Posts tagged Hosting
Setting up a LogicMonitor Agent
Dec 30th
LogicMonitor is a really cool server and network monitoring and measurement system which we’ve been working with. It uses a lightweight monitoring agent installed on your local network which collects data from your systems and passes it over SSL to an external aggregator. It’s capable of auto-discovery and is mostly self-configuring though you can adjust many of the metrics. After many years of working with patchwork monitoring and alert systems we’re pretty excited about it. Call us if you’re interested.
Setting up a monitoring agent on your local network is easy. The server hosting the agent just needs a JRE (Java Runtime Environment) installed using version 1.6 or greater and must be able to make an outgoing SSL connection. To monitor Windows systems, you’ll need to install the agent on a Windows server.
CloudStack + vSphere: the marriage
Dec 15th
This was for a customer of ours that wanted to move from a pure VMware vSphere environment to a CloudStack managed environment with vSphere as the hypervisor.
I don’t think anyone would disagree that the documentation for CloudStack still needs work. But all the documentation in the world can’t help if you decide to skip important sections.
Logic Monitor through screen shots
Dec 12th
This is the part where I talk about LogicMonitor as a part of our ipHouse internal learning enrichment task. I am going to do this through screen shots because it works for me and I hope you learn a little along the way.
I was in great need of Nick’s help because at first I thought I could create just any host name. So of course I chose the name barf. Well you can’t do that. You need to use a machine name that already exists. Nick said I should choose smtpgrey-2.iphouse.net or smtpgrey-1.iphouse.net (inbound SMTP border servers in use on our network).
Once I figured that out it was all smooth sailing!
SysAdmin Golf: The Hard Way
Dec 9th
This is the hard way to p2v a Linux server into a vmForge VDC. You’ll need the VMware Converter bootable CD, and somewhere to store your disk image. If you have a Windows server and shared disk on your local network, that may be faster than a USB hard drive, which is what I used. This is a cold clone procedure, which means that your server is down while its being copied. And it may be down for a while, depending on how much disk your server has, how quickly it can be cloned to local storage, and finally how quickly it can be uploaded to your VDC.
comparing software load balancers
Dec 1st
now that i have three different software load balancers installed (Balance, Crossroads, and Pen), i want to evaluate their relative performance. benchmarking a single web server isn’t difficult using tools like ab, but trying to benchmark a load balanced cluster is somewhat different. since most load balancers support stickiness, all the requests from a single source will be directed to a single back-end server. thus, i’ll need to run the benchmarker from several different sources simultaneously, or i’m really just testing one server with something in the way. fortunately, i have three machines on different IP addresses sitting idle.
