Posts from 2011

VMware vSphere 4.1 and VCP Web Links

Richard Green on

Having just finished the course for vSphere 4.1 today, it’s going to be all hands on deck revising this stuff for VCP for the next week or so. Here is a list of useful links for vShpere and ESX/ESXi related knowledge which will liekyl help others along with myself in my quest to obtain VCP.

http://vmetc.com/2008/02/12/best-practices-for-esx-host-partitions/

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsphere4/r40/vsp_40_config_max.pdf

http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/virtualization-pro/choosing-a-block-size-when-creating-vmfs-datastores/

http://vmware-land.com/esxcfg-help.html

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsp40/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm#href=install/c_vc_hw.html

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_vum_40_admin_guide.pdf

I will be updating this list on an on-going basis with all of the resources I come across.

Lastly, I cannot and will not vouch for any of these sites. These are merely just sites I have found to be useful for me.

A Busy Week at Home and Work

Richard Green on

As the title suggests, its a busy week this week all round. On Monday, I started the five day journey on the road to VCP while I attend the VMware vSphere 4.1 course with Gloval Knowledge, and with VMware currently running their own version of Microsoft Second Shot, hopefully I can have a chance if sitting the exam soon.

The wife, Nicky, Sat her final exam for her foundation course, Access to Higher Education for Midwifery, which means she now has the nervous wait to find out her final graded.

Me personally, I went to the doctors yesterday about my ongoing knee problems post-running and have now been referred to a physiotherapist for possible treatment.

As I write all this from my Windows Phone WordPress application, sitting in the car while Nicky runs into Tesco, we are about to go out for dinner with the girls to celebrate Layla’s birthday with another family, Gary and Amy and Joe’s birthday too.

The Blog is Back

Richard Green on

For anyone who frequents my blog, you may have noticed it’s been offline for a couple of weeks.

I recently moved to a new server with my current hosting provider, and I took this opportunity to seperate a forum I run and the blog into their own seperate MySQL databases. Unfortunatly the blog had some issues, which today turned out to br a typo’d database username. We live and learn 🙂

Now that the blog is back, I’ve taken the liberty of upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. I’ve also decided that my old theme was looking tired as I do about every six months or so. As you will see, I’ve switched to the new TwentyTen theme that’s included in the new version of WordPress. This is only temporary while I make my new theme, which is going to be one I saw by Touchality based on a Windows Phone 7 Metro UI.
For the record, this is also my first ever post from the Windows Phone 7 WordPress application.

Corsair AX750 Professional Power Supply and Memory Installation

Richard Green on

So in the latest episode of part installation in my progressive Home Server 2011 build, I received my power supply and the memory in the post today.
The memory is the same as that originally specified in my home server design: 4GB of Corsair 1333MHz DDR3 as two 2GB sticks so that I get the most from the dual channel memory controller. This isn’t XMS or Dominator or any of the special Corsair models of memory, but instead the standard Corsair memory. The reason for this is that the home server isn’t going to be running a large number of memory intensive processes and especially not one’s which require ultra-low CAS latency and timings or lots of paging in and out.
I’ve always used Corsair memory since I switched from unbranded about 4-5 years ago due to lots of back to back memory related issues. I’ve never had a single stick go bad, even the three 2GB sticks of Registered DDR2 in my current Dell PowerEdge SC1425 home server build (which has been up and running every day for the last three years). If a stick ever did go bad I know I have Corsairs lifetime warranty to back me up too which is nice.
The power supply has a three key requirements in this build. One is to be silent or as very near to silent as possible. Two is to provide enough SATA connectors to support the six SATA-II disks that will be going in the server, and lastly but not least is to be as energy efficient as possible even as low power draw levels.
Silence was a difficult one for me to find because all of the silent power supplies I was able to find didn’t support more than four SATA-II disks and I didn’t want to be using Molex to SATA converters in the build as it’s just another thing to go wrong or stop something working at 100% efficiency. As per the previous point, six disk support was hard to find. It was achievable but only on the higher end power supplies capable of delivering silly amounts of power up to 1200W in some cases. Whilst a power supply only uses the power is needs, they have power efficiency curves based on the demand. Typically, the lower the draw from the PSU’s peak or recommended continuous load rating, the worse the efficiency, and alas the final requirement.
I was mainly after a supply rated at 80 PLUS Bronze, however anything better was a plus. When I found the Corsair AX750 Professional Series Modular PSU, I was in power heaven. With a peak load of 750W, sleek black good looks, and a modular design supporting up to twelve SATA—II disks, I would not only have enough SATA connectors to meet the needs of my current six disk design, but also capacity to extend to the full ten disk capacity of the case if I wanted to in the future, but thanks to the modular cabling I am able to maximize the air flow in the already airy case by only installing the cases I need to deliver power to the disks and motherboards.
The power supply is 80 PLUS Gold rated the supply delivers a massive 90% efficiency at 230V even when operating at below 20% load (I will probably be in the 6-7% region) which is something very rare for a power supply. The power supply does have a fan, which is rated at 35dB at full 750W load which is load, however when running below 20% load, the fan is disabled due to the lack of heat generation which means I meet the final criteria for silence.
The supply comes with a full seven year warranty from Corsair, and because I will be only running the power supply and extremely low load levels, none of the components are likely to ever be taxed to a level to cause them to fail which means this supply ticks all the boxes I had as minimum requirements, goes an extra ten miles with tonnes of extra features and nice touches but leaves me safe in the knowledge that it will outlast my projected storage utilization for this server (and most likely the shelf life of Windows Home Server 2011 too).
Lastly, I decided that as I not going to be using the rear case fans that I should remove them to give me a bit more through flow for the air and also to get the hanging Molex connectors out of the way. There is a shot of the case without these fans now and the extra ventilation it will give me. The front case fans are still installed as once the build is complete I am going to review the temperatures and make a decision as to whether the temperature warrants having some air movement and if the dB level from them is acceptable.

X-Case RM400 and Asus E35M1-M PRO Motherboard Installation

Richard Green on

So I’ve just finished installing the motherboard in the case, after a while spent moving the stand-offs around to accommodate the microATX motherboard. Here are the shots of the motherboard in the case, and the rear panel for the motherboard.

As you can see, the motherboard takes up barely any room in the case, which might be a downside, because I’m going to potentially run into issues with SATA cable length, but it’s excellent, because it means it will give the passively cooled processor far more room for the air to circulate, keeping the internal case temperature lower.

The Blog….Fixed

Richard Green on

So it seems that the blog has been offline for about three or four weeks without my knowledge.

The only thing that actually led me to the problem was when logged into LinkedIn last week, I saw that the site wasn’t able to pull my RSS feed.

After much investigation and troubleshooting with the PHP side of things, it turns out that a problem with the hosts MySQL database engine caused one of the tables to become dirty and needed repairing.

Soon, I’ll be moving the blog to a new dedicated MySQL database as it currently shares its database with another product, Simple Machines SMF Forum, however I’ve just been given some extra databases from the host for gratis.

Past the First Hurdle, but In a New Camp

Richard Green on

Since my last post about the new Home Server project, I’ve received financial backing in the form of overtime at work to start the purchasing, and I’ve also received WAF (Wife Approval Factor) in that the new server will be near silent, give us much greater storage capacity while cutting the overall power consumption significantly.

Late last week, I ordered the case for the project and the motherboard with a twist.

Since my last post on all things Home Server back in March, I have discovered a new product, recently released by AMD square in the playing field of the Intel Atom. The processor is the AMD E-350 Zacate, based on the AMD Fusion platform. The platform is designed for high performance, yet low power consumption, while integrating HD video capabilities and other top end features into the chipset.

So moving away from the Asus AT3IONT-I board with the Intel Atom 330 processor, I have instead gone for the Asus E35M-1-M PRO motherboard, being an AMD fanboy in a previous life.

This motherboard is microATX by contrast to the Intel board, which was miniITX. This shift in form factor gives me more flexibility due to the increased number of PCI Express slots and also means there is room for more powerful chipset on the motherboard. The net result, is a motherboard, which, for a little over £100 gives you a 18W TDP processor which can be passively cooled, or actively cooled with the optional CPU fan included, support for up to 8GB DDR3 memory, 2x PCI, 1x PCIe 1x and 1x PCIe 16x, 5 SATA-II 6Gbps ports supporting JBOD, RAID0 and RAID1, Gigabit LAN, USB 3.0, HDMI, DVI-D and VGA video output, along with SPIDIF optical out for audio.

The new motherboard sees the power consumption up from 12W to 18W, however this extra 6W, based on the performance benchmarks and a recent review from TheWindowsBlog on Twitter which you can read at the Windows Team Blog site really seems worth it. The motherboard they reviewed is actually the miniITX version of the board, which lacks a couple of the features I have, but the processor and chipset is identical.

Forum topics on sites like The Green Button and AVForums are all suggesting that this processor and video card combo, in a HTPC scenario are more than capable of handling two simultaneous HD streams, something the Atom can’t manage on it’s own.

With the motherboard in hand, I have to say it’s a really nice looking board, and the features still blow me away for such a small and tightly integrated package.

The case is another ball game. The pictures over on the X-Case website really don’t do it justice. The 4U chassis has large slots in it’s front to allow for decent airflow. Unlocking the front panel allows you to lower the flap to reveal the internal air filter and two 80mm fans, with the air filter mounted in front to stop the case inhaling the dust. Inside the case, you have ample room for even a Full ATX board, so my microATX board is going to be swamped inside, but at least it will have six of the ten 3.5” drive bays full with 2TB Western Digital Green disks to keep it company.

I’ll be assembling the motherboard in the case later today, and will grab a picture. Next month, I will hopefully be ordering the memory and the power supply which will give me enough to get the machine powered on and to configure the EFI BIOS settings how I want them before ordering the RAID controller and the disks last.

In light of the additional PCI slots, I am currently thinking about adding an Intel Dual Port Server NIC to the machine so that I can setup a team to give me more throughput and redundancy on the network, as this is what I currently have setup in my existing Dell PowerEdge SC1425 box.

Configuring IIS Redirects for HTTPS with the SCOM 2007 R2 Web Console

Richard Green on

Whilst working with the SCOM 2007 R2 Console today, I saw that on our SCOM RMS server, the Default Web Site in IIS was running still and occupying Port 80 for no good reason, while the SCOM Console was relegated to Port 51908 which isn’t very user friendly. Additionally, the site was in the clear with no SSL, so I wanted to make the site secure.

Step 1 was to disable the Default Web Site and stop it from starting automatically. Once this is done, remove the Binding for Port 80 from the site to make that port available for use. Once you have done this, you can follow the steps per my previous post Redirecting Non-HTTPS Traffic to HTTPS for SharePoint 2007. Although the post in entitled for SharePoint 2007, it applies to any server running Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 with IIS 7 or 7.5, just you need to rename the websites that you create accordingly.

Once complete, users will be able to type the server name which hosts your SCOM Web Console, without needing to append the default port number, and they will be automatically redirected to Port 443 for the HTTPS version of the site, instead of an IIS error stating that they need to use the HTTPS version.

System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 Web Console Authentication

Richard Green on

Whilst working on something un-related today, i discovered a problem with our SCOM 2007 R2 Web Console at work – When I tried to connect to the site, I was prompted for my credentials and I provided my domain logon, but it kept coming back at me until eventually, I got a HTTP 30 Unauthorised error.

A lot of blogs and forum topics online including some at Microsoft (Example: http://blogs.technet.com/b/kevinholman/archive/2008/09/24/installing-the-web-console-on-a-2008-management-server-using-windows-authentication.aspx) will recommend that you configure Kerberos Delegation for the computer account which hosts the Web Console, using the credentials of the SCOM SDK Service Account.

This is my eyes was a bit of a dirty hack, and the cleanest and most obvious solution had to lie in IIS and its Authentication schemas.

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Sure as could be, the OPWebConsoleApp Application Pool in IIS was configured with ApplicationPoolIdentity which in English means it’s not no permissions on the network, or has no access to the domain to verify domain credentials.

My solution to the problem is as follows.

Firstly, create a new Application Pool in IIS. Call it what you like, but this will be hosting your Operations Manager Web Console, so best to name it accordingly. I named mine SCOM 2007 R2 Web Console. I also elected not to have the Application Pool start immediately, as we need to configure the credentials on the Pool first.

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Right-click on the new Pool, and select Advanced Settings. Under the Process Model group, there is an item called Identity – Click the … button on the right of the line to open the next dialog. Change the Identity to Custom Account and specify the username and password for a domain service account which can host the Pool, then click OK button you get back to the Application Pools list in IIS.

Now you can start the Pool by right-clicking and select Start. If the Pool fails to start, you need to verify that your credentials specified for the Pool were correct, and that you don’t have a Group Policy preventing that account from running as a service or such.

Now, right-click on the existing OPWebConsoleApp Applications Pool and select View Applications.

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Right-click on each of the applications, and select the Change Application Pool option. You will be given a list of available Pools, and select the one which you just created.

Once complete, you need to restart Web Sites, however the easiest thing to do, is from an elevated command prompt type iisreset which will reset all of the Pools and Web Sites.

Assuming you have Windows Authentication enabled on the Operating Manager 2007 WebConsole Web Site (which you should by default) then you should now be able to successfully access the site using Single-Sign On (SSO) with no requirement to enter credentials.

For bonus points, you can be a friendly, security conscious administrator an set the site to Require SSL Encryption and create a new IIS Web Site to redirect Non-SSL users to the SSL site.

A New Breed of Blog

Richard Green on

As time goes by, I feel more and more integrated into the Primark collective, getting my teeth into more new and exciting things. As time goes by, I foresee this blog evolving somewhat, not in its purpose, but in content, as I am exposed more to Exchange 2007 and likely 2010 in the future, SharePoint 2010 and the System Center family including Operations Manager, Configuration Manager and probably Service Manager and Data Protection Manager around the corner too.

I hope you enjoy the new material as and when it arrives.

Richard