Our web site tech person, Chad Clarke, sent me the following e-mail on April 26 in response to questions I asked. We have been really busy this week with the seminar, so I didn't get around to posting it. Some of you might find it interesting. I don't understand any of it myself.
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(Following from Chad on 4-26-06)
Yesterday, I killed a few processes to fix the problem. The cause was that the backup scripts didn't complete in time and caused things to hang up. I am not sure why it happened again, but I rebooted the machine today. If this happens again, I will look into this further.

As for setting you guys up on a Virtual Machine, you should only see an improvement on your site and store. What the people don't know is that catsailor is still getting a dedicated server. However, it will be running 2 virtual machines on it. One will be linux and hosting your site, while the other will be windows and hosting your store.

The new dedicated machine is a dual xeon 2.8G, 4G Ram, 2-160G SATA-300 drives running at RAID-1. This is a pretty hefty machine to run only 2 virtual machines on. Each Virtual machine will have more horse power than their current servers. The catsailor.com site is currently on a dual P-II machine with 1G of RAM and a 20G IDE HD. The current store is currently on a shared hosting machine.

Tests have shown that drive performance is about 12x better on the new system than the old system. CPU performance is better as well.

As for the Virutal Server environment, we did lots of research. Based on price/performance, the Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 came out ahead. We did look at xen, Virtuozzo, and VMware.

Another main reason for setting you guys up on a virtual server is for disaster recovery purposes. We still run our servers out of a New Orleans Data Center. We came close to some problems during Katrina last year, but the facility remained up and operational through the entire ordeal. The
owners of the Data Center have taken measures such as adding a 4th DS3 from a completely different network to allow for more redundancy. They haved also purchased a fuel truck and are stockpiling fuel to run their generators if needed. Anyway, with the Virtual Server environment that you will be running in, we will be able to move your Virtual Machine with relative ease to anther datacenter if needed.

The users who may have questioned the use of MS Virtual Server, may be the type of person who is anti MicroSoft. I am not sure, but I have looked at both linux and MicroSoft solutions and as I said above, at this point, MS Virtual Server R2 is the best in regards to price/performance to meet your needs.

Chad Clarke
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P.S. from Mary:
All this should be happening, first for the store, and then for the forums within the next week or two, and then everything should be lightning fast.