So today we faced a situation where one level 3 opened his mouth and said virtualisation only has 5% performance loss when put against a standard OS on a physical dedicated server, so we decided to put these into some real world tests. The results are shocking to say the least. Hardware Specifications: Dell Poweredge R410 Enterprise Server Dual E5520 2.26Ghz 12GB DDR3 1066Mhz 4 x 300GB 15K SAS Drives in a RAID 10 Array. Perc6/i Hardware RAID Card with BBU Operating System Setup Setup One: ESXi 5.5 with Single instance of Ubuntu Server 13.04 with VMtools Installed (All resources assigned , 2 Processors with 8 Cores - 16 Cores total & 12GB memory) Setup Two: Bare install of Ubuntu Server 13.04 We decided to run some tests that are universally available to all readers to test this themselves so we decided to use www.serverbear.com. So lets get straight into the results UnixBench Processor Results: ESXi 5.5 with Ubuntu Server 13.04 UnixBench (w/ all processors) 3620.3 Ubuntu Server 13.04 UnixBench (w/ all processors) 5316.9 We are seeing almost a 32% drop in processor performance which left a few jaws dropped! I/O Results using IOPING: ESXi 5.5 with Ubuntu Server 13.04 I/O Seek Test (No Cache) - 7420 iops, 29.0 mb/s I/O Reads - Sequential - 1825 iops, 456.3 mb/s I/O Reads - Cached - 370452 iops, 1447.1 mb/s Ubuntu Server 13.04 I/O Seek Test (No Cache) - 9520 iops, 37.2 mb/s I/O Reads - Sequential - 2286 iops, 571.6 mb/s….

Making the case for Solid State Storage As the performance of flash computing devices improves the cost associated with them is expected to fall. The advantages are already well-known – lower power consumption, cooler operating temperatures and less strain on hardware. Yet making the case for them is still a difficult task, namely because consumers are skeptical about spending more cash up front, even if it means they save in the long run. Solid State Drives: To Buy or Not to Buy While there are pros and cons to every new technology, the proof lies in the real world applications we inevitably apply them to; colocation resellers have likely stock piled an entire army of HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) - that are at the very least, mid-cycle in their life span. At this point, it may not make sense financially to invest in newer Solid State Storage systems. However, for larger companies, take for example Amazon web services, equipping servers with SSDs allows them to serve an entire community of users who rely on them to stream movies, music and run cloud-based web applications from afar; SSDs have less latency and enable Amazon to deliver high I/O instances to consumers. They have proven themselves in the real world and in this case, Amazon’s move to outfit servers with nothing but SDDs makes sense entirely. Solid State Drives: Worth the investment for consumers? Amazon Web Services proves a case can be made for SSDs in the data center, but what about….

We sat down with Kev, the Operations Manager here at Servers Australia. Here’s what he had to say. What do you do with SAU? I’m the Operations Manager so basically I look after everything under Jared (our Managing Director), or all of the things that he delegates to me. So I look after the guys day to day activities, manage projects, new order provisioning and customer complaints since I’m such a people person. How did you get to your position today? I started off in construction in 2004 doing admin and six months later I was managing 12 contractors for a Department of Housing head contractor. I then worked for another construction company doing project management for residential housing upgrades for 7 years. But then I decided I needed a bit of a sea change so I moved from Sydney to the Central Coast and went for an interview as a Level 1 with SAU. But when they saw what I could do and my management background they created a Customer Service Manager role for me and that’s how I ended up here with SAU. What’s it like in the SAU office? Hectic is what I’d say. No two days are the same but it’s definitely a challenging and rewarding job. Have you always been interested in IT then? Yeah I have. I remember getting my first computer at 10. It was a 486DX4 100MHZ. I can even remember all of the specs for it. It had 8MB RAM, 540MB….

Buy new not OLD The most important thing when buying a server is to check the age of the server as many hosting companies are offering older style servers, and while these are OK for starting out they are no good for a production or high traffic website. Old servers have been used and the drives degraded, power supplies worked and all components heated and cooled many times. It’s always best to ensure that you ask for a NEW server from your supplier. Servers Australia only ever offer the newest and latest hardware and this means we can repair/replace any of the parts we have in production as we refresh our fleet every few years. Buying older hardware also means it may be harder to source the parts if and when the old server does stop running. Data Charges Getting a nasty surprise from your provider is never a good thing so make sure when buying a server you are given a nice data allowance and that you know the cost of excess data up front. As a guide in Australia you should never pay more than $1.10 per GB for excess data charges, as this is standard across the board and is also a reasonable rate. Buying data in bulk or in advance will generally save you 50% off on your data charges and is important to look out for. Control Panel or Not When buying a server, you need to decide if you want and need a control….

SMTP is the acronym for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, which is as its name implies, is a protocol for sending email messages across the internet. This is used in conjunction with POP3 and IMAP which are also protocols that enable you to download messages from a mail server straight to your computer. Note that SMTP caters to outgoing emails while POP3 and IMAP are used for incoming mail. Now, the standard port implemented for SMTP connections is Internet port 25. If you happen to be having trouble sending messages, chances are likely that your internet service provider is blocking this port. Hence, the reason why it’s recommended that you use an alternative SMTP. Depending on your OS, here’s how to check whether or not your ISP is blocking port 25: 1. Check port 25 in Windows Click on the Start menu button, which is located at the lower left corner of your screen. Look for the tab “Run” (Note that you can also press the Windows Key and the R key simultaneously to open the run prompt). Click on it and a new will pop up. In the text field of this window, type cmd then press the “Enter” key. Another window called the “MS-DOS prompt” or “command-prompt” will open. Type the following command in the command prompt window and press “Enter”:telnet my-domain-name.com 25 2. Check port 25 in Mac A pre-installed terminal emulator is delivered for each Mac OS. Usually located under your Mac HD -> “Applications” directory ->….

Ryan Sweeney is one of the newer members of the Servers Australia Team. After taking him out for dinner as an initiation ceremony, we decided to sit down and have a chat with him to get to know him a little more. Hey Ryan, how are you going today? Hey! I am going fine thank you. As the newest member of Servers Australia, how are you liking working here? I am loving working at SAU. There a great bunch of people and I get to learn about heaps of cool stuff. What are your interests? Well Computers of course. I also like Playing Acoustic Guitar, Listening to music, Fishing & Radio Scanning Tell us more about the website you run. I run a website called CentralCoastOnlineScanner.com which streams 2xaudio streams from two digital radio scanners and a scanner that decode RFS Pagers as well. What is your favourite thing about the job? My Favourite thing about the job is that I get to play with new technology eg. Raspberry Pi’s & Different Server Technology. Thanks for sitting down and having this chat, I’ll let you get back to it.It’s been a pleasure, anytime.   Author: Alex Burgess

Perhaps one of the most important new features added to recent Apache versions (2.2.12, to be specific) is the long-awaited support for multiple SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) sites on a single IP address. Prior to this, it was only possible to have an SSL Secured Web site if it was bound to one particular IP address. This means, that before SNI (Server Name Indication) , if for example, you only had two IP addresses, you only had the ability to have two SSL Secured Websites. On two IP addresses you can have as many regular HTTP sites assigned to either IP, however only two SSL Secured sites. What made this even more frustrating is that if www.example1.com and www.example2.com were on the same IP and example1.com had an HTTPS site as well, going to https://www.example2.com/ would, in fact, take you to the equivalent of visiting https://www.example1.com/. This meant that most people who wanted an SSL Secured Website had to restrict one site (both HTTP and HTTPS variants) to a single IP address to avoid this type of confusion. With Apache 2.2.12 and support for the SNI extension to the SSL protocol, this has changed completely. Now you can configure name-based SSL Encrypted sites, just as you can configure name-based HTTP sites. The bottom line is that the five IPs that you needed today to run five SSL sites can be reduced to one IP if you meet the below requirements (provided, of course, you use the newer Apache). There are….

So yesterday marked the 13th International Caps Lock day. This day is a commemorative day originating by the software developer Derek Arnold. Why does this even occur, and why has it been celebrated for so long now? Well Arnold claims: International Caps Lock Day is in fact a testament to the small mindedness of certain Western individuals: the majority of the world’s population writes in scripts which have no concept of letter casing. Therefore, it is advised to laugh at anyone who invokes this day as an excuse to dismiss local typographical conventions: they are simply making an ass out of themselves. So what do we think about this, WELL IT’S ANOTHER REASON TO CELEBRATE. SO HAPPY INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY, EVERYONE! Dedicated Servers Specialists - About Us

We are giving away a free Virtual Server for 12 months to one lucky fan of the Servers Australia Facebook page! All you have to do to be in the draw to win is to head over to our Facebook page here, go to the ‘Free Stuff’ tab (ensure you have liked the page) then fill out the form with your details! Be sure to enter correct information so we can get in contact with you if you win. This prize is worth a total of $551.40! The competition will run until the 31st of October 2012 at 5pm, and we will draw the winner on the 5th of November, 2012. Specs of the server you might win are: 3.6GHz Dual Core Intel Xeon E5 CPU 1024MB DDR3 1600MHz RAM 25GB Storage Space 10GB Backup 200GB Bandwidth per month If you have already liked our page, you can go straight to the form here to enter your details to be in the draw to win!

We successfully got Ubuntu 12.04 Server working using Ubuntu Server 12.04 64-bit enterprise driver on the RevoDrive3 X2 BOOTABLE! That’s a 200,000 iop card with 1.5GB/sec Writes! Check out how Peter pulled it off. http://www.oczenterprise.com/drivers.html Specifically : http://www.oczenterprise.com/files/drivers/OCZ%20Ubuntu_Server_12.04_64-Bit_3.3.4.0_DS.tar.gz Copy the driver to a USB Stick NTFS will do , extract with winrar in windows. Using ubuntu-12.04-server-amd64.iso from any Ubuntu Mirror and burn it. Start installer and run it untill you get to configuration of Eth0 and then STOP! Press CTRL + ALT + F2 to get access to console. modprobe -r mvsas parted_devices <- This should list partitions and you should only see the USB Stick /dev/sda mkdir /usb mount.ntfs /dev/sda1 /usb cd /usb insmod ocz10xx.ko parted_devices <- it should now list the new RD3 drive /dev/sdb Pressing CTRL + ALT + F1 will get you back to the installer which you now can continue through the install, though when finished, do NOT reboot. Now press CTRL + ALT + F2 to get access to console again. **Mount RD3…in my case, the install drive was “sdb” mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt # Copy the kernel module into target system’s kernel module tree. cd /usb cp ocz10xx.ko /mnt/lib/modules/3.2.0-23-generic/kernel/drivers/scsi/mvsas/. **You will also need to blacklist the mvsas driver from booting ever again nano /mnt/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist Add this file in: blacklist mvsas Save & Exit Now need to “chroot” into the new OS on the RD3 and add “ocz10xx” kernel module to “initrd” so drive is detected during boot # do the chroot mount -bind /proc….