capabilities of the voice portions of the demo. Voice quality over all the attached devices (including and especially Round Table) is excellent. It does not, however, benefit from piping over a PA. Outlook voice access appeared to have a hard time understanding Eric's commands. This only happened when he was hooked up to pipe the sound over the house audio. I use OVA on a regular basis here at 3Sharp, and never have those problems.
The big point I'm trying to make is that these features work exceedingly well in the real world, and the sound quality is top-notch whenever you add voice to the mix. Watch the demo and pay attention to the features being shown, and remember that when you use them the quality of voice is likely to meet or exceed that of your PBX.
The keynote can be found here for those who missed it: http://wm.istreamplanet.com/customers/ms/10162007_300k.asx
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
There's an article I wrote in this month's Windows IT Pro magazine that provides an overview of high availability solutions for MOSS. Part of the article is available here:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/ArticleID/96301/96301.html?Ad=1 The article is brief and takes a very high level view of architecting for high availability. Over the next few months, I'll try to post in-depth on the subject, breaking it down into the different components.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
I've seen it before and ran into it again today. On IBM T4x series laptops, OS installation fails from burned media (which you should only be using if you have a VL agreement with MS) if it was not burned on another T4x laptop. Now, bear in mind that this experience only involves 4 separate occasions, but I felt that was enough to warrant an eyebrow raising at the minimum.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
I ran into an interesting issue today to which I found no ready solutions online. I finally figured it out and decided to post it here. If you experience an issue where you try to open a local XML file in IE, and IE just sits there blank displaying “connecting” as the status, try the reregistering msxml3 by clicking start>run and typing in “'regsvr32 msxml3.dll”.
Monday, April 23, 2007
For my 3 readers :P, I have written a Visual How To on BDC search for the MSDN, which can be found here: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb410114.aspx
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Just a quick post about an interesting driver “feature” in the Intel PRO/1000 chipset. When you install the driver package in Windows, and select a full install, you'll find that you can't access the advanced management features via RDP. If you're planning on using this driver with a server, and, like me, you performed the install via an RDP connection, save yourself the frustration of trying to figure it out. The driver install works, but to specify VLANs for your NIC, you have to be present in front of the box unless you have a remote control software like SMS.
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
I simple online search will provide you with thousands of opinions on this topic. What I've found in my travels, is that it all comes down to the situation.