E Ravi

Microsoft Exchange hosted services

eravi — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 03:45:00 GMT

Recently we signed with microsoft for the Exchange hosted services. This is paid service from microsoft.

Main advantage of this is on continuity and content filtering for our mailing services.

Use full link on MEHS on Self Training and 24/7 support Resources:Service FAQ’s Self-Paced Training Sessions:MEH Filtering Automated Self Training MEH Archive Automated Self Training MEH Continuity Automated Self Training MEH Encryption Automated Self Training 24/7 Technical Support Contact Information:support@frontbridge.com

US/Canada Tel: 866.291.SPAM (7726)

204.927.2580

Technical Support Customer Portal:https://messaging.custhelp.com/

Thanks

E.Ravi

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Exchange 2007 related articles from Microsoft.com

eravi — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:55:00 GMT

Here are some interesting and useful MSExchange related articles posted by Microsoft in the last month April 2008 : Thanks to msexchange.org.

Exchange 2007

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SQL Server -Get A Traffic Report: Analyze Your Database Usage With System Tables

eravi — Wed, 28 May 2008 07:19:00 GMT

This article really useful to take the reports on

1. Who's connected to your SQL Server

2. Dealing with blocked processes

3. Performance killers

4. Clues to SQL Server performance problems

5. Process Management

6. SQL Server

7. Database Performance

You can use with System tables built in with SQL server 2005 – which does these performance tasks for you. Check on sp_who, sp_who2, and Enterprise Manager are simply presenting data from the master.sysprocesses table.

Here go with the article from Microsoft which gives lot of info on this…

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc160786.aspx

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Live id support from microsoft.

eravi — Wed, 21 May 2008 08:07:00 GMT

https://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?LN=en-us&prid=10123&x=11&y=11

This page is really usefull to get liveid support from microsoft.

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Size your SERVER - Load Estimation – Recommendations from IBM

eravi — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:25:00 GMT

Size your SERVER - Load Estimation – Recommendations from IBM

Customer Input for Size the Webserver:

1.90million page user per month
2.Page wait 10k
3.NO SAN is required
4. NO DB clustering required
5.No Backup solution is required.

Software Details :

1. Operating system : Win 2003
2. Database : MS SQL
3. CMS application.

<<Techline response>>
Thank you for using ASEAN Techline.

Kindly note that the sizing for the web server requested is based on the best-effort basis since we do not standardly support sizing for third
party web server applications.

The sizing is done using the IBM Web-based Workload Estimator, using Microsoft IIS 6.0 with the following assumptions.

1. Which version of Microsoft IIS will you be using? IIS 6.0
2. What is the total number of visits per second? 100 per second (90 mil page/month = 35 page/sec)
3. How many pages will be displayed per visit? 10 pages
4. How many objects will be displayed per page? 200 objects/page
5. How much storage should be allocated for web content? 100 GBs
6. Indicate what percent of the pages are Static and/or Dynamic. Static: 60.0%; Dynamic: 40.0%
7. What percent of pages will use processor-based SSL? Encrypted: 15.0%
8. Select the desired server form factor for this sizing. Rack-optimized
9. RAID Support for this workload: RAID-5

The recommended server as below, included buffer for a 50% growth on the workload and disk capacity.

x3650 with two (2) x 2.0GHz Intel 5140, 2GB Memory, 300GB Internal Disk

Please note that if the sizing results does not fit with the web server application required, kindly consult the software vendor to provide
sizing on the hardware requirement, so that we can provide server recommendation accordingly.

Support from IBM Asia : ASEAN Techline Specialist
Notes: ASEAN Techline/Malaysia/IBM Email: techline@my.ibm.com

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Server Sizing. Independent & Easy -http://www.sizinglounge.com

eravi — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:55:00 GMT

This website is really usefull to size the hardware when you have the Pageviews/ users/concurrent users on IIS. To size a server lot of parameters being focussed.This is some extend accurate when we do a Manual size of server (Ram,HDD,CPU).

http://www.sizinglounge.com

Calculate your Pipe requirement for hosting a soltuion : http://www.netmakers.com/bandwidth.htm

Sizing the network

Network sizing provides the most formulaic approach to Web server sizing and capacity planning. The goal of network sizing is to ensure that no bottleneck occurs between the Web server, the network cards, and network and client requests/response.

Determining the size of the network is based on the server use and characteristics. For example:

The amount/frequency of a request sent to the server (hits)
The size of that request (client request)
The size of the request (Web server response), total size of average Web page, including all objects

At a high level, basic network calculation can be expressed as follows:

bps = h x s

where:

b is the required network bandwidth per second (bits per second)
h is the number of Web server hits per second
s is the average size of each hit in bits

Bits and bytes

Networking components measure traffic differently from servers and storage components. Networking components usually measure traffic in bits/second, while servers and storage measure it in bytes/second. For example, a 100 Mbps network can transfer 12.5 MB per second. See calculations in Figure 1 . Figure 2 shows the utilization.

Figure 1. Calculating transfer rate for network

Figure 2. Network utilization

Finally, network overhead accounts for approximately 30 percent network utilization. This overhead results from all communications such as packet headers. Several vendors offer network card solutions that provide Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) acceleration; that is, network overhead can be off-loaded to a hardware card optimized for establishing and tearing down TCP connections.

Estimating number of hits

Accurate sizing requires a good estimate of the average number of hits per day. There are two approaches to estimating the number of hits per day. The first approach presumes that you have access to Web traffic information. In this case, calculate Web traffic and break the day into four-hour windows. Select the number of hits in the highest four-hour window. Multiply this figure by 6 (see Figure 3 ).

Figure 3. Web server traffic: 24 hours

Use the peak four-hour period as the reference point. Multiply it by 6 to determine hits per day. Then divide by 24 to determine hits per hour.

The second approach most likely applies to building an infrastructure from scratch, which requires a different set of steps. Identify the architecture of the Web site, including number of pages, objects per page, and the target customer. If it is an internal site on an intranet, your calculations can be based on the customer base and company or department size. If the Web site is an Internet site, talk with other people who have similar Web sites and can help you to estimate traffic characteristics.

Determining the processor size

Processor sizing is straightforward if steady state CPU utilization of less than 80 percent is assured. This is crucial to maintaining efficient response times, because the higher the CPU utilization, the longer the queue, and consequently, the longer the response time per request. If the CPU utilization is above 80 percent, queues grow exponentially rather than linearly. (See Little's Law for more information about queues).

Server-generated dynamic content, such as CGI or Java^TM servlets, makes it difficult to size the processor. The processing costs of this dynamic content will be high enough so that the Web server processing cost is not significant. This assumes that the Web server has been correctly configured.

Benchmarking data for the dynamic content generation processing that will be performed is essential. This data can be used to estimate the number of CPUs and CPU speed necessary to serve the dynamic content. This estimate requires an understanding of the proportion of hits that will cause dynamic content to be served to allow the average computational effort per hit to be calculated.

Sizing the memory

Knowing the resources to be used can help to determine the amount of memory required. For Web servers, consider the byte size of all the software resources running on the processor, beginning with the operating system. The Available Bytes counter can serve as a guide to the size of the unused portion of memory. Allow for 10 percent of memory to be free; this is also known as memory freespace.

As a rule of thumb, you can never have too much memory, because server performance degrades heavily when the system has insufficient memory. The amount of memory is generally a balance with the monetary cost. The availability of sufficient memory prevents the server from accessing the disk frequently. It also enhances the end-user experience while resulting in less work on the server.

If users request information that is stored in memory, that information can be retrieved directly from memory rather than accessing the disk.

To calculate memory requirements, add the required memory for the following consumers of RAM:

Operating system and Web server memory usage. See documentation for the applicable operating system and Web server to determine memory usage. In addition, remember that memory is directly affected by the number of concurrent connections.

Generating dynamic content. Generating dynamic content requires extra memory compared to serving static pages. If applicable, consider the amount of memory required to generate dynamic pages and the number of concurrent connections to estimate how much memory is required.

Calculating dynamic and static content ratios. When calculating the ratio of dynamic to static content served on a site, it is easy to overestimate the percentage of dynamic material, particularly because some content that appears dynamic is actually served as static content. A good rule of thumb is that dynamic content is loaded from a database, while static content loads from HTML, text, or other static types of files. Note that many Web sites today have a dynamic front-end and link to static pages. For example, visit www.microsoft.com and drill down a level or two and you will find Active Server^TM Pages (ASP) delivering the documents.

Financial sites that provide up-to-the-minute stock market quotations are good examples of a high dynamic content ratio. These sites typically provide 30-40 percent dynamic to 60-70 percent static content. Look closely at your site to assess the ratio of dynamic to static content.

Operating system and Web server caching. Two key types of caching are key to Web server performance: operating system file system caching and Web server caching. Be sure to allocate and account for memory for these processes. The system administrator usually controls these settings.

Putting it all together

Once the memory requirement is determined, this should be considered an absolute lower limit beyond which the server will fail. Add some contingency, then track the actual memory performance (especially the amount of disk access) when the site is implemented. Use the guidelines in Figure 4 .

Figure 4. Calculating lower limit of acceptable memory

Sizing the hard disk drive

Sizing the disk drives and number of drives is as important as determining memory and processor speed. It is important to never exceed 85 percent usage of disk drive space. Base the selection on 85 percent of used space and 15 percent free space. For example, with 8 GB of data: 8 (data size = GB) + 1.2 (15 percent free space based on 8 GB = 1.2) = 9.2. In this case, select one disk drive close to the 9.2 GB calculation or two smaller disks with capacity equal to 9.2.

Optimizing disk performance. Sizing and performance are not the same. Sizing is based on a conservative percentage of performance capabilities to allow for peaks and spikes in usage. Industry practice supports using no more than 80 percent of disk capacity and maintaining 20 percent of disk space for other network requirements. Choose the size of the disk based on the site size, considering the 80/20 ratio. However, Dell recommends employing a 60/40 ratio for multiple data centers-existing or planned for the future.

RAID

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a disk subsystem that provides disk performance, reliability, or both. RAID is a set of two or more hard disks and a specialized disk controller that contains the RAID functionality.

The theory behind RAID is that instead of using one large drive to store all of the data, a set of smaller drives provides the flexibility to add redundancy and/or increase performance. There are many varieties of RAID, but the most commonly used RAID types are 0, 1, and 5.

RAID-0 offers better performance. RAID-0 is disk striping only, interleaving data across multiple disks for better performance. It does not provide safeguards against failure. For that reason, it is technically not "true" RAID because it does not provide fault tolerance. RAID-0 requires at least two hard disk drives (HDDs) and a RAID controller card.

RAID-1 provides high reliability. RAID-1 is disk mirroring that provides 100 percent duplication of data and provides a small performance benefit. Because both drives contain the same information, the RAID controller can read data from one drive while concurrently requesting data from the other drive. However, write speeds are slower since the controller must write all data twice. While RAID-1 offers high reliability, it doubles storage cost. The system will keep running if a hard disk fails. RAID-1 requires at least two HDDs and a RAID controller card.

RAID-5 provides both performance and fault tolerance. RAID-5 is one of the most commonly used RAID types. Data is striped across three or more drives for performance, and parity bits are used for fault tolerance. The parity bits from two drives are stored on a third drive. RAID-5 requires at least three HDDs and a RAID controller card.

Scalability, availability, and planning for growth

Business requirements increase over time. By adding processors, memory, and disks, Dell's PowerApp.web servers and general-purpose servers can scale up within each server, then scale out modularly. Businesses then have the option to scale their network by purchasing servers as needed, thereby realizing a return on investment (ROI) in a shorter time, rather than purchasing one large Web server and hoping to realize ROI.

Recent tests show that the PowerApp.web 120 Windows Powered systems were able to handle 1,110 concurrent users with 30,940 ASP request/minute with moderate load on the processors, shown in Figure 5 . See the article in Dell Power Solutions² for details.

Thanks : http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/power/en/ps3q01_graham?c=us&cs=555&l=en&s=biz

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Traffic details for a website - Free

eravi — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:40:00 GMT

Good free stuff to get Traffic detail about a website.

This site gives the info on page views, Rank, Daily basis. Even you can compare with other websites on graphical mode.

Country wise visitos stastics is also available.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/yahoo.com

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Office 2007 Mime Types (for IIS)

eravi — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 07:28:00 GMT

Office 2007 Mime Types (for IIS)

.docm,application/vnd.ms-word.document.macroEnabled.12 .docx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document .dotm,application/vnd.ms-word.template.macroEnabled.12 .dotx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.template .potm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.template.macroEnabled.12 .potx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.template .ppam,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.addin.macroEnabled.12 .ppsm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.slideshow.macroEnabled.12 .ppsx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.slideshow .pptm,application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.presentation.macroEnabled.12 .pptx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.presentationml.presentation .xlam,application/vnd.ms-excel.addin.macroEnabled.12 .xlsb,application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.binary.macroEnabled.12 .xlsm,application/vnd.ms-excel.sheet.macroEnabled.12 .xlsx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet .xltm,application/vnd.ms-excel.template.macroEnabled.12 .xltx,application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.template

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Visual Studio 2005 Team Editions Comparison

eravi — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:08:00 GMT

	Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals with MSDN Premium Subscription	Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects with MSDN Premium Subscription	Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers with MSDN Premium Subscription	Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers with MSDN Premium Subscription	Visual Studio Team Suite with MSDN Premium Subscription
MULTI-LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT FOR THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPER
Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals
Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Architects
Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Developers
Visual Studio Team Edition for Software Testers
Database project with source control integration of all database objects and support for offline representation of a database schema
Database Unit Testing, Data Generation, Database Refactoring, Schema Compare, Data Compare, Database Schema Deployment Tools
Advanced Database and T-SQL Tools
Unit Testing, Code Coverage
Dynamic Code Analyzer, Static Code Analyzer, Code Profiler
Application Designer, Logical Infrastructure Designer, Deployment Designer
Visio and UML Modeling (in MSDN Subscription)
Load Testing, Manual Testing, Test Case Management, and Web Testing
Visual Studio Professional (includes Class Designer)
Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual C++, Visual C#, Visual J#, Visual Web Developer, and Visual FoxPro
Reusable component creation, Server Development Tools, Advanced debugging tools including cross machine debugging
Smartphone, Pocket PC, and Windows CE Development; Web application precompilation
Visual Basic and Visual C# Stored Procedure Authoring and Deployment
Visual Database Tools; Oracle and DB2 database access; XSD Editor; XSLT Editor and Debugger
Visual Studio Tools for Office
Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Outlook, and Microsoft InfoPath programmability
Integrated visual design surfaces for Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel
Action Pane and Smart Tag programmability
Microsoft Access 2003 Developer Extensions and Runtime License
Source code and version control for small team collaboration using Microsoft Visual SourceSafe
ENTERPRISE APPLICATION LIFE-CYCLE MANAGEMENT TOOLS and APPLICATIONS
Team Foundation Server Workgroup Edition (limited to 5 users)
Team Explorer (includes Team Foundation Server CAL)
Enterprise templates, policies, and guidance for sharing development best practices
Advanced software, database, and business process modeling tools

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Microsoft Support, Troubleshooting & Customer Service

eravi — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 07:53:00 GMT

http://www.fixya.com/support/microsoft

thanks

E.Ravi

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Server Load Balancing and its Benefits

eravi — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 06:43:00 GMT

Good article on Server Load Balancing and its Benefits from tech Brief.

Server load balancing is the process of distributing service requests across a group of servers. The following diagram shows load balancing within a server farm.

Server load balancing addresses several requirements that are becoming increasingly important in networks .....

More in the pdf attached with this article.

Thanks
E.Ravi

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Separate Audio from VCD

eravi — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 07:03:00 GMT

Good tool to separate Audio from your Video Disk.

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Virtualdub : Tool

http://www.free-codecs.com/VirtualDub_download.htm More codecs and players.

Free tool to Separate Audio from VCD.

Thanks to Virtualdub

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What is a Client Access License (CAL) - Microsoft products - Guide

eravi — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 11:39:00 GMT

CAL: This is about CAL (Client Access License) - I get questions from my client whether there is need for a CAL during the purchase of MS products: Application Center, BizTalk Server,Commerce Server, CMS.....

Finally i got a Matrix from MS which gives a clear cut on whether there is a need for CAL or not.

For more info : http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sam/lic_cal.mspx

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