Kenon Ewing

IDM
ITS is currently looking at HA solutions for the Identity Management project. Utilizing our current CSM load balancer and possibly purchase Big IP F5 load balancers to handle the medical center, we will have a three server redundant architecture for epassword authentication. We will have a 6 server redundant architecture the HA medical center application needs. There will also be another two server load balanced in an active / passive configuration for gateway servers that translate the IDM instructions to AD transactions. This allows for real-time propagation of events inside the Identity Management service to Active Directory.
Backup
ITS updated tuning parameters to allow NFS to take advantage of the previous TCP and UDP tunings implemented about a month ago.
Virtual Environment
Snapshots – ITS has scripted an automated snapshot management solution for virtual machines. We are currently evaluating what virtual machines ITS will choose to perform weekly snapshots of specific virtual machines.
Firmware – We have had two small outages associated with outaded firmware on IBM x86 servers. The outdated firmware can cause ESX 3.0.2 to have connection issues with internal disk drives, thus when this has happened, All virtual machines continue to run, but all management to the ESX host in question is lost until reboot. Furthermore, since all the virtual machines are still powered on, we cannot move these virtual machines to other hardware because there is a lock file that disallows multiple right acess to the same virtual machines (and right so). So to fix this situation, ITS has to power off the ESX server in question to allow the release of the lock file on all the running virtual machines, which then allows the virtual machines to move hosts.
VCP – I have been studying to get my Virtual Center Professional (VCP) certification, and I am scheduled to take the test on Wed Feb 26. (wish me luck)

IDM
ITS has been working diligently on the identity management application. This month we put together the build documentation that should allow rapid deployment of these servers to provide the num identity management service. The Applications Hosting team built two pre-dployment VM’s from the build documentation that the Development team is now using to configure master to master replication. Upon completion of this task we should be able to build the production VM’s for this project.

Hardware Monitoring
We have been trying to get a handle on hardware events and their proper detection, notification, and resulotion in our environment. Since one of the most important parts of our infrastructure is the virtual environment, we started with those physical servers. We have 6 HP servers and 10 IBM servers. The HP servers have now been registered to our HP SIM monitoring server, and IBM are registered in our IBM Director, which will give us visibility to pre-empt into our hardware problems.

Sitemason
ITS released a new sitemason service this month. ITS worked with our vendor Sitemason to ensure a server that would handle the load that our current server sees. ITS deployed and tuned a VM for the front end web service and physical back end database service.

Training
ITS sent myself an one of my team members to RedHat Certified Architect Training with a focus on performance monitoring and system tuning. This entailed an in depth four day course followed by an examination for certification on the last day. I will have results within a few weeks.