Glo Networks Technical Blog (Glo Blog)

Recently Microsoft has been making changes to their free Hotmail email service. In fact, while all the accounts and addresses remain active, Hotmail as a service is no more.  Instead the 300+ million active accounts have been transferred to the new Outlook.com service.  As you may expect this many accounts adds up to a lot of data.

Apparently the total amount of data that Microsoft had to transfer from Hotmail to Outlook.com added up to mind boggling 150PB (petabytes) which is over 150 million gigabytes. For those of us who aren’t familiar with these vast amounts of data Microsoft has kindly made this pretty infographic which gives some more relatable examples of how much this really is.

That being said my particular favourite is one that is still almost unimaginable due to the sheer scale. According to Microsoft if you burned 150PB of data on to DVD discs and then stacked said discs on top of each other the resulting tower would be taller than Mt. Everest. In fact it would be nearly 6 times the height of the world’s tallest mountain, and if my quick fact check on Wikipedia is correct the top would be higher than the International Space Station’s orbit!

Microsoft say that transferring all this data between the services took them 6 weeks and apparently went very smoothly. Considering the negligible amount of complaints that we’ve seen online (or at least negligible by the usual amount of complaining you get on the web) we’d be inclined to agree.  Good job Microsoft, not only have you successfully migrated the worlds second largest web based email service with very little disruption but you’ve also made me reconsider all data sizes in terms of towering stacks of DVDs.

Posted by James in Cool Stuff, General | No Comments »

Every now and then we get non-typical requests. Normally it’ll be for something mundane like helping out with a Managing Director’s kids computer, or providing broadband for a board member.

However the most recent one was to get a Microsoft SQL database transaction log shipped to a remote server, thats on a different domain, and could not be contacted over a normal SMB/CIFS share.

Immediately the first thought was of VPNs, but that wasn’t an option for politicial and security reasons. The next option is to avoid transaction log shipping and move to replication over HTTPS – unfortunately not an option due to political reasons.

So we started breaking down transaction log shipping. What is it? In essence a transaction log backup, which is then copied and restored. Figuring that we could set this up in parts we queued up the A Team theme and went to work setting up a lab.

It turns out that it’s surprisingly easy to do; On the primary server, cheat and use the Microsoft SQL Studio Management GUI to setup the primary as you would normally, but don’t add a secondary server. This gives you the backups into a directory of your choice.

Next job is to transport those backups to the secondary server(s). For this we chose to use winscp. It’s something we often use and it’s easily scriptable (we’re aware of other options – rsync and so on). Using winscp in console mode (/ini=path/to.ini) to create and save a session. We then created a winscp script to open a connection and call the synchronize command, to sync the local and remote folders. This is then called on a scheduled task every X minutes.

Now the backups are being copied to the secondary server the next and final step is to get those backups restoring into the secondary SQL server. First step is to restore a full copy of the database, in standby mode (as usual – if you manually seed). Next we need to setup the tasks to restore the transaction log backups.

Now we can’t use the GUI, so we’ll need to manually do it using the log shipping stored procedures. If you’re not familiar with these I highly suggest that you look them up rather than blindly running them. The timings for very much tweaked for our settings – you’ll certainly need to alter the “primary-server-name”, “secondary-server-name”, and “C:\Path\To\SQL\Transaction Log Shipping” (this needs to match the destination that your files are copied to on your secondary server) – you’ll also want to alter the retention and deletion period to match the settings on your primary.

declare @LSCopy_Job uniqueidentifier,
    @LSRestore_Job uniqueidentifier,
    @LSSecondary_Id uniqueidentifier

exec sp_add_log_shipping_secondary_primary
    @primary_server = 'primary-server-name',
    @primary_database = 'primary-database-name',
    @backup_source_directory = 'C:\Path\To\SQL\Transaction Log Shipping',
    @backup_destination_directory = 'C:\Path\To\SQL\Transaction Log Shipping',
    @copy_job_name = 'LSCopy_primary-server-name_primary-database-name',
    @restore_job_name = 'LSRestore_primary-server-name_primary-database-name',
    @file_retention_period = 2160,
    @overwrite = 1,
    @copy_job_id = @LSCopy_Job OUTPUT ,
    @restore_job_id = @LSRestore_Job OUTPUT ,
    @secondary_id = @LSSecondary_Id OUTPUT,

exec sp_add_log_shipping_secondary_database
    @secondary_database =  'secondary-database-name',
    @primary_server = 'primary-server-name',
    @primary_database = 'primary-server-name',
    @restore_delay = 0,
    @restore_all = 1,
    @restore_mode = 1,
    @disconnect_users = 1,
    @restore_threshold = 120

Now that we have the jobs setup they’ll need schedules set and to be enabled. This is do-able using the sp_add_schedule, sp_attach_schedule and sp_update_job stored procedures, however this can also be done via SQL Studio Management – use which ever you’re more comfortable with. The important thing to note is that the copy job is not required (since it’s happening over FTP(S)/SFTP/SCP/whatever) and can either be deleted or left disabled, and your schedule must be sane.

The only thing to do now is to setup some form of monitoring. This is the most important step. You can either use SQL alerts or look for event logs indicating that the databases are out of sync.

Now you can sit back, relax and utter the words “I love it when a plan comes together“.

Posted by Karl in Applications, Cool Stuff, Replication / Data Shipping, Scripting, Servers | No Comments »

So a few days ago Microsoft let everyone have a play with Windows Server 2012. We’ve been using the previous release (beta) for some time now and thought we’d better keep up to date. Obviously you can’t do an upgrade so on a test machine it installs nice and quickly and works like a dream.

Now this test machine has been running Windows Server 8 Beta for some time and before that Windows 2008 R2 Server. Both times as a Hyper-V host without a problem. However a clean install of Windows Server 2012 on it and adding the Hyper-V feature the machine will no longer boot. A lot of fiddling and I’ve found that in the BIOS disabling the ‘No-Execute Memory Protect’ feature allows it to boot. Of course you then have no Hyper-V functions !

Is this a feature ? Does this effect other motherboards ?

It appears that there’s a problem with the Gigabyte motherboard and this new build. The motherboard in question is a GA-P55M-UD2 release 1.0.

We know it’s not completed software and as such expect problems. Just thought this was a bit of an interesting one. We’ll report back if we find a solution.

Posted by Chris in Desktop Hardware, Desktops and Laptops, Operating Systems, Operating Systems, Servers | 2 Comments »

Recently we’ve adopted a new policy regards laptop sales here at Glo.  All laptops we sell will now be fitted with SSD’s.  For laptops that don’t come with SSD’s fitted by the manufacturer we will fit aftermarket SSD’s.

The reasoning behind the policy is as follows: The average cost of laptops we sell are £500-£600. The average cost of a midsized SSD is around £100. The performance benefits of an SSD are quite vast when compared to the average spinning disk drive. We feel that for around an extra 20% of the cost of a laptop you can turn a decent business laptop into an excellent one!

All customers who have purchased laptops fitted with SSD’s from us to date have got back to us to tell us how impressed they are by the performance.

The only time we feel an SSD would not be suitable for a laptop would be if for some reason a large amount of disk space is required. In this scenario an SSD of a suitable size would likely be cost inhibitive.  However we cannot remember a time when a customer has stated a large amount of disk space as a requirement for a new laptop.

For anyone interested our aftermarket SSD’s of choice are the Corsair Force 3 range of drives. We’ve found these drives to be great performers and very good value for money.

Posted by James in Desktops and Laptops, Laptop Hardware | 1 Comment »

If you’re running Windows Vista or Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 it may be time to think about upgrading as today marks the end of Microsoft’s mainstream support for the products. As with all Microsoft products it will move into the Extended support phase which lasts  for some time, in Vista and Exchange Server 2007′s case until April 2017.

The main difference between the phases is Microsoft will not accept requests for warranty support, design changes, or new features during the Extended Support phase, and Extended Support is not available for Consumer, Hardware, or Multimedia products.

Further information on the Mainstream and Extended support phases, and product lifecycles in general, can be found here.

We thought we’d take this opportunity to share some of the other support lifecycle dates for Microsoft products:

Windows Desktop OS’s

Windows Server OS’s

Microsoft Exchange Server

Microsoft SQL Server

As you can see from the above Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 are the next products to move to Extended support in July of next year. Good job Windows Server 8 is around the corner!

Posted by James in Desktops and Laptops, General, Operating Systems, Operating Systems, Servers, Small Business Software | No Comments »