Mordtech's Blog

Dogging laptop in Ubuntu

mordtech — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:47:35 +0000

My personal laptops have underwent quite a change over the last couple of months. First, I left all since of reality at the door and purchased my first Mac. One of the little 13 inch white versions. I went in with the assumption that if I wasn’t a fan of the OS, I could always load Vista over the top of it. Second, my older laptop which was having a hard time running vista was finally loaded with Ubuntu 8.1. I’ll discuss this in a later post.

The older laptop is a 1.7 Centrino with 1GB of ram. Even with Ubuntu, the machine felt like it was lagging. I installed the CPU monitor and noticed that the CPU never reached above 600 MHZ. Add, I read many, many, many web pages discussing how to turn on cpu scaling, none worked. Many stated that issues like this were usually BIOS related. I booted into the BIOS and checked settings, verified that I had the latest BIOS from the Toshiba website, and reset the BIOS to defaults. Still no help. I then went and checked my Wifes system using CPU-Z. Lo and behold, her’s was also stuck at 600 MHZ. It was an underperforming Toshiba epidemic.

During some freetime at work today, I did a little troubleshoogling. I came across an a 45+ page thread on tabletPCBuss.com. This thread was started in 2004 by people looking to update their older CPUs to Dothan based CPUs on Toshiba laptops. While the CPU was pin accurate, after installing the CPU, it would never reach above 600 MHZ. After a considerable amount of playing around, the thread participants were able to tweak the BIOS using Toshiba tools and a modified file for the BIOS. A pparently, after about page 20 or so, other readers started reporting the same issue of the 600MHZ cap after receiving their laptops back from Toshiba maintenance. By using the same tools needed to replace the CPU, their laptops immediately reached the full potential of the CPU. In the thread, one of the readers posted links to bootable floppy image files with all of the tools. I downloaded the image files onto a USB drive and went back to work.

I get home and now I have to get the image file onto either a CD or a USB flash drive. As I didn’t want to overwrite my flash drive, out comes a CDR and back to Google to learn how to convert an ima to bootable CD. I found that mkisofs is my friend. The page BIOS Flashing with a bootable CD-ROM, has you doing a few other steps, but as the IMA was built specifically for this purpose, you can skip and go straight to the mkisofs command:
sudo mkisofs -o bootcd.iso -b pom1150.ima -c boot.cat ./pomt150.ima

on my laptop running at 600MHZ, it still took less that a minute to complete. Now I opened the folder holding the bootcd.iso, right clicked it and burnt to CD using the default Ubuntu CD burning application. Again, less than a minute, CD complete.

Now reboot the laptop, and boot to the CD. The bat file has three options 1,8,9. it looks like option 1 is what does the work, 8 and 9 are verification. On my laptop, step 1 took a couple of minutes and automatically rebooted the laptop. Booting into Ubuntu, My CPU monitor applet now reports anywhere from 600 MHZ to 1700MHZ. Ubuntu is much happier. I am even able to install Virtualbox and Windows 7. Now it could use more RAM, but the system is much peppier now.

Now that the system is running quicker, I’ll write later on my thoughts about Virtualbox. I’ll also write about Mac OS X and Vmware Fusion 2. Like I said in the first paragraph; Lots of changes.

Fry’s Electronics store poor customer service

mordtech — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 23:19:09 +0000

I purchased an Asus Motherboard from Fry’s in Fishers Indiana. The system was going to be an ESXi PC for home use. When I got the machine home, I wasn’t able to find where to enable AMD-V. I found an article online that made it sound like you need to upgrade the BIOS to get the functionality to enable the AMD-V. I downloaded the rom file from the Asus website and extracted it to a USB key. I booted the workstation into the BIOS and ran the EZ flash utility. Everything appeared to have gone well, until the system rebooted. I received a bad checksum error and that it needed the backup rom to restore. I popped in CD that came with the board, and it reported an error stating that it was too old for the functionality of the system. The processor was a Quad Core Phenom 2.4ghz with 4GB of Crucial Viper DDR2 1066 ram. Next I tried downloading an earlier version of the BIOS rom and changing the name to what the system was looking for. I tried different version of the ROM, USB, CD, and could never get it to fix the BIOS.

So, I packed the family into the car and made the 40 minute drive back to Fry’s. I packed up the motherboard, processor, fan, memory. I took everything in, just in case I switched over to Intel. Well, after speaking to the customer service rep, she was going to give me the credit for the motherboard and I was going to go grab a Gigabyte. Another rep, looked at the box and said that I was missing the shield for the case to cover around the ports on the back of the case. Unless I picked up the exact same board, I couldn’t return the board without doing an 80 minute round trip. She spoke to her manager who said there was nothing they could do.

Now, I knew better than head up there without the shield. I even looked at it before I sat down in front of my workstation to research other boards that would work with ESXi that they had at Fry’s. Now, if they would have said that there would be a restocking fee or something along those lines, for 10-15%, I would have paid it. When they told me there was nothing they could do, I told them fine, I’ll return everything else. I returned $300 worth of components, all opened of course, and I’ll return the motherboard on Monday. If they drop the price for open boxes by even 10%, that little shield will end up costing them over $30.

I always try to purchase locally before going online, if the costs are even remotely comparable. It helps to keep the local stores open and I assume that I’ll get better service than from an online vendor. However, the local store needs to realize that they usually charge a premium over the online retailer, and as such, they need to be aware of customer service. Now, I’m fully aware that the mistake was mine, but Fry’s could have handled the situation better. Hopefully, someone from the Fishers’ Fry’s will pick up on this post and make their service reps aware of alternate solutions to situations.

Keurig Special Edition B60

mordtech — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 22:06:14 +0000

I finally received a semi-approval from the wife to purchase a Keurig single cup coffee maker. I say semi-approval because I’m not sure if she was really serious when she said yes. I didn’t give her a change her mindJ, I just ran out of the door. I went with the B60 version. The primary reason was that it can make 3 cup sizes. The other advantage is that my wife, a non-coffee drinker, can make teas and hot chocolates, just as quick. We still have our Senseo, but it doesn’t handle tea or hot chocolate, as well as the Keurig.

List price for the B60 is $199 but you can find it online and at local resellers for $149. We bought our at Kohls. They were offering scratch off tickets that could give 15, 20 or 30 percent off for Kohls Credit card holders. You also get a $10 Kohl’s cash voucher for every $50 spent, to use after Christmas. I was able to scratch off a 20%. I walked out of the store with the B60 for $120 including tax. We also got $20 Kohl’s cash. So the system basically cost us $108.

So far we’ve ran three kcups through it. The first was the Celestial Season’s Mandarin Orange Tea, made it for my wife. After adding a little sugar to it, she really enjoyed. Next I put in the Van Houtte French Vanilla. It wasn’t bad, but I probably won’t buy it in bulk. I tried a second cup using the same Kcup. The second cup was pretty weak. I could have been because I’ve been using the large mug setting on the machine. The third Kcup was the Green Mountain Nantucket Blend. This was really good. I still used the large mug setting, and the resulting cup tasted similar to a good cup of percolated coffee that you would get at a catered event.

Our Senseo is over two years old; I was just getting bored with the limited coffee selections. So far we are pretty happy with the Keurig taste. Time will tell it the quality of the system is as good as the Senseo.

Imaging VMware ESX Guest using ImageX

mordtech — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 22:00:58 +0000

VMware ESX has the ability to clone templates, and this is a great feature when using iSCSI or FC datastores. When leveraging NFS datastores however, you lose thin provisioning on those NFS datastores. One way to get around this is to use a third party imaging software.

Microsoft provides a free imaging package titled imageX. You can read about on technet from here. A quick synopsis is that, unlike other imaging software, ImageX focuses on the files instead of disk blocks. This allows ImageX to leverage a Single Instance Store (SIS). Image X will compress the first image at around 33 to 50% of the on disk size, and will store the image in a file with a WIM extension. The WIM file holds the SIS and also indexes of which blocks of data are associated with the image. The benefit of the SIS and imageX can be found when appending a second image to the WIM. imageX will create a second index in the WIM file. It will then start imaging the machine, it will find a file and compare that to the SIS. If the file is found, it will add a pointer to the new index and move on. If the file is not found, imageX will add the file into the SIS and then add a pointer in the new index and move on.

To use imagex, you will need to download the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK). After installing the WAIK, you can follow the instructions found here, on svrops.com, to create a WinPE boot CD. Before you create the CD using he OSCDIMG, you will need to inject the Network and SCSI drivers required for ESX. To do this, you will first need to get the correct drivers. You can either scour the internet looking for them, or you can just select install VMware tools from a guest VM. On the Guest VM, open my computers, Open the CDrom, \program files\VMware\VMware Tools\Drivers\ and copy the Vmxnet and SCSI folders. Now, on the machine that you installed the WAIK on, run the following commands

peimg /inf=DRIVE:vmxnet.inf /image=DRIVE:

peimg /inf=DRIVE:vmscsi.inf /image=DRIVE:

you can also use the same commands to inject other drivers, if you are going to leverage the boot CD across other hardware also. After you’ve injected all of the drivers that you plan on, go ahead and complete the instructions found on svrops.com. Now, after the OSCDIMG command, you will have a bootable WINPE iso. One point, make sure that you when you run the unmount command, ensure that you use the /commit command. If not, all of your changes will be lost, and you get to do it again.

Image Capture

So now that you have a bootable winpe iso, with imagex and the correct drivers, what do you do. First, build a gold image(s) of Windows XP, vista, 2003 and/or 2008. Patch everything with the latest service packs, security patches, etc… Also, its best to build the initial gold image with multi processors. That way you can use the same image for single/multi processors with out needing to change the HAL. next sysprep the gold image. You can find instructions for running sysprep here. After running the sysprep, start the VM and mount the CDrom as the iso created.

After booting, you will need to mount a network share, use a command similar to: Net use m: \\\share.

next go to x:\program files\imagex. Depending on whether this is a new WIM that you will be creating , or an existing WIM that you will be adding to. If new, type imagex /capture M:\.wim “”. If existing, change the /capture to /append. This is important, if you do a capture into an existing wim file, it will overwrite the wimfile. Bad Juju!!! If you have multiple drives, after the initial capture, just change the to the next drive letter and repeat.

Image Apply

Create a new VM manually. It doesn’t need to be identical, but ensure that the hard disks are large enough to hold the uncompressed data from the gold image. Next, boot to the ImageX WinPE iso created earlier. After booting up, you will need to run diskpart, you can find websites online that detail everything about diskpart, but to create a basic C drive, you will need to run the following commands.

Diskpart.exe

Select disk 0

Create partition primary size=

Select partition 1

Format fs=NTFS label=”Sys” Quick

Active

Now, for each additional disk, select disk and run all of the same commands as above except, change the label to a description of the drive. Also, run the active command on the sys drive. After you have configured all of the drives type exit to get back to the command prompt. From the command line, run the net use command again. Next, change to X:\program files\imagex\. Type imagex /apply m:\.wim c: /verify. After the image is applied, you can rerun the imagex /apply command change the index number and the drive. After complete, unmount CDrom and reboot the VM. You should now be greeted by the Windows mini-setup.

While not as fast as VMware builtin clone from template, it does allow you to continue to leverage the thin provisioning inherent in NFS datastores. In our environments, it takes roughly 20 minutes to build a Windows 2003 VM, versus about 10 minutes to build the same VM from template.

Leveraging Solaris 10 ZFS Functionality for ESXi

mordtech — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 01:47:39 +0000

With the decision of VMware to release the ESXi version of the industry leading hypervisor for free, one might wonder where else can I save money and still get enterprise level performance. One area is in the storage. The Solaris ZFS file system is a great starting point for small businesses looking to move into enterprise level virtualization while still hitting a relatively small price point. Sun recently released three new products in the 7000 series of products: the 7110, 7210 and the 7410. While the 7210 and 7410 would make a techie drool. For the small business, the 7110 offers most of the benefits of the two larger versions, at a very affordable price. The 7110 starts at around $10,000 list and would rise to $16,000 with the three year platinum warranty and SCSI controller. Now, you could build a SUN server with similar performance characteristics, but you would lose one of the best features of the new Sun Storage; Storage Analytics. This feature is an enhancement of Dtrace that allows the administrator to drill down into the performance of the storage, to isolate performance issues.

So what do you have to do to get VMware ESXi and Solaris ZFS doing their thing together? Build your Solaris 10 Server. There are many good resources for available on the internet for configuring Solaris 10 and ZFS. Here are the instructions from SUN. Some basic recommendations: keep the system drives and the data drives separate. Use a mirrored ZFS pool for the system drive. Use RaidZ2 for the data drives, with a minimum of 5 drives: 3+2 and no more than 11 drives: 9+2. When you go above the 11 drive mark, you’ll just add an additional raid set to the ZFS pool. Leave a drive or two available for a spare(s) in the pool.

After you have your ZFS pool created.

You first need to first create the file system. All you really need to decide is: do you want a quota (Upper limit), reservation (minimum limit) and a name. you would enter the following command

zfs create /

You can get creative with the organization, if you know that you are going to have multiple NFS filesystems, you might enter zfs create pool/VM_NFS/FS01 or pool/VM_NFS/root. Ok, done, you’ve created a ZFS file system. Now you might want to set a quota and/or reservation.

zfs set quota=250G /

There you now have set a limit of that pool of 250 GB. Also, at this point, that is a thin provisioned size. Very little space will be utilized until data is written. The next step is to set a reservation, if so desired.

zfs set reservation=100G /

You now have a file system that has taken up 100 GB of the pool. While no data has actually be written to disk, the pool will show that the available size has been reduced by 100 GB. Now, the last step before we can start configuring the ESXi datastore is to mount the filesystem as a NFS share.

zfs set sharenfs=root= /

The key in the above command is the sharenfs=root=. That command will give the ESXi server root access to the NFS share. Without that, you will be able to mount the share, but you will not be able to create or open VMs hosted on the share. Ok that’s it, on to the ESXi server.

Build the ESXi Server

First download the ESXi server software. You can always download the free version, and then apply the purchased license purchased at a later date. Install ESXi per the instructions found here. Now, open your browser and go to the IP address that you assigned to the ESXi server from a Windows workstation. In the left hand corner of the page, you will see a link that states “Download VMware Infrastructure Client.” Go ahead and install the client. When it is complete, click on the shortcut and use the username Root and the password you created during the ESXi install. The next step is to install either the free license or a purchased license for the ESXi install. Left click the server name and select the configuration tab. Next select the “Licenses Feature” option. Select the top “Edit” to the right of “License Source.” Select the “Use License” option and either type or paste the license provided by VMware.

Next, you need to enable NTP time. You can either point it towards and internal time server if available, or towards public name servers. For my home network or other small businesses, I point towards the following: pool.ntp.org, 0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org and 2.pool.ntp.org. You enter the NTP servers by selecting the Configuration tab, “Time Configuration” option and properties in the upper left hand corner. Ensure the “NTP Client Enabled” Checkbox is checked. Next, select the Options button, and select the “NTP Servers” option. Delete the default server. Click Add, type the first of the NTP server and repeat for each the remaining 3 NTP servers. Check the “Restart NTP service to apply changes.” Select OK twice and wait until the change is applied.

Next we need to configure the networking portion. If you are a small enough, you can get by with two network ports and push both client traffic and NFS traffic across them. You might notice latency if your traffic begins to exceed, if you experience this, you will need to add/configure additional NICs. Ensure that any traffic that involves clients and/or NFS traffic is redundant. Also, Vmotion and the NFS datastore traffic should be placed on GB interfaces on GB switch ports.

We are now ready to mount the NFS datastore. First select the configuration tab and select the Storage option. In the right hand corner, select “Add Storage.” Select the “Network File System” option and select Next. Next enter the IP address or Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) of the Solaris NFS server. For the folder enter //. Ensure the “Mount read only” is unchecked and then enter a easily recognizable name for the datastore. Select OK and you should have a datastore created that shows a size equal to the Quota configured earlier. Go ahead and create a VM, you done.

Other features of ZFS that is useful to ESXi

One cool feature of Solaris ZFS is the ability to make writable clones of file systems. Imagine building 1,2 5 VMs. Sysprep them, clone the file system and re-present the new cloned filesystem to the ESXi server. Or you could build a test environment of a web and SQL server that could be stood up in seconds. The clone process leverages the snapshot functionality.

zfs snapshot /@

zfs clone /@ /

zfs set sharenfs=root= /

zfs set quota=250G /

zfs set reservation=100G /

Now, you have a second file System that contains an exact copy of file system as it existed at the time of the snapshot. The snapshot name can be nearly anything you want, if you are creating a snapshot that will be use for cloning test environments, you might name the snapshot : webServer_SQL_Test_Gold. Also, if these are windows VMs, run sysprep against the servers and shut them down fully before creating the snapshot and the clone. Another thing to be aware of is that you are limited to 8 NFS datastores by default in ESX, to extend past that you will need to modify the NFS.maxvolumes under the Configuration tabà advanced setting. You can run up to 32 NFS datastores per ESX host/cluster.

You can also present iSCSI drives to your ESX clients from the ZFS pool.

On the Solaris Wiki site, you will find a great write-up about how to present ISCSI ZFS luns to various initiators.

If you have questions, concerns, gripes, etc… leave a comment and let me know.

Troubleshoogling

mordtech — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:53:59 +0000

This weekend was one of those weekends, spent more on Google, looking for potential fixes, than with our families. One problem was a firewall was put in place between two sites and they were not correctly configured to allow extended DNS to pass. The firewalls used DNS guard and a limit of 512 bytes on UDP traffic. DNS resolution traffic uses UDP and would normally fit under the 512 limit. Windows 2003 DNS leveraged extended DNS. The Pix firewall would stop the UDP traffic when it exceeded 512 Bytes and DNS Guard would terminate the session. We were able to isolate the issue through nslookup and reviewing the firewall logs. In nslookup, when the server was changed to one of those behind the firewall, we would get request timed out. When we started looking at the firewall logs, we saw a second DNS request packet coming from the server, using the same session number. After some Google research, we were able to conclude that our issue had to do with the UDP packet size and DNS guard. By increasing the size allowed for UDP to 4096, we eliminated the errors seen in both the firewall logs and nslookup.

Well after we put that problem to bed, we ran into other issues that one by one, we were either able to find an exact fix for or information that point us in the right direction, on Google. Today, a coworker and I were laughing about it, when we started throwing out phrases. Google troubleshooting, trouble Googling; but the one we like the best was troubleshoogling. It is amazing the amount of data related to troubleshooting that can be found by having the right search criteria in Google, which is the hardest part of troubleshoogling.

Microsoft Licensing 3 – Clusters

mordtech — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 03:25:38 +0000

In this post, I’ll discuss licensing when working in a clustered Microsoft environment. I’ll pick some of the more common Microsoft Apps and detail what is required to properly license them. Windows 2003 and 2008 support eight node clusters. In a two node cluster, you can technically have them configured in an active/active configuration. However, this is not considered best practice by Microsoft. They recommend running in an Active/Passive configuration. Three, four and five node configurations must have one passive node; the other nodes can be active. In the cluster, you can only have up to four active nodes, so nodes five through eight must be passive. All nodes must be licensed with either Windows Server Enterprise or Windows Server Datacenter. In most cases, Windows Server Enterprise makes the most financial sense. Enterprise has an MSRP of $4,000 per server up to eight physical processors versus $3,000 per physical processor using the Datacenter SKU. If there are more than 8 physical processors, you must use Datacenter.

Hyper-V cluster

The Datacenter SKU makes the most sense as the basis of your Hyper-V cluster in most Hyper-V environments. With the free unlimited guest OS licensing on each server, the breakeven point is 8 guest OS across the 2 node cluster. You receive the right to run 4 instances of Windows OS with each license of Enterprise. In a cluster, during a failover situation, more than 4 VMs might be running on the single node. Therefore, you would need to buy an additional 4 licenses of Standard. That would put Enterprise and datacenter, both at $12,000 for a 2 node cluster. Above 8 guests on the cluster, or when you are running copies of Enterprise on the guest VMs. If you have four physical processors, you would need to run roughly 20 guest VMs to break even.

This is a good point to add a quick discussion about virtualized environment hardware. Should you buy bigger 4 or 8 processor machines with multi-core or go wide in your cluster with dual processor boxes. When I’m designing clusters for a virtualized environment whether VMware Infrastructure or Hyper-V, I go wide first, and then scale up. My reasoning for this is simple, in both the VMware licensing model and Microsoft’s Datacenter licensing model; it is per socket costs. If you have 4 cluster nodes of dual processors or 2 cluster nodes of 4 processors. Both VMware and Microsoft will charge the same cost. Normally though the hardware costs to purchase two quad processor servers would be higher than four dual processor servers. You also gain the ability to have a higher utilization rate when going wide. In a two node cluster, you can only run at 50% capacity. But with a 4 node cluster, all four nodes can run at 75%. Another issue is that when running the larger hardware, a single physical server failure will shutdown basically 50% of your environment until they restart on the other node. When going wide, only about 25% of your environment will go down.

SQL Server

With SQL server, you would more than likely use the Windows 2003 Enterprise license. Unless you’re servers have more than eight processors, and if they do, you probably need this blog entry to explain licensing. Starting in SQL 2005, SQL enterprise is no longer a requirement for a SQL cluster. The Enterprise license now gives you additional features such as data warehousing. Microsoft is generous with SQL licensing in the cluster. You do not need to purchase a license for the passive node. License the active node with either per device or processor licenses and go. Again, in the same scenario as with Hyper-V, the licensing is the same whether you have two eight processor servers versus eight dual processors servers. Again, if you need more processing power on your database, you probably don’t need this blog. I should be talking to youJ.

Exchange

In a clustered environment of Exchange, you must run Exchange Server Enterprise per the Exchange Server 2007: Platforms, Editions and Versions web page. Also, you need one copy of Exchange for each node in the cluster. You do not get the benefit of not licensing passive nodes like you would on the SQL cluster. Exchange Enterprise licenses have an MSRP of $4,000 per server. As previously stated, and supported by Dell and IBM tests, Exchange does not scale well above 2 processors. So again take the cluster wide.

There are whitepapers by Dell and VMware that Exchange actually scales better in the Virtual environment than in physical. On a quad processor quad core IBM server, VMware was able to scale to 16,000 mailboxes. This was done with eight dual vCPU VMs each hosting 2,000 users. A blog discussing this can be found here. Dell wrote a similar paper on a dual quad core server.

My suggestions here; skip Microsoft clustering; get a couple of dual quad core processor servers and two licenses of VMware ESX 3.5. Load the servers up with as much ram as they will take and buy Exchange 2007 standard at $700 per VM. Build two Exchange servers using Standby Continuous Replication (SCR) between the two. Configure a Rule in the VMware cluster to put the two servers on different Physical ESX hosts. The VMware HA will protect you from a physical hardware failure; SCR will minimize the impact of an OS or application failure on the primary Exchange server. Of course you will still need additional servers for the other functionality in Exchange 2007: Edge transport, Client Access, Hub transport and Unified messaging. But with the cost savings of not buying additional servers, you can build standalone VMs to provide each piece of the Exchange environment.

SharePoint Server

With SharePoint Server, the best play would be to run a network load balance cluster for the SharePoint front ends and place databases on SQL cluster above. This will be a significantly cheaper solution as it will not required cluster able hardware and would only required Windows Server Standard instead of Windows Server Enterprise. It would also provide as high if not better uptime as a clustered front end.

SQL Server Pricing: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/pricing.aspx

Exchange Server licensing: http://www.microsoft.com/exchange/howtobuy/default.mspx

Exchange licensing comparison: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232170.aspx

Microsoft licensing 2

mordtech — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:36:33 +0000

In a previous post, I spoke about licensing Window Server in a virtualized environment. Today, I’ll be addressing Client Access License or CAL, especially revolving around web facing. By web facing, I mean any server that services requests from any machine not owned by the firm. The underlying Windows OS license is not impacted whether it is web facing or private. Windows Standard is Windows Standard. To connect to a Windows server however, the machine in question needs to be accounted for with the purchase of a CAL. Purchasing a single license of Windows 2008 Standard gets you 5 shiny core CALs, Enterprise gets 25 CALs. In the datacenter licensing model, no CALS are extended’ but as seen in the previous post, found here, the savings more than make up for a few missing CALs. One gotcha in Windows CALs is that they are OS specific. If your firm purchased Windows 2003 CALs, you would need to upgrade to Windows 2008 CALs to connect to a 2008 server.

What do you get with the Core CAL? Here is a quote lifted from the Microsoft website discussing the Core CAL. “The Microsoft Core CAL Suite encompasses four fundamental Microsoft server products that provide your people with identity management, directory services, enterprise communication (e-mail, calendar functions, and scheduling), collaborative workspaces, and asset management. ” The interesting part of that quote is you now get an enterprise communication, previously known as an Exchange CAL. You also get a SharePoint CAL, and a Systems Center Configuration Manager Cal: Previously SMS. Pretty good, for a MSRP of approximately $40 a CAL, you get access to the standard functionality found in a Microsoft based IT environment: Active Directory, file and Print, Exchange, SharePoint and SCCM.

There is also an Enterprise CAL suite. The Enterprise CAL gets everything found in the Core CAL, plus Office communicator standard and enterprise, Rights Management and System Center Operations Manager (SCOM, previously known as MOM), Exchange 2007 Enterprise and Forefront Security. The extra functionality will cost you slightly around $125 per machine. Microsoft recommends that if you are going to roll out two or more of the systems found in the Enterprise CAL, it’s in your best interest financially to purchase enterprise CALs. You don’t have to specifically run one or the other either. If you only have 20 users running Office communicator or SCOM, buy 20 Enterprise CALs and buy the remaining CALs as Core. In larger numbers , however, this could become a burden on management as you have to ensure that you carry enough Enterprise CALs. You can also buy CALs specifically for each of the products in the Enterprise CAL. Again, this might become a management nightmare when dealing with large numbers of clients.

Now on to web facing servers: if you know that only users from your firm using devices that are properly accounted for in the CAL count. Then you have nothing to worry about. However, if anyone connects to a web facing server using anything other than a device with a CAL, you might need to an additional CAL type. I say might because Microsoft recently added a limited use External Connector to their Windows 2008 Web Server SKU. Microsoft now allows for up to 50 concurrent connections to their Web server product. Now this only affects web servers, if you have a terminal Server or file, file and print or need more than 50 concurrent connections to a web site. You would need to purchase an additional product. Bring on the Windows Server 2008 External connector License: Big name, easy functionality. If machines are connecting to a server other than a 2008 Web Server OS and they are not accounted for in your CAL count; you need an external connector. Luckily, Microsoft doesn’t stick it to us that bad, and they actually dropped the price from the 2003 version. The external connector license now costs $2000 MSRP.

Another area, where Microsoft gets a little extra money for web facing servers is through SQL licensing. Again, if you know exactly how many machines are connecting to a SQL server, you can buy that number of SQL CALs. You can purchase a Server plus 5 CAL suite of SQL Standard for $1849 with an additional CAL cost of $162 per client device. Now if you can’t guarantee that you know exactly how many users are going to connect through to your SQL server, such as in a public facing web server, you would need to license you SQL server by processor. This allows an unlimited number of connections, but it is significantly higher; $6,000 per processor. If you have a four processor SQL server, it would cost you $24,000. OK, you thinking but I only have one device connecting to it; the web server. Ah, good thought but Microsoft has already blocked that play. They believe that the web server is not the client; it is only the middle man in the delivery chain. You need to license the individual client machine; IE Joe public sitting at his Vista laptop sitting his living room watching the latest episode of Heroes on DVR. Ahem, sorry moving on.

So hopefully that gives you a basic understanding of Client Access licensing. A post on Cluster licensing will follow.

Microsoft Windows 2008 pricing: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/pricing.aspx

Microsoft Core CAL: https://www.microsoft.com/calsuites/core.mspx

Microsoft Enterprise CAL: http://www.microsoft.com/calsuites/enterprise.mspx

Microsoft SQL Licensing: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/pricing.aspx

Microsoft licensing

mordtech — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 19:28:49 +0000

We are beginning to go a usage audit to true-up our Microsoft licensing. For the most part, the licensing is straight forward. Use a product, get a license. Don’t use the product, don’t get a license. But where confusion creeps in is around items such as virtualization, Public web access, Clustering. In this blog I’ll discuss Microsoft licensing in the virtualization arena. I’ll write another entry on public web access and clustering within the next day.

Licensing in the virtualization arena:

You have three options for licensing the Windows Server operating system. The first is that you buy a license for each virtual machine based on whether it is running Windows 2003 Standard or Enterprise: Easy enough. Option two is a bit more tricky, according to the Microsoft licensing for Virtualization web page, you can run “…you to run up to four software instances at a time in virtual operating system environments (OSEs) on a server under a single server license.” The third option is to purchase a license of Windows 2003 Datacenter, which is licensed per socket, for each of your Physical Hypervisor Hosts. This allows you to run an unlimited number of Windows Server based guest VMs on that particular host.

Lets look at a quick cost benefit analysis of each licensing type. We will use a two node cluster of dual processor Quad core servers. We will exclude networking, storage, electrical and cooling consumption. Those would be similar under any of the three licensing options. I also won’t even begin to do a hardware cost comparison between physical and virtual as there is enough information on the web to make an accountant cry about how much you will save virtualizing your environment. We will use a Server vCPU to pCPU ratio of 5:1, which should give us roughly 40 vCPUs. Given that we need the overhead to allow a hardware failure, we will not account for the second Host node. We’ll break down the license usage as 34 Windows 2003 Standard and 6 Windows 2003 Enterprise Guests.

License option 1: (one license for each Guest VM)

	MSRP	Amount	Option 1 Cost
Std	$1,000	34	$34,000
Ent	$4,000	6	$24,000
			$58,000

As you can see in the graphic above, the MSRP of those 40 servers would be approximately $58,000.

License option 2: (Windows Server Enterprise – 4 free on the same server)

	MSRP	Amount		Option 2 Cost
Ent	$4,000	12		$48,000

Here is where it can a little dicey, the license states that you can run 4 instances of the OS on one server. When you license in the two node environment, especially when using a product such as VMware Infrastructure DRS; you can not be sure how many VMs will reside on one physical host at any one time. It might be 20-20 or it might be 22-18, etc.. While it would look like you only need 10 Enterprise licenses to cover those 40 servers, you would probably need at least 1 extra for each node to ensure that you never have more guest VMs running on one node. Even with purchasing two extra licenses of Windows Enterprise, you still save $6,000 over the one-license per guest option. Another benefit is that you can run either Standard or Enterprise and still be in the good graces of Microsoft.

License option 3: (Windows Server Datacenter – run what you brung!)

		MSRP	Amount	Option 3 Cost
DataCenter		$3,000	4	$12,000

Here is where Microsoft licensing in the virtualized arena begins to shine. Microsoft DataCenter licensing has an MSRP of $2,999 per physical processor. Not per core, per physical socket. That means that for each node in the cluster, we need $6,000 worth of Microsoft OS, to cover everything. This licensing option also allows us the opportunity to load whatever OS, the business unit needs. Or, we just standardize on Windows Enterprise for the Virtualized servers and not worry about any features that are disabled on the standard version.

Microsoft Licensing for Virtualization: https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/highlights/virtualization.mspx

Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Pricing:

Out of our Sprint Contract with NO ETF!!!!

mordtech — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 09:42:57 +0000

We’ve been trying to get out from under das boot of Sprint for a couple of months now. On Black Friday, I did a quick search on getting out of a Sprint contract. And there it was, Sprint was going to make a change to their administrative fees and someone had used that has the basis of a “Material Change” to the contract.

As we were heading off to pick up the kids from the grandparents’, we grabbed the mail from the day before. We found our latest Sprint bill outlining the changes that are to go into effect. We immediately contacted Sprint to see if we could get our contract cancelled. Of course, the CS rep we spoke to said that we wouldn’t be able to get out of the contract without Early Termination Fees (ETF). We asked to speak to a manager. The person that got on the line, wasn’t much more help; typical Sprint Customer Service. When we asked to speak to their manager, we were told everyone else had gone home for the day. We had them log a ticket and they said someone would call us back on Saturday. A Sprint CS rep called us on Saturday, but we we’re unable to speak to them. We arranged on a Monday call back.

My wife called me on Monday stating that Sprint had called back and said that yes, it was a material change to our contract and that we could port our numbers with no ETF. I almost immediately went to ATT’s website and started researching phones. I had already purchased an iPhone about a month before, and since I had to make sure my wife didn’t steal it every day, I already knew what I was going to get her. We had to find two phones for other members of the family. We were hoping to get a phone with a slide out keyboard and also cheap. But that just didn’t happen; we ended up going with the Sony Erickson w580i.

The Sprint saga is coming to a close.

Now, moving on to our experience at the AT&T retail store. I’m not sure when it happened, as we left AT&T for our home phone service almost 3 years ago, because of poor customer service and availability. Now, we are using them for our wireless coverage as well as their U-Verse TV and Internet service. The two times, I’ve been in AT&T retail stores in the last month and a half, I’ve actually left happy. That has never happened at a Sprint store. Our salesman was patient, even though we had our two son’s running around like crazy hooligans. And, I recommend that if anyone from AT&T happens to read this. Get some games on the demo iPhones in your retail stores. Our five year old was less than thrilled with the fact that he couldn’t play games on the iPhones like he could on mine. Anyways, we walked out about an hour later with a new iPhone, 2 w580i’s, and a family plan.

Also, AT&T, please try out your website with an iPhone. I have more Safari failures on your website when viewed through the iPhone browser than anywhere, except maybe the Monster.com website.

You can find more information here: http://consumerist.com/5098064/reader-escapes-sprint-with-no-etf-thanks-to-admin-fee-increase