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View Full Version : Your membership dollars at work...



rforsythe
Tue May 10th, 2011, 08:24 AM
Occasionally people ask where the money for memberships goes. Usually it just pays for upkeep of the software and occasional parts that break. Thanks to several recent contributions and a great deal on equipment by a fellow member, I'm happy to say that we will be completely upgrading our server hardware in the near future. This will give us two redundant servers (each also having RAID1 storage), replicating data multiple times and in multiple ways. Through Xen we will split the functionality into Linux virtual machines, to lessen the impact of a corrupted file system in a single OS instance among other benefits.

I'll get the systems soon and start building them. I intend to get things cut over in the next week or two; you can anticipate some intermittent outages around that time, though I anticipate they will be brief.

Bashed
Tue May 10th, 2011, 08:28 AM
Put it in your pocket for all I care, you and Bob certainly deserve it.
It's good to hear you are paying it forward into the site.
Thanks again for keeping this thing going!:yay:

DemonRider
Tue May 10th, 2011, 08:31 AM
:headbang:Thanks For The Great Work Guys!:bananna:

dirkterrell
Tue May 10th, 2011, 08:50 AM
We're finding that virtual machines are the way to go for things like this, so I bet you'll end up liking this setup even though it is a little more work in the beginning.

Canuck
Tue May 10th, 2011, 09:07 AM
What's the English translation of what Ralph just said?

t_jolt
Tue May 10th, 2011, 09:28 AM
Everything i do for my company is virtual. Now we use Vmware and not xen, as the licensed features i feel are better on vmware, but im sure csc doesnt have 5k around for a license :) Virtual is going to be the new standard i think. So if you want to start in IT, you better start learning :)

Tyrel

Mother Goose
Tue May 10th, 2011, 09:39 AM
I thought it was to buy the mods beer? Dammit.

TurboGizzmo
Tue May 10th, 2011, 10:26 AM
I like hyper-v and then installing vmware server in hyperv!

More specs! Is this replication using Linux with a heartbeat failover?

Wrider
Tue May 10th, 2011, 10:32 AM
Occasionally people ask where the money for memberships goes. Usually it just pays for upkeep of the software and occasional parts that break. Thanks to several recent contributions and a great deal on equipment by a fellow member, I'm happy to say that we will be completely upgrading our server hardware in the near future. This will give us two redundant servers (each also having RAID1 storage), replicating data multiple times and in multiple ways. Through Xen we will split the functionality into Linux virtual machines, to lessen the impact of a corrupted file system in a single OS instance among other benefits.

I'll get the systems soon and start building them. I intend to get things cut over in the next week or two; you can anticipate some intermittent outages around that time, though I anticipate they will be brief.



What's the English translation of what Ralph just said?


More money/parts = two servers that are backed up independently. (4? ways of backing the site up.) And the site will not be handled by one computer working it's ass off, it'll be handled by a couple of separate computers so that if something goes kaput on one it doesn't screw everything up.

Techies, is this about right? That's what I'm gathering.

Ricky
Tue May 10th, 2011, 10:34 AM
Nice! I just switched my personal server over to virtual, and I'm stoked I did. Now I'm in a virtual cloud with SAN storage.

Mother Goose
Tue May 10th, 2011, 10:42 AM
"Yay cloud!"

t_jolt
Tue May 10th, 2011, 10:47 AM
I like hyper-v and then installing vmware server in hyperv!

More specs! Is this replication using Linux with a heartbeat failover?

Vmware 5 is suppose to finally support installing the hypervisor inside a vm. Now that could be fun :)

TurboGizzmo
Tue May 10th, 2011, 10:51 AM
Vmware 5 is suppose to finally support installing the hypervisor inside a vm. Now that could be fun :)

I tried VMware first on my 2008 server (because i had experience with it) and had all kinds of problems, reformat and reinstall 2k8 and Hyper-V setup without a hitch, plus helps me learn it and add it to the resume.

bornwildnfree
Tue May 10th, 2011, 10:52 AM
Thank you rforsythe (http://www.cosportbikeclub.org/forums/member.php?u=3) and to all those who donate!

rforsythe
Tue May 10th, 2011, 10:53 AM
We're finding that virtual machines are the way to go for things like this, so I bet you'll end up liking this setup even though it is a little more work in the beginning.


Everything i do for my company is virtual. Now we use Vmware and not xen, as the licensed features i feel are better on vmware, but im sure csc doesnt have 5k around for a license :) Virtual is going to be the new standard i think. So if you want to start in IT, you better start learning :)

Tyrel

Yep, pretty much. We use virtualization here at work thousands of times over, running VMware as well; just for my group I run 4 ESXi servers to handle our monitoring and management of security systems, about to expand to a dozen (the four in place now condensed our server count down from around 30). I'm also designing and writing the application that will automatically manage thousands of virtual firewalls as instances spin up and down for capacity and flux. CSC won't be buying any ESXi licenses, but Xen apparently works well (Amazon runs their entire cloud service on it) and is free.

Server specs are quad core Xeon CPU, 8GB RAM, and lots of disk. The RAID1 will prevent a single drive failure from bringing down a physical machine, and by being redundant we could lose a VM or an entire physical host and still stay up.

I have not worked out my methodology for failover redundancy yet, but will likely involve IP sharing and a heartbeat. I haven't set that up on Linux before, so I'll have to sort that out. Data replication between VM's will depend on what it's doing (rsync for files, MySQL will replicate itself, DNS is centrally managed and pushed out, etc).

t_jolt
Tue May 10th, 2011, 11:08 AM
Now i havent gotten to crazy into the virtual firewalls yet, we only use virtual load balancers and switches right now. Whats crazy is the v-nexus stuff that cisco has. All the layer 3 stuff that it does is crazy. But doesnt the clustering options of ESXi handle all the power scaling required? or are you trying to get it down to a more granular level?

Tyrel

rforsythe
Tue May 10th, 2011, 11:13 AM
So far Nexus hasn't been a great fit, but we are looking at other software-based solutions. Basically we need IP-level control applied at a physical host level, with a lot of other requirements to make that work well.

dirkterrell
Tue May 10th, 2011, 11:37 AM
CSC won't be buying any ESXi licenses, but Xen apparently works well (Amazon runs their entire cloud service on it) and is free.


I refrain from making a snide comment re Amazon's recent cloud outage. :) (Xen wasn't the issue.)

We've settled on VirtualBox for a variety of server functions and it works pretty well. I'm also driving a robotic observatory with a Linux box running two instances of XP in VirtualBox. The XP vm's drive the cameras, dome and telescope mount, and we do the processing and archiving on the Linux side. We're basically imaging the entire sky to create a color catalog of all objects in a certain range of brightnesses (10th - 17th magnitude for you astro geeks). It's been running for a year and a half, one system in New Mexico and one down in Chile, and it's worked like a charm.

rforsythe
Tue May 10th, 2011, 11:42 AM
I refrain from making a snide comment re Amazon's recent cloud outage. :) (Xen wasn't the issue.)

We've settled on VirtualBox for a variety of server functions and it works pretty well. I'm also driving a robotic observatory with a Linux box running two instances of XP in VirtualBox. The XP vm's drive the cameras, dome and telescope mount, and we do the processing and archiving on the Linux side. We're basically imaging the entire sky to create a color catalog of all objects in a certain range of brightnesses (10th - 17th magnitude for you astro geeks). It's been running for a year and a half, one system in New Mexico and one down in Chile, and it's worked like a charm.

Nice. Yeah I'm well versed in what happened with AWS, and despite the recent human-caused outage they still have a very nice service offering.

dirkterrell
Tue May 10th, 2011, 11:52 AM
Nice. Yeah I'm well versed in what happened with AWS, and despite the recent human-caused outage they still have a very nice service offering.

Oh yeah. I was just having a chuckle at their expense. We use their service quite a bit for Mars atmospheric simulations, and they were very forthcoming about what happened. It just shows how difficult it can be to predict how badly and rapidly things can go haywire in such complex systems.

asp_125
Tue May 10th, 2011, 12:11 PM
What's the English translation of what Ralph just said?

+1000. I think this means more server space for Friday kitteh pictures or the NSFW thread.

rforsythe
Tue May 10th, 2011, 12:13 PM
Sorry, let me make an executive-level translation for you: "Servers will be more gooder. Stuff will work better. That's all."

asp_125
Tue May 10th, 2011, 12:44 PM
He's a Canuck.. .you left out "Servers will be more gooder.. eh?"

Canuck
Tue May 10th, 2011, 01:34 PM
He's a Canuck.. .you left out "Servers will be more gooder.. eh?"

You should talk. Eh, Jeff? :lol:

~Barn~
Tue May 10th, 2011, 09:59 PM
For all you network admins out there, give me a call if your systems need the best precision monitoring suite available. We run on all distributed systems (WUL), HP NonStop, Payment/ATM architectures, and we also have a product for the IPT side of the house as well. www.ir.com (http://www.ir.com)

WolFeYeZ
Tue May 10th, 2011, 10:15 PM
For all you network admins out there, give me a call if your systems need the best precision monitoring suite available. We run on all distributed systems (WUL), HP NonStop, Payment/ATM architectures, and we also have a product for the IPT side of the house as well. www.ir.com (http://www.ir.com)

This official thread got officially jacked :dunno:

~Barn~
Tue May 10th, 2011, 10:38 PM
Threads. They're what's for dinner.

Genoru
Fri May 13th, 2011, 07:56 PM
This might be a stupid question, MIGHT. So how do I get the supporter titles, and where can I donate to the club? Couldn't find a link or any info about that. Seems like it should be on front page. Maybe I'm blind while not riding.

rybo
Fri May 13th, 2011, 09:42 PM
This might be a stupid question, MIGHT. So how do I get the supporter titles, and where can I donate to the club? Couldn't find a link or any info about that. Seems like it should be on front page. Maybe I'm blind while not riding.

If you click the "User CP" link in the toolbar you will go to the User Control Panel. At the bottom of the User CP page on the left hand side you'll see a link marked "Paid Subscriptions" Click that link and you'll see how to become a supporter.

Thank you for supporting the CSC!

S

Genoru
Fri May 13th, 2011, 11:25 PM
If you click the "User CP" link in the toolbar you will go to the User Control Panel. At the bottom of the User CP page on the left hand side you'll see a link marked "Paid Subscriptions" Click that link and you'll see how to become a supporter.

Thank you for supporting the CSC!

S
I knew it was a stupid question! Thanks!

Swift
Mon May 30th, 2011, 10:32 PM
I are a supporter nao. yay!

bodhizafa
Mon May 30th, 2011, 11:55 PM
What the hell....just paid for a year, figure I owe it to CSC :)