Tuesday 21 April 2009

Visio Diagram of the Lab

To help people understand the layout of the lab here is a network diagram:

Thursday 16 April 2009

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -17

Part 17:

Setup of outlook, and testing off client side fail over.




Part 17 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -16

Part 16:

Setup of Exchage Virtual server. Server side test of fail over.



Part 16 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -15

Part 15:


Installing MS Exchange 2003 to the second node.



Part 15 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -14

Part 14:

Installing MS Exchange 2003 on to the first cluster node.



Part 14 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -13

Part 13:


iscsi setup on node 2.

Adding a node to the cluster.



Part 13 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -12

Part 12:

Installing iScsi in windows 2003 server, setting up Iscsi.

Setup MSDTC (network)

Exchange Prep.

First Node setup (cluster setup)

MSDTC Cluster Group



Part 12 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -11

Part 11:

Openfiler Setup. Partitioning for Exchange, iscsi setup and LUN mapping.


Part 11 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -10

Part 10:

Openfiler Booting...


Part 10 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -9

Part 9:


Joining a workstation to a domain.


Part 9 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -8

Part 8:

DHCP Server setup.


Part 8 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -7

This one is does the same for cluster node 2 as I have done for node 1.


Part 7 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -6

Part 6:

This shows you why I use newsid.exe when using cloned servers.
Sets up the server and joins it to the domain.



Part 6 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -5

Part 5:

Testing Active Directory using dcdiag.exe and tidying AD to make it more secure
(mainly trying on secure dynamic updates)


Part 5 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -4

Part 4:

How to join a server/computer to the domain.


Part 4 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -3

Part 3:

This part is how to setup Forwarders within DNS server manager and then install Active Directory on to the first Active Directory server within the company (New forest New domain).


Part 3 How to setup a cluster lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -2

Part 2:

This video shows you how to install remote access server and configure it for NAT.



Part 2 How to Setup a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo.

Setting Up A Cluster Lab for Exchange 2003 -1

Well its been a long time coming but to balance out my unix/BSD/linux posts, I thought I would add some windows tutorials to the mix.

So here we have it..

This is a how to guide on how to setup a lab, from DNS server setup, Active Directory, Remote Access Server (for NAT) to Cluster Nodes and installing Ms Exchange within a cluster.


This is designed from the perspective of a student trying to setup a working lab within VMware/physical machines to play around with exchange in a clustered environment.

Here is Part one:
How to Setup a DNS Server within Windows 2003 Server


Part 1 of How to Create a Cluster Lab from Richard Vimeo on Vimeo

Sunday 5 April 2009

ZFS and BSD

So for a client of mine I have been looking into ZFS for BSD.

He needed the ability to add drives to an array and have the filesystem grow to take advantage of the new space.

BSD volume management is pretty lacking atm (without zfs) linux has LVM which works pretty well for them. However with all the pvcreate lvgroup extendfs pvscan etc there are alot of tools to learn.

In steps FreeBSD...

There are bascially 2 tools
zpool and zfs

So how do I create a volume?

zpool create mytankname raidz da0 da1 da2

For those that have RAID experience this will create something like a RAID5 array.

It will also automount it to /mytankname

Now imagine you then had to add some more disks..

zpool add mytankname raidz da3 da4

This would automagically add da3 + da4 to the array.

New space will be avalible as soon as the command has been issued.

Get the status of your array like this

zpool status mytankname

Space like this:
zpool list

Unmount filesystem like this:
zfs umount mytankname

and mount it like this:
zfs mount mytankname


Dont forget to make sure that it starts at boot:
echo 'zfs_enable="YES"' >> /etc/rc.conf


Things to be careful of:
ZFS is experimental atm
If you machine is currently doing swapping then ZFS probably isnt the best choice atm
Once you have choosen the vdev i.e. raidz disk spare mirror only add the same of that type, this means that once you do
zpool create tank mirror da0 da1
do NOT do
zpool add -v tank da2

As the failure of da2 will take the whole array with it



Other tips:
More info on compression alternative roots etc here
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSQuickStartGuide

Live videos:
Add/replace
http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/zfs/zfs_add_replace.swf
Compressions/gzip
http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/zfs/zfs_compression.swf
Snapshot
http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/zfs/zfs_snapshot.swf

http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/misc/zfs/zfs_ufs-on-zvol.swf