The Enterprise Engineering Center Blog

Windows HPC @ SC09

2009-11-19T18:36:00Z

SC09 is going well and the work by the ASU students is very impressive. To learn more about it, please check our Wenming Ye's post on the Windows HPC Survival Guide blog. http://blogs.msdn.com/hpctrekker/archive/2009/11/14/super-computing-2009-next-week.aspx Kevin Engman Product Manager - EEC...(read more)

EEC at SuperComputing 09

2009-11-17T16:51:00Z

This week we are attending SC09 http://sc09.supercomputing.org/ educating folks about the EEC and supporting the HPC team. They will be demoing Excel Runner, which is tested at the EEC. We are also excited for the Arizona State University's work here in the student challange. They are the only team that is running on Windows HPC Server 2008 and spent 2 weeks in October at the EEC validating their appications. If you're at SC09, please stop by booth 1135 and say hello. Kevin Engman Program Manager...(read more)

Free eBook: Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2

2009-10-30T16:31:00Z

A great new book on the new features and refinements in Windows Server 2008 R2 is available in the Microsoft download center. It’s called Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 and is targeted primarily at Windows server administrators who are responsible for hands-on deployment and day-to-day management of Windows-based servers for large organizations. The EEC hosted dozens of customers for product validation testing during the development cycle for R2 and we are excited to see it finally available...(read more)

Benchmarking Exchange 2010 on Fusion IO solid state drives

2009-10-13T16:50:00Z

During a recent engagement with Siemens SWAT team we were able to benchmark Fusion IO cards in their exchange environment and used JetStress 2010. The server used was an HP 385 G5 running Windows 2008 R2. Below are the storage performance results from testing: I/O Database Reads Average Latency (msec) 4.830 I/O Database Writes Average Latency (msec) 12.094 I/O Database Reads per second 7,761,885 I/O Database Writes per second 6,406.448 I/O Database Reads Average Bytes 32,869.093 I/O Database Writes...(read more)

Samba's Great DRS Success

2009-10-07T20:49:00Z

Last week 5 Samba developers once again came to the EEC for to do some interop work. This time around they were going to be working with the Directory Replication Service (DRS) with the aim of moving from 'Samba4 to Samba4' replication to 'Samba4 and AD replication'. The results were a big success. To learn more about it, please read Andrew Bartlett's account. http://people.samba.org/people/2009/10/05 Kevin Engman Product Manager - EEC...(read more)

Scale testing the world's largest PKI, all on WS08/R2 and Hyper-V

2009-09-25T22:31:00Z

This week, we’ve been in the EEC doing our scale testing on the world’s largest PKI, issuing 100s of millions of certificates from 100s of CAs to devices around the world. The entire design is built on WS08R2 Hyper-V and WS08/WS08R2 CAs. To simulate one of their Hyper-V hosts, we used a similar machine to the ones being used currently in the hosting facilities: a Sun Microsystems 2.4GHz, 4 socket, quad core machine with 64GB. We loaded our host with 10 VMs, each assigned a single VCPU and 6GB. All...(read more)

Hyper-V Support, Performance and Load Tools

2009-09-22T22:05:00Z

During one of our engagements with Tuev Nord , (one of the world’s largest technical service providers of the Mobility, Industrial Services, International, Natural Resources and Training and Human Resources fields), the Windows Server Hyper-V feature team supplied an exhaustive list of websites covering documentation and tools around Hyper-V. I thought I’d share that with you. TechNet On Hyper-V Ø Hyper-V Getting Started Guide Ø Hyper-V: Using Hyper-V and Failover Clustering Ø Hyper-V: Using Live...(read more)

Microsoft’s “Redmond Ridge 1” Now Open

2009-09-10T02:08:00Z

For those folks that like facility news, yesterday Microsoft’s Managed Lab Services team gave a small group of reporters and bloggers the first external tour of the their new data center in Redmond, aka Redmond Ridge 1. Artist’s rendering of Redmond Ridge 1 Todd Bishop, editor & founder of TechFlash, was one of the lucky few and he talked about his experience and the facility on his blog. http://www.techflash.com/seattle/2009/09/microsoft_shifting_server_labs_from_offices_to_remote_green_facility.html...(read more)

Dell Increases Footprint at the EEC

2009-08-26T19:17:00Z

Last week 20 new Dell™ PowerEdge™ R710 servers arrived and are quickly being brought online for a customer engagement occurring in the next couple weeks. These servers contain Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® X5550 CPU’s, 24GB memory, eight 300GB SAS HDDs, and much more. We are pleased to have this new hardware available for customers and ISV’s as they validate our products and services. The new Dell servers in POD 2 lit up by the IRIS system To learn more about Dell’s PowerEdge R710 server line, please visit:...(read more)

Customers testing on 256 Processor Superdome

2009-08-18T22:19:00Z

Recently I was able to work with BWIN, the world’s largest online sports-betting and gaming provider, at the EEC while they tested the scaling of their workload on the world’s largest Windows Server, a HP Superdome with 128 cores and 256 threads, and HP’s largest disk array, a HP XP24000. We were able to test various configurations (64 cores, 128 cores, Hyperthreading on or off) during their stay and gathered tons of performance data around optimizing BWIN’s SQL Server performance. This was the first...(read more)

More HP ProLiant DL380 G6’s Arriving

2009-08-11T00:31:00Z

While I was on vacation a couple weeks ago we received 10 new HP ProLiant® DL380 G6's equipped with dual Intel® Xeon® X5570 CPU’s, , 24GB memory, dual port 8Gbps fiber channel adapter, 2 146GB 15K SAS drives and dual power supplies. These were the 1 st G6’s that the EEC has obtained and they were quickly added to a customer’s test environment while they continued their validation of SQL Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2008 R2. This week two more DL380 G6’s will be arriving. These will have dual...(read more)

New IBM Storage Comes to the EEC

2009-08-06T22:44:00Z

This week we just completed installing a new IBM XIV® Storage System: Model 2810 in san-alley. Ours is configured with 180 1TB SATA drives, and 15 modules; a data module consists of one Intel® Xeon® Quad-core 64-bit CPU, 8 GB fully buffered DIMM RAM. The flexibility that this hardware provides will greatly increase the effectiveness of the EEC by allowing us to meet the demands of our customer and product group engagements. Hardware Specifications: Hardware Highlights Total Storage Central Processing...(read more)

UC Releases OCS R2 Site Resiliency White paper

2009-07-28T21:51:00Z

Earlier this year the Office Communications Group (OCG) approached the EEC and our Partners ( HP , F5 and Shunra ) to help them build an environment where they could perform the necessary testing to create this much needed white paper. This was a challenging project, but was completed because of the wonderful collaboration amongst the teams from each company. Here’s an overview of the white paper: This white paper describes a site resiliency solution for Office Communications Server 2007 R2. The...(read more)

Latest Lizard results on Rhiannon – 90%+ on 512 cores and 5.15 TFlops!

2009-07-22T00:15:00Z

The latest Lizard results on Rhiannon came in over the weekend. On 64 nodes of 2.66 GHz Dual socket Nehalems (Turbo mode on), we achieved 5.15TFlops out of peak performance 5.72 TFlops (2.8*4*8*64), still north of 90%. Needless to say, we feel pretty good about this kind of efficiency and Rhiannon! J Wenhao Wu Sr. Technical Product Manager, Windows HPC Server...(read more)

Sun releases Virtualizing Windows on Sun Ray Thin Client White Paper

2009-07-17T01:24:00Z

As part of the expansion of the EEC, our team looked at a way to improve the customers’ experience of accessing their virtualized environments to perform their testing while at the EEC or from a remote location. We have accomplished this with our VDI solution which is highlighted by the Sun Ray thin client. To learn more please visit http://www.sun.com/software/sunray/index.jsp or just view the white paper here http://www.sun.com/solutions/vdi/microsoft-eec-case-study.pdf . Kevin Engman Product Manager...(read more)