One of the hottest topics in storage is automatic storage tiering. Rick Vanover explains what it is and why it will be a big splash in many SANs.

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Storage tiering is a practice that has existed in many ways for storage administrators for a very long time. In a static disk assignment, you can provision a number of storage tiers by manipulating these key design elements:

• Storage protocol: Ethernet-based (iSCSI/NFS), fibre channel, or direct-attached storage. Each connectivity media has its own throughput that will affect the overall experience of the storage.
• Drive speed: The revolutions per minute (RPMs) of the drives in an array is a factor in the overall performance of the storage design.
• Drive interface: The most popular disk interfaces in use today are Ultra320 SCSI, SATA, SAS, fibre channel, and solid state drives. The throughput and I/O operations per second (IOPS) for each of these drive types is a factor in determining the behavior of the storage array.
• RAID level in use: RAID 1, 4, 5, 6, 0+1, 5+0, and other proprietary levels can make significant differences in throughput. Check this AC&NC RAID.EDU resource for information on standard RAID levels and the NetApp page on RAID-DP.
• Quantity of drives: Generally speaking, if your array hits on more drives, you can access less surface area from more drives to enhance the performance of the array.
• Disk size: Drives that are very large (potentially with many arrays striped across them) can bog down the overall throughput of the array. While the 2 or 4 Terabyte drives are attractive for SATA storage, the throughput and interface rate for the drives are the same as 1 TB or smaller drives.

For most storage systems, aligning these design elements to craft the best performing storage system with the resources available or what can be purchased is about as much storage tiering as can be done. If you’ve never built up a few designs and put a performance benchmark on the storage design, you really should — there can be an incredible variance in the performance results.

As you can see, this can be very tedious in the flat storage arena without advanced management. A new set of features are showing up on some of the more full-featured storage processors that provide automated storage tiering. Automated storage tiering will allow the storage processor to put the segments of data on the level of disk that it needs, when it needs it. Examples of this technology are 3PAR’s Adaptive Optimization, Compellent’s Data Progression feature, IBM’s Easy Tier, and EMC’s fully automated storage tiering (FAST). This video shows a preview of EMC’s FAST:

The automated storage tiering technologies allow the storage administrator to permit a volume that may reside on a lesser-performing disk set to be dynamically moved to a higher-performing tier automatically. One of the best use cases is to put the bulk of a SAN’s storage requirements on less expensive SATA storage and use automated storage tiering to move those volumes or sub volumes to higher performing SAS or solid state disk drives.

The ability to automate storage tiers is quite attractive, primarily because the right resources will get the right disk when it is needed; however, some administrators may express concern about the data blocks or volumes being moved dynamically around a SAN. While each product will implement automated tiered storage differently, it is not far from standard volume migration technologies that exist on most storage processors, operating systems, or hypervisors. I can see a great reduction in the amount of tier-1 (SAS) or tier-0 (solid state disk) storage zones that many administrators may need to provision in order to keep the hot spots on the premium disk.

Where does automated storage tiering fit into your storage roadmap? Let us know in the comments.

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Microsoft has promised to dispatch an investigative team to a Chinese factory allegedly engaged in workplace violations, with a full audit to be conducted the week of April 19. However, the National Labor Committee report that sparked Microsofts action also documents how the KYE factory in Dongguan has a supposed history, according to its sources, of covering up violations such as the use of underage workers ahead of both government and corporate audits. That report also alleges that workers are coached on what to say to auditors before their arrival. Microsoft insists it has been monitoring workplace conditions at the factory on a regular basis.
- Microsoft announced plans April 15 to investigate allegations of labor violations at a Chinese factory building its products, in response to an April 13 report by the National Labor Committee. However, that same report suggests the factorys management has a system for disguising potential violat...

Microsoft ended support for Windows Vista RTM April 13, meaning that those who wish to continue to use a supported version of the much-maligned operating system must update their copies with service packs. Mainstream support for Vista ends April 10, 2012, while extended support for Vista Business and Vista Enterprise will end April 11, 2017. The number of users of Vista and Windows XP has been steadily falling in recent months, as the newer Windows 7 claims an accompanying larger share of the U.S. operating system market. Microsoft is also adjusting its product support life-cycle policy to offer limited support under very specific circumstances.
- Microsoft ended support for Windows Vista RTM, the original and patch-free version of its much-maligned operating system, on April 13. Those who want to continue using a supported version of Vista will need to update their copies with service packs. quot;What does 'End of Support' mean? quot; ...

For a high-level overview of the health of your virtual environment, check out VKernel’s free Capacity View tool.

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Back in the days of the physical server, an administrator purchasing a server would size a server with plenty of RAM, disk, and processor for a server’s long life. In many cases, computing resources were over-provisioned in an attempt to make sure that potentially growing resource needs would not max out the resources of the new server. While over-provisioning resources cost a little extra money on the front end, upgrading a server mid-cycle tended to be pretty expensive.

How times have changed.

The era of virtualization is in full swing, and over-provisioning servers — now in the form of virtual machines (VMs) — is not only unnecessary since resources can be added on-the-fly, but it also has a significant cost. For example, every unnecessary gigabyte of RAM added to a VM is a gigabyte of RAM taken from the central resource pool that can’t be added to some other needy VM. The same goes for disk space and processor. We’re in an era of “right-sizing” our individual workloads. By right-sizing VMs, companies avoid prematurely buying additional virtual hosts.

Although VMware and Hyper-V provide performance-viewing capabilities, both tools are far from complete and simply provide you with a point-in-time look at where things stand at any particular point. From that aspect, the built-in tools don’t really provide much in the way of analysis. VKernel aims to fix that shortcoming by offering tools that take performance analysis to the next level. Some of VKernel’s tools, including Capacity View, are free, although there are some limitations, which I discuss below.

(Note: For this article, I’m using Capacity View with VMware vSphere and vCenter.)

The free Capacity View tool provides you with a very high-level overview of the health of your virtual environment. Beyond telling you what resources are currently being consumed by individual VMs, Capacity View gives you insight into how appropriately your VMs are sized, but only at an aggregate level. For example, Capacity View won’t tell you that the VM named vm-print is over- or under-subscribed, but it will tell you that you have 10 VMs using too much RAM or 12 VMs that haven’t been assigned enough disk resources.

You can download Capacity View from VKernel’s Web site; it’s quick and easy to install. Once installed and upon first execution, you’re prompted to answer a few questions (Figure A). Specifically, you need to point Capacity View at your vCenter server or, if you don’t have a vCenter server, at an individual ESX host. The only other parameters that you need to specify are the Username and Password parameters that you see in Figure A.

Figure A

The Capacity View configuration screen. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Capacity View makes heavy use of vSphere’s built-in API to gather performance statistics that are then matches against the limited parameters that you specified on the configuration page.  Capacity View then displays a dashboard-style screen with an overview of your virtual environment.  One such screen is shown in Figure B and gives you an overview of a live virtual environment consisting of six hosts, thirty-two powered on virtual machines and eleven data stores.

Figure B

The high-level environment overview. (Click the image to enlarge.)

In the center of the screen, you’ll see an overview of the physical and virtual resources available in this environment. Below the overview, you’ll find these three columns of information:

• Performance Problems. How many VMs are insufficiently configured or suffering from high I/O latency problems?
• Available Capacity. Given current trends, how many more VMs can be safely added to this environment before resources are taxed beyond a reasonable level?
• Over-Allocated Resources. How many VMs have been assigned too many resources, including too much CPU, over-allocated RAM, or an overly generous amount of disk space? Correcting these issues helps to increase the available capacity, which will lead to higher numbers in the Available Capacity column.

Because it’s a free tool, Capacity View does not notify you about specific actions to take to free up capacity or tell you which VMs you need to add RAM to in order to fix performance problems; VKernel’s other tools, including Capacity Analyzer and the Optimization Pack, provide those details.

Summary

Capacity View identifies where you might be experiencing problems in your virtual environment; this free tool is intended to entice you to purchase the more advanced VKernel tools: Capacity Analyzer and Optimization Pack. Capacity View does a good job of telling both that you might be giving away the farm to some VMs and that you might be being stingy with others. This kind of detail is the first step in your VM right-sizing effort.

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SAN JOSE, Calif. – April 14, 2010 – Cisco today announced that it is expanding the industry's broadest portfolio of small business technology with new solutions to help small businesses connect their business to the world, secure their network and communicate more effectively. New technologies include a family of energy-efficient, unmanaged switches and a wireless virtual private ...

Microsoft debuted its Kin One and Kin Two smartphones, aimed at a 15-to-25-year-old demographic, during high-profile presentations in San Francisco and New York City on April 12. The smartphones emphasize social networking and the ability to near-instantly share videos, images and messages with a wide variety of contacts. While the presence of the Kin One and Kin Two may not drastically sway Microsofts fortunes in the smartphone arena, analysts suggest that this new initiative shows how serious the company is about being a competitor in the consumer mobile space.
- Microsofts new Kin One and Kin Two smartphones, aimed at a younger audience, were unveiled during a high-profile presentation in San Francisco on April 12, with journalists in New York City following along via live video feed. Both devices, whose features emphasize social networking, will mak...

Microsoft unveiled its Kin One and Kin Two smartphones during high-profile presentations in San Francisco and New York on April 12, showing off the devices targeted at a younger, social-networking-happy demographic. The Kin One is a compact device with a sliding form-factor, reminiscent in many ways of the Palm Pre, while the Kin Two is more akin in its length and heft to the Sidekick, another smartphone that was aimed at a social-centric audience. In addition to presenting an aggregation of social-networking feeds on its home screen, both the Kin One and Kin Two emphasize connectivity through embedded cameras capable of shooting video, and an online Kin Studio that uploads data from the phone to the cloud for later retrieval. Both the Kin One and the Kin Two, once released in May on Verizon Wireless network, will be the first Windows Phones to feature integration with Zune media player.
- ...

Microsoft revealed two new smartphones, the Kin One and Kin Two, during several high-profile presentations in San Francisco and New York on April 12. Scheduled to debut on Verizon at some point in May, the phones are designed for a younger demographic heavily into social networking. Both the Kin One and Kin Two include sliding keyboards, cameras for shooting video, and software designed to facilitate the sharing of content with friends. Kin One and Kin Two may be something of an offshoot of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's broader smartphone operating-system initiative due to roll out on devices near the end of 2010.
- Microsoft unveiled Kin One and Kin Two, two smartphones targeted at a younger demographic, during several high-profile presentations in San Francisco and New York on April 12. The devices, which seem to be the culmination of the long-rumored “Project Pink,” incorporate cameras, touch screens and...

The Oracle Application Users Group released the results of a study last week that revealed 87% of the respondents blame data growth for their performance issues. As I opined recently, I think it could be very good for IT if users culled data that they don’t need in order to reduce stress on storage and backup infrastructures. A recent PC World article suggests that users who don’t do such cleaning regularly may be costing their companies a lot of money.

On the infrastructure side of things, there are a lot of technologies aimed at trying to help organizations spend less on storage. Deduplication technologies remove redundant information on storage devices so that things like operating system files or presentations that exist on many users’ home drives will only take up space once. Multi-tiered storage allows the most critical data to be stored on high-speed, expensive hardware while less crucial or less frequently used data resides on slower, cheaper hardware.

Unfortunately, the IT-centered solutions leave us with the same problem: Data growth is explosive and nearly unchecked in all industries. Granted, there are many good reasons to keep a lot of this data, including regulatory requirements, files that need to be quickly accessible, and files that are accessed frequently. However there are many files, particularly on users’ desktop PCs, that are simply irrelevant, old garbage that should be treated as such. In the business world, there is too much work to do for us to spend the necessary time cleaning our data.

In order to be a help, I am posting my strategy for getting rid of unnecessary files in bulk without the danger of losing any data. This is what I educate my users to do, and we have been able to forestall increasing server space simply through reducing file volume on our servers.

1. Get a CD or DVD burner for your PC.
2. Burn all of your data files to the burner you acquired.
3. Go through the media you just burned to make sure the burn was successful.
4. Delete everything you just burned from your PC.
5. Browse through the media you just burned and copy back to your PC only the files you absolutely know you will need in the next day or two.
6. Keep the media in your drive for a few weeks and, when you need a file that is on the media, copy it back to your PC.
7. Label the disc with the date (I do this yearly, so I label mine “Clean - 2009″).

For Outlook, the process is a little different. I keep a year of email in a PST on my desktop. Every year, I take the previous year’s PST, archive it to CD or DVD, and close the PST in Outlook. So, at the end of 2009, I archived all of my 2009 email, created a new PST for 2010, burned my 2008 email, and then deleted the 2008 PST.

Using this strategy, I still have access to my old email and files if I need them, but they aren’t taking up space on my hard drive, a network drive, or any backup medium. As a result, my inbox is a little over 13 MB, last year’s PST is just under 500 MB, and My Documents is under 50 MB. I am also secure in the knowledge that if someone shows up needing an email or file from two years ago (when I started my current job), I have access to it.

What data spring cleaning best practices do you recommend? Do you think expecting users to clean up their own data is realistic? Share your tips and your thoughts in the discussion.

TechRepublic’s Servers and Storage newsletter, delivered on Monday and Wednesday, offers tips that will help you manage and optimize your data center. Automatically sign up today!

Microsoft will release a beta of its Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 with a variety of tweaks in areas such as user interface and integrated archiving. Following the June SP1 release, IT administrators will have more granular control over e-mail storage policies and other matters. Microsoft finds itself challenged in the corporate messaging and collaboration arena by a number of companies including Mozilla and Cisco Systems, as well as Google with its Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook.
- Microsoft plans on releasing the beta of its Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 in June, bringing a number of changes to user interface, integrated archiving and other areas. quot;SP1 will include fixes and tweaks in areas you've helped us identify, including a roll-up of the roll-ups we've r...

Version 12 of the Sysinternals Process Explorer diagnostic tool has new features that allow admins to have even more visibility into Windows Server processes.

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Process Explorer, which is arguably one of the most frequently used Sysinternals tools, has been updated to version 12. The latest version includes a number of new features that allow server administrators to see what program, service, or system process is interacting with a file. According to this TechNet blog, the update also includes a number of other minor improvements and bug fixes.

The significant new features for the popular diagnostic tool include the following:

• Show Web hosted Internet Explorer 8 processes
• Display of svchosts’s service category
• TCP/IP information for properties of a process
• Service name mapping to running threads

Process Explorer has a lot of tabs and views, so it may take you a while to find the new features. Figure A shows the new feature that displays the TCP/IP information of a given process.

Figure A

Click the image to enlarge.

Figure B shows an example of the new feature that will display a Windows service name to a running thread. This feature detects if a thread has been started by a service.

Figure B

Click the image to enlarge.

In Figure B, the two processes on the left (vpxd and JettyService) were originated from a Windows service and have the Service tab visible. On the right, the user process (Firefox Web browser) does not have a Service tab.

You can install Process Explorer version 12 via a free download from the Microsoft site. This update of Process Explorer works for Windows Server 2003 and higher. It also works on Windows XP and higher. This tool continues to hold the crown of most useful in my book.

Process Explorer is the most useful tool that I use in my server admin work. What do you think of Process Explorer? How do you use it? Share your thoughts with the TechRepublic community.

Stay on top of the latest Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 tips and tricks with our free Windows Server newsletter, delivered each Wednesday.
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Montreal, April 7, 2010 — Concordia University is pleased to announce today the donation of a comprehensive network security solution valued at more than $400,000 from Cisco Canada to Concordia's Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science. The solution will be located in the new Cisco Network Security Laboratory at the Concordia Institute for Information Systems Engineering (CIISE). ...

Scott Lowe provides an overview of the Management Server installation process for Windows Essential Business Server 2008.

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Windows Essential Business Server 2008 (EBS) is Microsoft’s answer to midmarket technology needs. While overall management of EBS is simpler than it is for larger organizations that rely on vanilla Windows, the installation process consists of a number of steps.

In part one of this two-part series on the installation process for EBS, I explained how to run the Planning And Configuration wizard, which is the initial process necessary before moving on to the step that is discussed in this column: deploying the Management Server.

Note: This tutorial is also available as an image gallery.

Begin the installation

Although it has streamlined administration tools, EBS is really just Windows Server 2008 with a set of management tools designed to simplify common tasks; as such, the installation process for EBS begins like it does for any Windows Server 2008-based system: Insert the installation media into the optical media drive on the server and power on the system.

What you see at the very beginning of the installation process is identical to what you see when you install a plain vanilla Windows Server 2008 system, so I won’t go over that part here except to note that you simply need to choose an installation method, which should be Custom since this is likely to be a new server rather than an upgrade. Perhaps the most notable difference is the lack of an edition selection page during installation. Whereas a plain Windows 2008 installation asks you to choose the edition you’re installing — Web, Standard, Enterprise, Data Center — EBS does not ask you to choose.

Management Server Installation wizard

The real installation difference comes into play after the base Windows 2008 system is fully installed. Once that happens, the system starts up and the Management Server Installation wizard begins, starting with the Welcome screen (Figure A). Click the Next button.

Figure A

The Management Server Installation wizard’s Welcome screen. (Click the image to enlarge.)

With the preliminaries out of the way, the wizard asks you to decide which network adapter you want the Management Server to use for network communications. As you see in Figure B, my lab’s virtual machine has a single network adapter from which to choose. If your server has multiple network adapters, all of them would be listed here. After you choose a network adapter, click the Next button. Once you do, the wizard queries the selected network adapter to gather information; then, you’re moved to the next installation step.

Figure B

Choose the network adapter to use for communication. (Click the image to enlarge.)

The installation wizard needs periodic network access in order to achieve its goals. For example, during the process, the wizard will look for updates that improve the installation process. In order to facilitate this communication, the wizard needs to assign a temporary IP address to the network adapter; this address can be assigned automatically via DHCP, or you can opt to manually assign an IP address (Figure C).

Figure C

Choose your temporary IP address assignment method. (Click the image to enlarge.)

With IP addressing out of the way, the installer moves on to ask if you’d like to download updates during installation. In order to maintain a secure system, I recommend selecting the Download And Install Optional Microsoft Updates During Installation (Figure D); once you do, and after you click the Next button, the installation wizard looks for and downloads necessary updates from Microsoft. (This step can take a few minutes.) Once the installation wizard is updated, the system restarts and the installation continues.

Figure D

Decide whether to update Windows during installation. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Regardless of your selection on the Microsoft Update screen, the installer requires you to download critical updates that might affect the installation wizard (Figure E).

Figure E

Installation wizard critical updates are installed. (Click the image to enlarge.)

If you’re installing the management server for the first time, there is a high likelihood that you have yet to create your Active Directory domain.  On the next page of the wizard, you’re asked if you still need to create a new forest and domain or if you plan to join this server to an existing domain (Figure F). In my case, I needed to create the domain, so I selected the Create A New Forest And Domain option. Click the Next button.

Figure F

Choose whether to create a new domain or join an existing one. (Click the image to enlarge.)

If you’re wondering if all of the work you went through during the planning phase was for naught, you’re about to find out. When you get to the next page of the wizard, you’ll see the Load Planning Data button (Figure G). At this point, you need to make available whatever media on which you stored the planning data from the first phase of the installation. In my lab, I added a second virtual CD-ROM drive to my virtual machine and pointed that drive to the location where my planning data was stored. You can use a disc or a USB key to store the planning data, or you can store the information at a network location. The goal is to point the wizard at the planning file that you created in the first phase.

Figure G

Locate the planning data. (Click the image to enlarge.)

You’ve already decided that you need to create a new domain, so now you need to name it and define the password that will be used for the domain administrator’s account (Figure H). After you provide the requested information and click the Next button, the wizard scans the network to make sure that the domain name is not already in use.

Figure H

Provide a Domain Name and an administrator Password. (Click the image to enlarge.)

The names you use for your EBSs are important and are defined on the next page of the installation wizard. I named my management server ebs-mgmt, my security server ebs-sec, and my messaging server ebs-mail (Figure I). After you click the Next button, the wizard verifies your server names.

Figure I

Provide the names for your EBSs. (Click the image to enlarge.)

IP addresses make network communication possible. When you get to the Assign IP Addresses screen, provide the IP addresses that will be used for each of your services (Figure J). Click the Next button.

Figure J

Provide the IP addresses for each of your EBSs. (Click the image to enlarge.)

The installation wizard knows what you want — it even presents a list of internal network IP addresses for your consideration (Figure K). You can choose to accept this list of IP addresses (which I opted to do) or make changes. Click the Next button.

Figure K

Choose how you want to define internal IP addresses. (Click the image to enlarge.)

The Management Server can also act as the DHCP server for your network, or you can choose to continue using your existing DHCP service, as you can see in Figure L. In my lab, I didn’t use EBS’s DHCP server since I already have one, but in a real-world scenario, I highly recommend that you allow EBS to handle DHCP duty in order to facilitate smoother network communication. If you were to choose the EBS-based DHCP service, you would be presented with two additional DHCP configuration screens (Figure M and Figure N) on which you would be asked to configure DHCP settings, including the name of a DHCP scope, the starting and the ending IP addresses, and the subnet mask and gateway addresses for the new scope.

Figure L

Decide how DHCP should be handled on your network. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Figure M

Provide details for a new DHCP scope. (Click the image to enlarge.)

Figure N

The new DHCP scope also needs DNS and address duration information. (Click the image to enlarge.)

File storage continues to be one of the most basic uses for servers; your new EBS needs a place to store its files, and it’s up to you to define a volume to use for this purpose. If you have only a single volume in your server, you won’t have the option to choose any volume other than the system volume (Figure O). If you know that you have other volumes in your server, click the Disk Management button to initialize and format the volume. Click the Next button.

Figure O

Choose the volume on which data should be stored. (Click the image to enlarge.)

EBS includes the Remote Web Workplace (RWW) feature, which provides users with a portal environment used to access resources remotely. The Company Profile page of the wizard (Figure P) asks you to provide some information about your company; this information will be used to generate an SSL certificate for use with RWW.

Figure P

Provide company profile information. (Click the image to enlarge.)

The wizard also includes questions about whether you’d like to participate in Microsoft’s error reporting service, which automatically sends crash reports to Microsoft (Figure Q), and in the company’s Customer Experience Improvement Program, which sends actual usage information to Microsoft to help it develop future versions of Windows (Figure R). Many company security policies prohibit the sending of this kind of information, so choose carefully.

Figure Q

Do you want to automatically send crash reports to Microsoft? (Click the image to enlarge.)

Figure R

Does your company want to participate in the Customer Experience Improvement Program? (Click the image to enlarge.)

After you review your selections, click the Install button (Figure S). You’ll see a progress screen (Figure T) that shows how far along the installation has progressed. The installation can take hours. Also, your server may reboot multiple times during the installation. After each reboot, the installer picks up where it left off.

Figure S

Review your selections and click the Install button.

Figure T

A progress bar lets you know where things stand. (Click the image to enlarge.)

At the end of the installation, you’ll see the Continue Installation screen (Figure U), which indicates that the Management Server has been installed but that you still need to deploy the Security and Messaging Servers.

Figure U

It’s time to move on to the next server installation. (Click the image to enlarge.) Want to keep up with Scott Lowe’s posts on TechRepublic?

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Microsoft's decision to end support for Intel's Itanium chip in its server architecture, along with terminating future development of its Essential Business Server, suggests that the company is attempting to shift its server business to take advantage of what it sees as developments in both the processor architecture and cloud computing space. At the same time, its moves in the consumer space, including the brutal elimination of several legacy products and the upcoming release of several new ones, suggest a parallel streamlining of its products.
- Microsofts recent decision to end support for Intels Itanium chip in its server architecture, along with the elimination of its Essential Business Server (EBS) development, suggests that the company is trying to reposition to take advantage of several developing business IT trends, including virt...

Windows Server 2008’s DHCP engine has a filter that can reduce risk of rogue devices. IT pro Rick Vanover discusses this new feature.

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One of the least glamorous parts of IT is tracking down a rouge system that received a DHCP address, especially if it is causing an issue on the network. IT pros have become good at looking at a MAC address and determining what type of system it may be. For instance, users may bring a wireless router from home into the office or install a virtual machine without any protections on the network.

Windows Server 2008 R2’s DHCP engine introduces a MAC address filter engine. The filter is pretty cool; it allows you to specify wildcard MAC address ranges to allow or deny address assignment on the network.

For example, take the requirement to prohibit Hyper-V, VirtualPC, or VirtualServer virtual machines from receiving IP addresses on your network. Figure A shows how you can do this with the filter.

Figure A

Click the image to enlarge.

For the specific case of virtual machines, I created a scorecard of the MAC address types and the associated hypervisors.

Clearly, the DHCP filters are not bulletproof. Most hypervisors and wireless devices let users spoof MAC addresses. But chances are, this will knock out most of the users who could potentially do the least desirable things on your network. In the case of wireless devices, determining the organizationally unique identifiers (OUIs) for Linksys, Netgear, D-Link, and other products may be a good idea if you have a problem with unauthorized devices showing up on your network. A more strict approach is to set a filter only for the devices you expect to use on your network.

I think this is pretty neat for an otherwise boring service. Do you see yourself using this new feature? Let us know in the comments.

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Microsoft could reclaim its flagging market share in many consumer areas with a new wave of products, including Windows Phone 7 and Bing, according to a new report from research firm Jefferies Co. These products represent the possible fruits of increased Microsoft spending in research and development. However, while software such as Bing and Project Natal will definitely allow Microsoft to compete more aggressively in certain segments, it will be years before these products, if successful, translate into appreciable revenue streams.
- Microsofts new wave of products, including Windows Phone 7 and Project Natal, have the potential to help the company regain market share in the consumer segment, according to a new report from research firm Jefferies amp; Co. In addition to representing a potential source of future revenue, that...

Red Hat has officially entered the desktop virtualization market. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) for Servers will allow customers to deploy Linux, Windows XP, or Windows 7 clients virtually. This takes the processing that is normally done by the client PC on the user’s desk and moves it to the data center, where high-powered servers can process much more quickly.

Desktop virtualization market

Desktop virtualization is still in its infancy as far as the market goes, but it is reminiscent of the mainframe days when the processing was done on a huge machine in a data center, while the users had “dumb terminals,” or screens that displayed the data that was served up by the mainframe. These days, most people are more comfortable with the computers on their desk doing the majority of the work, while enterprise applications are run off of servers in the data center.

Benefits
Some of desktop virtualization’s benefits include the following:

• Client machines can be extremely scaled down thin clients with only the processing power necessary to display the screenshots that are sent down from the server.
• Users generally see performance benefits, as the machines running their desktop OS are servers. If the planning process is done properly, those servers can blow away the performance of all but the highest end user workstations.
• Virtual desktop environments are far easier to keep patched and upgraded. The environments also make software deployments a breeze since the updates only have to be applied to the server.
• Remote users and travelers have the ability to access their desktop from any machine capable of running a remote desktop application, from a laptop, a client’s office, or an Internet kiosk in a library or an airport.

Major drawback
Desktop virtualization hasn’t received much traction because, if all a user has is their virtual desktop, a network or server outage can stop an entire enterprise in its tracks. However, it is getting to the point that desktop virtualization’s benefits seem to be outweighing the infrastructure concerns.

Red Hat vs. the competition
There are established players in the desktop virtualization space, and they might make it tough for the Linux giant to make progress.

For instance, Microsoft is in the virtual desktop market, having teamed with Citrix to form a roadshow, which they are hoping will convince customers to choose their offerings over market leader VMware, which also has a desktop virtualization initiative.

Red Hat’s offering has one compelling feature that its competitors’ products lack: the ability to import virtual machines from VMWare, Citrix, and Microsoft’s virtual platforms. Red Hat senior product marketing manager Andrew Cathrow claims that moving virtual machines from the other platforms to RHEV is a “very simple” process.

Red Hat has also increased the resources available to each virtual desktop in order to make large processor and memory intensive applications perform better for the users. In addition, the management suite includes a data warehouse that can be exported to most SQL-based databases. The icing on the cake is the pricing, which includes a free hypervisor for customers already running RHEL, as well as management tools that Red Hat claims are “dramatically lower-cost than our competitors.”

My thoughts on desktop virtualization

I have long been a proponent of desktop virtualization. I remember pining for a technology that would allow me to patch or upgrade the operating system for my users without having to visit every machine. I vividly remember upgrading our campus to Microsoft Office 2003 with Group Policy and having to physically visit every single PC to install Windows XP and being supremely disappointed with the hoops I had to jump through to get things done. Desktop virtualization can ease many of those problems, but you must have solid infrastructure components in place because a network failure could result in your users being unable to get to their desktop.

Is your company experimenting with desktop virtualization? If not, does it plan to in the near future? Share your thoughts on desktop virtualization in the discussion.

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Microsoft finds its latest request for a multiple-judge review in a long-running patent-infringement suit brought by i4i rejected by a federal appeals court. Microsoft had asked for a panel of 11 judges to review its arguments in the case, in which i4i alleges that Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007 violate its custom XML-related patents. In August 2009, a federal judge in a U.S. District Court ordered Microsoft to pay $300 million and pull copies of Word 2003 and 2007 from store shelves within 90 days, a ruling that set off months of legal maneuvering.
- It may be April Fools' Day, but it's doubtful that Microsoft finds anything funny in a federal appeals court having declined its latest request for a multiple-judge review in an intellectual property lawsuit. The case, in which i4i alleges that Microsoft Word 2003 and 2007 violate its custom XML-...

Serving a dynamic campus community out of a repurposed classroom in a decades-old building has its challenges. Scott Lowe describes his team’s efforts to revitalize a college’s neglected data center.

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Westminster College’s IT infrastructure has grown throughout the years in a very organic way. In the beginning, it was only a single VAX terminal connected to the University of Missouri; now it’s a fiber-connected network with thousands of nodes, dozens of servers, and terabytes of storage.

I’m very happy with where Westminster College is headed in terms of infrastructure and architecture. However, one area that has not been up to par is the physical location where we house our infrastructure. We’ve spent time fixing up what used to be a basement classroom in the campus administration. I wish I’d had the forethought to take pictures of what the server room looked like a while back, but I didn’t; I did take a few “after” photos. In this post, I describe what improvements our IT team made and explain why we made those changes.

Details about the “before” server room

Our server room is a repurposed basement classroom that was granted to IT well before my arrival at the college. The room measures about 15 x 15, has a concrete floor, and has a drop ceiling that is a few inches below the floor structure supporting the floor above.

When I started at Westminster, the room looked like the diagram in Figure A. This isn’t a scale drawing, but you can see where the various components were placed.

Figure A

The old server room layout

There were three server racks (none of which were full) that housed the college’s couple dozen servers. The campus fiber optic network at the time was all multimode and terminated in the network core you see on the diagram. The blue box represents the cabling for the building housing the server room. All of that cabling is terminated into a wall mount rack and feed the systems and users that work in Westminster Hall, the building in which the data center resides.

As you can see, there were three lights in the room. The lights provided enough light to work by but left some darkish spots.

The two green boxes on opposite walls of the room were patch panels that were connected to one another across the room with the cabling running above the drop ceiling; this was the cabling used to connect the servers to the core switch. Without a raised floor, this was a decent alternative, but it didn’t provide for much growth and working on it was a pain.

The A/C unit in the back of the room is a standalone unit with four air vents blowing out the top of the unit and pointing in various directions to cover as much of the room as possible.

The room has no raised floor, and it never will — it’s a basement with a concrete basement floor. Although we could jackhammer out enough material to create a raised floor, it’s not really necessary anymore.

The room had a lot of problems, including:

• Inadequate air flow. The Dell servers we use blow air from front to back; there was about a foot of space between the rear of the racks and the wall, and it was hot back there! Plus, cold air wasn’t being delivered where it was needed most.
• Inadequate lighting. As I mentioned, some areas of the room simply were not lit well enough.
• Really difficult to work on systems. There was very little space between the rear of the racks and the walls, making it very difficult to work behind the systems.
• No flexibility to expand network core. Without additional racks, we didn’t have enough space to extend our fiber optic network. As a part of a new building project, we ran 288 strands of single mode fiber cable across campus and needed a place to terminate that new cabling.
• The “blue box” that was the building’s internal cabling was a mess. The word spaghetti doesn’t come close to describing the morass of 150 patch cables run from that blue box to switches in the “network core” area.
• UPSs that were almost at capacity.
• No ability to easily disconnect and move the UPSs.

Improvements to create the “after” server room

Throughout the past few months, as time has permitted, my data center guy and I made a bunch of changes designed to correct some of these problems. Figure B is a look at the new layout.

Figure B

A newly fixed up server room

Moved server racks after eliminating one
First, we eliminated one server rack and turned the remaining two server racks (Figure C and Figure D) so the rear air flow was not impeded by a wall. This gives us ample room to work behind servers without worrying about claustrophobia setting in.

We were able to eliminate a full rack by following these steps:

• Virtualizing older, larger, more power-hungry systems to fewer smaller blade-based systems with a SAN backing the entire thing. This has reduced the number of physical servers and reduced power consumption to a point where our UPSs are happy again.
• Not leaving 1, 2, or even 3U of space between our systems anymore. There’s no point in that for servers with a front to back air flow, so why waste the rack space?
• Moving our backup server and tape library to another secure campus location where it has a direct fiber connection back to the core.

As we walk by the sliding glass door (yeah, a sliding glass door — it’s not my favorite entryway, and it’s something we’ll change in the future), we can now look for bad lights at a glance.

Figure C

Figure D

Improved cold air distribution
In Figure B, you’ll see green lines and boxes connected to the A/C unit (you can see the unit in Figure E); these are duct extensions that we installed in order to drop cold air where it’s needed rather than just allowing cold air to blow randomly around the room. This move has already made an impact. Our Dell M1000e blade chassis fans used to run at a very high rate to keep the chassis cool. With this move, the fans run noticeably slower, meaning that the unit is having an easier time staying cool.

Figure E

Added two new network/cabling racks
In order to accommodate a large, new single mode fiber installation, we added a new rack (Figure F) to the left of the existing network rack and moved the core switch and all the network electronics to the new rack and left the older rack in place to house fiber optic terminations for the campus network. We’ve added quite a bit in the way of network gear, and we don’t need to worry about having enough space to house it now.

Behind the existing network rack, we’ve added a new rack (Figure G) intended to house all of the cabling for the building itself and get it away from the core network switch. The 150 patch cables that run into the core network rack seriously get in the way and are a pain in the neck to manage. We added the new rack when we renovated the IT office space across the hall and needed to re-run all of the network cabling into the space. This summer, we’ll extend the existing patch panels to new patch panels in this common building rack and move the switches that service the building to this rack in order to be able to more easily work on the core switch. Although we don’t have to do a lot with the core network rack, we want to make it easy work on it when the time comes.

Figure G

Added lighting
We’ve added a couple of lights to darkened areas in order to improve our ability to work. It’s amazing what the simple addition of a couple of lights can do.

Added a cable tray
If you look carefully at Figure B, you’ll see a sort of thatched area on the diagram; this denotes a new suspended cable tray (Figure H) that we added at about 7′ high in the room, or about 6″ below the ceiling. We’ve also removed the patch panels that previously served the servers and instead laid the server connecting patch cables into this easy-to-reach cable tray. This step has made it much easier to make changes and add new cables as necessary; it has also made tracing cables a lot easier.

Figure H

Cut the cord on the UPSs
In order to make it possible for us to more easily do routine maintenance on the UPSs and to move them if it became necessary, we had an electrician install massive power plugs in the end of the UPS cord. Prior to doing this, the UPSs were hardwired right into the electrical panel, so maintenance was more difficult.

Summary

We didn’t make radical changes to the server room, but by correcting what were some relatively serious problems (particularly with air flow), we did create a very functional space. Westminster College is looking at the possibility of a new academic building, which may afford us the opportunity to build a true data center down the line.

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