Confirmation and Perfmon

Blogging Confirmed
I needed to use this blog today to go back and look at what I had written back in February about moving icons around on the Blackberry, so I learned a valuable lesson today; keep on blogging!

I enjoy blogging, and know that in order to remember some of the tips and tricks I am picking up I need to have a central repository of information, hence Computer Pooh. However, it is not every day that I get confirmation that an idea of mine is a good one, yet here I am blogging about one.

Perfmon
I am continuing to study for my first MCSE test. As a matter of fact, I really want to take the first one here in September, yet I am not sure I am ready.

I have been looking at the performance monitor this week, and wanted to quickly blog here the items that are best to monitor so I can log in an see this from the web.

• Networking: Network Interface- bytes sent/sec and bytes total/sec; Server - bytes rec'd/sec and it should be no more than 50% of bandwidth; TaskManager - Network Utilization should be 30% or lower
• Disks: Physical Disks - %disk time should be less than 50%; Physical Disks - Current disk queue length should be between 0 - 2%
• Memory: Memory - pages/sec should be 0 - 20%; Memory - Available bytes should be 5% + of RAM; Memory - Committed bytes should be less than RAM; Memory - Pooled Non-paged bytes should be steady; Memory - Page faults/sec should be below 5
• Processor: Processor - % Processor Time should be less than 85%; System - Process queue length should be less than 10%; Server Work Queues - Queue length should be less than 4%; Processor - interrupts/sec should be steady to low

Learning Hardware Arrays

RAID 5 Please

In order to repartition an older server that only had a 3GB boot partition, we had to break our RAID 5 array. We demoted it to a RAID 0 and deleted and re-created some partitions, and in the end, had to re-install the OS. Once we did this, we wanted to to re-create the RAID 5 partition, but the software that talks to the controller would not go back to RAID 5 as an option.

In the end, on our ProLiant ML350 Server we had to delete the array and reboot to return to the factory default, which was RAID 5.

I am still try to decipher what I learned from this experience. . .I am not convinced I learned anything at all. Well, I guess I learned that I really know nothing about hardware arrays. I am studying for the 70-290 Windows Server 2003 exam and read about software arrays, and that makes perfect sense to me, but this hardware array stuff is much more difficult.