Your Virtualization Farm- how many servers should you allocate?
A student recently was worried about the number of servers that they had allocated for their virtualization farm. There are a few tools out there that can do a pretty in depth analysis of your physical environment and usage and give you an estimate as to what resources you would need to virtualize all of your physical systems. VMware’s Capacity Planner tool is the most notable of these types of systems. But it costs and can take quite a while to gather enough information – usually at least 30 days.
For small companies this might not be feasible so you can get a rough, very rough estimate of the number of servers that you need by using this formula.
Number of VMs X amount of RAM needed by each VM = Total RAM
Total RAM / 4 = Total number of Cores
You can then use this number to figure out how many physical machines you need based upon the number of cores available. Then give it enough Physical RAM to support the Virtual Machines, allowing 10% of RAM for Service Console and VMKernel, etc.
Example:
So for 30 VMs that need 2 GB of RAM each you need at least 60 GB of RAM for the ESXi Server. You then calculate the number of Cores by dividing 60 by 4, which gives you 15 cores. If say you have 2 Way Quad Core machines with 32 GB RAM, you have 8 cores per machine. Thus each host can only support 16 VMs at most. But on the safe side you need to factor in 10% of the RAM will be used by the service console, VMKernel and other agents running on the host. Ten percent of 32 is 3.2, rounding up we get 4 GB of RAM thus we only really have 28 GB of RAM available and can only really support 14 VMs per host. Thus to support at least 30 VMs we need 3 hosts and if we want to failover support we will need an extra host. So to safely support at least 30 VMs we need 4 hosts.
Blog Author: Alicia T, brings to her classroom two decades of teaching experience and the expertise that comes from a prior career as an IT consultant. Specializing in teaching Microsoft, NetApp, and VMWare training software and programs, Alicia understands and emphasizes the connections between various tools and platforms in order to maximize student proficiency.
Want to get Cisco certified?
We want to minimize the things you have to worry about. By enrolling in a Expected to Run (ETR) or a Guaranteed to Run (GTR) class, you are doing away with the need to reschedule or redo travel and hotel plans. A few less things to worry about, so you can focus on what’s really important- your training and certification.
A shout out to all you network professionals. Here are Guaranteed to Run dates for our upcoming CCNA classes, CCNP Boot Camps, VMWare vsphere Boot Camp amongst a few.
Our certified and acclaimed CCNA, VMWare and CCNP instructors are scheduled to run classes in the coming two weeks. Check out the schedule-
Guaranteed to Run Boot Camps |
||
| Course Title | Location | Start Date |
| CCNP Voice (CCVP) + CCNA Voice Dual-Certification | Fremont – San Francisco Bay Area, CA | 2/6/2012 |
| CCNA Training Boot Camp | Dallas, TX | 2/13/2012 |
| VMWare vSphere 5.0 Certification Boot Camp | Fremont – San Francisco Bay Area, CA | 2/13/2012 |
| Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 Boot Camp | Fremont – San Francisco Bay Area, CA | 2/20/2012 |
| CCNA Training Boot Camp | Fremont – San Francisco Bay Area, CA | 2/20/2012 |
Which are the best Cisco certifications to boost your IT career?
Within the IT and technology industries, the options for career paths are often varied and numerous. There are many employment opportunities, areas of expertise, and certifications to obtain, so how does one figure out what to pursue?
The decision will comes to rest on several crucial factors, such as your current career status, your desired salary, where you want to end up, and what you need to do in order to arrive at that destination. One of the most universally-recognized brands for any IT professional to be affiliated with is Cisco Systems and the various certifications they offer. But what should you choose to become certified in?
IT Professionals can choose from among a wide menu of options when it comes to skills they want to become proficient in. Below is a guide to some of the most basic and fundamental areas of Cisco training—preliminary areas of expertise that you can build upon to increase your career success.
Cisco CCNA training program
Becoming familiar with the procedures, strategies, and techniques of Cisco networks is integral to the curriculum one must study in order to gain certification as a Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA). A CCNA certiification serves as a gateway for further personal development. Cisco CCNA Training allows you to not only master the basics of setting up and troubleshooting networks with regard to both hardware and software, but to progress onward to other certifications and career opportunities, such as CCNP and CCIE.
Cisco CCNP certification
Once you’ve obtained the prior certification and have the knowledge necessary to operate Cisco networks on a preliminary level, you’ll want to consider climbing the ladder even further by enrolling in a CCNP course. In the progression of licensed Cisco courses, Network Professional designation immediately follows that of a Network Associate. By studying for your CCNP certifications, you will become familiar with how to implement proprietary IP routing, switched networks, and how to maintain such networks. Some programs also offer a unique combined training program for both certifications, in which students learn the basics of both technologies.
Cisco CCNA Security certification
Possessing CCNA Security certification indicates that you are familiar not only with basic CCNA technologies, but that you are able to perceive and address threats to the infrastructure of information systems. These include weaknesses in networks and potential harmful threats from external sources. Cisco CCNA Security certification is a benefit for any IT professional regardless of your specific career path: holding the certification attests to your commitment to safety, and your awareness of the importance of securing data that is vital to a company’s operation.
Cisco CCNA Voice certification
For anyone working with a company that utilizes voice technologies, having this certification is an absolute must. This certification trains and prepares individuals for work in the areas of VoIP technologies, including IP telephony and IP PBX. Students also learn about how to solve problems with call control, voicemail, and other features of a voice-integrated information system. This certification prepares one well for work as a voice manager, voice engineer, or an administrator for similar technologies.
Cisco CCNA Wireless certification
An education provided by the leading providers of courses in Cisco CCNA Wireless certification offers one a solid background in the pillars of wireless technology, covering such topics as wireless regulatory bodies, WLAN RF principles, topologies, and the interactions of WLANs with wireless interfaces. Once completed, individuals will know how to install and configure wireless controllers with confidence, and to make use of a variety of wireless clients and techniques.
About Cisco Training
Professionals who are highly proficient in the employment of Cisco operational systems supervise the Cisco courses offered at Unitek Education. Instructors are familiar with CCNP and CSP1 tracks as well as CCNA curriculum, are Cisco certified, and also serve as consultants to Unitek Education.
About Unitek Education
Unitek Education is well known as an IT training provider for skilled professionals seeking Cisco certification. As a Cisco Learning Partner (CLP), it offers highly focused training for individuals and corporations through accelerated training boot camps in Cisco CCNA and CCNP at its cutting-edge training centers in the United States. The acclaimed CCNA training program is a highly specialized course teaching both ICND1 and ICND2 using official Cisco training curriculum. To learn more about CCNA training courses, please visit www.unitek.com/training/cisco/ccna-training.php or call toll free 1-888-825-6273.
California Citrix
Among the bits and pieces of undocumented Citrix history that I’ve picked up from the national Citrix classes we’ve been running at Unitek over the years, I learned that Citrix really was named after the “citrus” trees in Ft. Lauderdale, where Ed Iacobucci invented Terminal Services and sold it to Microsoft. Of course Microsoft missed out on all the enterprise features that Citrix still brings to the table with its flagship product, now called “XenApp”, that runs on top of Microsoft Terminal Services.
Out here in beautiful Bay Area, California, though, it turns out people do use Citrix on citrus tree farms, and we’ve also had some students from almond tree farms, tomato sauce farms, even J. Lohr Vinyards, a wine company n southern CA. They told me that if you have grape fields and you don’t have Citrix, you can’t compete, everyone has to know what temperature which grapes are at what time in order to go pick them, and they do that via a remote application being pushed down to handheld devices in the field, and how else are you going to do that effectively and efficiently? Citrix, of course!
And it’s not just the farmers out here setting up Citrix farms. A good portion of the work out here is the healthcare field. Kaiser Permanente, the biggest non-military implementation of Citrix in the world, sent their lead architect to our CCIA class several years ago. We have also worked in depth over the years with the leads from Stanford Medical, and Sutter health. We’ve trained the team from Stora Enzo, the largest paper company in the world, IKEA, Visa, and Chevron, side by side of course with a bunch of great engineers from smaller companies we’ve never heard of (though some of those can be the most interesting examples of what Citrix can do with a shoestring budget). Everybody uses this stuff, and what I’ve found is that the engineers who make it to a national Citrix class of this caliber are usually the best of the best, which is partly why I enjoy this job so much.
The US Government, it would seem from recent history, has to be the biggest Citrix user in the world, though it’s broken up into millions of isolated implementations. At Unitek we’ve taught Citrix to the FBI, CIA, DoD, Navy, FDA, and who knows how many others. Almost every class has some kind of government client, which always adds to the security aspect of the product.
All this is what really makes Unitek’s national classes stand out from the crowd, because after 5 years of teaching here, though we offer a lot of value-add just from our own collection of insights, the biggest value-add, I believe, is you guys, eachother, because after my lectures and demonstrations, it’s the teamwork of a great class that really makes the experience.
So if you come out to one of our Citrix classes here in the Bay Area, we’re going to want to do more than just teach. After we explain the product and the “Best Practices”, we are going to want to know what you are doing with Citrix, and how you are doing it, because Citrix is a niche, and leveraging the amazing wealth of tools Citrix offers today is an art that gets better all the time.
How Many Spares Drives Dhould I Allocate For My Storage System?
This question comes up frequently and the answer is somewhat complex. It depends on the number of drives in the storage system and the characteristics of those drives.
Remember, if you are clustering your storage system, each head in the cluster will need its own spares. Additionally, if you are using syncmirror, you will need spares for each storage pool.
Additionally, if your storage system has both fibre channel and SATA drives you need different spares for each technology. Fibre channel drives cannot act as spares for SATA drives and SATA drives cannot act as spares for fibre channel drives.
Ideally, if you have disks of different speeds or different sizes, you should have spares for each size and speed. It is possible to mix drive speeds. For example, if you have a mixture of 10k and 15k fibre channel drives in a storage system you should allocate the different speed drives to different aggregates. If a 10k drive fails, then a 15k spare could act as a spare. You will not be able to use the additional performance of the 15k drive, but the raid group of 10k drives will perform as before. You are just not getting the performance you paid for when you bought the 15k drive. The reverse if not true. If a 15k drive fails and the only spare available is a 10k drive, then the effective speed of the raid group of 15k drives will be reduced by the 10k drive. This is better than no spare at all, but now you have reduced performance.
It is also possible to use a large drive to act as spare for a smaller drive. Again, this is a supported but not recommended. The capacity of the large drive will be reduced to the same size as the drive it is replacing. Of course, a small drive cannot act as a spare for a larger drive
After this is becomes just a question of numbers.
You should have two spares drives in each category, up to 100 drives. Then, NetApp recommends that you add one additional spare for each additional 84 drives. Here is a table from TR-3437:
| Number of Shelves | Number of Disks | Recommended Spares |
| 2 | 28 | 2 |
| 6 | 84 | 2 |
| 8 | 112 | 3 |
| 12 | 167 | 3 |
| 24 | 336 | 4 |
| 36 | 504 | 6 |
| 72 | 1008 | 12 |
Error 0×80040201 Sending e-Mail From Outlook
When attempting to send an e-mail from Outlook, I received the following error message:
I use several accounts in my Outlook profile, and have previously read that a support article on the microsoft support site recommended to delete and re-create my outlook profile. A number of different sites when I googled “outlook error 0×80040201″ seemed to indicate the same thing; delete and re-create my Outlook profile. One of these days I’ll get around to deleting and re-creating all four of my profiles some day…
I could have ran this ‘registry cleaner???’
http://errornerds.com/error/?k=0×80040201&gclid=CKW3vdSEhpwCFRlcagodk0QS_w
Or tried what everyone else did – delete and re-create the Outlook Profile:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/829918/en-us
…but my issue seemed limited to outbound e-mails that either had an attachment (but only to certain people for some reason) or e-mails with embedded graphics and more than 500k, so I had a difficult time believing it was a corrupt profile.
So, when today I tried to send an e-mail, a very important one, and when the issue persisted, I thought I would dig a little deeper as it was a non-work day, and came up with the following:
On outbound e-mails for addresses that I have typed before (and according to the microsoft articles that suggested I re-create my profile – to addresses that weren’t contacts) I would have an alias instead of the actual e-mail address, even though they may not have existed as contacts in my default outlook contact profile. What I started thinking was that if the address was indeed an exchange ‘in-memory’ address as according to this article:
http://www.pcreview.co.uk/forums/thread-1872774.php
I tried all suggestions, but it didn’t work for me. What I found was that Outlook still had some Exchange adresses in ‘ it’s memory’ and the message to be sent included an exchange adress, whereas exchange was not being used anymore.
This could happen on systems which have used Exchange but have changed back to POP3 E-mail delivery.
Checking the to-be-sent messages is the key, remove the adresses that are exchange adresses and substitute them with the real POP E-mail adresses.
Kind regards,
Martijn Arns
Brainquiry / Brain Resource Company
Netherlands
www.eegbiofeedback.nl / www.brainquiry.nl
…then why not use the ‘Delete a Name From Auto-Complete’ feature of outlook, in which you:
1. Select the unwanted name or e-mail address by using the UP ARROW or DOWN ARROW key.
2. Press DELETE.
…and viola – PROBLEM FIXED. I didn’t even need to take the rest of my Sunday away from my family to uninstall outlook, re-install my entire OS because I was dumb enough to download some ‘free registry cleaner…’ or re-create my profile(s).
I certainly hope I can save someone time so they can spend it with their family, like I did with mine today!
MM
Microsoft CRM Consultant
Unitek Microsoft CRM Services
Cisco Wireless Update
Now is an exciting time to be in the Cisco wireless training arena.
We currently have the IUWNE class, which teaches students the foundations of wireless, and leads to the CCNA-Wireless certification.
Rumours abound that soon Cisco will launch a CCNP level series of classes for the wireless track too.
We know Cisco are committed to wireless, as they have officially announced the ‘CCIE Wireless Written’ and CCIE Wireless Lab’ exams.
CCIE Wireless Written was made available in February of 2009, and the CCIE Wireless Lab is available as of April 13th.
CCIE Wireless Written is exam number 350-050. The exam is two-hours long, and has multiple choice test with 100 questions. It is designed to test wireless professionals in planning, designing, implementing, operating and troubleshooting Enterprise WLAN networks. The exam is closed book and no outside reference materials are allowed.
The CCIE Wireless Lab will only be tested in San Jose and Brussels at the moment. It is live as of April 13th. Costs are USD$1,400+taxes. Cisco have not officially released the hardware or software versions to be tested in the lab yet, watch this space…
Clarifying “Windows PE”
Hi All,
Today I wanted to clarify a commonly used term “Windows PE”,which some of the people always have doubts on.
Lets see how many of us can get it right !!!
Windows Preinstallation Environment (Windows PE) 2.0 is a minimal Win32 operating system with limited services, built on the Windows Vista kernel. It is used to prepare a computer for Windows installation, to copy disk images from a network file server, and to initiate Windows Setup.
Windows PE is not designed to be the primary operating system on a computer, but is instead used as a standalone preinstallation environment and as an integral component of other setup and recovery technologies, such as Setup for Windows Vista, Windows Deployment Services (Windows DS), the Systems Management Server (SMS) Operating System (OS) Deployment Feature Pack, and the Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE).
In the past, MS-DOS-based boot floppy disk was used to start a computer and then connect to a network share where a Windows installation source or disk image was located or to troubleshoot and recover a copy of Windows that did not start.
But we all know how many limitations it had !!!!!
-No support for the NTFS file system.
-No native networking support.
-No support for 32-bit (or 64-bit) Windows device drivers, making it necessary to locate 16-bit drivers.
So now we have Windows PE to solve all those limitations and offer great features like
-Native support for NTFS 5.x file systems, including dynamic volume creation and management.
-Native support for TCP/IP networking and file sharing (client only).
-Native support for 32-bit (or 64-bit) Windows device drivers.
-Native support for a subset of the Win32 Application Programming Interface (API); optional support for Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) and Windows Script Host (Windows SH).
-Can be started from different kinds of media, including CDs, DVDs, USB flash devices (UFD), and Windows Deployment Services (Windows DS).
Certifications in this Economy
I find myself in an interesting position during the economic woes because of my verifiable experience and certifications. Think about it if you had over your resume and you have one or two certifications what does that mean? Yea read some books took some tests good for him. Well what if you have 5 or 6? Hum, knows a thing or two is interested in learning, wow those are some pretty old acronyms and some pretty new ones too, been around a while… 10? Um why do you want to work for us? Or better yet, what can we do to keep you from working for our competition??? 15? No really I call B.S. let’s verify this resume before…. What they are all real?! CCNA, CCNA+Security, CCDA, CCNP, CCSP, CCDP, CCIE R&S, Cisco INFOSEC specialist, Cisco Firewall specialist, Cisco IDS specialist, Cisco VPN Specialist, MCSE NT4, 2000, 2003, 2008 + Messaging + Security. Learn Train Succeed.
Why Make the Move to Windows Server 2008
Hello all,
Finally, we are at a stage when companies are ready to upgrade to Microsoft Windows Server
2008. Yet, some people still want specific reasons as to why exactly Server 2008 is better than Server 2000.
Here are some of the highlights that are causing us to jump.
1. HYPER -V
With Hyper-V, the Windows Server 2008 virtualization solution, a single physical server can host the workloads of multiple Line of Business servers. Hyper-V helps organizations to achieve optimal use of their hardware resources and provides the agility needed to adapt to changing IT needs.
2. SERVER MANAGER
The Server Manager Console provides a single, unified console for managing a server’s configuration and system information, displaying server status, identifying problems with server role configuration, and managing all roles installed on the server. It allows administrators to complete tasks with fewer clicks without having to navigate between multiple tools and interfaces.
3. Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA)
Windows Server 2008 includes Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications (SUA), a multi-user UNIX environment that supports more than 300 UNIX commands, utilities, and shell scripts. Users can maintain one user name and password for Windows domains and UNIX systems, synchronizing the credentials automatically when one changes.
4. Active Directory Rights Management Services (AD RMS)
Companies need to share information with partners and clients without losing control over that information. Rights Management Services enables organizations to control how documents are used—including who can view them, whether they can be printed, even whether they can be forwarded or deleted—both internally and externally.
5. Server Core
The new Server Core installation option provides a minimal environment for running specific server roles. This helps improve reliability and efficiency, giving the IT department the ability to better utilize existing hardware. It also simplifies ongoing administration and patch management requirements by reducing the need to update unneeded files and functionality.