osij2is's questions

I'm debating on doing an ESXi 4.1/5.0 installation on a USB stick or a pair of 32GB SATA II SSDs (RAID1 mirror). According to VMWare's documentation, when ESXi is booting it looks for a 4GB space for a scratch partition. Assuming the USB stick I use has adequate storage (say 16GB), is there any advantage to installing ESXi on an SSD or better yet, and SSD RAID1 mirror? Note: The documentation states that ESXi takes up 5.2GB of free space on disk; 5.2GB + 4GB = 9.2GB which is well below the 16GB for the USB stick.

I'd prefer to use the SSDs for something other than the ESXi installation. I think my main concern is if the USB stick dies for whatever random reason. Can I just reinstall ESXi on another USB stick and ESXi will pickup as if nothing happened?

According to VMWare's ESXi 5.0 Performance Best Practices (PDF Link):

You can optionally configure a special host cache on an SSD (if one is installed) to be used for the new swap to host cache feature. This swap cache will be shared by all the virtual machines running on the host, and host-level swapping of their most active pages will benefit from the low latency of SSD. This allows a relatively small amount of SSD storage to have a potentially significant performance impact

NOTE Using swap to host cache and putting the regular swap file in SSD (as described below) are two different approaches for improving host swapping performance. Swap to host cache makes the best use of potentially limited SSD space while also being optimized for the large block sizes at which some SSDs work best.

I'm still new to ZFS. I've been using Nexenta but I'm thinking of switching to OpenIndiana or Solaris 11 Express. Right now, I'm at a point of considering virtualizing the ZFS server as a guest within either ESXi, Hyper-V or XenServer (I haven't decided which one yet - I'm leaning towards ESXi for VMDirectPath and FreeBSD support).

The primary reason being that it seems like I have enough resources to go around that I could easily have 1-3 other VMs running concurrently. Mostly Windows Server. Maybe a Linux/BSD VM as well. I'd like the virtualized ZFS server to host all the data for the other VMs so their data could be kept on a physically separate disks from the ZFS disks (mount as iscsi or nfs).

The server currently has an AMD Phenom II with 6 total cores (2 unlocked), 16GB RAM (maxed out) and an LSI SAS 1068E HBA with (7) 1TB SATA II disks attached (planning on RAIDZ2 with hot spare). I also have (4) 32GB SATA II SSDs attached to the motherboard. I'm hoping to mirror two of the SSDs to a boot mirror (for the virtual host), and leave the other two SSDs for ZIL and L2ARC (for the ZFS VM guest). I'm willing to add two more disks to store the VM guests and allocate all seven of the current disks as ZFS storage. Note: The motherboard does not have IOMMU support as the 880G doesn't support it, but I do have an 890FX board which does have IOMMU if it makes a huge difference.

My questions are:

1) Is it wise to do this? I don't see any obviously downside (which makes me wonder why no one else has mentioned it). I feel like I could be making a huge oversight and I'd hate to commit to this, move over all my data only to go fubar from some minute detail I missed.

2) ZFS virtual guest performance? I'm willing to take a small performance hit but I'd think if the VM guest has full disk access to the disks that at the very least, disk I/O performance will be negligible (in comparison to running ZFS non-virtualized). Can anyone speak to this from experience hosting a ZFS server as a VM guest?

I'm trying to figure out if there are any differences between the "R" vs. the "S" of this SAS controller. As far as I can tell, the "S" is a Sun Microsystems re-branded version. I can't find much solid documentation on the "S" version.

Most documentation that I find is on Oracle's documentation website, but mostly it's about setting up RAID on the HBA, not the specs themselves. I know Intel and (apparently) Sun re-brand the controller as their own but I'm curious to know if there are any minor/major differences that Sun may have made.

Thanks!

I've only administered rather small networks (<=25 nodes). Usually I put the gateway .1, dns/proxy as .10, mail at .20, printers at .30-39 and so on and so forth. I never directly use IP addresses as DNS hostnames are clearly the better way, but I like to have a clear pattern/layout/design when building a network from scratch.

My DNS mapping also has a simple naming pattern/layout as well. For example, all of my devices have two names; one formal name based on role (dc01, mail02, etc.) and an informal name. Nothing fancy, but real simple and manageable.

I'm trying to figure out a more intuitive/creative IP/Subnet/DNS scheme (if there is something better). I'm sure others have more intuitive schemes depending on the network objectives and such. My network that I'm working on is still small, but I have numerous devices to contend with.

I'm looking for a general pattern or methodology to assign IP address (ranges/classes), dns names and subnet networks that encompasses 4-5 major points:

1. Network services (mail, file, proxy, etc.)
2. Software development (environments - dev/staging/prod,
3. Media (streaming, large file transfers, archiving)
4. Virtual servers/desktops
5. VoIP

I've never worked directly with VoIP but it's something to take into consideration for the future.

Overall I got some really good ideas from everyone. Wish I could give out more votes/accepted answers. Thanks for the responses!

I have no real experience with ZFS, and very limited experience with Solaris & FreeBSD. After reading numerous articles about ZFS, I'm pretty convinced ZFS is something I want to use for my home disk array (16-20 disks).

I'm trying to decide between Solaris and FreeBSD. I have no real preference but I don't know the differences between the two.

Can someone point out the differences or benefits/advantages of one OS over the other?

EDIT:

To avoid being "off-topic", I'll rephrase my question(s):

1. What features do Solaris (or FreeBSD) have over the other in terms of ZFS support?
2. Are there significant performance differences between Solaris vs. FreeBSD vs. other in terms of ZFS?

I own a Netgear GSM7224v1 (link) 24-port gigabit switch at home. The switch is about 2 years old and works just fine. The two exhaust fans however, are making quite a bit of noise even after I've cleaned them out with an air can, the fans constantly change their noise, pitch and squeakiness.

Most of the time, this wouldn't bother me but it's gotten to the point where the sheer volume of the noise is unbearable so I need to do something more drastic to fix the issue. My question(s) to SF:

1.) Can I completely replace the fans? The hardware manual for the unit doesn't mention anything specific enough about the fans that are being used.

2.) Can I substitute fans of a similar size? Assuming I can't find the exact replacement exhaust fans, any reason I couldn't use another brand?

3.) Can I go without the fans? I realize that network hardware can get hot, but being such a large switch with only 14 or so of the ports being used, I wondered if I could get away with it. I realize this might not be a wise choice, but I thought it would be worth asking.

4.) Can anyone recommend specific practices/techniques into cleaning fans? I've never had an issue like this before so I'm a bit cautious on what to do next.

I have a 16-port Areca ARC-1260D PCIe RAID card and I was planning to use it as one large array (either RAID 10 or RAID 6). I didn't think about if it was possible to split up the RAID card into two (or more) different RAID arrays. The card in question supports multiple RAID selection.

Is there a large performance drop off (or any other caveats) in using multiple RAID selections off a single adapter? Typically, I've used RAID adapters for one single array at a time so I'm not sure if it's wise/unwise to use multiple RAID sets on a single adapter. Initially I was planning to use the entire array for VMs for XenServer, but now with this option, I'm thinking of making one array for the VMs, another for simple file storage.

Edit: This is for SATA, not SAS. Initially I was looking to fill the array with 1.5TB SATA disks, but the price for 2TB disks has fallen dramatically and I'm thinking of having two RAID arrays on the card; 1 array with 6-8 1.5TB disks, the other with 6-8 2TB disks.

I'm in the planning stage/phase of migrating one of our SQL Server 2000 databases to 2008. Our database holds numerous tables (hundreds) and stored procedures (hundreds). I'm trying to figure out which are in use and which are not. My first guess was to look in the sysobjects table and see if there's a field that stores the a 'last accessed' but I can't seem to find anything within the MSDN documentation.

What's the best way to go about investigating which objects are in use or not in SQL Server 2000?

Out of curiosity, would it be pointless/wasteful/silly to put a firewall as a VM guest (regardless of VM host - ESX, Xen, Hyper-V, etc. etc.) and redirect all traffic from other VM guests through the firewall VM guest?

I'm not sure if other people/organizations practice this or not. I know resources might be constrained (CPU, RAM, Disk/Net I/O) pending whatever traffic may pass, but are there any other scenarios or situations where placing a firewall as a guest VM and having the other guest VMs route to it rather is better or comparable to an external box from the host VM?

In terms of performance, I realize that being a guest VM resource usage will affect other guests but aside from that, am I missing anything? Security, best practices, common sense?

Any thoughts, comments or criticisms are welcome.

A colleague of mine asked whether IP addresses could be "approximated" to physical location. As with most IT questions, "it depends" was a response I used frequently. Is there a service or program that can take a list of IP addresses and find/approximate the physical location to where the IP is?

I'm currently trying out BizTalk 2009 for the first time. I'm by no means a BizTalk user/expert. The installation was quite a lengthy process but sticking to the Microsoft checklist, everything installed correctly without an issue on the first try.

My question may appear to be more stackoverflow-oriented, but my guess is that I have a system configuration issue that needs to be resolved.

The Setup (running VMWare Fusion 2.0) - all software from Microsoft is trial edition. I'm trying to work through several example tutorials and test deployments to make recommendations to management.

• Windows 2008 Server
• 2GB RAM
• 40GB HDD space
• Visual Studio 2008 Professional SP1
• Office 2007 Professional Plus
• SQL Server 2008 Enterprise

I'm currently trying out the tutorials on MSDN (link) and so far everything has worked without a hitch. I've been able to build the solution with no problems. But when it comes to deploying the solution, that's when I get several similar error messages (apologies for the formatting as there are numerous messages):

Error   1    Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED))

Error   2    at Microsoft.BizTalk.Gac.Fusion.IAssemblyCache.InstallAssembly(AssemblyCacheInstallFlag

flags, String manifestFilePath, FusionInstallReference referenceData) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Gac.Gac.InstallAssembly(String assemblyPathname, Boolean force) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment.BizTalkAssembly.GacInstall(String assemblyLocation) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment.BizTalkAssembly.PrivateDeploy(String server, String database, String assemblyPathname, String applicationName) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment.BizTalkAssembly.Deploy(Boolean redeploy, String server, String database, String assemblyPathname, String group, String applicationName, ApplicationLog log)

Error    5    Failed to add resource(s). Change requests failed

for some resources. BizTalkAssemblyResourceManager failed to complete end type change request. Access is denied. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070005 (E_ACCESSDENIED)) 0 0

Warning    6    Assembly "EAIOrchestrations, Version=1.0.0.0,

Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c697d29deb225ec9" depends on the following assemblies that must be installed in the Global Assembly Cache for runtime to succeed: Assembly "EAISchemas, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c697d29deb225ec9"

Error    7    Assembly "EAIOrchestrations, Version=1.0.0.0,

Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c697d29deb225ec9" references the following assemblies that must be deployed before deploying this assembly: Assembly "EAISchemas, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c697d29deb225ec9"

Error    8    Deploy operation failed.
""
Assembly "EAIOrchestrations, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,

PublicKeyToken=c697d29deb225ec9" references the following assemblies that must be deployed before deploying this assembly: Assembly "EAISchemas, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c697d29deb225ec9"

Error    9    at Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment.BizTalkAssembly.PrivateDeploy(String

server, String database, String assemblyPathname, String applicationName) at Microsoft.BizTalk.Deployment.BizTalkAssembly.Deploy(Boolean redeploy, String server, String database, String assemblyPathname, String group, String applicationName, ApplicationLog log)

Error    10    Deploy operation failed.
""
Assembly "EAIOrchestrations, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral,

PublicKeyToken=c697d29deb225ec9" references the following assemblies that must be deployed before deploying this assembly: Assembly "EAISchemas, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c697d29deb225ec9"

Error    11    Failed to add resource(s). Change requests failed

for some resources. BizTalkAssemblyResourceManager failed to complete end type change request. Deploy operation failed. "" Assembly "EAIOrchestrations, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c697d29deb225ec9" references the following assemblies that must be deployed before deploying this assembly: Assembly "EAISchemas, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=c697d29deb225ec9"
0 0

Now, at first glance looking at error #2 there appeared to be a problem with Visual Studio and the GAC. I tried installing the generated .dlls into the GAC manually (copying in windows/assembly) with no luck. Even though my user account is in the administrators group and all the BizTalk groups I couldn't install the dlls.

So, afterwards I logged in as the Administrator and was able to copy the dlls into the GAC and tried redeploying the solution (as my own user account) but the same error messages appeared. I'm out of ideas. I'm sure it's something simple as permissions as the obvious error message code points out E_ACCESSDENIED, I'm just not that familiar with BizTalk internally enough to try out anything else.

Any ideas or solutions would be most appreciated. Thanks!

I'm working with SharePoint 2007 and we're currently working with another organization for a long-term project. We need to access documents in their SharePoint site.

After trying to figure out the wide array of Microsoft products branded with the name 'SharePoint', I'm not even certain that SharePoint can link to an external SharePoint site outside of the domain.

Is it possible to link two separate SharePoint sites together? If so, how is it done? If not, is it possible to program a SharePoint webpart or some .NET component to transfer documents from site A to B?

For the past six or so years now I've done without any kind of anti-virus protection on my (personal) desktops/laptops. Between the A/V subscription scams, resource hogging and errors they 'unintentionally' create, I decided that having an infection was no different then the A/V scanners themselves (to a degree). I have yet to have any kind of virus infect my computers as pfSense and other firewall solutions do a solid job of keeping me safe and a steady diet of patching always helps.

With that said, I also run several consumer-level NAS devices (QNAP,ReadyNAS,etc.) for myself and a handful of clients. For myself, I'm confident that the possibility of a virus hiding amongst my NAS is slim to nil, but for my clients I'm more concerned.

So my direct question to SF: Does anyone know of any type of non-desktop A/V software that can run on a NAS or some service that can (remotely) scan network storage for viruses? I'm looking for a more targeted A/V solution for consumer level NAS. I'm vaguely familiar with Clam-AV for linux based NASes but if anyone else can suggest alternatives to desktop-AV type solutions, I'm all ears (eyes?).

My reasoning for non-desktop A/V scanning is largely based on my experience:

1. My clients computers are easily 3-4 years old. Having several computers all running A/V and slowing them down individually makes no sense when the NAS is perfectly capable of doing the A/V scanning work. I'm not concerned with the workstations as the data (documents, spreadsheets, databases, etc.) are more important.
2. My clients are (very) small business and often don't have a server. Their NAS is as close to a server as they have. Email, web hosting are often outsourced which makes perfect sense for them. All they need is a file server and a NAS is a downright cheap and effective alternative to the real thing.
3. Clients tend to inconsistently follow instructions. Sometimes they disable A/V when they know it's slowing down their computer. All in all, people learn after a disaster but often forget about it over time. No matter how much you try to educate your clients on what to do, their minds are on more important business oriented things and technical issues are (and should be) the last thing on their minds.

A client of ours is using IBM/Tivoli WebSEAL, a reverse-proxy server for some of their internal users. Our web application (ASP.NET 2.0) and is a fairly straightforward web/database application.

Currently, our client users that are going through the WebSEAL proxy are having problems with a .NET 3rd party control. Users who are not going through the proxy have no issues. The 3rd party control is nothing more than an AJAX dynamic tree that on each click requests all the nodes for each leaf.

Now our clients claim that once users click on a node in the control, the control itself freezes in such a way that they don't see anything populate. Users see "Loading..." message appear but no new activity there afterwards. They have to leave the page and go back to the original page in order to view the new nodes.

I've never worked with a reverse proxy before so I have googled quite a bit on the subject even found an article on SF. IBM/Tivoli has mentioned this issue before but this is about all they mention at all. While the IBM doc is very helpful, all of our AJAX is from the 3rd party control. I've tried troubleshooting using Firebug but by not being behind the reverse proxy, I'm unable to truly replicate the problem.

My question is: does anyone have experience with reverse proxies and issues with AJAX sites? How can I go about proving what the exact issue is? Currently we're negotiating remote access so assume for the greater part that I will have access to a machine that's using the WebSEAL proxy.

P.S. I realize this question might teeter on the StackOverFlow/ServerFault jurisdictional debate, but I'm trying to investigate from the systems perspective. I have no experience with reverse proxies (and I'm unclear on the benefits) and little with forwarding proxies.