Your membership dollars at work...

[rforsythe]

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]

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!

[DemonRider]

Thanks For The Great Work Guys!

[dirkterrell]

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]

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

[t_jolt]

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]

I thought it was to buy the mods beer? Dammit.

[TurboGizzmo]

I like hyper-v and then installing vmware server in hyperv!

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

[Wrider]

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]

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]

"Yay cloud!"

[t_jolt]

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]

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]

Thank you rforsythe and to all those who donate!

[rforsythe]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Sorry, let me make an executive-level translation for you: "Servers will be more gooder. Stuff will work better. That's all."

[asp_125]

He's a Canuck.. .you left out "Servers will be more gooder.. eh?"

[Canuck]

He's a Canuck.. .you left out "Servers will be more gooder.. eh?"

You should talk. Eh, Jeff?