Welcome to the High Availability Hosting Blog

Change 2011-06_09 to bring our new DNS & NTP servers into live service, and retire the old legacy DNS servers has been completed.

If anyone still has issues resolving internet names, a clear of the ARP cache should work.

The new servers (.241 and .242) are DNS and NTP servers, meaning you can resolve internet addresses as well as set y0ur devices’ clock against them.

** These servers are only used by internal customers of the Sheffield Data Centre, and do not impact any DNS servers for hosting web domains. **

We’re installing new cooling ducting next week in the Sheffield Data Centre.

The new ducts will tap into our existing Evaporative Cooling system and feed directly into the computer room to a low level, providing more cleaned, cool air to the racks.  The new ducts are to suppliment the existing air intakes.

The cooling system will remain switched on throughout the installation, no servers will need to be shut down beforehand.

Engineers will be on site monitoring all systems during the install.

We’ve penciled in Monday 13th June for the work.

UPDATE:

We got this work completed Wednesday 15th June, and we’ve already had positive feedback from a customer who tells us their servers are already cooler by as much as 10 degrees!  If anyone else out there has an update to server temperature, let us know!

The first customers are now using our new Hosting Control Panel, based on WebsitePanel.

The new control panel will replace several web interfaces to our services, including DotNetPanel (for web hosting & DNS), WebsitePanel (old – for Hyper-V), and MPS (Exchange 2007).  Enabling us to have a single point of control for all services hosted at the Sheffield Data Centre.

The new control panel also takes us further towards Exchange 2010, through which mailboxes will be provisioned via WebsitePanel.

Customers who have a service on any of the original control panels will see their services migrated over the coming weeks.  Login details, and a link will be sent to each customer individually.

Special offer!!

We’re running a special offer at the moment on 1.5GB memory Virtual Machines, from just £25 per month you get the following spec VM:

• Dual core vCPU @ 3.2GHz
• 1.5GB dedicated memory
• 50GB SAN disk
• 2 Public IP addresses
• Unlimited bandwidth
• High Availability option included
• Web reboot console

Linux OS:  £25 per month
Windows OS:  from £30 per month

Full details are here:  http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com/servers/special_1.5GB.aspx

Contact sales@ hahosting.com or call us on 0114 2280022 to have your VM configured just for you.

A snippit from the web page:

1.5GB VM special offer £25 per month

This week we registered our 2 replacement DNS servers for websites, public-facing resolution, and Reverse DNS lookups.

• dns1.sheffielddatacentre.net
• dns2.sheffielddatacentre.net

These servers will replace the 2 existing servers (dns1/2.thevirtualcloud.com) over the coming weeks.  First to migrate over will be the Reverse DNS zones for all the networks at the Sheffield Data Centre.

Part of the ongoing project to phase out resources on TheVirtualCloud onto a new Active Directory infrastructure, and a major step forward before the launch of Exchange 2010 hosting.

The new Hosting Control Panel will go-live to customers soon, the first service to migrate will be DNS hosting, but will eventually be a single portal for web hosting, virtual servers, DNS hosting, Exchange, and WebAppliance servers.

Morning!

Virgin Media have just had a power failure in Sheffield affecting most of Sheffield’s uplink traffic to Bradford.

Our BGP failed over to backup, network connectivity was restored to all customers automatically, and then back to primary when Virgin Media restored service.

To the 6 customers who contacted us, we should have called you back by now and confirmed the restored connectivity.

The drop lasted a few minutes whilst BGP re-routed as per network design.

Today one customer on our gaming network has been subject to an influx of traffic much higher than normal.

Suspected as a DDoS attack, we’ve moved their connection a seperate VLAN so we can monitor and restrict the spikes (which have now stopped) so no other customer is affected.

We’re working with the customer to identify the source addresses so we can blackhole them on the edge routers.

We’ve marked CH2011-04_08 to upgrade the firmware and management of the gaming network switch as a partial success.

Issues with the TFTP download from Netgear prevented us from successfully applying the updated firmware, and issues with the second gaming VLAN on the same switch prevented us from migrating ports.  We will attempt this again at a later time.

We did however successfully move the management VLAN to our new Active Directory network and update the MRTG monitoring scripts to not go through the application firewalls.

A “post-mortem” of why we couldn’t apply the firmware and 2nd VLAN will be done next week.

All services communicated out as impacted to affected customers should now be back to normal.

We’ve replaced the front doors of the remainder of our colocation racks with rear doors specially purchased to improve airflow.

This week Racks 7 to 16 have had their glass front doors removed and perferated rear doors installed.  The locks were also changed round so customers with their own keys can continue to access their equipment as before.

We tested swapping around doors last year as a trial, and with improved hot air containment and extraction in the first hot aisle, overall temperatures were lower and airflow greater.  With summer around the corner (somewhere) we’ve replaced the 2nd aisle’s doors as well.

With customers taking occupancy in the 3rd cold aisle, now was an ideal oppertunity to get this work done.

The black perferated doors were specially shipped by our supplier – Orion, and fit the racks perfectly. They also add to privacy as now you can’t see as easily into racks, but have a greater airflow.

New Rack Doors April 2011

For more information on our colocation packages, check out http://www.sheffielddatacentre.com

Today we successfully migrated a test CentOS5.5 Linux server, and a Windows 2008R2 Web Edition server from VMware ESX to Microsoft Hyper-V.

Once the VMDK’s had been migrated to Service Center Virtual Machine Manager, we were able to change the hardware template, install the Linux Integration Components (or Windows IC’s) and deploy the server to the Live Hyper-V cluster.

No major issues were observed, and both the Linux and Windows servers seem to be faster on Hyper-V!

We’re planning to repeat the testing several more times (with test servers) before finalising a VMware to Hyper-V migration plan for later in the year.

We hope to have remove the legacy VMware ESX / ESXi platform from live service by the end of the year.

(Sheffield Data Centre, Cloud VM Hosting)