In order to correctly use beacon fail-over probing for Vmware vSphere server network connectivity you need:

• 2 physical uplink switches in failover set-up;
• 3 physical uplinks in team per each vSwitch with beacon probing enabled;
• 2 of the uplinks (each going into different uplink switch) must be active and the third physical uplink should be set-up as a Standby adapter.

Beacon probing also works if you are using Vlan trunks. The only difference is that in case of any uplink failure beacon probes will be sent to all vSwitch VLANs increasing traffic a little.

Keep in mind:

You… Read the rest of this entry »

Popular sites receive high concurrent web visitor requests and some clients send bad favicon.ico fetch requests. If you are running nginx you probably didn’t notice that, for example: /category/favicon.ico generate significant 404 errors in your server error log file, because this file is located only in root, e.g. /favicon.ico.

Every request for non-existent file takes some load and every 404 missing file error is usually logged into error_log file, unless you have disabled error logging. To forward all non-root favicon.ico requests to /favicon.ico you can set-up the following rewrite rule in nginx.conf file in the correct server{} location:

rewrite ^/(.*)/favicon.ico$

… Read the rest of this entry »

Remember the time when 50GB monthly traffic for a dedicated server was so much bandwidth. Nowadays, 1000GB, 3000GB or even higher traffic monthly limits are common, but there are quite a few dedicated server companies lately offering 10TB (10000GB) monthly traffic limit. This is quite a huge monthly limit and 99%+ web sites will never attract this traffic (sorry, but I had to say this). The pricing is quite attractive and there are companies that advertise 10TB server pricing for less than 100$ a month (doesn’t sound that you really get 10TB for this price, hopefully you do).

Anyway, if… Read the rest of this entry »

For quite some time Intel and AMD has released 6 core processors and their cost has gone down. You should evaluate your server infrastructure carefully if you need to buy these new 6 core or more powered servers.

From my own experience, CPU resources are not the bottleneck for most of the applications we are running on Vmware vSphere – it’s performance is great and CPUs are fast nowadays. We are usually running out of the RAM with our vSphere 4 ESXi servers and thus, recommend a minimum of 128GB RAM for Vmware Enterprise license powered servers and at least… Read the rest of this entry »

There are only two Oracle certified operating systems that support hosting Oracle DB:

• SLES (Novell Suse Enterprise)
• Redhat (Enterprise Linux)

I have been using both OSes to hosting Oracle DB and so far it’s been working great. My personal choice would be Redhat, but I know you can get better pricing and features (from the licensing point of view) with Novell… if you know how to deal with these guys.