Below is a quick lists of the New, Updated and End of Life-d base images.

New Major Versions

• CentOS 6
• What’s new in CentOS 6 (RHEL technical details): http://www.redhat.com/rhel/server/details/
• This version of CentOS is not subject to the “time drift” issue
• These machines now run in PV (paravirtualization) mode
• Debian 6
• What’s new in Debian 6: http://www.debian.org/releases/stable/armel/release-notes/ch-whats-new.en.html

New Minor Versions

• CentOS 5.6
• RHEL 5.7

Updated Versions

• Windows Server 2003 – updated with Microsoft Security Patches & Powershell 2.0
• Windows Server 2008 – updated with Microsoft Security Patches, Powershell 2.0 and on SQL Server images, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
• Windows Server 2008 R2 – updated with Microsoft Security Patches

End of Life-d (EOL) Versions

• CentOS 5.3
• RHEL 5.4

Note: Servers already deployed that are running older (perhaps EOL-ed) images are not affected (meaning, we do not delete them) but you may want to consider refreshing those servers to a later version of the OS. When a server is EOL-ed, it is simply removed from the GoGrid base OS repository and you cannot create new servers from these images.

Remember that these updates and new versions only apply to NEW VMs that you create using these images listed above. If you have existing cloud servers running, please be sure that you regularly run security and Operating System updates to ensure that you servers are running the latest versions and have the most current security patches.

At GoGrid, we provide a variety of operating systems including:

• Windows Server
• Ubuntu
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• Debian
• CentOS

Operating systems in the cloud are very important because they are what your applications and infrastructure are built upon. Whether you’re using the cloud to deploy test & development environments, act as your data center or run your company’s business critical applications, the operating system plays a vital role in cloud infrastructure.

Most IT professionals are pretty passionate about what operating system they prefer. For instance, search for “Windows vs. Linux” on Google – over 109 million results have some sort of opinion on the topic. But, since actions speak louder than words, we wanted to determine which operating system was used more by the IT industry.

In early 2011, as part of the GoGrid Cloud Survey Report, we polled over 500 CTOs, developers and IT professionals and asked them a variety of questions regarding cloud computing trends, best practices and use cases. Because there is such a wide variety of operating systems that serve different use cases, we decided to ask: Which OS do you use for your critical business applications?

The numbers exceed 100% because most businesses use several different server operating systems to run their critical applications (businesses either run several physical, virtual or mixed environments to accomplish this). When we look at the results, it isn’t terribly shocking that Windows Server is used by 80% of the sample – they’ve been dominating the server scene since Windows Server 2003 or earlier. However, the amount of Linux and Solaris servers is much higher than anticipated. In fact, if you do a search of various Linux distros, you can see how Ubuntu, for example, is making huge advances in the space.

Just last year, ZDNet shared stats from the International Data Corp. (IDC) that found 73.9% of servers were Windows and only 21.2% of servers were Linux based. Perhaps our 2011 survey data is showing Linux use in the cloud is on the rise.

Do you have any strong thoughts or opinions about operating systems in the cloud? Which server operating system do you use? How do you think cloud computing will affect server operating systems? Does the Operating System even matter? We look forward to your responses.

With only one more blog post left in the series, the GoGrid Cloud Survey Report is coming to a close. Our next post will also be our last survey results article, but it covers the most interesting cloud computing question thus far: Why aren’t you using cloud computing? Stay tuned…

For more information on our survey methodology or to see all of our results, please download the Cloud Survey Report.

Objectives:

1. Configure GoGrid private network connectivity on Windows 2008 Server and test connectivity to Cacti server
2. Configure and start Microsoft SNMP service on your Windows 2008 Server
3. Add new Cacti device
4. Create graphs to log Local Connection and Local Connection 2 bandwidth and errors, Logged in Users, and server processes

Configure GoGrid private network connectivity on Windows 2008 Server and test connectivity to Cacti server

Below we see that we have a server (“Web2”) deployed on GoGrid with a public IP. Let’s log into this server and configure the private network with a private IP from the same subnet of the Cacti Monitor server. As I described in my previous post – I am using the prescribed private IP subnet from my GoGrid portal, contained under the List tab and then under Network – Private Network.

Once logged into the Windows 2008 server (“Web2”), I go to the Network and Sharing Center which is found by first going to the Start button. From here I need to open up Local Area Connection 2. This is the private network interface that plugs into your own private VLAN on GoGrid. I enter the “Properties” button and then open up “Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4)”. By default GoGrid will enable DHCP for this private network interface. If you have a DHCP server, your server can receive private IP addresses upon initial boot up. Perhaps I will cover this in a different post. For now, we need to configure the interface with a static IP available from our example private subnet 10.129.151.0/24. The subnet will be randomly generated for each customer account. I show you how to find this in my previous post, “How to Monitor Your Ubuntu Server on GoGrid in 6 Steps Using Cacti 0.8.7g.” Following the nomenclature – keeping the last octet of the 32bit address space the same as the public to make IP address association easier – I give this system the private IP address 10.129.151.110. The .110 matches up with the last 3 digits of the public IP address 173.204.58.110. This isn’t necessary, but helps you identify systems and know their private IP address based upon their public address and vice versa. See the image below of me assigning the private IP address.

Now, open up a command prompt >Go to Start, then Run – type in cmd and hit “enter”. I now test connectivity to the 10.129.151.0/24 network by pinging the gateway IP – 10.129.151.1. I get a response, so I can move on. If you don’t get a response, double check the private IP address you used and make sure the Subnet mask is correct. You can also test connectivity by pinging the private IP address of your Cacti Monitoring server. Remember, your 10.x.x.x/24 network will be different than my example subnet. Please check your portal for what you should be using.

Configure and start Microsoft SNMP service on your Windows 2008 Server

Check to see if you have the SNMP Service running already on your Windows system. By default, this server role in Windows Server 2008 on GoGrid isn’t installed and running. Go to Start -> Administrative Tools -> Services. SNMP Trap may be there, but we also need SNMP Service. To install SNMP Service go to Start -> Administrative Tools -> Server Manager -> Select Features -> Add Features. From here find and check SNMP Services (which covers SNMP Service and SNMP WMI Provider). See image below.

Click Next and this will begin the install process of this feature on Windows.

Once the SNMP Service is installed, we can go to the Services page to find and configure the SNMP Service with the appropriate community and host IP address to accept SNMP calls from.

First go to the Services page – Start -> Administrative Tools -> Services or from Run type services.msc

Find the local service – SNMP Service and right click it and go to properties. From here you need to give the service the community string that you will set on the Cacti server and the private IP address of your Cacti Monitor server. This is under Accepted Community Names and Accept SNMP packets from these hosts. See image below:

Add new Cacti device

This step is same “create a device” step that I outlined in my previous post – except the details of the host will be different.

The IP, hostname and template used in the screen shot below represent my example Windows 2008 server named “Web2.” I chose the Host Template Windows 2000/XP Host –> selected SNMP v2 -> put in the community string I chose, and clicked “create.”

You should see the SNMP information for the host quickly appears near the upper left portion of the screen. If you see an error here, you will need to check your private network connectivity between the two servers and check the SNMP Service configuration on the Windows 2008 server.

With the new device in place on Cacti, we can now create the graphs.

Create graphs to log Local Connection and Local Connection 2 bandwidth and errors, Logged in Users, and server processes

From the device we just created, go to Create Graphs for this Host.

From this page we want to add a check to the following graph templates seen below in the image:

1. Logged in Users
2. Processes
3. Local Connection
4. Local Connection 2

Once you have done this, click Create at the bottom of the page.

We will do this again for the In/Out Errors/Discarded Packets option next.

1. Change the “Select a graph type:” near the bottom of the Create Graph page to In/Out Errors/Discarded Packets
2. Next check box the “Local Area Connection” and “Local Area Connection 2”
3. Finally click the Create button at the bottom.

After about 5 minutes, the graph icons will be available and your data will then begin to accumulate for your viewing.

I hope this blog series was helpful for you. The GoGrid Cacti Monitor – Community GSI is a great server-based application that can easily be deployed to a GoGrid virtual server, and configured to communicate via SNMP with your servers on the GoGrid network. The information gathered will give you real-time and historical interface bandwidth, server performance, and other important system level information.

Be sure to check out other Community or Partner Server Images available on GoGrid. The GoGrid Exchange has many pre-configured software solutions that can be deployed to your GoGrid architecture in a matter of minutes.

Today (March 11, 2011), we released our March 2011 update (code name “Long Beach”). The major features and updates are listed below:

• Enhancement to the MyGSI Feature
• Usage Report
• Billing Improvements
• Ubuntu 10.04 Cloud Server Support
• Debian 5.0 Cloud Server Support

Please read on for details on each of the items listed above.

MyGSI Updates

About a year ago, we introduced a new feature called MyGSIs – customized GoGrid Server Images – and how easy it was to create and save a Server Image. Server images are helpful for horizontal scaling, re-imaging of servers, disaster recovery, or setting up failover environments. Until this update, we had a pretty straight forward 3-step process: 1) create a Sandbox Image, 2) configure your server, prep it, and run scripts, and 3) save the server to cloud storage.

Now, we have consolidated this process into ONE step. Simply select the existing server you want to save and click the Save icon. That’s it! There is no need to create a Sandbox Image, run preparation scripts or anything else. And, the best thing is, any existing server can be saved as a server image.

The Save button is also in the List view:

Once you choose the server that you want to save and click the Save icon or link, you will get the following prompt.

Note that if your server has more than 50 GB of data on it, the saving process will fail and you will need to reduce the amount of data on your server.

Simply give your server image a name, description, and indicate whether it is a Web or Database server.

After this, you server will be gracefully shut down, and the image saving process will start. You will see your server’s status light turn to amber:

And there will be an entry in the Jobs tab that not only states that the action has started, but also after a few seconds, displays the expected time for the server to be fully saved to cloud storage. If there is no “Estimated Job Duration,” just wait a minute and refresh the Jobs tab.

Your server will come back on line shortly.

Once the server image is created, you have the ability to instantiate new servers from it, or share it with the GoGrid community as a Community GSI (CGSI).

Lastly, the MyGSI process is backwards compatible, meaning that if you had created a Sandbox Server previously and it still appears within your GoGrid account, you can still convert it into a MyGSI using the same older process. Also, any MyGSIs created using the legacy process will still be available to create new server instances. However, the creation of Sandbox Images has been removed as of this release, and replaced with the much easier process described above.

Be sure to read the MyGSI User Documentation that can be found on the GoGrid Wiki.

USAGE REPORT

Included with the “Long Beach” update is a new feature to help you get a better view into the activity within your GoGrid account. There is now a new tab called “Usage” which is under the My Account section. This new report is in beta for the next 90 days.

The Usage Report overview is broken up into two sections: Metered Services and Fixed Services. Metered services are things like RAM, Storage, and Outbound Transfer. Fixed services are for items that recur regularly during a month’s time, things like monthly licenses or IP addresses allocated to your account. Metered services are more variable in nature.

The Usage Report shows a quick snapshot of Metered and Fixed Services for the current or previous billing period. NOTE:  The historical data in this report will not be backfilled; therefore the previous billing period will not be viewable as of this release. Also, the Usage data collection officially starts on March 11th, 2011. This means that the current billing period report may be inaccurate for up to 30 days for some customers. Once a full billing cycle passes, the Usage Report will show accurate data.

Under the Usage Menu, you can see a link to “Download usage report”. After selecting the billing period from the drop-down menu, click the link to download all of the associated usage data for that period and it will be downloaded to a CSV file.

The CSV file contains the usage statistics for the following objects:

• Cloud Servers – # of GB Hours
• Outbound Transfer – # of GBs
• Licenses – # of instances of a particular license
• Cloud Storage – maximum GBs stored for that day
• Load Balancing – # of instances of a load balancer
• Public IPs – total # of IP addresses allocated to the account
• Operating Systems – # of instances of a particular Operating System in use

The fields reported are listed below:

• Account Name
• Customer ID
• Report Start date/time
• Report End date/time
• Object Type (see above)
• Name of the Object
• Description of the Object
• Data Center
• Usage Start date/time
• Usage End date/time
• Quantity
• Units

A quick tip, be sure to format the “reportStart,” “reportEnd,” “usageStart” and “usageEnd” to mm/dd/yy hh:mm to see the full details with the date and time.

For additional details, visit the GoGrid Customer Portal Guide that discusses the new Usage feature.

Billing Improvements

One of the advantages of utilizing GoGrid’s Cloud Infrastructure Services is the ability to choose a Pay-As-You-Go plan or a Volume pricing plan. We are allotting more focus to the “billing experience.” In the past, our focus was on the delivery of the services and after engaging with our customers, we realize that some time and care was needed for the overall experience. To that end, we have kicked off a complete overhaul of the billing process to provide you with not only a better experience but also with more insight into your account usage.

This first iteration of Billing Improvements consists of the following changes:

1. Monthly Invoices
2. Account Plan Changes
3. Usage

The details of each of these items are listed below.

Monthly Invoices

To make the billing and invoicing process easier, we are removing daily invoicing. From this point forward, customers will now receive monthly invoices on their monthly bill date. The monthly bill date is the date on which a customer opened their account with GoGrid.

There are a few exceptions in which additional invoices may be generated:

• Fixed Services – if you are using a fixed service like dedicated servers, VPN, or hardware firewalls, you will receive an immediate, one-time invoice. The charge(s) for this service(s) will be pro-rated through the next bill date. However, the next monthly invoice will include a full charge for the next month’s fixed service and is paid in advance.
• Manual invoices – if there are manual invoices generated off-cycle.

NOTE: There may be a bit of a transitional period during March 2011 because of the switch from daily to monthly invoicing. If you have any questions, please contact your account manager.

Account Plan Changes

We have updated the process of making changes to your GoGrid account plan and have a clear trail of the changes you have made and when they were made. We have also added email notifications to the process so that you get two email confirmations: one when you request a change and one when the change is implemented.

Just as you could in the past, select either the RAM or Data Transfer Plan and then choose whether you want your plan to be Monthly or Annual (you get a better discount if you choose an Annual plan):

Confirm the plan you want and accept the terms of service.

Once you make your selection, there will be an indication of the plan change within the Plan Selection page (in red) and your current or active plan will appear grayed out:

Also, within the Jobs tab, you will see an entry confirming your plan change.

You may upgrade or downgrade your various plans as you see fit. Downgrades take place on the customer’s next bill date. Plan Upgrades take place retroactively back to the beginning of the current billing period.

The process for Upgrades is a bit more complicated. On the next bill date, customers are credited the last month’s lower plan charge and are charged for the new plan for the previous month and in advance for the next month.

Sometimes examples are a bit easier to understand:

In the case above, you can see how the charges for the lower plan are reversed out and the new plan is retroactively applied.

In most cases, people upgrade plans during a current month because they are going into an overage situation or in anticipation of incurring overage charges.

Ubuntu 10.04 Cloud Server Support

With this release, we are pleased to announce that Ubuntu 10.04 32- and 64-bit Cloud Server Operating Systems are now available to complement Ubuntu within the Dedicated Server Operating System choices. This is the LTS – Long Term Support – version of Ubuntu.

Debian 5.0 Cloud Server Support

Also with this release, we have included Debian 5.0 32- and 64-bit Cloud Server Operating Systems to complement Debian within the Dedicated Server Operating System choices.

More to Come

The “Long Beach” release is the kick-off of a new agile development process here at GoGrid. We will be aiming to have regular monthly releases from this day forward so stay tuned for more exciting news from GoGrid. Be sure to subscribe to the GoGrid Blog Feed to get regular updates.

Some of the noteworthy features and changes include:

• GoGrid Dedicated Servers in our East Coast Data Center
• Limited Time Promotion on East Coast Dedicated Servers and West Coast GoGrid Firewall
• GoGrid Image Sharing
• GoGrid Fortinet Firewall Ordering
• Increase Windows Sandbox Server Size
• Other Changes including Windows Patch Updates

Read on for more details on each of the items above.

GoGrid Dedicated Servers on East Coast

GoGrid has been leading the industry when it comes to Hybrid Hosting as is evident with other providers rolling out similar features. However, we are 2 years ahead of most of our competitors in providing integrated cloud and dedicated infrastructures within GoGrid. To complement this, we have rolled out GoGrid Dedicated Servers in our East Coast facility (US-East-1). GoGrid Dedicated Servers (GGDS) in our West Coast data center (US-West-1) have been incredibly successful for our customers.

GoGrid Dedicated Servers are provisioned via the GoGrid web portal and can be fully publicly and/or privately networked with our F5 load balancers, Firewalls, and Cloud Storage. There are a variety of use cases you might want to consider that are optimal for using Dedicated Servers or a hybrid of Dedicated and Cloud Servers including:

• Disaster Recovery – now you can set up a DR environment on either the East or West Coast.
• Fail Over – similar to DR environment, mirroring or providing a portion of your infrastructure on either coast can help you recover from costly outages. You can also set up a secondary presence to handle routine maintenance periods.
• Unique Application Sets – there may be some applications that have requirements for particular hardware or operating systems not available within the GoGrid Cloud Server list. In many cases, Dedicated Servers can meet these requirements.

The steps to provision a GoGrid Dedicated Server are the same in all of our data centers.

When you first launch the Add screen, you can select either US-West-1 or US-East-1. Selecting US-East-1 will show you the following:

You can see that “Dedicated Server” is now an option. Selecting that will start you down the easy process of provisioning a Dedicated Server.

Fill out the form and choose a Configuration option and Pricing plan.

Accept the Terms of Service for the Dedicated Server:

Once the server request has been created, it will be available within 2 business days as per GoGrid’s Service Level Agreement (SLA). You can track the progress by viewing the icon within the Grid and List views. Yellow means that it is being provisioned. When it is Green, your server is ready to use. The server below (GGDS East #1) is in the “Processing” state:

You can also view the status via the Jobs tab.

Once the Dedicated Server is ready, the Job will show as “Succeeded”:

GoGrid Dedicated Servers are also displayed within the List View.

Promotion on GoGrid Dedicated Servers or GoGrid Hardware Firewall

Beginning on 12/15/2010, GoGrid will be making minor price increases on Standard Dedicated Servers and Advanced Dedicated servers. The new pricing is reflected below:

• Standard Dedicated Servers: $300/month or $3,000/year if prepaid annually
• Advanced Dedicated Servers: $400/month or $4,000/year if prepaid annually

NOTE: If you purchase a GoGrid Dedicated Server prior to 12/15/2010, you will be GRANDFATHERED into the current pricing plan. What that means is if you purchase a Dedicated Server before 12/15/10, your price will remain at the old rates as long as you have the server deployed. The price for Ultra Dedicated Servers is not changing.

GoGrid Image Sharing

Have you created a server image that you are proud of? Or perhaps you want to share a Diaspora server to help spread the Open Source alternative to Facebook? With this release, we have launched a new GoGrid Image Sharing feature that allows for true collaboration between GoGrid users across the globe. The process is extremely easy. You start with a MyGSI (GoGrid Personal Server Image) and then simply click on the Sharing icon to make it available to all GoGrid users. Let’s walk through this briefly.

First, start with a private server image (MyGSI). Details on how to create a MyGSI can be found here.

Once you create your MyGSI, it will appear under the Images tab:

Note the Sharing state is set to “Private” by default and the icon next to it shows a single user.

To make the image “Public“, simply click on the Server Image line. It will launch the editing screen (where you can change the Name and Description of your server, as well as the minimum RAM required to use your image):

When you choose to make your image “Public” be sure to choose a clear, descriptive name to make it easier for users to find. Also, be sure to set the minimum amount of RAM for that server image to be at a level that it would perform well for other GoGrid users who deploy it.

Simply change the Sharing status from “Private” to “Public” and click the Submit button. Your server image will then be available to all GoGrid users.

Should you ever need to make changes to your server image, be sure to mark the image as “Private” and then go through the Image change process of using that Server Image to create another Image Sandbox, making your appropriate edits and then creating a new MyGSI.

Once the image is publically shared, it will appear within the GoGrid Cloud Server Image Selector (note the Owner column):

Creating a new server based on this Shared Server Image is the same process as creating any other Cloud Server within GoGrid. The only exception is that when you select a shared image, you will be presented with a screen that says GoGrid does not provide support for this image.

Once you agree to the terms, you can create your server.

GoGrid Fortinet Firewall Ordering

With this release, you can now easily order a GoGrid Fortinet hardware firewall. To provision a hardware firewall via the GoGrid Customer Portal you simply need to click on the Fortinet Firewall link in the portal. It appears under the Quick Links section:

As well as within the List view when the Network section is active:

Once you click on that link, you will be presented with the Fortinet Firewall Order Form:

Fill out all of the required and appropriate information and your GoGrid Hardware Firewall will be available within 2 business days. You will be notified via email when your Firewall is available to use. Please note, the Fortinet Firewall option currently is only available in our US-West-1 data center.

The GoGrid Hardware Firewall is $200/month and this price includes one type of VPN connection. Additional VPNs are available at $50/month or $500/year with a pre-paid plan.

Increase Windows Sandbox Size

Users of Windows Servers and the GoGrid MyGSI feature will rejoice with this enhancement. Due to popular request, we are increasing the GoGrid Sandbox Image size from 20 GB to 30 GB. The sandbox disk size for Linux distros will remain at 20 GB.

This increase in size will allow you to have more space for software and OS updates as well as your code and data.

Other Changes including Windows Patch Updates

This release also includes some other changes of note. For starters, we have renamed the “Upgrade” icon to “Scale”. This is part of the RAM Scaling feature that we released previously. To scale your servers vertically (meaning increasing or decreasing the amount of RAM allocated to your server), simply click on the server you want to scale and click the Scale icon:

For more details, please read our blog post on this feature.

We have also updated our base GoGrid Server Images for Windows to include the latest software updates and security patches as of November 30, 2010. The following servers have been updated:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2008 Workgroup
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2008 Standard
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise x64 Edition R2 w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition R2 w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2005 Standard
• Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition R2 w/MSSQL 2005 Workgroup
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise Edition w/MSSQL 2008 Express / PHP5 / IIS 7.0 + FastCGI
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition w/None
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition w/MSSQL 2008 Standard
• Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Enterprise x64 Edition w/MSSQL 2008 Workgroup

Several bug fixes have also been applied and the GoGrid API has been updated to version 1.7. Please see our Wiki for documentation on the new API items.

More to Come!

I’m sure that you’ll agree this is quite a list of enhancements and new features. There’s plenty more coming in 2011! I encourage you to attend our Webinars or request a 1-on-1 consultation with one of our GoGrid Cloud Specialists to learn more about how GoGrid makes Complex Infrastructure Easy!