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We are investigating reports of a Node crash in our 2nd Hyper-V cluster.  Engineers have been called to site to investigate.  We are lead to believe all client machines on the affected node have been rebooted automatically on a new node.  More updates when known.

(Saturday 28th January 16:20).

UPDATE 17:10 – All services for all customers who’s servers were on this node should now be back to normal.  The offending cluster node has been taken out of service for hardware replacement on Monday (30th).  Further work next week to re-balance the cluster following this incident will happen next week.

We apologise for this issue.

04/01/2011 17:30 – We’ve had reports of intermittent packet loss for some customers.  It seems to depend which way through Virgin Media’s network the connection comes in, so we’ve raised a ticket with Virgin Media Business (6 hour fix time).  Updates to follow.

UPDATE 04/01/2011 22:00 – Not all customers affected still, depends which traffic route is followed.  Virgin Media have escalated to BT for further checks.

UPDATE 05/01/2011 05:30 – Virgin Media have completed loop tests overnight and reset BGP sessions, we have rebooted 1 edge router. No further significant packet loss detected overnight however we will gauge during the working day.

UPDATE 05/01/2011 21:00 – It seems the majority of customers affected by packet loss yesterday are coming in via PlusNet, whilst we can’t confirm this fully yet, we’re asking any customer who uses PlusNet as their ISP to contact us ASAP if they’re having a problem.

Over the last weekend we migrated our first customer VPS from VMware ESX 3.5 to Hyper-V 2008R2.

This is a significant milestone as it signifies the start of winding down VMware for customer servers.  All new VM’s or VPS’s have been provisioned on Hyper-V (controlled by Service Centre Virtual Machine Manager, in a HA cluster) since 2010.

All our own servers have also been migrated to Hyper-V with the exception of Exchange 2007 which is now winding down due to the launch of Exchange 2010.

After nearly a year saying Exchange 2010 will be available to customers, we can now finally (and proudly) say the first mailboxes are now LIVE and handling email.

We have a brand new 3 node cluster (3 nodes, 3 databases, active/active/passive) in a single Database Availability Group, hosted on separate VM’s on separate nodes here at the Sheffield Data Centre.

We’ve got some more user testing to do this week, along with gathering feedback on various devices including iPhone, Android and Nokia, as well as Outlook on the desktop.

New customers who’ve been waiting for Exchange 2010 from us (there are a few) will start to see their orders processed this week.  Existing customers on Exchange 2007 will be contacted at the end of the month regarding the mandatory upgrade / migration.

No new orders will be taken for Hosted Exchange 2007, and the website will be updated to reflect this.  There will also be a budget Hosted Exchange mailbox (less space and without Outlook) in the pipeline too.

So, if you feel your email needs an upgrade, get in touch!  call us on 0114 228 0022, or email sales@hahosting.com

(Hosted Exchange 2010 now available from High Availability Hosting)

Please be aware webmail has migrated from webmail.thevirtualcloud.com to https://webmail.hahosting.com

This is planned work which has been communicated individually to all clients and blogged, any customer who’s having issues logging in please contact support@hahosting.com

Last week we sent out an update email to all our active customers regarding the new DNS servers going live at the end of the month.

Due to an error in the mailmerge on WHMCS – all our customers got an email containing;

Dear (customer),

xxx

Regards,

The “xxx” is where the mailmerge is supposed to go, but it didn’t work.  After some odd replies back (asking if were were insane, or just throwing free love about), we did manage to get a manual email update out to everyone.

For anyone who didn’t reply and is stil wondering – we love you as a customer, but not enough to send you kisses!

The software error in WHMCS has now been fixed  :-)

It makes me laugh when I delete all the spam messages our blog attracts. Clearly these people think it’s unmoderated and open. Silly people!

On a more business note, we’re not in the office on Easter Monday (unless emergency callout), but normal office hours will be resumed on Tuesday 6th.

Happy Easter everyone!

At 05:30 this morning a huge crane lifted our generator from it’s storage place nearby to the concrete pad and secure compound at the back of the Sheffield Data Centre.  It took a little time to plan, execute, beat the weather, and generally organise the lift – but it’s done and will be connected to the Automatic Transfer Switch shortly!

Not a great pic below, but it was practically dark when taken – the generator being lowered to it’s base:

Flying Generator

More pics and info will be available soon!

After several delays (mainly caused by bad weather, contractor delays, and Christmas!) we’ve finally had the footings dug out and concrete poured for the generator enclosure.

The grass banking was dug out on Tuesday 23rd, and concrete poured Thursday 25th.  Blockwork has been delivered and the enclosure itself is scheduled to be constructed next week.  Once the encloure is complete we’ll pull the thick generator cables through and move the generator itself into position.

We’re confident that (if there’s no more snow – which apparently doesn’t help concrete set!) the generator will be in position mid-March!

Digging out the footings

Ready for concrete

Concrete finally poured!

The generator, in storage. Waiting to be positioned.