VU Blog

This month I continued to produce information for the VUspace users environment, this information is being analyzed to determine the usage pattern of the VUspace users service.

I worked extensively on the backup environment this month in an attempt to reduce the number of backup failures in our environment.  We have two basic types of failures in our environment currently.  We have servers that are losing network connection to the environment and we have Windows clients that are failing system state saves via the VSS facility in windows.  The network situation is being resolved by moving affected servers to the dedicated backup networks.  We have a dedicated network for CO-LO servers and a dedicated network for ITS servers.  The VSS problem appears to be mainly a lack of MS patches or hotfixes that apply specifically to the VSS writers.  Though some clients are failing the same way for different reasons (memory, service configuration etc).

This month we implemented the new BlueArc 3210 (10GB network) into our environment.  Due to network problems between 100 mb/s, 1000 mb/s and the 10 gb/s of the BlueArc we ended up backing out this change and swapping in the Titan 3200 (6 1 gigE links).  This appears to have resolved the issue we were seeing with a high number of retransmits on the network causing poor performance for the entire community.

Additionally, Kenon and I have been tasked with replacing the smtp environment.  We have only recently had time to devote to this project and all of the work up to this point has been done by Troy.  It looks like we may be unable to implement the new smtp environment on Linux due to some Perl module problems and may have to take a look at Windows 2008 as our platform.