Posts tagged ipHouse
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)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_c.png?x-id=fdcb7eed-284b-426e-a61b-8138e593b7f6)
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.
VMware vSphere – 1 more day of waiting!
May 20th
Tomorrow, May 21st, 2009, normal people around the world will get a chance to download VMware’s newest edition of their infrastructure ’cloud operating system’ products named vSphere.
I am very excited to see what this all entails. I have read the documents, reviewed the upgrade steps and procedures, have read many a blog entry from those special enough to have early access.
What will it do for our infrastructure here at ipHouse? That I don’t know. The new Cisco Nexus 1000V stuff looks great, but initial reports of pricing push it out of our market space pretty quickly as what I have read so far show it to be over $10,000 per physical host. I do hope I am wrong, but until I can get someone on the phone (or even email) from Cisco dealing with this software, I am marking it as unobtainium.
Until tomorrow…when maybe I won’t be so lame with my lack of content…
ipHouse releases VMware based server services
Apr 24th
Virtualization, one of the buzzwords flying around the Internet today, is a method of running separate servers (guests) with separate operating systems on shared physical hardware (the host). I wrote a quick summary back in February, 2009 that should help give some context.
Here at ipHouse, we have chosen to use VMware for our virtualization products. We chose VMware because of its reliability, great support for many guest operating systems, and integrated set of management tools for both the hosts (the physical servers) and the guests (the running virtual machines). In fact, ipHouse is an official licensee of the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP), a requirement to sell virtual server services to 3rd parties (and as far as I know, the only authorized hosting provider in Minnesota, though I would love to be corrected).
Dubbed ‘SV’ internally, there are 4 different server editions available.
But before I get into the servers (and their configurations) themselves, I’d like to list the supported operating systems (and Linux distributions), many of which are ready for quick deployment where only the final configuration options need to be entered.
Immediately we support:
- Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Standard and Enterprise, 32/64bit
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Standard and Enterprise, 32/64bit
- FreeBSD 7.x, 32/64bit
- Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron), 32/64bit
- RedHat Enterprise Linux 5, 32/64bit
These systems are available with and without operating system maintenance handled by ipHouse, and if you choose to maintain your own system(s), we have an interface in place to facilitate your needs for a virtual console that will give you the ability to power on, power off, and reset the system, as well as doing recovery in case of a configuration error.
How does this work? Here is a tutorial I whipped up (with editing help from Ben) using the client tools we will supply.
(and it was fun to make, but really needs a voice over)
