Month: June 2009

Planning Works Out

If you’ve ever seen the back of a server rack that I’ve cabled then you’d never let me even plug in a power lead to a kettle.  I am horrible at cabling.  Simply awful at it.  Those probably aren’t strong enough phrases to be honest.  That’s one of the reasons I like blade/SAN technology; there’s a minimal amount of cabling and it’s all usually done by an expert engineer who’s installing the blade chassis and the SAN.  When we put in our gear, I made sure it was!

The engineer did a nice job at labelling everything.  All lead placements were planned.  We’ve a network mesh going back to our access switches from the blade Ethernet virtual connects.  There’s a divergent path between the blade fibre virtual connects, the fibre switches and the SAN chassis units.  Each server has dual channel HBA mezzanine cards And power is split between circuit A and B in each rack.  That means we can lose a circuit and still be operational.  Adding servers doesn’t require more cabling – only adding a chassis does and then I’ll get the engineer to do the work 🙂

Note: We went with Brocade mezzanine cards instead of the Emulex ones.  At my last job we had 128 HP BL460C’s with Emulex HBA’s.  I’d say at least a quarter of the HBA’s had to be replaced in the month before we went into production.  I spoke with an engineer from the reseller recently and he said they were still regularly failing.  We haven’t had any issues with the Brocade ones.

We put the power and fibre channel fault tolerance to test today.  We needed to replace 2 Power Distributions Units (PDU’s).  They have management boards on them that the data centre doesn’t use.  Instead they have an out-of-band management system.  The management boards faulted so we had annoying alarm lights and sirens.  We often bring people in for a show’n’tell during pre-sales so alarms are not good, even if they mean nothing, which they did.  The data centre power management system and our OpsMgr 2007 HP Management Packs would have told us if we had a power issue.

We scheduled the replacement for this afternoon.  Outages are out of the question for the mission critical services we provide to our managed server hosting customers.  We swapped out the PDU’s with the alarms.  Not a single flicker of a problem was seen.  I watched the OpsMgr console for alerts while I was logged into a few VM’s (stored on the SAN) running tests.  The MPIO fault tolerance (Windows Server 2008 SP2) and the power fault tolerance of the SAN/Blades worked.

I was pretty confident of there not being an issue.  Everything was tested by the HP engineer when we did the installation last year.  All the hardware was looking healthy and the “board” was green in OpsMgr 2007.  This just shows how a little bit of planning before you plug things in and a little testing afterwards works in your favour.

Microsoft Virtual Licensing

Emma Healey (Licensing Escalations Manager at MS UK) did an online session on licensing in the virtual world at the recent TechNet online event.

  • A volume license for Windows Server is assigned to hardware.  You could only reassign (move to different machine) it once every 90 days.  This is an installation, not a VM migration.
  • From Sept 1st 2008, we’ve been able to move CAL licensed applications from one host to another within a “server farm” as often as required.  The 90 day minimum rule does not apply. 
  • Only the Enterprise editions of Per Processor SKU’s have free mobility.  The 90 day rule does not apply.
  • The free virtual operating system environment licenses cover legacy Windows OS’s.
  • We CAN freely move VM’s from one host to another.  This is NOTHING to do with reassigning licenses.  You need to be sure the host can sufficient licensing.  There are no timing issues.  The 90 day rule does not apply.

Oh yeah, the licensing for SPLA is still punitive, i.e. DataCenter only exists as an anonymous SKU and authenticated SKU’s cannot be run (even if paid for) on it.

51 Weeks As An MVP

I’ve been an MVP now for 51 weeks.  I’m up for review and I’ll know if I’m renewed or not next week, probably Wednesday.  I know that it won’t be for Configuration Manager again.  As fate would have it, I haven’t work with ConfigMgr in a while.  That means I’ve nothing to blog about on that scene.  I found myself working with Hyper-V early last Summer and I deployed VMM 2008 the week it was released … from a hotel room in Barcelona at TechEd EMEA.  It consumed a lot of my time.  I learned a lot about those products.  I’ve done my best to share that here on the blog and by speaking at events here in Ireland, UK and the USA.  That’s set to continue this year; we’ll be upgrading to W2008 R2 once VMM 2008 R2 is released.  That’ll give me more things to learn and share.

Being an MVP has been cool.  I’ve access to great sources of information, some of which I can share and some which remain under NDA for some time.  The perks have been cool.  My only regret was being unable to go to the MVP summit.  I’ll see how the budget is for that next year.  And who knows what surprises lie ahead at work for me to learn/blog about!

They’re Still Recruiting … By Any Means Possible

I had to satisfy my curiosity this morning so I went and had a look.  I checked out 2 of the main recruitment sites that are used in Ireland.  Key words I was looking for were Sysinternals, 24*7*365 and Exchange 2007.  Easily half the adverts were for one job with the aforementioned Internet gaming company in south Dublin, just off the M50.  They have just about every recruitment agency in Ireland trying to find staff for this role with no joy.  Seriously people, if you’re offering a great package (which they most certainly are), there’s an abundance of available skills (12% unemployment, half of which are skilled professionals) and you still can’t fill that role – don’t you think you need to look at yourself and ask some serious questions?

Another recruiter rang me today about the role.  It was a quick “thanks but no thanks” conversation.  He sounded exhausted with this one.  I can’t blame him.

Comparing the Power Utilization of Native and Virtual Exchange Environments

Nathan Winters just tweeted about a whitepaper on the Microsoft site.  It compares physical with virtual Exchange implementations. 

“Reducing or controlling the high cost of the power to run and cool computer hardware is a top priority for many organizations throughout the world. Many organizations are considering server virtualization solutions to reduce their server footprint and the associated power and cooling costs. Because the virtualization of Microsoft Exchange servers rarely results in a reduction of physical processors, there is some question whether there is significant hardware, power, cooling, or space savings from virtualizing correctly sized Exchange Server 2007 server roles. This study compared the power utilization of native and virtual Exchange server environments in a scenario in which the number of physical servers was reduced from eight to two, but the total number of logical processors and the amount of memory remained the same.

When you consider virtualization of an Exchange environment, power savings is only one of many factors to consider. Depending on your requirements, virtualization may not be a good fit for your Exchange environment. For more information, see the Exchange Team Blog article Should You Virtualize Your Exchange 2007 SP1 Environment?”

TS Web on XP Error: ActiveX Not Installed Or Enabled

I’ve just set up TS Web (Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services web interface) on 2 XP machines.  Both were running IE7, the latest RDP client and XP Service Pack 3.  When I fired up the URL I got the following: “ActiveX not installed or enabled”.  The ActiveX plug-in for RDP wouldn’t work.

I did a quick Bing – OK I Googled.  Binging still sounds wrong – and found a fix.  I needed to delete a couple of registry keys from HKCU:

  • HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExtSettings{7390f3d8-0439-4c05-91e3-cf5cb290c3d0}
  • HKCUSoftwareMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExtSettings{4eb89ff4-7f78-4a0f-8b8d-2bf02e94e4b2}

I refreshed the page and all was well.  I was now asked (using the yellow bar) if I wanted to enable the ActiveX plug-in, which I did.

Having Trouble Recruiting? In This Market? What? Really? Why?

There’s an Internet gaming company here in Ireland, just off the M50 in south Dublin, that’s been recruiting for a senior Windows engineer for at least 4 or 5 months.  I’ve been contacted several times by agencies but I’ve no interest in them.  Normally it’s a place I would have been interested in: massive numbers of mission critical Windows servers including Windows 2008.  Tip off words in their adverts mention car parking, gym membership, 24*7*365, Exchange 2007 and Sysinternals.  That last one’s a dead give away 🙂

I blogged about them back in mid 2007.  I had some experience of how they advertised for an architect and the opening was really for a break-fix engineer.  I found that out in the last of 4 interviews. 

So why are they having trouble filling this job?  That last thing I mentioned is a clue of what they’re like.  I know some people who’ve interviewed there in the past and came out feeling bitter like I did.  I know someone (let’s call him Bob) who did their phone interview and was then asked to come in for 4 in-person interviews … at 2PM on the following Monday.  Bob couldn’t do it.  He has to give 1 months notice for time off.  Skiving off from work isn’t in his nature but the HR person was insistent that the interview would not be after hours.  It seems she wanted to recruit someone for their senior position who had no problem dossing from work.  When the Monday plan wasn’t going to work (after 1 month notice being explained).  Here’s what she offered: “OK, we’ll interview everyone else.  If nothing works out then we’ll call you in for the following Monday”.  The only response Bob could give her “Fine, we’ll then book the day off 1 month from the point you call me to say that no one else was suitable”.  Stupid, eh?  All because Ms. Thing wanted to finish work at 17:30.  That brought an end to his dealings with the company.

Unemployment is at over 12% in Ireland right now.  We have a 4 million population.  Lots of those have been skilled employees with great skills.  There’s no shortage of available people and others who are hunting for more secure work.  Any company that’s been failing to fill a position after 4 or 5 months must look at itself and ask some serious questions. 

  • Advertise the job that really is open.  Don’t back load the surprises that spring up in the last interview, the contract or the first day of work.
  • A person cannot know everything.  You have a laundry list of requirements so look for people who have similar skills that can transfer, e.g. they can learn new skills.  A handful of people in Ireland know the HP RDP stuff.  Consider people who know WDS because they aren’t too different.
  • Be flexible.  Asking people to take a risk by dossing from work in the middle of the day is ridiculous.  People are in fear for their jobs so make allowances.  Do you really want to hire someone who will doss from your company?  Are you going to “change them”?  LMAO!  I suspect in this case that the HR person was at fault.  We IT people are used to working late.  HR … well they clock out at 17:30 (oh that’s 5:30PM, dear).

Windows User Group Event: Operations Manager 2007 R2

Microsoft has just released the newest version of System Center Operations Manager, 2007 R2. OpsMgr, AKA SCOM, allows an enterprise to monitor the health and performance of the IT infrastructure from hardware all the way to the applications. Component monitoring, audit logging, service delivery monitoring and performance monitoring have been with us since 2007. SLA monitoring has been enhanced in 2007 R2 and Cross Platform Extensions add the ability to natively monitor UNIX and LINUX from the Microsoft platform

This session by expert Paul Keely will introduce you to OpsMgr and to the new features added in OpsMgr 2007 R2.

Agenda

09:30 Introduction
09:45 The monitoring story
10:00 Operations Manger Whistle Stop tour
10:40 Breakout
10:50 Monitoring deep dive, Monitors, Rules, Synthetic Transactions and Service level dashboards all from the field.
11:50 Q&A

The Speaker

Paul Keely has been working for Microsoft Consultant Services for the last number of years doing enterprise deployments of most of the System Center products, but mostly focusing on SCOM. Paul is back working for himself, is deeply engaged in a number of large SCOM deployments right now and is full of lessons learned and helpful information for anyone thinking about deploying SCOM, and for those working on it right now.

Where And When

Registration is mandatory for attending the in-person event at Microsoft.

The event will be held in Building 2 at the Microsoft European Development Centre (EDC), South County Business Park, Leopardstown, Dublin 18. 

Registration: 09:00

Event: 09:30 until 12:00

Registration

To attend in person you must register.

Webcast

Registration is not required to join the online webcast. You can join the web cast by:
1) Installing the free Live Meeting Client
2) Clicking on this link: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/usergroups/join?id=OpsMgr2007R2&role=attend