Gallery

Virtual machines, real users

Posted on 18 Jun 2009 at 11:06

Jon Honeyball keeps up with virtualisation and calls for greener servers, while David Moss continues setting up a course management system.

Proper servers have been designed and built until now with a focus on performance, reliability and high service availability, and while I'm not saying that power consumption and heat output have been completely ignored, there's no doubt that they've so far been of only secondary consideration. We now need to add in power consumption and heat output to the total figure of merit for a system, and with a vengeance. If a modern top-flight laptop with a multicore processor and several gigabytes of RAM can run off around 20W of power with a fully charged battery (think of this as equivalent to a UPS in server terms) then there's serious scope for a revolution in server design.

Of course, there will still be a place for those mainframe-style monsters, especially for ones that can gobble up half a dozen or more virtual machines, but we really could do with commoditised 1U servers that take low-power processor chips and feature laptop-style engineering ideas. And let's see solid state disks in there too, please. If I can get a five-hour battery life from the built-in battery on my laptop, then the engineering maestros at Dell and HP ought to be able to squeeze an appropriate battery pack into the back of a server whose box is more than 1m in depth. Let's see who can get us a significant power reduction first.

I want to see innovative thinking, like processor core idling, which I believe is supported in Server 2008 R2, so a strong implementation based around the System Center management tools is to be welcomed. It's been around for years in high-end monsters such as the Unisys E7000, and it's about time it was possible to incrementally reduce the power consumption of a rack server down to around 10W according to load. That's my target - to have a fully running server able to idle down to 10W of power consumption, and still be ready to ramp up to full speed within a fraction of a second. This would definitely cause the design of virtual machine hosting to be flipped over onto its head: move all the workloads down onto one server for the slow night shift and idle all the remaining machines, then just in time for the morning office inrush bring all these servers back up to speed and redistribute their workloads again. If we're to use hot-move technologies for virtual machines then such techniques need to become part of our daily automated routines.

I'll be looking for appropriate sessions at the forthcoming Microsoft Management Summit (MMS 09) to be held in Vegas in late April. Getting all this to work - and finding the hardware to support it - is one of my challenges for 2009.

Jon Honeyball

In the Moodle IV

Welcome back to my Server Room, and the fourth part of my ongoing series (following on from previous issues in April, May and June 2009) where I've been working towards setting up a Course Management System (CMS) called the Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, which is a bit of a mouthful so everyone calls it Moodle (you might also know such things as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or even as a Learning Management System (LMS)). Because I like a challenge, I decided to try to carry out my Moodle installation on the new Windows Server 2008.

Before you can install Moodle you first have to configure Internet Information Services (IIS) 7, install PHP Hypertext Processor (PHP) and a database of your choice, and as Moodle is open source I opted to install MySQL, PHPMyAdmin and MySQL Administrator as my database management tools. When I finished last month's column I'd just completed the installation of all the above components and had done a fair bit of configuration to those items, either using graphical tools or by the simple expedient of using Notepad on their INI files.