The Rise of Pheonix

It looks like December is going to be the big month. New servers, software and all. I have been pushing this off as long as possible because of the time it will take to set everything up. but we just cannot play with fire anylonger. Some of our servers are approaching end of life and we still have critical systems running on them.

The time is here to spend the money and make everything fully redundant. We are a small company, but when you are hosting websites for fairly large companies, you just cannot have your 4 year old Dell Poweredge running the critical database portion. If that server went down right now, we would be out of commission for 1 and a half days at least. Well really we could be back up in 4 hours, but running really really slow. As the fast solution would be to restore our databases to a different location then our webservers (there is not an extra DB server at our colo facility). Websites going over a vpn to hit the database = SLOW.

Really our 2 main servers at the colo facility can already handle a fair virtualized load, 2 dell poweredge with dual quad cores, soon to both have 16 GB of ram. the plan? Server 08 R2 Enterprise running Hyper V. We need to purchase one extra server to run the Hyper V managment server, but we can then run 4 instances of server 08 on each server.

The Hyper v manager is supposed to let you easily setup failover OPs on multiple servers running hyperV. So we should be fine splitting our server load between the 2 servers and if one decides to die, no down time, everything on the dead server fails over to the good one. We only have 4 critical system, so that works out perfect. anything else that dies with the dead server can wait for the dell technitions to come via NBD support contract.

The part that I’ve been dreading is the conversion. Right now we have one server virtualized with Virtual Iron and one two stand alone server that boot from our Equallogic SAN. the plan is to first migrate the 2 standalone OPs to virtual iron and have everything running on that one server. Then install Server 08 on those 2 stations, migrate everything from VI to HyperV. And Finally convert the VI station to HyperV and loadbalance the OPs.

That does not sound like fun to me. What it really sounds like is a December full of working Saturdays.

Virtual Iron has just imploded.  The company that I banked on for virtualizing our small but still significant for us data center.  Right now I cannot say how much Oracle blows.  Why would you buy a company and then pretty much right away kill the product line.

Now I’m stuck in a little bit of a situation.  I have a third server at our data center that I wanted to virtualize and now I have an inhability to buy VI licenses to cover it.  That really suck that I’m going to have to split virtual technologies, even if it is only temporary.  The worst part is that even though I hate Oracle for doing what they did.  The most cost effective thing right now would be to adopt the Oracle VM solution in its current form and then wait for the upgrade to move over my exisitin VI machines.

VMware is out of the question becasue of the expense involved.  Microsoft is a real contendor, but can be expensive also if I want the management piece.  Especially because the management part needs to be running on a server 08 X64 operating system.  My current VI management server is older and would not be compatible.

I’ll need to do a little more investigating, but in the mean time I’ll just sit here and be bitter at Oracle.

I am a tech junkie at heart, not a very good one but I try to be.  In two weeks I can finally install Windows 7 on my workstation at my day job.  Sure I know I could have installed the RC version months ago.  I would have had until next March or something before I started getting rebooted every few hours.  That was something that I did not want to deal with later.  I’d much rather have it done right and not have to do the whole reinstall again from scratch next year.  I think once is enough for me.

Back to the joy of two weeks from now.  Our company has access to the Microsoft Action Pack.  Which is a great deal by the way.  for $300 a year you get 10 licences to most every microsoft client app and one server license for server apps.  Plus you get everything as it comes out.  Starting last month they moved from a mail your disks to you model to a download on demand model.  so this means as soon as they release Window 7 to the site, I can run and get it.  Pretty exiting if you ask me.  I’ve got my second hard drive set and ready to go, I don’t think I want to commit to a full wipe, so I am going to leave my current OP intact just in case.

I did momentarily play wiht the beta version a while ago and what I saw was very impressive.  can’t wait.