HP TouchSmart Giveaway

Check out this giveaway from mom blogger: http://mckgiveaways.blogspot.com/2009/12/hp-touchsmart-giveaway.html

Moving the Blog

I have decided to move the blog to my own hosting.  I’ve been using Drupal lately, as mentioned in the previous post, and would like to put something there that I can actively play with.  At some point I’ll start playing with custom theming.  But, until then, I’m using the ubiquity theme.  I’ve enjoyed WordPress.com and would recommend it to anyone looking to blog easily. 

You can find the new blog a everydaysysadmin.com

New Code Repo Site

I’ve been playing with Drupal lately and have liked what I’ve seen.  I tried playing around a bit with custom theming but that was quickly kicking my butt.  I chose the Ubiquity theme, which I quite like.  The reason for this site was to create a code repository for stuff I use on the blog.  If you like, you can check it out.  This site will probably change quite a bit as I learn more about and get comforatble with Drupal.  As always, comments are welcomed!

everydaysysadmin.com

VMware ESX Bug

When I came into work today I noticed that I wasn’t able to power up a newly created VM in our ESX 3.5 cluster.  Within a couple minutes of searching I came across this blog post from Leo.  Apparently, this bug causes all VMware ESX 3.5 Upgrade 2 licenses to expire on 8/12.  This seems like a pretty big bug for an “enterprise” solution.  Don’t get me started on the term enterprise, that is the subject for a different blog post.  Below is a link to the VMware KB article.  They promise an update by tomorrow.  Yes, you read that right, by tomorrow!  C’est la vie!

http://kb2.vmware.com/kb/1006716.html

Exchange 2007 User Prep

I have been working on figuring out how to move our 20,000 mailboxes to an Exchange 2007 environment. The following script is one of the first steps. This script goes through each mail-enabled user account and tags one of the extensionAttributes with a number 1-number of mail stores I will end up with.

Disk Stat Reporting

Here at the university we use Perfmon alerts to alert us when Windows server hard disks are dangerously close to filling up. Sometimes, it’s nice get an idea of what the hard disks are at, looking to see if any disks are getting close to running out of space without getting an alarm in the middle of the night.

Barracuda CGI Stats Script

In our shop, we have two Barracuda Spam Firewall 400 series (http://www.barracuda.com).  I wrote a couple of scripts to keep track of statistics for the boxes.  There is a daily cron script that runs to grab the data from the previous day and dump that into a MySQL database. 

I’ve linked to the source code from the two scripts below.  They are both written in PHP.  Enjoy!

View date.php
View cudastats.php

Oracle ASM

I’ve been reading about Automatic Storage Management (ASM) that was introduced with Oracle 10g (R1, I think).  Not being an Oracle DBA, it looks very promising on the surface.  The idea is to let Oracle deal with disks that house Oracle data.  A major benefit is it’s ability to handle “hot spots.”  ASM can do mirroring, striping or both.  Disks can be added and subtracted on the fly, while the database is still up.  Very cool.  Check out the following links:

ASM Technical Papers

ASM Tutorial

Lefthand Rant

Warning: Rant content

So the talk of Lefthand math ties nicely into my topic for today. And yes, I’m going to rant. A number of years ago, we bought a SAN solution from Lefthand networks. It performed well. We were able to house Exchange and some file server stuff on it and it was just fine. We started down the path of virtualizing servers. We bought three more of the modules. At that point, they had discontinued the 150 model that we were used to. We smarted a bit from that, since we had negotiated future pricing on those units but we went ahead and bought 3 160 models.

Lefthand Math

Recently at work, we’ve started a request for proposal (RFP) process to purchase new SAN storage space. There was something that struck me about one proposal from Lefthand Networks involving their NSM160 platform (which they weren’t pitching at this proposal). We have several NSM160’s in our datacenter and one stat that they threw out there was the max IOPS number: 30,000. I do realize that they have at some lab somewhere running the absolute perfect test they have achieved this speed.

Working with the NSM160’s on a regular basis, I can tell you that real world throughput isn’t even close. In fact, if you divide that max number by 100, it would be way more in line with what we see daily. Now, of course this is a guess because Lefthand Networks provides no I/O monitoring tools to be able to glean performance numbers out of its SANs. That’s right, no tools native to the SAN.

I guess if I need to read or write (most likely read with a number like 30,000) millions of 1KB files sequentially, Lefthand is my company.