Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Posts tagged Windows Webhosting
Microsoft Expression Interactive and Graphic Design Free Betas
Mar 12th
Microsoft has recently released updated CTPs of their Expression Interactive Design and Graphics Design applications (personally I can't wait to see the Web Design application when it's released or atleast made available via beta). You can get details on what the Expression product line are at: http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/default.mspx The Expression Dev Team has a blog online at: http://blogs.msdn.com/expression/default.aspx (one thing is for sure, Blogs are definately handy in finding new dev details and especially Dev Team Blogs like this one that link together all kinds of presentations, notes and tutorials) Links for the March Betas are found on the Blogs website. There's also something called Orcas, which I'm downloading currently and want to play with it. It appears to be a WinFX design extensions for Visual Studio 2005. I don't know but it sounds pretty damn cool: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=AD0CE56E-D7B6-44BC-910D-E91F3E370477&displaylang=en Enjoy.
Virtual Server 2005 R2 & iSCSI
Mar 2nd
Microsoft has an article available regarding Virtual Server 2005 R2 and iSCSI. I've been digging around on the forums and it seems the only way to really get the performance out of this is by having the iSCSI storage on the actual host machine. I haven't played with it, don't know enough about it but I do know iSCSI is way cool and I'm dying to play with it. Here's the link: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=d112aa63-a51e-4722-a41b-98b3ab3700a3&displaylang=en
Virtual Server SCSI or IDE drives and why is SCSI so damn slow?
Mar 2nd
So in the Virtual Server how to on setting up a 2 node cluster there was mention that you should select the SCSI drive emulatored because the IDE emulator was slower than the SCSI one and that this was true even if you were running on IDE disks. Strange, right? Virtual PC Guy recently wrote a new blog entry that really sums up the two versions of disks and why one over the other: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2006/02/06/525487.aspx So now you're going to run off, create a SCSI disk and install the OS and wait and wait and wait and start cursing me because my god is that install taking a day and night. By the time it's done though you'll install the emulator and lo and behold it's a ton faster now. What gives? Why was the install so damn slow? It turns out that the SCSI drive isn't actually faster until you load the driver from the VM additions. So how do you get around this? Well, during install press F6 to load a 3rd party driver. If you go back to the Floppy disk in the machines configuration and and tell it to mount a known Floppy disk image you'll see there's one on there called something like "VM Additions SHUNT SCSI drivers" mount that bad boy and then go back to your install and have it read the drivers off of this disk. It will now use the VM additions SCSI drivers during the install and you won't have to wait 3 hours for the install to finish… This is a huge time saver… Oh and make sure you read that blog entry on the differences about the two and why SCSI versus IDE, it's a huge question that seems to get pounded time and time again.
Creating a Virtual Server 2005 Cluster
Jan 11th
Server Virtualization is becoming a major item these days and is many companies are adopting it. I've heard storys all over the place from development to production, from guys using it to setup test labs of multiple servers using only a handful of boxes to companies replacing 700 physical servers with less than 350. For the hosting industry I believe this technology is going to completely replace shared hosting and how we think of shared hosting today. SWsoft is one company who's server virtualization platform is already targetting hosting. The ability to move a virtual server to another physical server with almost zero downtime is simply awesome. Blah Blah Blah On to the goods. Microsoft has an outstanding article on Virtual Server Clustering that can be downloaded from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=09cc042b-154f-4eba-a548-89282d6eb1b3&displaylang=en If you're setting up virtual server, whether you plan to cluster it or not. I recommend you print out this article and read it thoroughly. It really does a great job of not only explaining the clustering setup but demonstrating just how powerful virtual server is and what can be done with it. Jess
SQL2005 Express Edition, Free Free Free
Nov 9th
SQL2005 Express Edition is Microsoft's follow up to MSDE2000. MSDE picked up tons of following and has been in use all over the place. Unfortunately for a web application it really didn't cut it and would be quickly outgrown. SQL2005 EE will replace MSDE and doesn't have the same 20 concurrent connections limitation that MSDE had. Here's the new limitations for SQL2005 Express Edition: – No query or workload governor (this is a big plus) – Limited to 1GB of RAM, it doesn't sound like alot but it's more than enough for most servers – Database sizes limited to 4GB in size. Again this is HUGE for databases most databases never make it over 20MB. – No Clustering (not an issue for most) – No Mirroring (not an issue for most) – No DTS (okay maybe a problem for some, but most don't use it) – No Full Text Search (okay, this is kind of bad, you won't be running sharepoing on express and probably most forums use full text for their search now too) – No Notification Services (what you don't get enough pages already?) – Replication as a subscriber only, still makes it a worthy backup server solution – No Analysis Services (no comment) – Service Broker, subscriber only – No Built in SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) but you can download this from here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=82AFBD59-57A4-455E-A2D6-1D4C98D40F6E&displaylang=en – No Reporting Services, that's a tiny ouch. – No backup/restore utility, this can be fixed via http://www.sqldbatips.com/showarticle.asp?ID=27 – No job scheduling (aka SQL Agent service) I think that's all of them but I'm not SQL expert so I probably missed some of them. I think the big limiting factor here is going to be no backup and restore utility. I'm off to install SQL express myself now though and see how she does…
