Open Systems SnapVault (OSSV) Web Reporting

Posted September 10, 2008 by kbn
Categories: Net Management, Techie, Work
Tags:

Open Systems SnapVault (OSSV) is a data replication/protection software from NetApp. OSSV runs on Windows, UNIX/LINUX, and VMWare ESX servers and it replicates block level changes back to a NetApp filer. We use this technology to replicate the data on all of branch office servers back to our datacenter. This replication allowed us to remove the need to perform tape backups in each branch office.

One of the strengths of OSSV is its simplicity, but that is also it’s weakness. The reporting and monitoring capabilities of OSSV can be cumbersome. You can get a lot of status information from the filer itself via the snapvault status command. However, the one thing that you can’t tell from filer is how far along the process is. That information is only available when the snapvault status -l command is run on the primary system (your Windows/UNIX/VMWare server). With windows that means that you either need to get either console access (via. Remote Desktop, VNC, etc.) or command line access with something like PsExec.

We’ve been running this way for almost two years, but I finally got tired of all of the typing. So I developed a web based reporting tool that gathers all of information and presents it in a nice graphical clickable interface.

The front screen of this php web application displays the status of all currently configured snapvault relationships. It does this by executing the snapvault status via an encrypted ssh key-based session to the filer. The resulting output is shown below.

OSSV Web Reporting Overview Screen

For each specific qtree you can click to get the detail about that status of that relationship just as if you had run the snapvault status -l command on the primary server. Thereby showing you how many files have been transferred, how far along you are on the current file and what errors have been encountered. All this is accomplished via winexe linux command. Winexe remotely executes commands on WindowsNT/2000/XP/2003 systems from GNU/Linux just like PsExec does from windows.

OSSV Server Detail Web Report

If anyone is interested in using this, I can supply you with my really ugly code. Finally a big shout out the phpSysInfo project from where I borrowed the CSS styling.

Comments: 5 Comments

Virtualization Gripes (part 1)

Posted August 29, 2008 by kbn
Categories: Techie, Work
Tags: , ,

Virtualization is not new, it has been around for a number of years. So why are so many software vendors afraid of it, and even worse hostile to it? We run a number of different application that have license managers for their software. These license managers are often a service and sometimes a hardware lock / dongle that runs on a server that all of the clients connect to for permission to use the software.

We’ve successfully virtualized many of these servers (they are great candidates because they are so often extremely under utilized when on physical boxes). The ones with hardware dongles pose some problems (I’ll save that for another post). Then along comes a product from ETAP. They will let you virtualize their application (which is extremely resource intensive), but they prohibit (i.e. software won’t run) you from virtualizing their license manager. This is completely insane! Their silly little license manager use very little memory, and almost zero CPU cycles. In our case it may handle one or two requests for a license a day (if that), and I have to install it on a physical box. What a PIA. 

In a plea to all software developers, “you have nothing to fear from allowing your software to be virtualized.” We are not trying to steal your software, we’re just trying to maximize our investment. Let alone allow us to be better prepared for disaster recovery. In fact, by making it difficult/impossible to virtualize is going to cost you money in the long run as I will strongly denounce your product and actively push our company (and others I deal with) to avoid your products and find alternatives that support virutalization.

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Virtualization Begins

Posted August 25, 2008 by kbn
Categories: Techie, Work
Tags: , ,

For about the past nine months I’ve been working on growing the use of virtualiztion within my firm. We had dabbled with virtualizing a couple of misc. application/development servers with the first release of VMWare Server, but I knew that in order to consolidate the rest of environment, as well as better prepare us for disaster recovery that we needed to expand our server virtualization strategy. The solution that made the most sense at the time was a VMWare Infrastructure solution utilizing their ESX platform.

The question was how to move forward without spending tons of money (and avoiding all of the politics involved in deploying a solution). The solution arose through the timing on our computer leases. We lease the majority of our computer equipment for three years. It just so happened that as I was looking to move forward, one of our major leases came up for replacement. To make it even better, not only did I have three servers that were due for swapping (and great candidates for virtualizing), but three years earlier we were forced in to ordering a large batch of workstation class computers. This time, with the advancement of technology, we no longer needed that class of machine.

With my good fortune, I was able to replace the three servers with two new servers (albeit much beefier units) along with the full ESX suite for both, and workstations with much better (thanks to Intel’s Core2Duo chips) desktop class units for basically the same monthly payment we already spending. It was a really win-win for company.

In some upcoming posts I plan to highlight our journey, cover some of the sites that helped us to get where we are, discuss where we are going, and finally highlight some of the difficulties and frustrations that we still face.

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Same Site - New Location

Posted August 22, 2008 by kbn
Categories: General

After years of hosting my own site, I’ve finally decided to move my blog to a hosted solution. You can now find my Nerhood Weblog at http://nerhood.wordpress.com/. I’ve moved all the content, and almost of the comments. If you read my site via my RSS feed it too stays the same at http://feeds.feedburner.com/nerhoodweblog/.

If you have linked to my site in the past, please update links to the new location. I will be keeping the old site alive and redirecting the traffic for a little while.

Hopefully with the change in site I’ll start posting some again. One thing that I do keep updated is my Del.icio.us links so check the out for the last things that I’ve found.

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Pachelbel Bedtime

Posted September 10, 2007 by kbn
Categories: Music and Video
Tags: ,

Here is a great video that Fern forwarded to me. It is amazing how closely this guy nails the trials of bedtime.

Comments: 2 Comments

Sparklining Excel

Posted September 4, 2007 by kbn
Categories: Techie, Work
Tags: , ,

According to Wikipedia a sparkline is a

“small, high resolution graphics embedded in a context of words, numbers, images … Whereas the typical chart is designed to show as much data as possible, and is set off from the flow of text, sparklines are intended to be succinct, memorable, and located where they are discussed. Their use inline usually means that they are about the same height as the surrounding text.”

A group has released an open source add-in for Microsoft Excel called TinyGraphs “that creates sparklines, mini column graphs, and area graphs from a row of data. It generates beautiful tiny graphics that are as small as a cell and is useful for visualizing large quantities of data, such as stock prices and exchange rates.”

While I have yet to actually use the add-in it is something that I definitely can see using in a number or reports that I generate at the office.

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I’m Back

Posted August 22, 2007 by kbn
Categories: General

Well after almost a week of being offline, I’m back. Sorry for the unannounced downtime, but I need to totally upgrade my sever and it has taken awhile to get things back on line. I think most everything is working (I still need to fix some things with the gallery, but the pictures are now displaying). Don’t expect much in the way of new content though, I haven’t had the urge to write here lately, but who knows.

Comments: 2 Comments

100 Miles

Posted July 19, 2007 by kbn
Categories: Health
Tags:

I finally did, I finally ran 100 miles. I completed my 100th mile on Tuesday. I wish I had gotten to this mark sooner, but hey better late than never. It took my 37 runs with and average distance of 2.7 miles and and average pace of 10′04″ minutes per mile.

Here’s to the next 100.

Comments: 2 Comments

A Supreme Nerd God

Posted May 16, 2007 by kbn
Categories: Techie
Tags: ,

Supposedly that is what I am, a Supreme Nerd God. At least according the NerdTests.com Here is how I rated:

Overall, you scored as follows:

3% scored higher (more nerdy),
0% scored the same, and
97% scored lower (less nerdy).

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is:

All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the SUPREME NERD GOD!!!

No I didn’t cheat, and yes I’m slightly embarrassed at my score. So I challenge you, my loyal readers to take the test, post your results, and let your nerdiness all hang out.

Comments: 10 Comments

Review: SB EventLog Monitor

Posted May 14, 2007 by kbn
Categories: Net Management, Work
Tags: , , , , , , ,

SB EventLog MonitorI have only one thing to say about this product, “How did I ever live without it”. If you manage more than one Microsoft Windows Server then you definitely need to be using SB EventLog Monitor.

So what does SB EventLog Monitor do that is so great, it collects, collates, and reports via a web interface upon Microsoft Event Log data. The UNIX world has had syslog forever and a ton of tools to help you manage the logging data generated by servers. I’ve even tried to shoehorn Microsoft Event Log data into some of those products, but it was never a good fit. SB EventLog Monitor allows you to quickly and easily manage and analysis what is going on across all of your servers. It allows you to quickly and easily view and filter error messages from different servers and identify patterns. This is particularly useful with dealing with multiple servers across slow WAN links.

It collects the Event Log data either via a Microsoft VB script that use WMI to collect only the new events or via an agent that you can install on your servers. The other requirements are MySQL, PHP (5.0+), and a web server (apache, IIS). While the install is geared towards running everything on a Microsoft server it is possible to run the database and web server on Linux. In fact that is what I did. The install is really pretty easy, so if you are looking for a relatively simple way to increase the manageability of your servers, then I strongly recommend that you take the time to install the open source SB EventLog Monitor.

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