I always try to get the best prices within the scope of common sense for clients. Mainly because as a integrated stack vendor, the pricing on one component can blow out the total price of the whole stack. And hardware is the first place to start (given an understanding of the management systems and risk credentials of the project at hand already).

One thorn in my side is mandated “Installation and Configuration” charges. Which are basically extortion attempts.

On the one hand no tech from SUN or IBM from their mainframe/mini computer division is going to know or be able to setup all variables in our system as we need – and as we will do over a long period of time – IE: the process of “Configuration” is Iterative and not finite to one small window of time. :-\

And going back to that whole vertical stack business. Why should a client pay a hardware vendor for support and then pay the integrator for support? These built in service charges make it harder for us to win business and sell anything as we have to protect ourselves as we will be doing the support – and that usually means that the client pays twice!

As much as these hardware firms like to chase the integrators and system builders as a great “Channel” to their products buyers in the market place. Mandatory setup and Configuration fees (Yes they apparently are mutually exclusive in charging if not in the vernacular of the Queen’s English!) are a great way of say “Up Yours” to said channel partners/integrators.

It is not yet clear who will get the Gold Medal – but the race is very competitive!

:-\

Select from database ID where name = RICHARD;

Returns and ID of 55 for example.

Then go and do a query like this:

Select * from some_other_table where ID = 55;

Returns, “Sorry does not exist, time to die…..”

Well apparently indexes when corrupt – which is NOT SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN – can cause PostgreSQL to go all stupid and not do a table lookup for real. This happened to me. So I found this:

PlanetPostgresql

Turns out that a reindex and a full vacuum can do wonders – even though a full vacuum is not needed with autovacuum and indexes can’t get corrupted…..or so they say.

I have now added a system wide reindex maintenance plan for PostgreSQL every night. I know that MS-SQL server has an option for this with their maintenance jobs inside enterprise manager. Maybe someone should make an enterprise manager for PostgreSQL too?

In any case, the short of it is, that we were juggling PERC4 cards around servers (PCI-X here, PCIe there..) and also complete raid 1 and raid 10 arrays too. The cards are supposed to “detect” the correct array type from the drives if the firmware was missing. Anyway, through a comedy of errors, it worked exactly 1/3 times. The other times we had to remember the exact settings of our arrays (stripe, etc) and how it was structured. So we could clear PERC cards and then recreate the arrays – taking special care to not initalise the new arrays.

So in the end, you can move arrays and channels about. And with LVM, even designations like /sda /sdb reording is also not an issue. However you should rely on good old fashioned hand held way of doing things. Before you start write down all the salient details of your arrays first.

DRAC RESET

What is a mixed bag in my mind is the new ESX3i. It will be first released in the new Dell VORSO servers, originally due to ship this month and as confirmed by my DELL Sales manager, is slipping into the new year. These servers will not need hard disks (So what about core dumps, logs and swap?) but will have embedded flash with the hypervisor installed.

On the surface it looks like the Hypervisor is now part of the system board. It ain’t. So I don’t expect ESX3i to give any speed increase. What I do expect is that it will give a massive boost to deployment times. If you are deploying new servers at the rate of one or more a week, this is cool. Right now at CANDIS with blades, we have all the wiring already in place due to the chassis. But we still need to go in through the management card to setup the OS. Yes we can open the box and slide in the blade and have a new server fully setup physically. But not the software. From the looks of ESX3i, it goes a step further. Power on the system, it finds a VC server, configures itself, boots up and presents it’s resources to the farm, ready to be dynamically allocated by the VC server.

Oh, they also have smart power management that can power down systems when their computing resources are not needed. This is cool. Since we pay about .2 RMB per kilowatt of power, it does add up. The new low voltage XEON’s are great power savers, as are the new high efficiency power supplies. However add in those dynamic server on/off controls and you will be able to make a serious dent in your power bill. Oh, and keep the “Eco-Terrorists” happy too and thus maybe avoid a politically correct jihad aimed at you, unlike poor Apple Inc.

VMWARE