As Mike wrote about his experiences with hardware vendors, I’m gonna devote this here post to my favorite software company in the world. We recently bought two copies of a software called “2X Application Server Enterprise Edition“. As one would think from reading the specs of the software, it’s near a Citrix solution (which it is, at least for a small part); but in return it’s faaaar away concerning the price. Just so you get an idea, about what I’m meaning with “faaar“:
Windows Server 2003:
Standard Edition: 2 * 91,00
CAL: 50 * 6,00
Terminal Server CAL: 50 * 17,00
___________
1.332,00The above are fixed costs, you need them anyway as both Citrix as well as the 2X solution is only working *on top* of Windows Server 2003 Terminal Services.
Now, here’s the real comparison between 2X Application Server & Loadbalancer and Citrix XenApp Platinum Edition:
2X 2 * 1510,00 = 3.020,00
Citrix 50 * 393,00 = 19.650,00
While 2X is licensed per terminal server, XenApp is licensed per user. As you can see from the above prices, the 2X solution is roughly 1/6 of the Citrix XenApp solution.
Read more…
Life 2X, Windows Terminal Services
Well, it’s April. And usually when it’s April, there’s April’s weather. In the morning I was rather surprised by the weather.
And after I picked up Michel, we some when arrived at work (that is one hour later), we had our own adventure park in front of the work place:
Collapsed trees
Apparently, the trees in at the entrance collapsed (thanks to Michel for the pictures), so we had to make our way through somehow … was rather funny way to start the day … *shrug*
Life
Well, we do appear to be having some strange load problems with our main TYPO3 box hosting several home pages of the local universities, as you can see below.
LOAD on t3node1 between 05:00-19:00 on 2008/04/07
We repeatedly tried to figure out which of them was the one responsible, but neither I nor the other Unix sysadmin knew a better way to figure out the load each TYPO3 installation was causing (since there ain’t no phptop or something similar). But since today the new semester started, we figured it might be good to finally figure which one it was. And a few minutes (as in one or two) wouldn’t be much of a problem compared to the advantage we’re getting out of it.
As a comparison, here’s the “normal” load for the last week:
LOAD on t3node1 between 2008/03/31 and 2008/04/07
So as a last resort (because of said load problems), we simply deactivated one vHost after another, until the load started to relax. Unsurprisingly it was one of the installations that had problems before. Let’s see whether or not the people over at said university are insightful or not … 
Life rrdtool, SLES9, TYPO3, Work
