Geekzone server update 2015

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freitasm

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#166327 9-Mar-2015 18:41

UPDATE: Geekzone will be down some time on the Saturday 28th March 2015 for this server migration.

We are now talking to HP about a server update. Our current HP DL360 G5 is getting a bit old and we want to make sure we don't have a hardware failure impacting the site. We are working towards an update to a HP DL360 G9, which HP provides to us as supporting our community.

We currently colocate at Datacom Orbit in Auckland and have no plans to change the location. They provide a great service to us there.

And you folks eat all our Internets:

I will be visiting Auckland when the time comes to make sure we can move the Geekzone VMs from one box to another and try to keep service interruption to a minimum during that period - whenever it is.

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#1254277 9-Mar-2015 18:50

well if you have some of the down time on the evening of March 27th you'll have less people complaining, well those at Nate's anyway

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#1254282 9-Mar-2015 19:01

What sort of specs are you planning on out of interest?

/Slightly off topic
We had a DL360 G9 arrive for a client at work today and were shocked to find it only had 2 DIMMs of Ram (Ordered 64GB of ram & thought it was missing some modules) until we took a closer look at the modules and saw they're 32GB each.

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freitasm

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#1254286 9-Mar-2015 19:06

I don't have a date yet but a change of configuration made it hard to get it by 27th Mar. I am thinking sometime mid-April or closer to the end of that month is more likely.

Our configuration comes with 32GB RAM.

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#1254306 9-Mar-2015 19:34

We'll just have to have another IRL the following month. For the reasons jeffnz stated :)

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#1254478 10-Mar-2015 08:57

freitasm: We currently colocate at Datacom Orbit in Auckland and have no plans to change the location. They provide a great service to us there.

And that puts to rest speculation that you host GZ in your bedroom.

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#1254494 10-Mar-2015 09:33

freitasm: We currently colocate at Datacom Orbit in Auckland and have no plans to change the location. They provide a great service to us there.

Yay, Datacom.

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freitasm

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#1257852 13-Mar-2015 13:21

I am told by HP our new server is in Auckland now. So I might end up doing the swap on the 28th March after the drinks (ooops).

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#1257908 13-Mar-2015 14:26

freitasm: So I might end up doing the swap on the 28th March after the drinks (ooops).

The success of the server swap may be inversely proportional to the success of the drinks ;-)

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#1258259 14-Mar-2015 09:52

Currently working on how to do this... Requesting work approvals from our DC provider (Datacom), looking at migration strategies (moving Hyper-V VMs from one machine to another to reduce downtime), preparing USB keys with OS ISO for install, downloading drivers, etc.

For those interested, our last big migration was from Windows Server 2008 to Windows Server 2012 around February 2013. I've an old blog post with details about Geekzone history over time, including hosting, servers, etc.

Some stuff changed since that post went live and I will put an updated version after our new server goes live.

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enfield

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#1258263 14-Mar-2015 10:02

just out of curiosity how much is the monthly bandwidth usage for a site like this

freitasm

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#1258265 14-Mar-2015 10:10

I wouldn't say it's large - we use lots of cached resources. Not counting emails (about 200,000 notifications sent in February 2015) and backups (database and VM backups are done to HDD then uploaded to cloud services) we're talking about 200GB/month. In total we use about 500GB/month.

Edit: we've sent an average of 7,000 notification emails/day in the last five years, and growing.

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#1259330 14-Mar-2015 14:16

Another simple question, but why does the site need to run on a server/virtual machine in a data centre - what is wrong with something like Azure?

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#1259336 14-Mar-2015 14:27

TwoSeven: Another simple question, but why does the site need to run on a server/virtual machine in a data centre - what is wrong with something like Azure?

The BDFL needs a seedbox as he suffers from Vodafone cable congestion. Azure is also a touch of distance away from NZ and speed is important to us geeks.

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freitasm

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#1259338 14-Mar-2015 14:34

TwoSeven: Another simple question, but why does the site need to run on a server/virtual machine in a data centre - what is wrong with something like Azure?

Cloud services are good for medium/large sized companies. Running Geekzone on Azure would cost a few times more than colocation. Also HP provides us with the server as a community contribution, making the benefits of colocation go even further.

And as above, there isn't an Azure location in New Zealand, so having a server in Auckland is the best we can do to provide a fast experience.

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#1259346 14-Mar-2015 15:04

Just for the heck of it I looked at AWS pricing. This is for one VM, which probably wouldn't be enough for all of GZ.

Windows on R3.XLarge (4 cores 30GB RAM), which includes 80G of SSD as temporary storage (cleared on reboot)
50GB of persistent SSD storage
200GB web transfer out
50GB web transfer in
500GB storage on glacier

US$507/month. Add another smaller server for general purpose stuff for US$238/month. That's a LOT cheaper than NZ Govt IAAS hosting, but I'm sure it's also a fair bit more than co-lo prices. You could probably drop it down a bit by tweaking VM sizes, using RDS, etc.

These prices add up really quickly even for large companies or government departments. A small govt dept will probably run at least 50VMs, a large department may run 2000. You could easily be spending $1M/month on hosting. If you owned the hardware you might work out better off in the end, but once you consider the large number of people you need to manage a setup that size maybe not. AWS has a calculator for that.

One reasonably small/simple solution I'm architecting for my workplace would need 3 VMs for each environment (web in DMZ, app server, db server), and we have dev (temporary), test (temporary) and prod (permanent) environments. Given our solution isn't high volume it could be hosted in AWS for around US$375 per month - less than I expected actually - each VM on NZ Govt IAAS with 4 cores and 4GB RAM costs something like $800 - $1000 per month. When I spec'd out my requirements if it was higher volume it went out to US$1400 per month - still far cheaper than NZ Govt IAAS which would be $5K+ I guess.

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