At the end of last year we had our Cisco UCS ordered and in your datacenter. In January we started the testing and made the Clusters ready for the production environment. In February we started the migration of our existing environment, mostly P2V and also some V2V migrations.

Here some interessting facts about our Cisco UCS and Hyper-V project.

• We use 12 Cisco UCS Blades this is like 10 HE of rackspace
• We migrated 45 Windows Servers and 47 Unix Servers in just one week
• We replace 2 racks of server with a half rack of two Cisco UCS Bladecenters
• We think we can replace 2-3 racks more with our two Bladecenters.
• At the end of this year we think we could replace 4-5 racks with 1/2 rack
• We still have a lot of physical and virtual server which will be needed to be migrated to the Bladecenter.
• We will get even more out of our Blade Servers by activting Hyper-V Dynamic Memory as a new feature of Hyper-V R2 ServicePack 1

This migration had a lot of positive influence on other things in the datacenter.

• we need now 4% less energie overall
• we need now 6% less cooling overall
• we need less space (1 and 1/2 racks at the moment)
• now our system administrator travel 50% less to the datacenter, because of hardware defects or other administrative tasks.
• We can deploy new servers in minutes instead of hours

I think all of this numbers (except the time we need to deploy new servers )will increase after the next migrations.

Now I started to write a series of blog posts about installing Microsoft Hyper-V R2 on the Cisco UCS system:

• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Part1
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Create Hyper-V Image for Blade Servers – Part 2
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Install Blade Servers – Part 3
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Configure Blade Servers – Part 4
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Configure Hyper-V Networks – Part 5
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Create Hyper-V Cluster – Part 6
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Add Nodes to Hyper-V Cluster – Part 7
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Add Hyper-V Cluster to SCVMM – Part 8
• Cisco UCS Hyper-V Cluster – Important Updates for the Hyper-V Cluster – Part 9

Microsoft Hyper-V and the Cisco UCS Bladecenter are a powerful team. The UCS Virtual Hardware takes alot of complexety from the hypervisor in your case Hyper-V. You don’t need NIC teaming and stuff like that. Thats is making it very easy to deploy Hyper-V Clusters. And with the Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager you can save a lot of time in managing your clusters, hosts, virtual machine and also in P2V and V2V migrations. Since Microsoft SCVMM supports Windows Powershell you can also do a lot of scripting automation. And with the release of the new Version of SCVMM (System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012) this will even get better for deploying new virtual machines, services and even public and private clouds.

We started with Microsoft Hyper-V R2 Servers before the release of Service Pack 1. We think we can even get a lot more out of your systems with the new Dynamic Memory feature for Hyper-V which comes in Service Pack 1.

At the end we think choosing the Cisco UCS, Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager for our datacenter was the best choice we have made, in terms of costs and technology.

This is a very small line of code to count Sharepoint 2010 Site Collections with Powershell.

(Get-SPSite -Limit all).Count

By the way, we at Genotec AG are offering a Hosted Sharepoint 2010 solution based on Powershell automation.

Last Monday we added support for the .NET Framework 4 to our Windows Shared Hosting Server at Genotec. Today the official Press release was published.

We also added support for:

• .NET Framework 4
• ASP.NET MVC 2.0
• Silverlight 4
• New Versions of Persits AspMail, AspPDF, AspJPEG

Genotec: .Net Freamwork 4 for Webhosting (German)

Der in Allschwil/Basel ansässige Internet Service Provider Genotec AG lanciert mit .NET Framework 4 die neueste Version des Microsoft Entwickler-Frameworks.

Mit dem Ziel stets neue Features und aktuelle Produkte zu integrieren, hat Genotec das .NET Framework 4 von Microsoft lanciert. Ab sofort steht allen Windows Webhosting-Kunden der Genotec dieses Angebot zur Verfügung.

«Die neue Version von .NET lässt Projekte im Windows-Umfeld noch einfacher und mit vielen neuen Features erstellen. Unsere Kunden werden grosse Freude daran haben.» so Thomas Betz, Entwickler bei Genotec. Die neue Version mit vielen Features überzeugt auf der ganzen Linie. Zu den wichtigsten Neuerungen zählen unter anderem Codeverträge, eine DLR (Dynamic Language Runtime), neue Diagnose und Leistungstools sowie eine verbesserte automatische Speicherbereinigung. Die komplette Abwärtskompatibilität rundet den sehr guten Eindruck des .NET Framework 4 ab.

Verfügbar ist das .NET 4.0 bereits ab dem kleinsten Angebot für CHF 9.90 pro Monat. Mit dem Shared Hosting Entry erhalten Kunden ein Webhosting mit bis zu 10 Domains, komplettes Mailhosting inkl. Webmail, tägliches Backup, Statistiken sowie der kompletten Integration ins Hosting Control Center von Genotec und weiteren Features.

Über Genotec AG:
Der Schweizer Internet Service Provider Genotec AG wurde 2001 gegründet. Das Unternehmen beschäftigt 36 Mitarbeitende und betreut in den eigenen Rechenzentren in Zürich, Basel, Bern und Allschwil über 50’000 Domain- und rund 500 Serverkunden. Genotec ist ein BAKOM-registrierter Provider und als «Microsoft Gold Certified Partner» zertifiziert. Genotec wurde von der simsa mit dem Gütesiegel «Swiss Quality Hosting» ausgezeichnet und ist providerliste.ch geprüft.

Seit 2008 ist Genotec neu bei Computerworld in den Top-500 der stärksten IT-Firmen der Schweiz gelistet.

Weitere Informationen zur Genotec: www.genotec.ch

Pascal Leu, Product Manager
Genotec AG
Binningerstrasse 95
CH – 4123 Allschwil
Tel. +41 (0)848 321 123

E-Mail: pressemitteilungen@genotec.ch

After updating Persits AspJPEG to the latest version on all our Servers we got this error on one of your systems:

Server object error ‘ASP 0177 : 800401f3′

Solving this problem is pretty easy, just register your AspJPEG.dll and restart IIS:

C:\>regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\Persits Software\AspJpeg\Bin\AspJpeg.dll"

C:\>iisreset

This works for other Persits Software as well.

Some weeks ago Genotec released the new swiss hosting project together with Microsoft. Heidihosts is based on Microsoft Hyper-v Server, and every customer gets his own Virtual Machine. There are some pretty cool configurations especially for students.

• Basispaket Hyper-V[Student]

  1GB Memory
  HDD 25 GB
  OS Windows Server 2008 Datacenter auf Hyper-V
  SFR 29.90

• Basispaket Hyper-V[Business]

  1GB Memory
  HDD 30 GB
  OS Windows Server 2008 Datacenter auf Hyper-V
  SFR 69.90

• Basispaket Hyper-V[Developer]

  1GB Memory
  HDD 30 GB
  OS Windows Server 2008 Datacenter auf Hyper-V
  SFR 69.90

All three come with a preinstalled configuration:

• Windows Server 2008 Datacenter Edition
• IIS 7
• ASP.Net, ASP, FastCGI und PHP
• SQL Server 2008 Express with Advanced Services
• PHP Distribution für Windows 5.2.6 mit fast CGI
• Microsoft Silverlight 2 und Silverlight 2.0 Tools
• Microsoft IIS7 Media Pack und Web Playlists