Systems Management – ThinkInBig

The Limits of Shared Hosting

Published July 27, 2012 by Carlos Veira

Have you ever wondered which is the real difference among different offerings besides the fact that your applications run on a shared server? In fact, most of the times, this seems to be a tricky question because most service providers describe the boundaries and limits of their services based on the following common parameters:

The resource type and quota: storage, bandwidth, mail boxes, mail lists, FTP accounts, database instances, etc.
The underlying platform: Windows (IIS/Apache) or Linux (Apache) under whichever version.

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The role of PowerShell in IT-aware Services and Applications

Published January 15, 2011 by Carlos Veira

Several months ago, I happened to share a nice conversation about the potential of PowerShell as part of the IT/Enterprise Architecture. Then I discovered that the benefits of architecting IT-aware Applications are still widely unknown or misunderstood. That’s the reason I would like to share my thoughts on this subject pointing out the special role that PowerShell can play in this field.

IT-aware Services and Applications

IT-aware Services and Applications incorporate the necessary instrumentation so that IT and Operations Teams can control, monitor, diagnose and operate them using the same semantics that the business uses in addition to the classic IT constructs and abstractions.…

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Configuring your Personal NMAgent Session Store

Published January 9, 2011 by Carlos Veira

Today I would like to explain a little bit what Session Stores are for the NMAgent and, therefore, what a Personal Session Store is. A Session Store is a database table that holds the information from your Agent Sessions when you have tell him to do so. Every run command invocation fires a new Agent Session and you have the option to persist the results in a database if you issue the -save parameter as well on the CLI.

Since version 4.54b0 you can choose your Session Store and define its name on your Profile Settings.…

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Massive and Distributed Folder Hard-Linking

Published December 28, 2010 by Carlos Veira

Some weeks ago, we have run into capacity issues in a server farm that provides services to a Computational Grid. This farm run Windows applications and, due to historical reasons, those applications were hosted on the system drive. That configuration have worked for some time, but, finally, we faced the need to move the whole solution to a different local drive. The question, then, was plan simple: how can we accomplish this task without affecting both the application behavior and the production service?…

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What’s new in NMTools v4.54b0

Published December 12, 2010 by Carlos Veira

Well, here we are again! :D. This is a much long awaited release. Definitely, this product is becoming more and more mature with each iteration. I can now say this from the experience of running NMTools on big and complex Production Environments to solve real problems and handle considerably demanding situations.

There is a lot of hidden work that has been done during the last eight months. That is why I would like to start thanking all the people that has contributed to this release in any way: code, feedback, ideas, etc.…

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Productivity, Cloud and The Red Pill

Published June 20, 2010 by Carlos Veira

I remember, back in 1.999, when The Matrix showed us the “Blue Pill – Red Pill Dilemma“. Since then, those Pills have become a popular metaphor for the choice between the blissful ignorance of illusion (the Blue Pill) and embracing the sometimes painful truth of reality (the Red Pill).

I don't know what you think, but I feel that, most of the times, we behave like Matrix Citizens. Things change and happen so quickly that we often don't realise what is actually going on.…

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OpenSLIM v3.73b0 released!

Published May 10, 2010 by Carlos Veira

It’s finally here! This is the first release since the NMTools spin off. A lot has happened since then. In fact, there are many changes in the OpenSLIM roadmap that I would like to tell you over the course of the following weeks.

As every new version, this one represents an additional step forward in functionality and also in reliability. Here is the list of new additions and improvements that this new major release incorporates:

Systems Decommissioning Management.
Improvements on how Virtual Environments are handled.

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Ramblings of a 64 bit Desktop User

Published April 11, 2010 by Carlos Veira

Now that I have taken some time to feel how someone deals with a 64 bit desktop, I have certain “confidence” to write about this. Of course, this is only my experience and, obviously, doesn't pretend to be a universal opinion. The following notes and comments refer mainly to Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit.

First of all, it's safe, usable and seems mature enough. The drivers diversity is more than acceptable and, finally, you take advantage of the hardware you have purchased for.…

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APIs and the “Technology Mix”

Published April 11, 2010 by Carlos Veira

Today I would like to recall a really nice conference I saw last January: “Infrastructure in the Cloud Era”. This presentation was performed at O'Reilly Velocity Conference 2009 by Adam Jacob (Co-Founder at OpsCode) and Ezra Zygmuntowicz (Co-Founder at EngineYard).

They cover the theory of how you should be thinking about building a Fully Automated Infrastructure classifying their analysis in the following areas:

Bootstrapping: Corporate Approvals, Agile Approvals, Cloud.
Configuration: Manual, Ad-Hoc, Infrastructure as Code.

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NMTools v4.0b0 released!

Published March 22, 2010 by Carlos Veira

Being able to allocate enough time to finally publish this release hasn't been an easy task for me. I hardly can believe it, but it's here! 😀

This is a very special announcement because this release introduces lot of new features and also introduces very deep changes from the previous versions.

One of the most noticeable details is that NMTools is now an independent project. It will no longer tied to OpenSLIM. Nevertheless, OpenSLIM still will be a dependency and you need it to fully take advantage of what NMTools delivers.…

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Tag: Systems Management

IT-aware Services and Applications