Month: December 2008

Web Hosting and Developer Roadshow 2008

Today (Dublin, 18th December, 2008) I attended the Web Hosting and Developer Roadshow in Microsoft Ireland. Laptop battery permitting, I’ll be blogging from here as the event passes like I did at TechEd EMEA recently. Dublin is the last leg in this European tour. Cormac Keogh (Architect, Developer Platform Team – MS Ireland) is the host.

The focus of today seems to be on virtualisation, e.g. Hyper-V and Novell partnership and using Windows 2008 for web site hosting. And for our feedback forms we’ll get the USB sticks with the metal covers that MS tend to use. Cool – ReadyBoost media for my laptop J

Arsim Muslija

Arsim Muslija (Business Development Manager, Hosting – Western Europe) takes over to talk about why we should use the MS web hosting platform. Funny: Apple I-Tunes pops up looking for an update over his PowerPoint slides! See, I told you Apple needs updates too.

96% of MS revenue comes from MS partners. The aim of this Roadshow is to interact more with the hosting/web development partners – educate and to listen.

Kevin Turner (COO, MS Global) email Arsim asking about what the plans were for hosting partners in western Europe. They responded with a plan but Turner wanted more. He wanted to increase hosting partner business. This is the realisation of Cloud Computing, SaaS and plans for partners to resell/build services on BPOS. And of course, MS aims to sell S+S (software + services – the rebranding of SaaS) via Azure and BPOS. There is a realisation that on-site installations are the solution of yesterday.

Wow – we’re going to talk about open source. We know MS posts stuff on CodePlex. There is the conspiracy theory that this is to avoid supporting some efforts via PSS. MS claims to have over 5000 projects on CodePlex. This includes a new blogging system from MS that was launched yesterday.

Software + Services is the MS branding of SaaS. Instead of soley relying on on-site installations, you can have completely online solutions or even a hybrid of on-site/online installations. For example, with BPOS, a partner can configure a client’s branch offices to use online hosted Exchange for onsite AD user accounts. These mailboxes would be fully interoperable with onsite Exchange mailboxes in other offices. This means the branch offices don’t need servers, just PC’s with Office. BPOS includes Exchange Sharepoint, Live Meeting and Office Communications. Additional services will add Office Live and Microsoft Dynamics. These will be hosted on the MS cloud in the new generation of MS data centres. However, these will be pretty locked down configurations where data could be located in any country. This is not possible for anyone concerned with Data Protection or the ability to configure/customise. So MS is not a threat to the hosting industry; the partners still need to deploy partner hosted solutions for those clients. There’s also the issue with client access to server solutions, e.g. you’re dealing with long distance latent connections. And of course, MS is new to the hosting industry. Some will feel uncomfortable with dealing with a gigantic company that is new to a service. There will be questions about customer responsiveness … we all know that product design is controlled by the Fortune 500, not the small/medium or even the large business.

There will be a hosting day event focusing on infrastructure in Ireland in 2009.

The MS partner hosting competency was launched this past summer. There will be training on Hyper-V and VMM 2008 that will be run in Spring 2009 for these partners. Lucky enough I won’t need it J

Summary:

  • MS is committed to work with the open source community. Office 2007 SP2 will work with more open source plug-ins.
  • MS wants to offer more options for infrastructure and application platforms.
  • There should be more flexibility in reselling products and services – Hmm… SPLA is far from flexible. In fact, it’s downright difficult and inflexible. Volume licensing is much better.

Microsoft Hosting Platform for Hosting Service Providers

The speaker is Matthew Boettcher from the USA.

The focus appears to be on shared services web hosting, e.g. the €4/month web site for enthusiasts.

Optimise the Infrastructure

  • Windows 2008
  • System Center
  • SQL 2008-12-18 IIS
  • Hyper-V

See Optimised Infrastructure on the MS website.

Easy To Manage

IIS7 is “easier to manage”. The IIS console is much different to IIS6. Everything is in one console, e.g. ASP.Net and IIS. Under the hood everything is stored in XML. The metabase is gone. That’s good news if you didn’t know already. Features of IIS can be delegated.

You can remotely manage IIS sites via HTTPS via the IIS admin console – enable the role service “Managed Service” (not on by default). In theory, provisioning of websites could be done using PowerShell and you could do away with the traditional web hoster’s control panel application. The catch is in providing a customer installation of the IIS7 console. You’d need PowerShell 2.0 or maybe W2008 R2 for this … we know new CMDLETS are on the way for IIS7. You can do all this using APPCMD.

Windows Web Server 2008

This allows SQL Server full install. It includes IIS7, WSS 3.0, .Net 3.0/3.5 and Windows Media Servers 2008. Allows up to 4 CPU’s and 4GbRAM (x86) or 32GB RAM (x64).

SQL Server 2008 Web Edition

  • Adds new PHP driver.
  • Up to 4 CPU’s.
  • No RAM or DB size limitation.
  • Has log shipping
  • There’s a database publishing wizard
  • There is policy based management
  • Performance Studio

Modular Architecture

IIS is modular and integrated. It’s a total rewrite. Only the components you need are installed. It also is more efficient with integrated components like PHP, e.g. FastCGI.

PHP on IIS7 with FastCGI is exponentially faster. Configurable caching of dynamic content increases this performance. Add in tracing and it’s a better platform than IIS6 for the programmer and web admin. This also includes Ruby and PERL.

MS recommends 1 web application per application pool. Web hosters won’t do that because there’s too much of a memory charge which would decrease price competitiveness (critical in this low end industry).

Media Services

Save bandwidth using bit rate throttling. This recognises the client/server connection speed and paces the delivery of content, e.g. just in time delivery. Broken connections are detected. This avoids wasting bandwidth.

Use server-side web playlists to hide URL’s, block skip/seek and integrate with web applications. There is an IIS7 Media Pack that adds web playlists (a .ISX file).

Smooth Streaming is new to IIS7. It’s a collaboration of IIS Media Pack, Expression Encoder and the Silverlight teams. It dynamically recognises the connection speed and adapts the picture quality to provide a smooth video instead of the “watch a bit, buffer, watch a bit, buffer” experience. There will be a public beta of this available by February 2009.

Web Farms

You can configure a master server for your XML configuration. The web servers go to this on location (clustered hopefully) to load their configuration. Now you have one configuration to set up and maintain.

Lower Cost of Infrastructure

Server Core has lower requirements … however W2008 Core Installation does not have .NET support. Wait until W2008 R2 for a stripped down version of .NET, probably 3.0 and/or 3.5.

We can run media services on a Core installation.

Security

  • BuiltinIUSR replaces BUiltinIUSR_<MachineName> … needed because the default machine name on W2008 is a huge long random-like string.
  • IUSRS replaces IIS_WPG.
  • SID injection for IIS_IUSRS group is optional.
  • You can use an application pool identity instead of anonymous.
  • Application pool isolation is on by default.

Operational Guidance

Learn.iis.net website for lots of IIS information.

There is the Hosting Deployment Accelerator kit, version 2.0. This is based on the RDP program of W2008.

Better Market Offerings and Optimised Infrastructure Due To Microsoft Virtualisation

Jan H. Haul, Expert Consultant, DNV IT Global Services.

Why Virtualisation?

Pain points for hosters:

  • Credit crunch
  • Staff
  • Uncertainty
  • Complexity
  • Drivers
  • Energy costs
  • Set-up speed
  • Licensing
  • System Management

Data centres in the world products 170m tonnes of CO2 per year. Netherlands (industrialised but green country) produces 146m tonnes per year.

Easier and better management.

Customer satisfaction:

  • Self service portal for deployment
  • Easy to clone, easy to revert to a “known good” state.

Those two sound nice, eh? The first is not possible on Hyper-V clusters. There’s an assumption that the user should know and understand the server infrastructure.  Driver isolation, i.e. the hardware is abstracted.  Centralised server administration.  Clustering of the hosts allows hardware/server fault tolerance.  And of course, Hyper-V is the virtualisation role of Windows 2008. Requires 64 bit hardware, DEP and CPU virtualisation enabled in the BIOS.

OK, this guy has made no mention of DEP. He also has refused to accept question so I can point this out. Some manufacturers hide DEP in BIOS so you cannot enable it. This prevents Hyper-V from installing/working because the VMBus/hypervisor rely on DEP for inter virtual machine security.  I’m not blogging this guy’s session any more. It’s a waste of wear and tear on the keys on my laptop.

Microsoft / Novell Partnership

Michael Croney is a sales director from MS UK.

Agreement signed on Nov 2nd (as you will have seen on my blog back then!) that was co-announced by both companies.

The components:

  • Agreement not to sue, e.g. the Linux IP issue.
  • Technical collaboration on virtualisation (Hyper-V IC’s for Suse Enterprise) and Systems Management (OpsMgr 2007 R2 Cross Platform Extensions).
  • Joint sales campaign, e.g. MS can sell SUSE Linux at a reduced cost.

MS doing this because 70% of their customers run Windows and Linux in the same data centre. They want interoperability.  There is Novell Moonlight: an open source implementation of Silverlight as a plug-in for Firefox.  Advanced management pack developed by Linux for SUSE Enterprise Server for OpsMgr 2007 R2.  “Open Server” will integrate with Active Directory. This was a more recent announcement.  Novell/MS are giving big discounts to other Linux users. Novell is providing “Co-support” for 2 years if migrating from RedHat to SUSE.  We then got a marketing video to watch *yawn*.

The Afternoon

Martha Rotter talked about Silverlight and gave plenty of good demo’s.  I was then away to meet someone in MS to plan some user group stuff for next year and that was the end of my session for the day.

An Interesting Quote

A sales man of a firm that runs it’s hosting service out of a computer room here in Dublin was quoted by a local IT paper.  He was talking about Software-as-a-Service (Saas) and the importance of availability:

"If the software being delivered is key to the business using it and has real value, then like everything else that is web-based, the critical term is availability".

I nearly choked on that one.  The company is question has had at least two major outages this year … one related to networking failure and the other related to power failure.  Of course, they’re "staffed by an extensive team of fully Cisco certified staff, ranging from CCNA. CCSP, CCNA and CCIE on a 24/7 basis, we can react to threats and issues as they arise".  Funny, their senior network engineer (who is a good guy) isn’t a CCIE yet and he certainly doesn’t work 24 * 7.  And I recommend the 2am test if you’re looking at them … knock on the door unannounced and randomly at 2am and see who, if anyone, answers the door. 

By the way, they’re still at 99.87% availability according to third party metrics, a far cry from the much desired 99.999% or even perfect 100%.

EDIT:

I met one of the other salesmen from this hosting company today.  I mentioned the CCIE claim and asked about that engineer becoming one.  "Oh yeah", blah-blah-blah was the response, confirming the claim on the website.  Strange, because the engineer in question hasn’t actually passed the CCIE exam yet!  Don’t ya just love this sort of sell-at-any-cost (to the customer) behaviour?

Create a Windows Server 2008 Cluster Within Hyper-V

MS PFE Ireland blogged about how to configure a cluster within a Hyper-V environment, i.e. how to set up 2 virtual machines running as a cluster – not how to create a Hyper-V cluster.  They used iSCSI to configure the shared storage to connect the virtual hosts, i.e. for the quorum and the shared service installation.

Setting up a Hyper-V cluster is another story altogether.  Here’s the short version.  The hosts should have a minimum of 3 NIC’s:

  • 1 for the parent partition (on the host network)
  • 1 for the cluster (on a private heartbeat network)
  • 1 for the virtual machines (usually on a network trunk and with TCP unbound).

You’ll probably go for 4 NIC’s.  However, the virtual machine network NIC’s can’t be teamed at the moment.  MS is working with OEM’s to resolve this.  Make sure the h/w is on the cluster compatibility list.  Avoid installing any OEM server network configuration tools until there is support from them for Hyper-V.

Build the machines with Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition.  You can go with Core if you want but I prefer to use Full installation – the OEM’s haven’t given us accessible ways to manage their hardware from Core yet (if they ever will).  Apply security patches.  Ensure the hosts are identical.

Set up your shared storage, either iSCSI or fibre channel.  If using an even number of hosts you’ll need to configure a small quorum disk or "witness disk".  If uneven then you don’t.  However I set one up anyway in case I need to remove or add a host – VMM will scream loudly if the cluster is not in a supported state, i.e. failover will be unpredictable.

For the virtual network, you’ll need to find out what workarounds (if any) are necessary for getting the VLAN trunk (VLAN tagging) working.  See my previous posts about the NC373i and Intel NIC’s.

Configure Hyper-V and add in the patches for GUID drives and VMM compatibility (see my previous posts).  Install the clustering service as well.  Configure the firewall to allow remote administration.

Build the cluster.  If using an even number of nodes you’ll go with node majority.  If uneven then it’s disk (the witness/quorum) and node majority.  Run the cluster verification report and save the results in case PSS ask for it.  If using an EVA SAN you must remember to set the node type to Longhorn (the codename for W2008) to pass the test.

Now you can configure your virtual networks – do it in the Hyper-V admin console if you don’t have VMM 2008.  Do it in VMM 2008 if you are using it to manage the Hyper-V cluster – you need to import the cluster into VMM 2008 management first 🙂

Set up your VM’s and test them.  Your VM’s will be on their own LUN’s provided by the SAN.  Provision the disk and present it to all your hosts.  Configure the disk (bring online, letterless/GUID and format) on the first host in the cluster.  Add the disk to the cluster.  Note the GUID for VM deployment.  Use your administration console (Hyper-V or VMM 2008) to deploy your VM.

In VMM you should be aiming to see a healthy state.  If you’re told the cluster configuration isn’t supported then check your host virtual network, cluster verification report and VM storage configurations.

There.  That’s probably a day’s worth of training in one short blog post.  Obviously it’s a bit more detailed than all that but it’s a dump on what you should look at.

Monitoring Untrusted Servers Over The Internet Using OpsMgr 2007

Walter Chomak wrote a good article to help people avoid a gotchya when monitoring un-trusted servers over the Internet using Operations Manager 2007 and the Gateway.  This applies equally when using OpsMgr and agents with certificates.  You need to be sure that the cert is for the actual FQDN of the server and that OpsMgr addresses the agent by the FQDN of the agent server.  Set up name resolution using DNS or hosts files.

Credit: Walter Chomak.

Intel Selling VMware Shares

VMware’s share value continues it’s downward trend of the last year as the competition heats up.  Entrants into the market such as Microsoft (Hyper-V is a tick box away from installation) and Citrix (with the mature XenServer) have put on the pressure in terms of sales in recent months.  You could try the excuse that IT spending is down – sure but people are reducing costs by virtualising their server farms.  Now, Intel is dumping a large amount of shares.

In December 2007, a share was worth $89.85.  Today it’s worth $24.74.  Still, they’re doing better than the banks!

Credit: Virtualization.Info

Virtual Private Servers Control Panel For Hyper-V

The big thing in the server hosting industry right now is virtualisation.  One of the buzz words is VPS or Virtual Private Server.  It’s a low end offering where a virtual machine is provisioned, quite probably on non-clustered hardware, e.g. if the host dies then every VM hosted on it goes down too.  This keeps the hosting costs low and makes the VPS machine very cheap.  You could think of VPS as being an enthusiasts solution.

There is a big market for this.  If you’re in the web site hosting business you’re familiar with using a Control Panel.  This is the system that is the interface for your customers to the hosting system.  DotNetPanel have just released their Control Panel for Hyper-V based VPS.  This allows VPS hosting companies that are using Hyper-V to sell virtual machines to customers and give the customers a web based interface over the Internet.

This looks like a great solution for selling to enthusiasts.  However, I don’t see it as a professional solution.  For me a virtual machine should be treated exactly like a physical machine (even if deployment is slightly different, e.g. different methods and quicker).  Business machines should not be cut from cookie cutters.  They should be on private networks protected by firewalls.  Firewalls aren’t one-size-fits-all.  Do you need TCP 443 open, TCP 3389, etc?  A limitation with this release of Hyper-V is that each VM on a cluster requires it’s own LUN – yes you can put lots of VM’s on a single LUN but that’s not a flexible cluster solution.  We’re waiting on Windows 2008 R2 for the cluster file system to make life easier for this sort of thing.  So VPS on Hyper-V means no host clustering in reality. 

Finally, in this sort of methodology, you cannot sell SPLA (leased by the month) licensing legally.  As a SPLA reseller, you must ensure that the correct types of licenses are being used by your customers.  For example, we have anonymous and authenticated Per CPU Windows Server licenses.  Per CPU licensing is used instead of user CAL’s.  Anonymous is fine where you have a dumb web server where Windows does not authenticate the users.  Authenticated licensing is required where Windows does authenticate the user, e.g. when a SharePoint site asks a user to log on the log on attempt by the user uses a Windows user account specific to that user.  Authenticated per CPU licenses are significantly more expensive than Anonymous.  I’ve noticed some hosting companies offer no explanation of this legal requirement and skirt around it to offer their customers the cheapest license available, despite it being illegal.  VPS sales automation places the responsibility on the customer who will not understand this so they’ll always go for the cheap option.

And don’t even get me started on people selling Windows Standard/Enterprise Anonymous licenses which are no longer available from Microsoft.  A: It’s wrong for these hosting companies to do this.  B: It was wrong of MS to pull these SKU’s from the list of SPLA licenses.