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Bloody Exchange Server
- Thread starter Mike_182
- Start date
Shed.
What do you do for a job ?
Better than yours. C*nt.
Better than yours. C*nt.
Seriously, however, I'm a 'Technical Analyst'. It involves infrastructure support, and migration/implementation projects.
Currently looking at putting in a few HP blades, although I'm nervous as I'm aware that they have a midplane redundancy issue (a lack of, to be precise) but at the same time the only other viable alternative is IBM blades - and I've never played with them!
Ah well, same fun again tomorrow at 5am... Gotta love our security manager. Rather than fix the fact that the firewalls may as well not be there, he'd rather have me 'harden' the server estate making it impossibly difficult to change anything later.
Currently looking at putting in a few HP blades, although I'm nervous as I'm aware that they have a midplane redundancy issue (a lack of, to be precise) but at the same time the only other viable alternative is IBM blades - and I've never played with them!
Ah well, same fun again tomorrow at 5am... Gotta love our security manager. Rather than fix the fact that the firewalls may as well not be there, he'd rather have me 'harden' the server estate making it impossibly difficult to change anything later.
Shed.
Ive not touched a server (besides the Dell thing powered by a P3 Xeon in our classroom) and i can only think the ccna (and the ccnp, Voip, Mcsa and foundation degree in computer science if i stay for another 2 years) wont be anywhere near enough for a job, i cant program either.
So basically im only doing networking s**t, and besides configuring a few switches and routers to run some s**t protocols like eigrp and ospf, i dont really know s**t yet.
So basically im only doing networking s**t, and besides configuring a few switches and routers to run some s**t protocols like eigrp and ospf, i dont really know s**t yet.
clustering FTW, 10 seconds to fail it over, then worry about the server rebooting!
As for HP blades, no redundancy issue on the chassis or the midplane, it has no active components to fail (excpet for a chip containing the serial number, but I think you can do without that
)To prove they are highly available HP now do non-stop blades using the same chassis. And non-stop servers are used for air traffic control etc and so can NEVER be down.
HP blades are one of my specialities, I'm a Master Systems Engineer in them and High availability and clustering solutions.
No other blades currently compare to the HP, they have 70% market share and the best range of server and options by far. The G6 blades come out in a month too, they will be immense, and now you can get the 300 sff sas drives in them, no-one else can do that!
I know you always know best Mike, but this is one thing I do know a lot about so do feel free to contact me if you want any info
ChrisR
ClioSport Club Member
Pulling wires out is so 90s, hopping on the ilo and pressing down the virtual power button ftw
mm blades, we had a few (not much by most peoples standards granted) come in the other day. About 70k worth of blades (4 full height, 1 half height) sat at the end of my desk and it looked like hardly anything there! Think there for all our VM ware stuff (another area dk loves)
mm blades, we had a few (not much by most peoples standards granted) come in the other day. About 70k worth of blades (4 full height, 1 half height) sat at the end of my desk and it looked like hardly anything there! Think there for all our VM ware stuff (another area dk loves
)lol, ILO rules, the guys at work still use RDC and I laugh at them when they do a recurring ping to see when the server comes back up again, watching the boot FTW!Pulling wires out is so 90s, hopping on the ilo and pressing down the virtual power button ftw
mm blades, we had a few (not much by most peoples standards granted) come in the other day. About 70k worth of blades (4 full height, 1 half height) sat at the end of my desk and it looked like hardly anything there! Think there for all our VM ware stuff (another area dk loves
I love the blade Onboard administrator, it just has everything in one place, even the bloody temperature of the ram zone and what speed the fans are running at, its the thing that sets HP out from the rest really.
We started off with 5 blades and thought we would struggle to fill a chassis, we've now got 14 in the one and 6 in the other lol, the accumulate fast when you know how easy they are to deploy, in the back door, 20 mins to build the hardware, shove it in the slot, rdp images it in 7 minutes and boom, a working blade, can't beat it! Well maybe by adding vmware into the equation
ChrisR
ClioSport Club Member
ILO rocks, watching a server boot, or 'pressing the power button' while sat at home is great
As for the blades, we've got an enclosure on 2 of our sites, one hardly has anything in, the other is filling up nicely now Couldn't believe the latest ones were 15k a piece though, can't remember the specs now though
Our guy who is the VM/SAN man is leaving next month so hopefully I'll get more involved in that stuff.
As for the blades, we've got an enclosure on 2 of our sites, one hardly has anything in, the other is filling up nicely now
Couldn't believe the latest ones were 15k a piece though, can't remember the specs now though Our guy who is the VM/SAN man is leaving next month so hopefully I'll get more involved in that stuff.
they must be BL680/685's with 4 processors for that spec!ILO rocks, watching a server boot, or 'pressing the power button' while sat at home is great
As for the blades, we've got an enclosure on 2 of our sites, one hardly has anything in, the other is filling up nicely now
Our guy who is the VM/SAN man is leaving next month so hopefully I'll get more involved in that stuff.
the virtual power has hurt me once though, was onsite installing some blades and did the firmware upgrade cd and it seemed to hang on one of the firmware updates, only the nic but it was frozen for ages. In the end i just did a cold reboot using virtual power, unfortunately the server never came back to life, it would power up but wouldn't even post, motherboard was knackered lol. Luckily it was a customers and I just DOA'd it, but it happened to me again last week on one of our blades, same firmware cd, think i need to burn a new cd lol, have decided i might not do the firmware upgrade in future, they only ever need the nic fw anyway, rather than doa this one though i just got them to send a new motherboard, that did the trick.
ChrisR
ClioSport Club Member
Yup 4 quad core and 32gig of RAM (could be 16gig, but they were 4 gig modules) in each I think. So 4 of those lol, my place invented the phrase over specced And you don't even want to know what was bought to simply run an intranet!
I'll have to check again tomorrow as it's bugging me now.
And you don't even want to know what was bought to simply run an intranet!I'll have to check again tomorrow as it's bugging me now.
182FF with cup packs
Christ, I wish the monkies who apply for our first line support jobs knew this "little".
We're a firewall support company, and the only people we generally get for our first line stuff are desktop support guys with little or no network knowledge. Most of them don't even know about 3 way handshakes
With blades, the best thing I saw was an HP blade server running VMWare ESX and V-motion. Replacing desktops with thin clients that RDP into vvirtual desktops. Watching a youtube playback on one of them as the admin guy moved the virtual machines between blades without dropping a frame.
Never got into the nitty gritty of them though, only had to config the network side of them. Interesting beasts though.
I'll toddle off to the corner now muttering "it's not the bloody firewall......"
Christ, I wish the monkies who apply for our first line support jobs knew this "little".
We're a firewall support company, and the only people we generally get for our first line stuff are desktop support guys with little or no network knowledge. Most of them don't even know about 3 way handshakes
With blades, the best thing I saw was an HP blade server running VMWare ESX and V-motion. Replacing desktops with thin clients that RDP into vvirtual desktops. Watching a youtube playback on one of them as the admin guy moved the virtual machines between blades without dropping a frame.
Never got into the nitty gritty of them though, only had to config the network side of them. Interesting beasts though.
I'll toddle off to the corner now muttering "it's not the bloody firewall......"
What Firewalls do you deal with?
Better than yours. C*nt.
Until you get to Exchange, yeah. But then we can't use storage blades for clustering and we'd quite like the entire lot to sit in one box. As it happens, there is a pair of clustered blades going in, attached to an MSA2024 (IIRC) because they don't want to connect it to the EVA, as they're technically for seperate sides of the business.
As for HP blades, no redundancy issue on the chassis or the midplane, it has no active components to fail (excpet for a chip containing the serial number, but I think you can do without that
Actually the Midplane only has one DC power rail to each blade, which means that should either a blade or power supply go wrong in a particular manner, then the entire enclosure shuts down. HP have issued a not insignificant recall for all Blade chassis power supplies manufactured pre August last year IIRC, in an attempt to over-engineer the power supplies so as not to fail. Granted, at least they've done something about it, but it's still a redundancy issue nonetheless.
And HP blades have a known issue with running the FB-DIMMs waaaaaaay over temperature - but then you'd know that too, and that whilst HP should have done something about it as they know the thermal requirements and dynamics of their own FB-DIMMs, it's actually down to the nature of the memory which requires an insane amount of cooling on it's own.
So no, I disagree - HP blades are far from perfect, however having very little experience of IBM stuff (and not having anything other than HP in our server room) it makes me wary to use anything else, as yes, HP blades are pretty good... Just not perfect
Better than yours. C*nt.
But that would require something other than the shitty 3Cum 'stack' (1Gb fibre between all the switches, apparently that's 'stacking' in their book) to have sufficient ports to plug all our server's NICs into, let alone their iLOs.
I've bucked the trend lately, not only have I just set up a site with the server NICs teamed, I've also plugged the iLOs in. And get this - I also configured them!
*Bangs head on wall*
Better than yours. C*nt.
Nope, the qualifications won't be worth shite. IMO.
I've got GCSEs. And half an A-Level. Experience from the age of 11 FTW!
182FF with cup packs
Nope, the qualifications won't be worth s**te. IMO.
I've got GCSEs. And half an A-Level. Experience from the age of 11 FTW!
Pretty much the same here. Handful of GCSE's an A Level. 2 years of a failed degree in engineering of which I never actually attended more than 4 lectures the 2nd year. (Drugs and clubbing FTW
)Everything is experience based (I've had computers int he house since the age of about 7 or 8). I have no IT qualifications at all. Not a single one.
My personaly speciality is Checkpoint (R55 onwards on pretty much all of the OS'es), but I also know PIX/ASA, Juniper, Watchguard and can turn my hand to the assorted handful of random shite we occasionally come across. On top of that, Bluecoat proxys, Cisco & F5 load balancers, IDP, basically if it's a security device I have some sort of exposure to it.
thats the beauty of blades, 1 network connection for all the ilo's through the onbard administrator!
the power supply problem I know about form last year, they replaced all of ours within 2 days which was good, it would be a VERY rare case for the entire chassis to shut down though because of it, we have had a power supply blow up and that took out the pdu but as we were running 6 PSU's in n+n it didn't affect anything really and we just replaced the psu with a spare and flipped the trip switch on the pdu.Until you get to Exchange, yeah. But then we can't use storage blades for clustering and we'd quite like the entire lot to sit in one box. As it happens, there is a pair of clustered blades going in, attached to an MSA2024 (IIRC) because they don't want to connect it to the EVA, as they're technically for seperate sides of the business.
Actually the Midplane only has one DC power rail to each blade, which means that should either a blade or power supply go wrong in a particular manner, then the entire enclosure shuts down. HP have issued a not insignificant recall for all Blade chassis power supplies manufactured pre August last year IIRC, in an attempt to over-engineer the power supplies so as not to fail. Granted, at least they've done something about it, but it's still a redundancy issue nonetheless.
And HP blades have a known issue with running the FB-DIMMs waaaaaaay over temperature - but then you'd know that too, and that whilst HP should have done something about it as they know the thermal requirements and dynamics of their own FB-DIMMs, it's actually down to the nature of the memory which requires an insane amount of cooling on it's own.
So no, I disagree - HP blades are far from perfect, however having very little experience of IBM stuff (and not having anything other than HP in our server room) it makes me wary to use anything else, as yes, HP blades are pretty good... Just not perfect
Our chassis is only currently running on 2 psu's, even though we have 14 servers and 200 people using them it doesn't need the third so its powered off, now thats energy saving for you!
As for the ram, its not a HP issue as you say as every manufacturer is currently using FBDimms and you know its an issue when you see the heat sinks attached to each one.
To address this though, HP are moving away form them in the G6 range, they are going DDR3 because of reduced power and heat, so thats also being addressed.
Must admit though, while we haven't got an immense amount of ram in ours they are nowhere near hot in the ram zone, not even approaching it, so you really must have to fill the things with ram to start getting this issue.
We have a clustered exchange mailbox role, works a treat, the other node is used for the file server so nothing is wasted, very handy when you need to reboot one of the nodes.
As for the internal storage in the c7000, you can do it with the 600 storage blade, its iSCSI but would do it all on in the one box. I know HP are also releasing a shared storage sb40c which would also help.
For the MSA2000, the best one to go for with the blades is the SAS version attached to the SAS switch and using the p700 sas controllers in the blades, in tests it actually slightly outperformed the FC version!
Good setup though, we have ours connected to an EVA.
Shed.
How long have you guys been at this for then ?
ChrisR
ClioSport Club Member
Right had a look in our enclosure today to see what the new stuff we bought actually was.
4 x BL680, each with 4 x 6 Core Xeons and onboard admin reporting 50gig in each. To be used for our ESX stuff.
Then as well as that just some BL460s and a storage blade.
Think we managed to swing the enclosure and some of the other stuff on the intranet budget
Will have to dig out the specs of stuff that's totally overkill for what it's used for.
Goes from one extreme to the other though, had a server today that kept throwing up high cpu usage alerts in MOM. Checked the server, and it was an old P3 lol.
Almost ended up with some dell blades on top as they has some offer on where you got the enclosure and 2 blades for £3.
4 x BL680, each with 4 x 6 Core Xeons and onboard admin reporting 50gig in each. To be used for our ESX stuff.
Then as well as that just some BL460s and a storage blade.
Think we managed to swing the enclosure and some of the other stuff on the intranet budget
Will have to dig out the specs of stuff that's totally overkill for what it's used for.
Goes from one extreme to the other though, had a server today that kept throwing up high cpu usage alerts in MOM. Checked the server, and it was an old P3 lol.
Almost ended up with some dell blades on top as they has some offer on where you got the enclosure and 2 blades for £3.
SLK 350
You mean you don't know your network inside out?! :approve:
Guessing it's not a production server, given how old it is? Anything out of warranty gets thrown onto our test domain, or skipped tbh.
ChrisR
ClioSport Club Member
Nope cos that's not my job
Although did know that server was s**t anyway. It's at one of our remote offices that's been closing down for almost as long as I've been working there hence nothing's been done with it as the answer was always 'there's no point'!. Only 2 people work there now and it's quite a big office, stupid really.Just acts as a file and SMS server, so it's doing nothing most of the time, and they'll be getting a nice new one when they move to a new office as gives us an excuse
Although it's not even needed as a file server anymore as they've literally just migrated over to a centrally based san at head office, and use a Riverbed appliance for caching.
presume you didn't buy that lot from us?Right had a look in our enclosure today to see what the new stuff we bought actually was.
4 x BL680, each with 4 x 6 Core Xeons and onboard admin reporting 50gig in each. To be used for our ESX stuff.
Then as well as that just some BL460s and a storage blade.
Think we managed to swing the enclosure and some of the other stuff on the intranet budget
Will have to dig out the specs of stuff that's totally overkill for what it's used for.
Goes from one extreme to the other though, had a server today that kept throwing up high cpu usage alerts in MOM. Checked the server, and it was an old P3 lol.
Almost ended up with some dell blades on top as they has some offer on where you got the enclosure and 2 blades for £3.
You get the chassis and an interconnect free if you half fill the chassis at the moment, and by buying 4x680's you half filled the chassis right there, and at 6k for the chassis and another couple of grand for he interconnect (depending on which one) thats a good rebate!
what the hell, if thats the case then it wasn't configured correctly if you've had that happen, we used to have an exchange 2003 cluster and it took seconds, 30 max to fail over.
Now we have 2007 running on a windows 2008 cluster and it takes less than half that, about 10 seconds and all the services are up and running, its rapid!
ChrisR
ClioSport Club Member
Don't think so, one thing I hate about my place is people tend to have their favourite supplies and tend to conveniently overlook the tender process, I still nag Hannah and Matt for quotes and info though
And did pass the details on to another guy in the team as apparently you guys can do Tandberg stuff as well??
Scirocco GT 2.0
Nope, the qualifications won't be worth s**te. IMO.
I've got GCSEs. And half an A-Level. Experience from the age of 11 FTW!
+1 I'm a strong believer in experience over qualifications too
Although I first got my hands on a computer at the age of 5 and knew it was the career for me ever since really lol
Shed.
Agreed, from doing the "labs" ie practical work on real equipment its clear that what ive learned is all from what ive done not what ive read. I cant remember all the theory behind s**t, i just know what to put in the cli and how to get stuff working.
this might be a bit of a thread hijack but i'll ask anyway.
for those of you that have made careers out of IT with no quals, how have you made the step up from messing about with home /desktop PC's onto servers, networking and a domains. I am confindent on any desktop PC and most software but we have a pretty basic terminal services server and another server (domain controller, I think, I'm not even sure! where do I learn this kind of thing!!)at work and I'm not really sure what it can do.
it might be a case of you don't know what you don't know but I'd kind of like to utilise it to it's maximum capabilities and I obviously have to be careful as the company runs off the thing but how does one go about making that step up and learning on my own?
for those of you that have made careers out of IT with no quals, how have you made the step up from messing about with home /desktop PC's onto servers, networking and a domains. I am confindent on any desktop PC and most software but we have a pretty basic terminal services server and another server (domain controller, I think, I'm not even sure! where do I learn this kind of thing!!)at work and I'm not really sure what it can do.
it might be a case of you don't know what you don't know but I'd kind of like to utilise it to it's maximum capabilities and I obviously have to be careful as the company runs off the thing but how does one go about making that step up and learning on my own?
Build your own servers - set up your domain controller, file server, mail server and get them running. Even do it in VMWare.
I have learnt form using VM's and customers servers really - just don't go breaking customer servers!
Try to find a particular part you are interested in and build knowledge form there
I have learnt form using VM's and customers servers really - just don't go breaking customer servers!
Try to find a particular part you are interested in and build knowledge form there
When I left school I got an apprenticeship for a local company working in their IT department. I went from helping people I knew to fix their computers, to being taught all about Windows NT, networking etc pretty much overnight. After being there for a few months I started getting relied upon more and more and my knowledge and experience grew out of that. A lot of it is must fiddling with things until it works.
Hope that gives you some sort of indication. Basically, to make the step up from doing desktop support to server support you need to gain experience and possibly some qualifications to back it up. I'd suggest setting up virtual (or physical) lab environments at home to learn stuff on.
Just fiddle around with stuff and if you're unsure what something does, Google is your friend. There are literally millions of articles on the internet teaching you how to install, configure and manage server environments. Maybe get some training materials to help you learn too?
