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Archive for August, 2008

3d-traceroute 3d Traceroute does what its name implies. It displays traceroute responses in a three dimensional representation: X-axis represents the hops (routers); the y-axis, the response time of the routers; and the z-axis stands for successive probes in time.

While this seems to be just some kind of gimmick, it might turn out to be useful, if you have to track down certain kinds of network problems. For example, if you experience erratic network transfer delays, you can find out easily where the bottleneck is. All you have to do is to probe your destination for some time. The router that causes the delays will stand out in the graphic representation sooner or later.

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Virtualization Congress 2008 Logo - Media You might have already heard about the Virtualization Congress in London taking place October 14-16, 2008. I am glad to announce that Alessandro Perilli, founder of virtualization.info and organizer of this event, has offered a 25% discount to all 4sysops readers.

Many important vendors in the virtualization market will be present. In particular, the three major players, i.e. VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix are sending high-profile representatives. You are probably familiar with Mark Russinovich, one of the founders of Sysinternals. I suppose there are not many at Microsoft who have as much detailed technical knowledge about Windows he does. He describes his keynote at the Virtualization Congress in the video below.

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When it comes to cloud computing, most people think about hosted applications running somewhere in a big data center. Only time can tell if this kind of cloud computing will gain acceptance. It seems to me that things develop very slowly here. But what about renting a complete server in the cloud? Meanwhile, most big web hosts also offer dedicated servers. Prices go down almost every month, and the servers they have are becoming more powerful. Since we are about to buy a few new servers, I compared the prices and considered the consequence of moving some of our servers to a third-party data center.

My experiences

I have been working with rented dedicated and virtual servers on my private projects for a couple of years. My overall experience is quite positive. Administering a server in the cloud is not much different from managing a server in our server room. For most tasks, it doesn’t really matter where the server is located. It could be in the room next door or on the other side of the planet.

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Reducing hardware and power consumption costs might be viable in some scenarios with virtualization technology although the possible cost savings are often exaggerated. However, there are other factors to consider here.

Sophisticated virtualization technology does not come for free. Yes, there are a couple of free solutions available. However, they have important downsides. The most prominent solution is probably VMware Server. You could run it on a Linux host without any license costs. But we all know why VMware offers this product for free. It is not just because of Microsoft’s Virtual Server. The main reason is that they want you to buy VMware ESX after you started to like virtualization technology. You will want to have more performance, more redundancy and many other features that VMware Server lacks. Of course, this is an absolutely legitimate strategy. However, for most organizations it will mean they will pay sooner or later for virtualization technology. These costs certainly also have to be taken into account when it comes to the overall costs of server virtualization.

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This is my second post in the series about the costs of server virtualization. So, what is it about the “hay argument”: ten horses require ten times more hay than one horse? Do ten servers always consume less energy than one? I don’t think so. How much hay or power is consumed does not depend solely on the number of workers performing a certain task.

I suppose a well-fed sumo wrestler consumes ten times as much food as a ballerina. However, ten ballerinas have a fair chance to floor a sumo wrestler. Power consumption is connected to the amount of work that has to be done. Thus, if a high-end server has to do the work of ten average servers, it obviously needs a lot more power than each of them does.

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Submitted by Josh Stephens - Blog: Geek Speak

solarwinds_netflow1 Download SolarWinds FREE Real-time NetFlow Analyzer to Get Deep Visibility into Network Traffic & Slowdowns!

Our new free tool unlocks the power of NetFlow on your network: SolarWinds Real-time NetFlow Analyzer! This free desktop tool captures and analyzes NetFlow data in real time to show you exactly what types of traffic are on your network, where that traffic is coming from, and where it is going. With Real-time NetFlow Analyzer, you can take the guesswork out of diagnosing traffic spikes and troubleshooting bandwidth issues.

If you are new to NetFlow, you’re going to love this powerful protocol. If you haven’t already, it is easy to turn on flows on your existing Cisco routers. We even have a free tool – NetFlow Configurator – to help you remotely configure NetFlow v5 via SNMP on supported Cisco® devices. We’ve bundled this tool with the Real-time NetFlow Analyzer download, so that you can get started with monitoring network traffic immediately.

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A while ago, I discussed the seven disadvantages of server virtualization. Cost was one factor that I did not cover in that post. Questioning whether one can reduce costs with server virtualization sounds a bit like blasphemy these days. You will hardly find an article about server virtualization that does not claim that it is the best way to save costs in the data center. According to this view, server consolidation is the main benefit for virtualizing servers.

The arguments supporting this claim are so obvious that most IT managers do not dare question them. Replacing ten physical servers with just one seems to be the best cost-saving measure one can think of - and since the Green IT hype began, even CEOs talk about power-saving in the data center. The calculation seems to be quite easy, too: ten horses require ten times as much hay as one horse. Every CEO can understand that. So does it really make sense to challenge the costs saving axiom of server virtualization? I think it does.

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NT-EventLog-Explorer The NT EventLog Explorer was developed to simplify manual retrieving and creating of event log related information for Microsoft Operations Manager. However, this tool can also replace Windows Event Viewer in some situations. In particular, if you want to access the event logs of a certain application or service, you will accomplish this faster using NT Event Log Explorer.

The Explorer-like user interface lets you navigate easily to specific sources. In Event Viewer, you would use the filter or the search function to list the event log entries of a certain source. If you don’t know the exact name of the source, this can be difficult. Thus, clicking through the “Event log tree” of NT EventLog Explorer will be faster in many cases.

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