Server upgrade

I had planned to start a server upgrade this holiday - however due to the NTLDR is missing error message appearing during a server reboot, the upgrade was rushed forward to this afternoon.

After attempting a repair from the Server 2003 install CD (which failed), I decided to swap out the 120GB main drive for another I had lying around. Then whilst the fileserver was re-installing Server 2003, I put the dead drive into an external enclosure and attached it to the new server. Luckily the drive was still alive and I was able to copy the 50GB+ of Virtual Machines to the new server.

To cut a long story short, everything is up and running now, with my setup split across 4 servers now instead of the previous 3. You'll notice a slight speed increase from the upgrade - as the slickhouse homepage now takes around 0.5 seconds to generate, rather than the previous 0.7. I'll look into moving MS SQL Server to a new virtual server, leaving MySQL on its own to occupy the full allocated RAM, in the near future - which may reduce that time even further. The new setup is as follows:

Router:

Backupserver (not always on): Fileserver: Virtualserver: The Virtualserver itself still uses Microsoft's Virtual Server 2005, though I tried installing VMWare's ESXi, but it doesn't support the motherboard's onboard SATA controller (AMD 780G Southbridge). The point to mention is that it can support up to 16GB RAM, using 4 x 4GB modules - however 4GB DDR2 modules are still a rarity. At the moment it's using about 1/2 of the 6GB RAM running 7 virtual machines (all Server 2003 at 256/512 RAM allocation).

I've decided to stick to Virtual Server 2005 for the forseeable future, as it's very quick to get a Virtual Machine back up and running if I encounter another problem like today's. It's simply a case of copying across the vhd and either creating a new machine (pointing to said vhd), or also copying across the vmc file to keep the existing machine's settings.

Separating the 1TB storage from the virtual servers should make storage upgrades easier in the future and also allow for less downtime when carrying out maintenance. Let's see?

Posted: Sunday 28th December 2008, 18:02pm
Categories: Computers and Technology, Slickhouse, Web
Tags: microsoft, server-2003, virtual-server
Bookmark and Share

There are 6 comments:

Adamskii said:

Dude; "0.5 seconds to generate", well it took me 0.6 seconds wtf!? Lol I joke I am so funny! Very Happy new year to all three of you!

31/12/2008 12:00:47 | Permalink

Matt said:

Ah, it varies. The good news is that it's successfully running 8 Virtual Machines, with over 2GB RAM free. The Dual Core CPU seems to handle the multiple machines very well.

Happy New Year to you too, now to come up with some resolutions...

01/01/2009 22:15:31 | Permalink

LordByron said:

Best deal i could find for an egg box.

http://www.hotukdeals.com/item/308062/xbox-360-arcade-console-only-107-de/

02/01/2009 11:14:34 | Permalink

Adamskii said:

Expired|!!! Sainsbo gogogo (ifitson) Some funker took the flat i wanted here, bah! My house is freezing, better get used to it as going to be in a tent soon

03/01/2009 13:52:53 | Permalink

Matt said:

Are you planning on moving out from your house then? You could always put a tent inside another (as you've done before) to create double insulation. Maybe even fill the cavity with some foam stuff for a semi-permanent solution?

Funny thing is, I went to turn my XBOX on last night as I planned to cover it in a towel to make the red light appear. Popped Mass Effect in and started playing, expecting it to crash on me as it did 2 weeks or so ago. However, after 2 hours of gaming it was fine. So it appears to have been a one off. I guess leaving the 360 turned off and unplugged from the wall for that long sorted it out.

If it goes again, I'll be toasting it with a towel to force the red lights. If that doesn't succeed, then I'll pop to Sainsburys. Thanks for the advice!

03/01/2009 15:36:32 | Permalink

Adamskii said:

360's are mentalist. & the towel trick will likely fix it before it breaks it but its got to die sometime and with nothing to lose may as well when u need to.

Yeah the tent idea is good, it was so dam hot when I did that last time that that prob would end up being hotter then my house can get right now anyway. Cavity insulation on a tent? Like it!

04/01/2009 18:37:01 | Permalink

Leave a comment