Cutting Edge IT

PFDAVAdmin Error

2011-03-11T12:50:00.001-05:00

If you are seeing this error on the PFDAVAdmin Tool:
Could not expand https://localhost/exadmin/admin/mydomain.com/public%20folders/ : name cannot begin with the '0' character, hexadecimal value 0x30. Line 1, position 386'

Ensure .net framework 1.1 is installed on the workstation you are using. Dont install it on the Exchange server though.

Xendesktop 5 How to Trust XML Service

2011-02-14T15:34:00.000-05:00

Set-BrokerSite -TrustRequestsSentToTheXmlServicePort $true

Exchange 2010 Remove Read Receipts

2011-02-10T10:54:00.000-05:00

New-TransportRule -Name "Remove_Read_Receipts" -MessageTypeMatches ReadReceipt -DeleteMessage $true

Cannot Delete Exchange 2010 Database because of arbitration mailboxes

2011-01-28T11:39:00.002-05:00

If you run the command: Get-Mailbox -Arbitration -Database DB
you see arbitration mailboxes listed.

Move them - Get-Mailbox -Arbitration -Database dbsource | New-MoveRequest -TargetDatabase dbtarget

You can also disable them unless it is the first DB in the org by doing:
Get-Mailbox -Arbitration -Database db | Disable-Mailbox -Arbitration

Microsoft Certificate Services and VMware SSL Cert

2010-12-10T09:58:00.004-05:00

Here is a great post on how to get an SSL cert on your vSphere server using Microsoft Certificate Services.

If you are using SRM you will have to do a repair on the installation after changing the DB password.

http://community.citrix.com/display/ocb/2010/08/09/Secret+to+getting+VirtualCenter+to+use+an+Enterprise+CA+SSL+certificate

VMWARE SRM Netapp NFS

2010-11-02T14:31:00.002-04:00

When configuring the array manager for SRM with Netapp NFS volumes you receive the following error:

Error while executing 'discoverLuns' command

If you are only using NFS with VMware you will need to create a dummy igroup for VMware -

igroup create -i -t vmware sra_dummy_igroup

vCenter vSphere client slow on Windows 7

2010-10-12T11:06:00.000-04:00

Try this: Right-click the vSphere Client’s shortcut and choose Properties. In the Compatibility tab select Disable desktop composition.

Defragmenting Virtual Center 4.x (Update)

2010-09-15T13:20:00.001-04:00

In SQL Server Management Studio:

Use
go
dbcc showcontig (VPX_HIST_STAT1)
dbcc showcontig (VPX_HIST_STAT2)
dbcc showcontig (VPX_HIST_STAT3)
dbcc showcontig (VPX_HIST_STAT4)
go

If fragmented run:
dbcc indexdefrag ('', 'VPX_HIST_STAT1', 'PK_VPX_HIST_STAT1')
dbcc indexdefrag ('', 'VPX_HIST_STAT2', 'PK_VPX_HIST_STAT2')
dbcc indexdefrag ('', 'VPX_HIST_STAT3', 'PK_VPX_HIST_STAT3')
dbcc indexdefrag ('', 'VPX_HIST_STAT4', 'PK_VPX_HIST_STAT4')
go

How to disable DEP fully

2010-09-13T17:16:00.000-04:00

bcdedit.exe /set {current} nx AlwaysOff

How to rebuild the Exchange 2007 Index

2010-08-18T15:47:00.001-04:00

From the Exchange command shell: ResetSearchIndex.ps1 [-force] -all

Event 111 and 1085

2010-08-18T15:42:00.002-04:00

If you are using folder redirection via group policy and you see these events login as the user that is having issues redirecting their folder. Run regedit (you may have to temporarily add them as an admin) and go to the security of HKCU. Make sure that the user has full control permissions to HKCU.

I have seen it where the user has no permissions for HKCU and instead another user has the perms.

Exchange 2007 Cert Private Key Missing Error

2010-05-24T10:22:00.001-04:00

Get the serial number of the cert via the certificates MMC.

Run the following command:

certutil -repairstore my “SerialNumber“

Migrating Netapp Filer to new SAN Switch

2010-04-13T16:10:00.006-04:00

Exchange 2007 Convert a Shared Mailbox to a Regular

2010-04-13T16:07:00.002-04:00

set-mailbox (mailboxname) -type:regular

Exchange 2007 with 2003 OWA Activesync Error 503

2010-03-26T13:20:00.002-04:00

I was receiving this error on our front-end 2003 OWA server, which is connecting to a 2007 mailbox server and has ISA:

HTTP status code: [503]. Verify that the Exchange mailbox Server is working correctly.

I was also receiving this error:

The mailbox server does not allow "Negotiate" authentication to its [exchange] virtual directory. Exchange ActiveSync can only access the server using this authentication scheme.

Users couldnt use their iPhones to connect to Exchange. Indeed Windows authentication and basic authentication were enabled.

I tried everything and ended up rebuilding the Exchange virtual directory by doing:

remove-owavirtualdirectory -identity "server\exchange (default website)"

and recreating it:

New-OWAVirtualDirectory -OwaVersion:Exchange2003or2000 -VirtualDirectoryType Mailboxes -Name "exchange"

Boom.

How to Calculate VMware failover capacity

2010-02-16T09:34:00.003-05:00

If you are getting insufficient resources to satisfy HA failover messages, check this article out on why and how to fix it. The way they calculate resources is kind of wack.

http://www.vmwarewolf.com/ha-failover-capacity/

VMware converter with Windows Server 2008 R2

2010-02-11T11:44:00.002-05:00

If you try to use vmconverter to import a VM from another virtual center you probably have seen the "unable to determine guest operating system" error.

There is an easy workaround. Change the OS on the VM that you are going to import to Windows 2008 64 BIT. Run the import. Then change it back after the import.

NTP on ESX

2010-02-11T10:50:00.003-05:00

I use this document so much that I figured I would post a link to it. I always seem to have issues with my ESX servers losing their time sync via NTP. Here is how to set it up correctly (it will still break) and how to fix it.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1339

Kill Remote RDP Sessions with Command Line

2010-01-21T15:43:00.002-05:00

A great way to kill remote RDP sessions is built into Windows. Do the following:

qwinsta /server:(ServerName)

Write down the session ID

Now to kill it:

rwinsta /server:(servername)

That is it. Works like a charm.

SDHolder AD Domain Admin Inherited Permissions

2010-01-12T11:21:00.002-05:00

For those of you that have found issues with inherited permissions that you cant seem to get control of, read on. It may be because of the SDHolder object in AD. Here is an excerpt from Microsoft on it.

"Every hour, the Windows 20xx domain controller that holds the primary domain controller (PDC) Flexible Single Master Operation (FSMO) role compares the ACL on all security principals (users, groups, and machine accounts) present for its domain in Active Directory and that are in administrative groups against the ACL on the following object:
CN=AdminSDHolder,CN=System,DC=MyDomain,DC=Com

Replace "DC=MyDomain,DC=Com" in this path with the distinguished name (DN) of your domain.
If the ACL is different, the ACL on the user object is overwritten to reflect the security settings of the AdminSDHolder object (which includes disabling ACL inheritance). This protects these administrative accounts from being modified by unauthorized users if the accounts are moved to a container or organizational unit in which a user has been delegated administrative privilege for the modification of user accounts. Note that when a user is removed from the administrative group, the process is not reversed and must be manually changed."

Exchange Top Level Security Permissions

2009-12-01T10:42:00.002-05:00

In order to see the top level inherited security permissions in Exchange you have to add the following reg key and restart ESM (Exchange 2003):

Hkey_Current_User/ Software/ Microsoft/ Exchange/ ExAdmin

Create a new Dword Value of "ShowSecurityPage" and give it a value of 1.

Now restart ESM and you will see the security tab at the Exchange org levele

Messaging Records Management (MRM) Exchange 2007 Entire Mailbox

2009-11-19T10:58:00.003-05:00

If you are using managed folder policies and would like to apply deletion rules to folders outside of the default folders such as a user that creates a folder at the root and not in the Inbox, you may have to work with "Entire Mailbox"

I have used this setting in the past and it can cause havoc. In other words it will apply to every single folder, including calendar, contacts, etc. when you use it.

The only way to ensure that it wont apply to a specific folder is to have that managed folder part of the same policy.

So if you have Entire Mailbox selected to delete emails after 90 days, everything in Outlook older than 90 days will be deleted. If you also have a Calendar managed folder policy for 120 days as part of the same policy, which includes Entire Mailbox, the 90 day rule wont apply to Calendar. The calendar items will delete after 120 days and everything else 90 days.

Another option is to choose for the Entire Mailbox policy to only delete emails and not all items. IF you do this then it will only delete emails for the entire mailbox and not items like calendar entries, tasks, etc.

Be careful.

Exchange 2007 File Share Witness Multi-subnet clustering

2009-11-10T09:30:00.002-05:00

If you are placing the file share witness at the same site as your active Exchange 2007 server, when you have a primary site failure Exchange will not be able to start at the DR site. This is because it will only have 1 of 3 votes as both the quorum and the active are down.

You will have to run a /fq (net start clussvc /fq) to force the quorum to start at the secondary site.

Check this one out:
http://blogs.technet.com/timmcmic/archive/2009/04/26/file-share-witness-fsw-placement-and-the-cluster-group.aspx

Migrating user from Exchange 2003 to 2007 BES

2009-10-21T11:25:00.003-04:00

Most people that I talk to suggest to restart BES services if you migrate a user between Exchange servers. I have found that all you have to do is run handheldcleanup -u. It works for me every time. Try it.

Windows 2008, Exchange 2007 CCR Cluster multi-subnet

2009-09-17T09:59:00.002-04:00

To decrease the fail-over time of a multi-subnet CCR cluster running Exchange 2007, decrease the TTL of the DNS record. When a fail-over occurs in a multi-subnet environment, the DNS record must change to the new IP. To make this happen faster, run the below command.

The default is 20 minutes, plus the 10 minutes it takes for the cluster to even change the record, plus the amount of time a client caches the record. This can lead to long fail-over times.

To change the TTL to 5 minutes run: Cluster.exe res /priv HostRecordTTL=300

Windows Server 2008, Cannot Create cluster

2009-09-17T09:57:00.002-04:00

If you are having issues creating a cluster in Windows 2008, try this:

Change the value for the MS failover cluster virtual adapter
1. Open Registry Editor.
2. Locate the following registry subkey:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
3. Under this subkey, find the subkey that holds a DriverDesc string value entry whose value is "Microsoft Failover Cluster Virtual Adapter."
4. Under the subkey that you found in step 3, add the following string value registry entry:
Name: DatalinkAddress
Value data: 02-AA-BB-CC-DD-01
5. Restart the computer.
6. Repeat step 1 through step 5 on other computers on which you experience this problem. When you do this on other computers, replace the value data of the registry with different values in order to set a unique value for each node. For example, set the value on the second node to 02-AA-BB-CC-DD-02, and set value on the third node to 02-AA-BB-CC-DD-03. If you notice this behavior on distinct clusters, make sure that you use an address for each node that is unique across all clusters.
7. Try creating the cluster again.

Exchange 2007 cannot uninstall Exchange Tools

2009-09-17T09:54:00.002-04:00

If you cant uninstall the Exchange tools because the option is grayed out, run this command:

MsiExec.exe /X{24B2C164-DE66-44FE-B468-A46D9D5E6B31}

Windows 2008 CCR Cluster, Exchange 2007 error

2009-09-17T09:50:00.002-04:00

Microsoft.Exchange.Cluster.ReplayService (7012) Log Verifier e0a 31573001: An attempt to open the device name "\\source\share$" containing "\\source\share$\" failed with system error 5 (0x00000005): "Access is denied. ". The operation will fail with error -1032 (0xfffffbf8).

If you get this error in your Windows 2008 CCR cluster on Exchange 2007, you can ignore it, for now. It should be fixed in future releases. Check this link:

http://blogs.technet.com/timmcmic/archive/2008/12/21/windows-2008-exchange-2007-sp1-ese-522-errors-on-ccr-passive-or-scr-target-machine.aspx

SnapDrive Windows 2008 Cluster Access Denied

2009-09-11T12:55:00.003-04:00

After installing snapdrive on a cluster member, I got access denied when trying to add a disk. Apparently you have to install SnapDrive on both servers before proceeding even though it is a CCR cluster

Netapp Cannot Delete Snapshot Error LUN Clone

2009-09-09T10:36:00.002-04:00

I ran into this error whilst trying to delete a snapshot created by SME. I found this page:

http://www.oneandonemakesthree.com/?q=node/50

Which states:

When you clone a LUN, you are left with snapshots that won't be deleted even after you delete the cloned LUN. These snapshots will start to consume huge amounts of space.

If you try to delete the snapshot, it will say that the snapshot is busy and can't be deleted. You have to delete any snapshots that were taken while that LUN clone existed as the LUN clone exists in those snapshots.

Issue the command:

lun snap usage volume_name snapshot_name

The will be the snapshot that is currently busy that you are trying to delete. The results of the command will be a list of snapshots that you have to delete before the busy snapshot can be deleted, and you can reclaim all that space.

iPhone, Exchange 2003, OWA, ISA 2006

2009-08-17T13:51:00.002-04:00

I just got done setting up OWA with ISA 2006 for iPhone test users. One thing that I ran into, which I have seen in the past, is an issue when you have an ISA server with only one leg, purely in the DMZ.

With OWA if you don't want users to have to type in /Exchange when connecting to the Exchange server you have to basically create a redirect rule that comes into effect when a user just types in the root of the OWA server. That rule then forwards them to /Exchange. Simple, but a PIA if you are trying to figure it out.

Here is how to do it: http://www.messagingtalk.org/exchange-2007-owa-url-redirection-using-isa-2006

vsphere, TPS, high memory utilization on Nehalem processors

2009-08-07T13:09:00.004-04:00

After upgrading from ESX 3.5 to vsphere all of VMs were throwing memory alerts. I found this article

Basically with MMU and large page sizes enabled, TPS doesnt work so well because of the larger page size. For now I disabled the alerts, but there is also the option of disabling large page sizes.

vsphere 4, paravirtual SCSI

2009-08-06T14:07:00.000-04:00

From the Admin Guide:

VMware recommends that you create a primary adapter (LSI Logic by default) for use with a disk that will host the system software (boot
disk) and a separate PVSCSI adapter for the disk that will store user data, such as a database.

ESX using NTP has Wrong Time zone on command line

2009-08-03T15:08:00.003-04:00

The ESX servers at my customers site all use NTP. This is working great. All the VMs have the correct time using VMware tools, when I check the time under configuration, it shows the correct time, etc. However, when I log into the ESX server itself via SSH it has the wrong time when I run the date command.

This is because there is an incorrect time zone set. This is easy to fix and shouldnt affect your NTP settings.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1436

HP NIC Teaming, Netapp CIFS, vRanger Pro Issue

2009-07-29T12:39:00.003-04:00

I was seeing extremely slow CIFS performance on servers with HP NIC teams. This includes our vRanger backup server. I would map a drive and it would take minutes to come up, etc. I finally found a NOW article suggesting to run:

options ip.fastpath.enable off

This command, from my understanding, will not use cached MAC addresses. Because of the way our HP NIC team is setup, different MACs were being presented and this caused an issue. So far so good.

Virtualizing Citrix

2009-07-29T10:42:00.007-04:00

I have recently virtualized a customers entire Citrix environment. It is performing quite well actually. No issues so far. I did follow some of the recommendations here

I did not, however, follow everyones suggestion not to P2V the Citrix servers. I was forced to P2V them and they are running perfectly thus far. The 2 main things that I followed were disabling the memory balloon driver and shared folders within VMware Tools.

The memory balloon driver acts as a program within the VM and will give and take memory based on the host and VM requirements amongst other things. With Citrix, I decided to not enable it.

For information on how the balloon driver and the swap file work, check it here

Varonis on Netapp

2009-07-29T09:29:00.001-04:00

To get Varonis to manage Netapp CIFS volumes you must run the following fpolicy commands to create an fpolicy.

fpolicy create Varonis screen
fpolicy options Varonis required off
fpolicy enable Varonis

Replicating and failing over VMs

2009-07-27T15:05:00.000-04:00

When you automate the replication and failover of virtual machines, you will need to make a change to the config file if you dont want to answer a question per-VM on failover because the UUID changed in the new environment.

In order to automate this process, when you build a VM edit the vmx file to include:

uuid.action = "keep"

NETAPP WHITE PAPERThis will keep ESX from asking a question on whether or not you want to change the UUID.

Windows Server 2008 Cannot Ping or Connect to Internet

2009-07-24T10:27:00.002-04:00

I am building out some Windows Server 2008 machines. One of them couldnt be pinged, couldnt connect to the Internet, but could reach servers on its own subnet. When I ran an ipconfig I could see that one of the default gateways was 0.0.0.0. When I went to network properties it wasnt there. I tried deleting the entry from the registry, it didnt work.

The solution was simple: run the command route delete 0.0.0.0 and then go into network settings and add the real gateway again.

ESX NFS Snapshot Issues

2009-07-20T11:53:00.003-04:00

I have been having snapshot issues with ESX on Netapp NFS. The server is hanging for a long time when deleting snapshots. We are also seeing ESX Ranger issues when doing backups.

The Netapp guide mentions to install patch ESX350-200808401-BG. I am on the version 3 of ESX 3.5 so it wasnt necessary. All I had to do was add this line to the esx config file.

prefvmx.consolidateDeleteNFSLocks = "TRUE"

ESX Ranger, ESX, Netapp, NFS

2009-06-30T16:00:00.003-04:00

If you have ESX running on Netapp, you sure as hell probably installed the Netapp ESX tools. If you didnt then you should. A couple things that the tools do is change NFS settings within ESX.

I ran into an issue with ESX Ranger failing on backups from Netapp NFS to a Netapp CIFS share. The error was:

The Backup file /vmfs/volumes/NFS_TIER_BLAH/Server1//Server1-flat.vmdk that was transfered appears to be Invalid! Transfered Size: 112546265463, Expected Size: 94667312308.

The solution seems to be changing the NFS timeout values within ESX by:

Changing the value of NFS.HeartbeatFrequency to 12
Changing the value of NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures to 10

This will work for most people if they havent already installed the Netapp tools and therefore already have these settings. This didnt fix my problem, but it may yours.

My solution was to Use NFS instead of CIFS for the target. It works thus far.

Sean

Some Basic Netapp Tips 1

2009-06-24T15:41:00.004-04:00

Here are some tips that I share with clients. They are not rules of thumb, simply ways of doing things. For most of my clients I share a VM Tips file, which I update constantly and a storage tips file, in this case Netapp.

After creating volumes log into the filer and turn on volume autosize with the trigger set to volume

After creating volumes log into the filer and set the snap autodelete to on

Set the snapreserve % to 0 when creating volumes that will house LUNs. Just create the volume big enough to handle a LUN plus the snaps manually.

Make sure that when you grow a volume that you login to the filer and reconfigure volume autosize. This can be done by typing vol autosize reset; followed by vol autosize on

Always set the default security to restricted for iSCSI and add initiators as needed

Continued.....

Extreme Networks ESX Port Grouping

2009-06-23T11:48:00.003-04:00

By default if you create a port group on an Extreme switch it is layer 2. If you then create a port group in ESX or a vswitch and choose IP hash for load balancing, it wont work properly. You need to change the port grouping on the switch to L3_L4.

The same applies to a Netapp dynamic VIF as Netapp uses IP load balancing as well.

Netapp and ESX Network Setup

2009-06-16T10:56:00.002-04:00

Here is a quick snapsnot of a setup I have done in the past with ESX and Netapp

Netapp Volume Creation

2009-06-16T09:29:00.002-04:00

I have decided to make a quick reminder of things that I usually do after creating a Netapp volume:

vol autosize (vol) on - This will autogrow the volume once a threshold is reached
snap autodelete (vol) on - This will auotmatically delete snapshots when a threshold is reached
sis on (vol) - This turns on single instance storage. You can check the status of SIS by running a df -s
Change the security on the NFS mount for NFS volumes to allow for the IPs of the servers that will use the volume.

Normally this is enough. I will have more information if you are creating a volume that is going to be SnapMirrored.

Netapp SnapMirror with SMVI

2009-06-16T09:24:00.004-04:00

If you are using SnapManager for Virtual Infrastructure with SnapMirror, you may have seen this error:

[ERROR - SnapMirror update from source snapshot null to destination location DESTFILER:dest_vol failed]

The reason for this is that I have edited the snapmirror.conf file in order to force SnapMirror to use a specific NIC port.

When you do this SMVI cannot initiate SnapMirror because it expects a different filername in the SnapMirror.conf. Since I changed the name to point to the other interface, you must do the following to the snapmirror.conf in order for SMVI to now work:

(sourcefilername) = multi (sourcefilerIP,TargetFilerIP)

HP DL 380 G6 Memory Configuration

2009-05-13T09:54:00.002-04:00

Here is how to populate an HP DL 380 G6 with memory. With the new BIOS you can populate 12 out of 18 slots and run at 1333 Mhz as long as you have the right memory.

DL 380G6, Netapp, iSCSI, NFS, Network Config

2009-04-30T15:12:00.003-04:00

Here is a good ESX config for a DL380-G6 with a Netapp array using NFS and iSCSI for VM placement.

HP DL380 G6 using Intel X5550 processors

2009-04-29T13:53:00.006-04:00

I recently purchased some servers to host our ESX environment for a client. We went with the X5550 processors. Be careful of how you purchase the memory cause the more you buy the slower it is.

Basically the server has 3 channels with 1 CPU and 6 channels with 2 CPUs. Each channel has 3 slots for a total of 18 slots with 2 CPUs. If you populate 1 slot per channel you can run at 1333 MHz. If you put in one more memory chip in a channel, you run at 1066. One more and you go down to 800 MHz.

The 8 GB DIMMs do not run at 1333 so basically if you want to run at that speed you can only have 24 GB of memory. Here is the table:

Convert VMFS VMDK to RDM

2009-04-21T10:10:00.000-04:00

vmkfstools –i /vmfs/volumes/data1/W2K3standardgoldenmaster/W2K3standardgoldenmaster.vmdk -d rdm:/vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba1:0:6:0 /vmfs/volumes/data1/rdmvir/rdmvir.vmdk

Vsphere 4

2009-04-21T10:05:00.005-04:00

I am in the middle of designing a virtualization solution and I knew this was coming. I think I may have to step back a bit. Check out the release of the new VMware now called Vsphere 4.

http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid94_gci1354214,00.html

Running VMs in NFS

2009-04-01T19:10:00.003-04:00

I am currently working on purchasing a Netapp array for a client along with some VMware. My plan is to run most of the VMs on NFS for various reasons. First of all, I think it is cool and that is always most important. Since the VMs are just chilling on a remote file system, you think of them like you should, just files. Create directory structures, one say for email with all your email servers, one for you file servers, etc.

With the Netapp de-duplication, which is built into their array, you can save a lot of space when running the Vms in NFS. You can do similar when running VMFS on Netapp SAN, but the space doesn't get returned to the file system like it does with NFS.

If you look at the performance numbers, only FC beats it out. iSCSI is dead even. With Netapp you get all of the NAS features with it including snaps, replication, etc.

I will post my results with this client. I have had luck doing this in the past, but never in production. From what I read and hear it works like a charm. Some say it is the best thing to happen in their DCs in a while.

Replicating VMs

2009-04-01T19:09:00.000-04:00

When replicating VMs to a remote site
If the LUNs being presented at the remote site are to differnet ESX hosts then you can change the LVM.DisallowSnapshotLun = 0 and then rescan which will allow you to see the LUN without resignaturing it. You can then browse to the vmx and register it.
You could also change the LVM.EnableResignature = 1 which will resignature the LUN and therefore require the UUID in the vmx to be changed before registering it.

Sean

equallogic

2009-03-27T15:08:00.002-04:00

It looks like Dell/Equallogic won the mid-size storage array of the year. I am currently working with a customer to get rid of one. My guess on why it has such a large install base in this industry is the fact that it is the standard of one of the large IT support firms that do support in my industry.

It does work. It can be fairly slow and uses RAID-50. Yes, RAID-50. Each unit itself can only have 14 disks and dual controllers. It is pure iSCSI. If you want to add disk, you add a unit and create a group. The group is basically a multitude of units in which a pool of storage is created. Hosts connect to the group IP and that forwards you to the correct unit to get your data.

It is basically the same thing the big guys are trying to do with storage virtualization. EMC and Netapp have been doing similar stuff on a larger scale. The idea is cool. You pop one of these and add it to the group and it auto-configures its RAID groups, IP info, disks, access, etc. Pretty neat.

It is a slow performer though and that is why we are getting rid of it, on top of the fact that the way it grows vertically is something we dont desire. I do suggest reading a bit about RAID-50 though.

vmware navisphere agent install

2009-02-20T11:49:00.003-05:00

Here is how to install the navisphere agent on esx

Log into ESX server via ILO
VI /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Change permit root login = yes to uncommented
comment out permit root login=no
run service sshd restart
Use winscp to connect to the server via ssh
Copy the navisphere files to /home
Log into the ESX server via ssh
See if the agent is already installed by running rpm -qi naviagent
rpm -ivh naviagent-.rpm
add user system@(IP address of SPA) to the agent.config file in /etc/navisphere/agent.config using vi
add user system@(IP address of SPB) to the agent.config file in /etc/navisphere/agent.config using vi
You can also do the above steps using the navicli by typing: navicli remoteconfig -setconfig -adduser system@SPA IP (Do the same for SPB)
run service naviagent start from the command line
Open up firewall ports by typing the below commands
[root@server home]# esxcfg-firewall -o 6390,tcp,in,naviagent
[root@server home]# esxcfg-firewall -o 6391,tcp,in,naviagent
[root@server home]# esxcfg-firewall -o 6389,tcp,in,naviagent
[root@server home]# esxcfg-firewall -o 6392,tcp,in,naviagent
[root@server home]# esxcfg-firewall -o 443,tcp,out,naviagent
[root@server home]# esxcfg-firewall -o 2163,tcp,out,naviagent
[root@server home]# esxcfg-firewall -o 6389,tcp,out,naviagent
run service firewall restart
run esxcfg-firewall -q to see open ports
run service naviagent restart

VMware round robin load balancing

2009-02-13T13:56:00.005-05:00

I have been curious to test out round robin load balancing in ESX 3.5. Recently I have been only working with Clariion (active/passive) arrays. Now at my new client they have active/active arrays (Symmetrix).

From my understanding the way it works is it will push I/O on an HBA path until a set amount of blocks are sent. At that point it looks to see which HBA has a smaller queue and it will use that path until the number of blocks is reached again.

You dont have to set it like this. You can have it use a preferred path, etc., but this option seems to make the most sense.

I dont know if this is how it really works, but that is my understanding. Pretty cool stuff if it works. As to this day it still says experimental.

Anyone use this?

SYSLOG with ESX

2009-02-11T10:36:00.000-05:00

To use a syslog server with your ESX environment:

In /etc/syslog.conf file add the line "*.* @IP Address”
service syslog restart
"esxcfg-firewall -o 514,udp,out,syslog" to allow syslog outgoing trafic
"esxcfg-firewall -l" to load config

Convert RDM to VMFS

2009-02-09T15:54:00.002-05:00

To convert a VMware RDF device, which is harder to manage than a VMFS volume, you can run the below command. I have needed to this for various reasons, namely data center migrations. You can conver it back later, if needed, which I have also done.

vmkfstools –i /vmfs/volumes/data1/W2K3standardgoldenmaster/W2K3standardgoldenmaster.vmdk -d rdm:/vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba1:0:6:0 /vmfs/volumes/data1/rdmvir/rdmvir.vmdk

VMware queue depth

2009-02-09T15:41:00.003-05:00

I know every ESX admin has dealt with storage performance issues at some point. Most detailed research includes modifying the HBA queue depth.

Basically queue depth is the number of outstanding requests between the HBA and storage. I believe the default is 32. This is normally fine, but with VMware you are sharing the HBA so if you have a multitude of high i/o servers, you may have more than 32 requests.

When the queue length is reached there is basically a SCSI reset and communications is briefly halted. This can cause performance issues if it happens often.

You can use ESXTOP in disk mode to see your queues. If you decide to change them you can use esxcfg-module as per below (from http://communities.vmware.com/message/790859#790859):

Set the HBA queue length to 64 on all adapters

to get driver: vmkload_mod -l | grep qla for q logic
vmkload_mod -l | grep lpfcdd for exmulex
to change q logic
esxcfg-module -s "ql2xmaxqdepth=nn"
esxcfg-boot -b or esxcfg-boot -m
reboot
to change on emulex
esxcfg-module -s "lpfc0_lun_queue_depth=nn lpfc1_lun_queue_depth=nn"
esxcfg-boot -b or esxcfg-boot -m
reboot

Make sure to defragment your VC DB

2009-02-09T15:38:00.003-05:00

I have been doing this for years, but wanted to make sure that I shared this. If you see any performance issues with Virtual Center, this usually helps the problem.

I would assume everyone does it, but when I talk to people about it, they generally dont.

This is how to defrag the DB:

Log in to Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio as an administrator.
Right-click on the database that VirtualCenter is using.
Click New Query.
In the New Query window type:
Use (DB)
go
dbcc showcontig (VPX_HIST_STAT,VPXII_HIST_STAT)
go
where represents (DB) the name of the database that is running VirtualCenter.
Click Execute.
Look at the amount of fragmentation
To defragment
Log in to Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio as an administrator.
Right-click on the database that VirtualCenter is using.
Click New Query.
In the New Query window type:
dbcc indexdefrag ('', 'VPX_HIST_STAT', 'VPXII_HIST_STAT')
go
where represents the name of the database that is running VirtualCenter.
Click Execute.

Replicating Boot Volumes

2009-01-30T15:07:00.002-05:00

One key strategic decision that allowed for almost immediate failover to a DR site was replicating the boot volumes of tier 1 servers. I personally architected this with VMs, but the same can be done with a Windows server booting from the SAN. I have never personally done much booting from SAN with non-VMs. I tried this back in the Windows 2000 days, but there were issues with the page file.

It makes it easier to manage as well because you don't have to build out a server on the target side, ensure that it is up to the same spec as the source, etc. When you power up the server in the DR site it not only has the replicated data LUNs, whether that be SQL, Exchange, flat files, etc., but you also have an exact copy of the underlying Operating System.

I used RecoverPoint to do the replication. The last couple versions had the option to specifically replicate the boot volume and so it made it easy. One thing you really have to pay attention to is the necessity to quiesce or create point-in-time copies of the boot volume and not just replicate it sync or async. If you do this, there is a probability for lost in-flight transactions and you will blue screen (which I have done, of course)

RecoverPoint has a command line utility that I scheduled in scheduled tasks, which quiesces the server and creates a point-in-time image that is sent to the remote side. When you failover, always choose one of these images and not the latest I/O. The good thing with RecoverPoint is that you can choose any point in time and then change it if it doesn't work. The problem with the boot volume is that you have to allow direct access to the LUN, which then erases all of the other point-in-time copies, so you have to get it right the first time or you are screwed.

Once you choose the latest clean image on the target, you then do the same for the data LUNs and boot the server. It will come up with the same IP address so you have to have a solution for this. There are a couple ways of doing this.

One way is to use a global load balancer like Cisco or F5 Big IP. This provides a front-end IP address that end users use to connect to the back end servers. If the primary is up, the F5 forwards traffic there, if the DR side is up and the primary isn't up, it will forward traffic to the DR site. Never have them both up at the same time. If you do, make sure to set the F5 to use the primary at all times when available.

The other way to handle this is to use a stretched VLAN. There are downsides to this such as increased traffic, including broadcast traffic, that could fill the pipe. It does, however, allow you to boot up a server with the same IP address at a different site and the switches will see the change and forward accordingly.

There is of course the option to bring up the server and change the IP address, then change DNS to point to the new IP, but you will have to flush all of the end users DNS cache. This can be done with third party products automatically, but I think the first 2 options are a better fit.

More text mining reference

2009-01-30T15:04:00.003-05:00

Categorization Identifies main themes in a document by placing the document into a pre-defined set of topics. Relies on a thesarus.

Clustering Groups documents on the fly instead of categories that are pre-defined

Concept Linking Links documents based on their common shared concepts. Helps find information they wouldnt normally find using traditional searching

Information Visualization A visual representation of documents or corpus

Information Retrieval Indexing and retrieval of textual documents, finding a set of ranked documents that are relevant to query

SANPulse

2009-01-20T14:26:00.002-05:00

Over the many years of doing data center migrations, tech refreshes, data migrations, tiering, increasing utilization, etc. I have always imagined a tool that could perform these manual tasks.

When vendors like EMC, HP, IBM, etc. normally go in and do data migrations, they do it manually. Send in a bunch of heads and manually write scripts to do the migration. I have managed similar efforts with and without the storage vendors. They suck.

No situation is the same, of course, but the similarities are never used to your advantage. Every migration is different so every data migration is written, basically, from scratch. The vendors don't care as they are billing per/hour for heads.

This year is a big year for consolidations/migrations. As companies merge, go out of business, cut costs or take advantage of low cost infrastructure, the need to move data around the data center becomes critical.

I have been talking with a couple people from SANPulse technologies. Some of them actually worked in the same organization that I was a part of which did data/data center migrations. They created a product which I could only imagine years ago.

You can read their white papers on their website: http://sanpulse.com

This takes all of the manual headache out of migrating data. From what I gather it offers the ability to see the environment, make changes, migrate data and report the results up to management.

I don't see how anyone could do a data migration without this in the coming months. I think they will continue to be successful. I suggest you read their stuff if you are a migrator.

I am a migrator.

Primary Storage Optimization

2009-01-08T12:47:00.003-05:00

There is now a lot of talk in the industry on Primary Storage Optimization. I would define Primary Storage Optimization (PSO) as reducing the amount of physical capacity used compared to the amount of actual data in your primary storage.

Techniques used for this include compression, de-duplication, single instancing, etc.

PSO is tough though. It is easy to optimize non-primary storage using Storage Capacity Optimization techniques similar to above, but primary storage has different requirements and properties.

First of all you can get more optimization out of backup storage because there is more redundancy.

The PSO solution must run with minimum latency so it doesn't affect the application. This has been a sticking point.

Who wants to add another point of failure or dynamic to the simple act of reading and writing storage?

There are some solutions out there, mostly software solutions that can do PSO. To get around the latency I believe some of them do it post processing compared to in real-time.

To me it makes sense to do this on the SAN level. Pop in an SSM blade and de-duplicate the storage on the network level. I also think this is the best way to virtualize storage. They can work hand-in-hand.

Virtualization Cost Model

2009-01-06T18:03:00.003-05:00

Back after the New Year. Feels good. I wanted to post my virtualization cost model that I developed when virtualization got out of control at a previous engagement. See my virtualization crack blog posting for more information on that.

The cost model front end was easy to develop. If you have been doing consulting for many years I am sure your Excel skills could do the lists, if statements, links and data filtering that is on the front end of this model.

The hard part is the back end. There are a lot of equations that I worked for days on to figure out specifics on the model. Some examples being: How do you calculate price per port? How do you calculate price of cooling? How do you calculate the cost of physical space? Etc.

I had to sit down and figure out these equations and then sit down with business owners, finance and IT to get these base costs to plug into the equations.

Do we include purchase price of past equipment? How do you calculate the cost of a GB? Is it just the cost of the array/# of GB? What if you add disk?

I came up with some weird ideas, but it worked and was agreed upon in the end. I also had to work with someone across the world to calculate DR and backup replication costs.

For the network, I just did the total cost of the equipment/ports for the cost per port. This isnt the best way to do it, but for the network gear, that is what was agreed on.

Backup costs include de-duplication. How do you figure that out? Actually that is easy. I just did some averages for ratio and came up with a total size based on that. For example a 5 TB de-duplicated array really is 50 TB, so I used that number.

Anyways, after I figured out all of the equations I plugged in the numbers into a worksheet and the front end references those. There are drop down lists, which contain if statements based on the choice.

Here is a screenshot of the first version of the model. For some reason I cant find the latest version on my USB stick.

Let me know if you have questions.

Text Mining Reading

2008-12-19T09:48:00.001-05:00

http://www.texttechnologies.com/

Some basic text mining terminology

2008-12-16T10:25:00.000-05:00

Corpus	A collection of texts or documents
Sentiment Analysis	Aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic
Lexicon	Dictionary or encyclopedia
Taxonomy	Arrangement based on hierarchial structure
Multi-word Term	A group of words represented by a single term
Entities	Names, addresses, Social Security Numbers, Company names, etc.

Twitter

2008-12-16T10:22:00.002-05:00

This is a good article on how companies are starting to make money on Twitter http://www.internetnews.com/webcontent/article.php/3790161/What%20Keeps%20Twitter%20Chirping%20Along.htm#

Storage de-duplication

2008-12-12T14:01:00.002-05:00

Right now de-duplication is being used mainly as a way to decrease the size of backup data sets. I have made the Data Domain 5 TB appliance a key part of my backup strategy in the past. Basically I was able to write around 50 TB of data to the appliance even though it only had 5 TB of actual disk.

How you do this isnt something I want to go into. Basically it breaks data into chunks, compares them to what is already in the system, if something is already there it uses a pointer instead of storing the data.

Since we were backing up entire VMs, we were getting 20X de-dupe ratios because of the redundancy with the c drive, for example.

My whole issue is that now de-duplication is thought of as a technology solution. You buy a data domain, anything you write to it is de-duped. I dont think that line of thought makes sense.

I think there are two things that must change. The first is that de-duplication should be thought of as a feature or service. You own a Clariion array, you own a DMX, you own an EVA. You can enable de-duplication. It is a service. Not a hardware solution like Data Domain.

With Data Domain you have silos of de-duplicated data. For this reason the second thing that I think will have to happen soon is global de-duplication. I have always thought of this since I can remember understanding storage. It has yet to come in full swing, but must happen.

The growth rates are so high and there is so much waste that a global de-duplication system must happen. Basically something that sits above all of your physical storage, on the same level or part of storage virtualization, that goes into all of your data and de-duplicates the entire enterprise. Now you dont have to worry about seperate de-dupe silos.

The virtual layer can handle the data access and pointers. My bet is that the ratios will be significantly high. Maybe not as high as it is with backup for obvious reasons.

Along with this is the need to be able to access de-duplicated data at fast speeds. This is the hard part and can partly be handled through caching or tiering within the de-duplicated environment.

LSI

2008-12-11T16:37:00.003-05:00

I got a demo from Leximancer today. I like the idea that it doesn't use a Lexicon. I couldn't, however, get an answer on what algorithms it uses. Does it use LSI? What is LSI?

From Webopedia: Latent semantic indexing it is an algorithm used by search engines to determine what a page is about outside of specifically matching search query text. The LSI algorithm doesn't actually understand the meanings of words on the page but it can spot patterns of related words. LSI will may return relevant results that don't contain the keyword at all, but those pages with related words.

I think Google one day made a change to use this and everybody panicked cause they were basing their relevance on pure keywords.

Does Leximancer do this?

Virtualization and crack

2008-12-09T11:57:00.003-05:00

I led a virtualization strategy project at a large hedge fund. This involced collecting application requirements including mainly performance requirements, whether or not the applications could be virtualized according to the application vendor (pretty much everything can technically), downtime, RTO, RPO, backup requirements, etc.

Once I had these requirments I used the VMware tool Capacity Planner to assist me in collecting performance data. It also makes recommendations on whether or not a server can be virtualized based on parameters put into the system.

A list was created, I spoke with the business and developed a migration plan. Luckily at the time the P2V built into VMware was good enough. I have used Platespin in the past, but the latest version with ESX works well.

After executing the migration plan, using online migration methods for increased uptime (which is also built into the P2V tool) I sometimes had it in the plan to migrate the server to a different data center as I was also leading a data center migration project at the time.

This allowed for the ability to migrate a VM while it was being virtualized as I was also leading a data center migration project at the same time. I would import the VM into the target environment on target storage. We had the two data centers connected from a network perspective. I have had it where this wasnt possible for another client and used SRDF to migrate the VMs, which worked great and allowed for instant migrations.

My whole point of this was to tell you that the worst part of all this was that everyone liked it. Too much. We went from shoving it down peoples throats that VMs were the best and people eventually liked it so much that they became addicted. We eventually had to pull back. I set it up to be able to build a fully functional VM in 10 minutes. This made people sick to their stomachs and they wanted more.

I then built a cost model, which I will talk about later, to charge people for VMs because demand was too high. So what is the difference between a VM and a crack dealer? I guess the come down is more planned in one instance.

But what about the economy?

2008-12-08T10:17:00.002-05:00

As I move between gigs it is always funny to hear my recruiter friends try to scare me. The current tactic to try and bring you down is the economy. I tell them my rate and they say "oooooo...you know that everyone is cutting rates?" Everybody is hurting they say. Yes, this may be true, but why are you calling me? Cause you need my skills?

Fear rules all. This is how some presidents win elections. The issue is that I understand this and come out ahead because I ignore the fear. While others are taking full time positions I am able to stay a consultant with less competition.

Quit trying to scare me. I do understand that you are scared yourself.

Storage Virtualization

2008-12-05T16:11:00.003-05:00

From Wiki: Storage virtualization refers to the process of abstracting logical storage from physical storage. The term is today used to describe this abstraction at any layer in the storage software and hardware stack.

I have done evaluations on EMC Invista (block virtualization) and the cost is very prohibitive to the organization I was working with. We had the Cisco 9506 switches necessary for the SSM module to snap in storage virtualization, but the SSM module itself was 250K or so with the software for both SANs.

At that time the only thing Invista was really good at was storage migrations. Yes, that is a main feature of storage virtualizations, but I wanted some ILM. I want this thing to understand the data and auto-move based on rules. I believe the latest version has some basic capabilities to do this, but I can do storage migrations in the background using other tools, even cheesy ones like Open Migrator.

By the way Open Migrator works very well for WIndows hosts. I would just do it yourself. Dont pay EMC to do the services as the product is a cake walk. Basically you create a pair with the targe LUN, it syncs without any affect to the host, when it is done you reboot and it switches over. It does require a couple reboots though depending on if the driver is needed.

I would welcome conversation on any real examples of Invista. I know that HDS and IBM have been doing their version of storage virtualization and have real customers. EMC, not so much.

Clarabridge

2008-12-05T15:38:00.000-05:00

Here is a good article on Clarabridge:

http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2008/11/clarabridge_foc.html

Storage Transformation

2008-12-05T09:14:00.002-05:00

I have completed many storage transformations for many large organizations. I think most companies need one. To me a storage transformation is taking a look at multiple areas: Tiering (Storage services catalog), application alignment, storage cost optimization, storage utlization, backup and recovery assessment and archive.

Basically coming in using a tool such as ECC to collect data on all of the SAN attached hosts, meet with the business/application folks with a questionnaire to talk about the application and its requirements and do an infrastructure assessment.

For the storage infrastructure, create a storage services catalog that will meet all of the business requirements, fill in any gaps that exist. Use the business data to align applications to the appropriate tier.

Before you actually align the tier, come up with a good utilization target. 80% is a good one. With thin provisioning this step becomes much easier to implement, but assuming this doesnt exist, when you tier you move the data to smaller LUNs to improve utilization.

A backup and recovery assessment can be as simple as looking at all of the exisiting jobs and infrastructure and match the backups to the requirements previously collected. Maybe you really dont need to keep 1 year of data online, maybe you only need one backup a week, etc.
Normally it is good to talk about archive at this stage. This applies from structured to unstructured archive. Database archiving or moving files to an archive platform based on age, type, etc. This is harder than it sounds because of the available tools. Some of them slow down the system during high I/O's (DX).

This all becomes easier if you have a storage virtualization engine on top. Being able to move the data in the background to different tiers, increase utilization and auto0-archive makes it all the more easy.

Social Media and Text Mining

2008-12-04T16:59:00.004-05:00

As I am doing a text mining project for a large pharma, I am realizing that our current scope of just using their internal Voice of Customer data is not enough. As the world changes and more people Blog or post comments online, we need to capture that, mine it and bring it into our analysis.

For this reason, I am going to push harder that we include blogs to scrape as part of this mining project

The new Way to Learn in the Enterprise

2008-12-04T14:00:00.002-05:00

The current way to learn at most organizations is to read some presentations, maybe some videos, answer questions at the end and you are done.

That is old news.

First of all this should all be centralized in a system. Based on your profile (area of work, preferences, past and future training, assigned learning, skillset, etc. A list of training areas should be assigned. Right, so that is being done.

The cherry on top is user-generated (or modified) learning. What if you are watching a video and you have something to add to the training, a question, a comment, etc. There should be private discussions, comments, the ability to upload information to each training area. This allows for the training to be modified on the fly. It also raises the consciousness. Learning should always be collaborative.

If everyone is modifying content, tracking issues and questions, the content will improve and people will learn more. Add rewards and it will be fun too.

Social Networking in the Enterprise

2008-12-04T13:43:00.002-05:00

This is another thing that will have to happen soon. If not soon, then when the web 2.0 generation starts running companies. I saw this company has a new release on some enterprise social networking software.

http://www.saba.com/products/social/

Pretty cool stuff. Again, I think one main goal of this is to raise the collective consciousness. One person by them self isn't smart (exception typing). That is why we have teams. To be able to connect everyone's thoughts, allow them to communicate, record this communication, you are essentially creating a collective consciousness.

Not just that, but just facilitating different types of communication is important. Everyone uses email, phone and meets for real at most large companies. Email is going to be used less and less, but it will have its place for stuff that isnt interactive and is more formal.

User created content, interacting with user created content. Now we just have to mine this content with a text mining tool to get relevance.

Best IT Nerd Corporate Shoe

2008-12-04T13:01:00.002-05:00

I love looking at ITers shoes when they are stuck in the corporate environment. I thought I would share mine. I bought them from a vintage store so they are like 20 years old, but you have def. seen the updated version on some IT folks.

Document and text Summarization

2008-12-04T11:52:00.002-05:00

Text summarization software processes and summarizes the document in the time it would take the user to read the first paragraph. The goal is to reduce the length and detail of a document while retaining its main points and overall meaning.

This can be done by doing some natural language understanding which generates sentences through knowledge to represent the text. It can be done simply by extracting some key sentences from a document or it can simply do keyword summaries.

None of these work.

Try MS Word. It has a summarization option. They only way to get it to work is to design your document in a way that it is obvious. For example everything under executive summary will be tagged as part of the summarization.

Twitter in the enterprise

2008-12-04T11:45:00.002-05:00

Even though I rarely use twitter (none of my friends really do and I am tired of making my dog) I think that there will be no way for companies not to use it. If you look at communication from top to bottom it has its place. You can always know what people are doing, you know how they are feeling, you know if they are on vacation, you can post questions and answers to groups of people.

It simply fills a gap in communication. Maybe it wont be Twitter, maybe it will be Outlook or IM status, but somehow there will be organizations that will use this more and more. Watch.

Tiered Storage

2008-12-04T11:33:00.002-05:00

I have setup so many tiered storage models for different companies that it has become a one week activity. Why are tiered storage models important? They tell you that they save money, align the data with the appropriate storage based on business requirements (which change over time) and get the best use out of your resources.

In reality they cost money. At least from my experience. I think they are a money maker. I have gone in and created these models, identified gaps and guess what.....those gaps get filled with technology that is purchased. I need to be selling this stuff too. The storage organizations created them to make money.

I do though, think they are necessary. In the past everyone threw the best disk at everything, costing a lot of money. Most applications can run on lowered tiered storage like Clariion. I have moved entire data centers to Clariion (some tiered storage strategy that was) with no issues.

One problem with tiered storage models is not creating the application which takes in requirements and auto-assigns. This is necessary. Guess what, I do that to. I can drop in a company for a short term gig and save them money. Or cost.

Information Extraction

2008-12-04T11:12:00.002-05:00

One issue with current text mining is that when key words or terms are extracted to be used for classification or clustering (later in the process), they must be relevant. If this step fails the whole process fails.

There needs to be a network of text mining implementations that communicate to create a larger, more advanced system. Everybody is doing the same thing.

Text mining stop words

2008-12-04T10:43:00.000-05:00

Stop Words in text mining are words ignored in a query because they are so commonly used that they can't contribute to relevancy. I think this is a key indicator of why texting, twitter, and sometimes blogging is much more efficient. Essentially we get rid of a lot of the stop words to create more precise statements. One issue with this is that you need to really understand the language very well as well as the person you are communicating with.

Instead of: John went to the store to buy a can of peas it would be: John went store buy can peas. There are much better examples, but that just came off first. Hmmm...

EMC RecoverPoint and F5 Load balancers = 5 minute failover across the world

2008-12-04T10:29:00.000-05:00

The new version (3) of RecoverPoint started as a pain in the ass. I did the upgrade myself and the RecoverPoint appliances we were using didnt have enough memory. It took many crashes (and 1 server outage) before we figured this out. I figured it out by running a TOP and watching the memory.

After upgrading the memory these things work.

The product itself is a great DR solution. It creates point in time snaps of SQL, Exchange, etc.

My solution is replicating our Virtual Machines boot volumes. This means that if a server in the hosting site goes down, we can immediately power up the target server and it has all of the exact same data because we are also replicating the boot volume.

You may ask, ya, but it if it has the same IP address, wont there be an issue? My solution to that is to use F5 load balancers (global). This allows clients to point to the F5 and the F5 to understand which side is up, local or remote. Seemless failover in under 5 minutes across the world. I bet you cant do that.

The new RecoverPoint GUI is very nice, but the order in which you do things is much different. Basically backwards.

I will say that in any company that I have to do DR Strategy in the future, RecoverPoint will definitely on the top of my list. Storage agnostic and easy to use.

Backup and Recovery Setup

2008-12-04T10:16:00.000-05:00

I recently designed and implemented a backup/recover solution for a small hedge fund. They were using Veritas Backup Exec, a Quantum P50 DLT (or something). Brick level backups were being done on the Exchange server and everything was being backed up over the LAN.

As everybody does, our backup and restore times were not meeting SLAs. I performed an analysis and ended up bringing in EMC Networker, Data Domain, EMC Replication Manager, Kroll On-track and ESX Ranger.

This solution allowed me to backup large data sets on the SAN using Replication Manager, it allowed for fast backups and restores with the ability to store around 50 TB of data on 4 TB of disk using Data Domain and the EMC Networker software, although harder to learn, is enterprise class.

Backing up virtual machines is cake. ESX Ranger snaps them off and puts them on Data Domain.

All Data Domain is replicated to our DR site.

No more slow brick level backups of Exchange. By using Replication Manager to clone to the backup server, we backup the Exchange database files in their interity. Replication Manager also truncates the logs when the backup completes.

What if we want to restore one mailbox? Using Kroll Ontrack we can look into the EDB files, choose the mailbox we want to restore and restore it to a PST.

SLAs are met, restores are quick and now I sit back on move on to the next project.

Text mining and mapping the human brain

2008-12-04T10:07:00.000-05:00

Text mining is a bottom up approach. The ability for a system to understand language will be much easier as we begin to map how the human brain works, neural networks, artificial intelligence, etc.

This may sound obvious as everything will be easier to understand, but at some point I think the current approach to text mining will meet the research being done on artificial intelligence/neural networks/mapping the human brain.

I just hope it happens soon as the current software is very basic in how it understands language and needs a lot of teaching.

Text mining Clustering

2008-12-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

The major text mining vendors cant seem to do what we need. From what we see they are concentrated on doing mainly Voice of customer. Right now we are looking at clarabridge. They have the best interface I have seen yet, but trying to find previously unknown information isnt easy.

Classifying the text is done very well, but I dont want to have to build the meta data model. I would like clustering to do a better job and do it for me.

It has yet to be seen.

What is text mining?

2008-12-04T09:46:00.000-05:00

According to Wikipedia: Text mining, sometimes alternately referred to as text data mining, roughly equivalent to text analytics, refers generally to the process of deriving high-quality information from text. High-quality information is typically derived through the dividing of patterns and trends through means such as statistical pattern learning. Text mining usually involves the process of structuring the input text (usually parsing, along with the addition of some derived linguistic features and the removal of others, and subsequent insertion into a database), deriving patterns within the structured data, and finally evaluation and interpretation of the output. 'High quality' in text mining usually refers to some combination of relevance, novelty, and interestingness. Typical text mining tasks include text categorization, text clustering, concept/entity extraction, production of granular taxonomies, sentiment analysis, document summarization, and entity relation modeling (i.e., learning relations between named entities).