zona's questions

Does anyone know if Google Apps for Business edition hosts the apps (gmail, calendar, etc.) on a physically separate infrastructure than the Standard (free) infrastructure? We've been growing increasingly annoyed with the lost/severely delayed email messages, downtime, etc. of Google Apps (standard) over time, and we are wondering if moving to the paid version would bring any benefits. Specifically, if the Business edition is not in some way on a different physical infrastructure, and we are in essence paying for a few small perks but still run on the usual standard/free setup, then we would probably have the same (or just as many) issues with the Business version.

I've emailed Google's sales team responsible for GApps, but haven't heard anything back in 4 days, which already doesn't speak well for the service. So, anyone have any insight into this?

Thanks in advance for any and all help :)

What would be the best way (i.e., most reliable way) to create a persistent VPN connection between 2 servers if you don't have the ability to create a point to point VPN between the edge firewalls/routers of the 2 networks?

I have a server that's geographically distant from our office (for example, say the office is in San Diego and the remote server is in Chicago). We do not control the firewall/router for the remote location. We need the remote server to maintain a persistent VPN connection back to our offices. By persistent, I mean connects automatically (even after reboots), doesn't time out, and can re-connect in the event of a dropped connection. The remote server will be a member of our domain (all Domain Controllers are in the office location). Only traffic for the domain's subnet should go over the VPN connection. All other traffic should otherwise go to the remote server's default gateway.

We do have a VPN Server at the office location (Windows Server 2003 RRAS). The remote server is Server 2008. I do have control over the office firewall, but not the remote firewall or router. Is there any robust/reliable way to set this up?

Hopefully the description makes sense. If more detail is needed, please ask.

I am looking for information on some of the limits (hard-coded or theoretical) for IIS7 and NLB for website hosting. I have looked around but haven't found anything concrete yet.

On a basic, single server IIS7 setup (Server 2008 x64), is there a limit on how many websites you can host on a single server? Or a theoretical limit on concurrent web requests? I'm not talking about memory limits or resource utilization, I simply mean is IIS7 either hard-coded or limited config-wise to only support a maximum number of websites? 1,000? 10,000? More?

Also, does adding a second server via Microsoft's NLB into the mix reduce any of these theoretical limits?

I will be looking into capacity planning and resource limits later, but for right now I was just trying to find any documentation on what the theoretical limits are of IIS7 itself.

Thanks.

Update: Just saw this blog post with some info on IIS6. If anyone knows if these limits and/or server tweaks still exist for 2008/IIS7, please let me know.