Posts tagged ipHouse
Example cost: Virtual Private Cloud (updated)
Feb 10th
Back in September, 2009, I had written a post with a quick overview of what a private cloud (or infrastructure) looks like and some basic costs and information, including why it is a great product (I am biased).
Since then, Dell has retired the PE2900III model server and items change, this is an update for the basic configuration.
Reminder graphic:
2 Servers, 1 firewall
So, originally, the physical servers were configured as:
- Dell PE2900III (reasonably priced, very reliable, I have spares on the shelf)
- 4 ethernet ports (2 built in, 2 port card installed, more can be added)
- 2 73GB SAS drives mirrored together for booting VMware vSphere 4
- 32GB RAM (48GB is max for this hardware platform)
New servers look like:
- Dell PET610 (reasonable price, very reliable, spares to go onto the shelf)
- 4 ethernet ports (all built in)
- 2 80GB SATA drives mirrored together for booting VMware vSphere 4
- 48GB RAM (192GB max available – very expensive)
The reason for the RAM change is that I am seeing a 2:1 (or higher) ratio of RAM to CPU usage in terms of percentage, and 48GB is a good place for this sized system. Also, the newer Xeon 55xx series processors uses RAM sticks in 3s instead of 2 or 4 at a time. 48GB is 12 4GB sticks of RAM. The newer 55xx series of processors also has working hyper-threading (or H/T) and I am seeing very nice performance on servers deployed using this processor family in our network.
Cost difference? The original posting listed had estimated the cost at $1,600.00 per month (see previous post), and I estimate this to be very close, inching up to approximately $1,700.00 per month, and this number should be high. (for accurate pricing, please contact ipHouse sales people, they can run up a quote based on real numbers)
Apache 1.3 – you were loved
Feb 4th
So, across my RSS feed today, I saw a blurb…
Apache terminates ‘outated’ web server
What?
I clicked the link and was sent off to The Register for their report on the issue.
Apache 1.3 was released in July, 1998 – 12 years ago, and still in operation today.
At ipHouse – we use 1.3 as the tried and true Apache webserver on our cluster. We’ve not had either issues or problems; and security updates are few and far between. I guess after 12 years no one cares anymore to hack such old code or something.
Goodbye Apache 1.3, we had a long relationship, but your sister is younger and better equipped for todays Internet. Don’t cry, we’ll remember you fondly.
Hello Apache 2.2 – we are look forward to a long relationship on our network behind our F5 load balancers.
*sniffle*
Summary: Apache 1.3.42 is the final release according to the Apache Software Foundation. They recommend moving to Apache 2.2.14. Apache 2.0 will end once Apache 2.4 has been released, and finally, Apache 2.3.5 is in alpha stage.
Reference:
UNIX Shell services, what’s the fuss?
Jan 21st
Wowzers, quite a little thread going on in a newsgroup, but really, what’s the big deal?
I think I know…
Not everyone uses the Internet for viewing web pages and downloading pr0nself-help videos and television shows. The Internet itself has become much easier for the layman to use, and with that, these historical services are no longer needed and support for them is harder and harder to come by.
In the past, most service providers (especially the ISPs that service residential users) used to offer some kind of UNIX shell for their paying clientele. Over time, the number of service providers has decreased, and of those that are left, the percentage of them that offer this type of environment has decreased by orders of magnitude. I’ll speculate on why further down this post.
UNIX shells are fascinating experiments in shared computing resources with a very long history.
VMware releases vSphere 4.0 Update 1
Nov 20th
The crowd cheers!
Though that might just be me :)
I am very excited for this update and I hope that it goes as smoothly as other updates have gone.
I have already updated 2 non-production systems (both ESX) and I am in the process of updating some non-production ESXi servers.
One of the items I need to schedule is the update of the vCenter software – this will require an actual outage for customers who are managing their VMs through ipHouse.
I hope that this update fixes 2 problems I have seen in the past (from the vSphere Client point of view):
- Inability for a datacenter administrator to view or clear host alerts and alarms from the hardware
- Interesting permissions issues that end up being more restrictive than the topic states
Both of these have been difficult to work around.
The first one requires the customer to contact us to ‘reset’ their hardware sensors.
The second one has actually hampered one customer from controlling their VMware cluster because of issues dealing with datastore management and the ability to attach an ISO image to their newly created VMs.
One item that is really exciting is the raising of the number of vCPUs (virtual CPUs) per physical CPU core to 25 per. Since we are able to sell VMware based virtual servers to customers, the ability to scale this higher could mean higher savings long term. Be nice to update pricing to reflect these savings later as well, though don’t know if there will be enough right now. At this point we really aren’t reaching the previous limit of 20 vCPU per pCPU.
Added support for Microsoft Windows Server 2008R2 is also welcome as we were wanting to deploy this version of Windows for customers.
Full release notes can be found here and are worth reading if you are into the enterprise products from VMware.
Related articles by Zemanta
- VMware boasts a half mil vSphere downloads (theregister.co.uk)
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Outbound Email Spam is teh suck
Jul 23rd
No mispelling, just playing ‘new internet lingo’ game. Did I win?
Let’s get serious…
This week, multiple customer accounts were breached. Starting approximately 3 weeks ago, a phish was sent out that some of our customers responded to, giving out their account information.
We looked through our mail logs and found the users who had been phished and we changed their passwords.
Along the way, we either missed some users who were phished, or another phish was done that we did not detect.
On Monday, 2 accounts that had been phished at some time were used to send spam through our outbound email servers. By default, our outbound email servers require SASL authentication. The abusers authenticated to our servers, and over the next couple of hours, we were thoroughly abused, and our servers started slowing down. Not enough to trigger monitoring, though. Kudos for performance tuning, spankings for not noticing this until a customer told us.
On Wednesday, we got hit again, by a single account this time, and 18,640 connections later, our servers were again getting exercised.
All this preamble, what is it for, Mike?
I’ll tell you – on Monday our outbound mail servers got onto some of the anti-spam lists, including Yahoo, Hotmail, Comcast. We did what we could to remove the IPs of our servers from the lists, but Hotmail (in particular) has a 72 hour period for removal. Ah well. 72 hours does suck, but it is survivable.
Then came Wednesday…and another account was abused, putting us back on those same lists we just got off of, and while still on the Hotmail list, our 72 hours got reset. Oh that is frustrating.
