Day: 1 March 2005

Can’t Get Enough Bandwith

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I just finished the paperwork on getting our office more bandwidth. We currently have 1 T-1 (and its redundant shadow twin). That amount of bandwidth is just not cutting it. We are maxing out our circuit several times a day. With the price drop on bandwidth we just ordered a 4.5 megabit link and are going to drop our redundant pair of T-1’s. Since we don’t have a call center in our office anymore we don’t need the extra redundancy, and the 4.5 meg link is actually cheaper than the 2 redundant T-1’s we currently have.

Save money and triple our bandwidth, that was worth the trade off in redundancy. Since there is such a lag in order time to delivery we won’t see this bandwidth for several weeks. I estimate it up and running by May 1. Sounds like a long time, but it is worth the wait.

VMWare Server

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We just bought our first (of many I hope) license of VMware GSX server. We also just picked up a nice Dell Poweredge 2650 off of eBay to run it on. We are plugging it into an existing SCSI disk array we had. We are bumping the ram to 4gig and with the existing dual Xeon 2.8ghz processors should make this a nice little server. VMware suggests 3-5 virtual machines per physical box depending on its configuration. I figure I can get more if I have several virtual machines that need to be always up, but are not always worked on. I already have a list of a bunch of projects that can be virtual machines, vs buying a physical server. We already built a Biztalk 2004 Server and SQL server to go along with it in GSX virtual machines using the demo copy we had. Once this new server is built we will port them over. Since it is just copying a few files it is trivial to move the VM’s to a new server.

I am also itching to try out the beta of VMware Workstation 5.0. I downloaded the beta but have not had a chance to try it yet. it looks like there is a bunch of new features. The more I use this software, the more I think it is the wave of the future for an environment such as ours. I can cut down the number of servers I have and save money doing so. Allot of my dev and QA servers are old, and will slowly need replacing. Putting them into VM’s makes sense. I see a ton of other applications for the software. This is our first foray into VM’s for server use. If successful I hope to do more with it.

Back To Work

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It was my first day back since I got sick. I ended up leaving early (3ish) since I was still very tired. The bright side is I made it through the day! I am resting now (sort of). hopefully I will be at 100% tomorrow since I have a full day planned that I cannot really bail out of if I start feeling bad.