As we have discussed on the Monitis blog virtualization is one of the hottest IT subjects today.

One leader in this field is Citrix — with the XenServer product family. XenServer is the most known commercial implementation of of the open source Xen hypervisor. By the way, you should pronounced Xen like “zen.” It comes from a Greek word meaning “guest.”

1. Integrate NGINX Monitoring into Monitis.com
NGINX is one of the most popular new web servers out there. It is lightweight and powerful. But monitoring it is no small task. The statistics module that comes with NGINX is not reader friendly, so this post shows you how to monitor NGINX performance with Monitis. In 5 quick and easy steps, Monitis creates a monitor for your NGINX server, with a column for each performance metric. Graphs are shown.

1. Top 10 Open Source eCommerce Software (Joomla and Drupal) – Part 1/2
This is for all you eCommerce store owners. Previous posts compared 20 shopping cart software vendors, including Shopify and Volusion. This post is similar, but focuses on open source shopping cart softwares for Drupal and Joomla. The first post covers the following 5 products/vendors: Hikashop, SimpleCaddy, OpenCart, redShop and RokQuickCart. Each is described with a list of Pros and Cons.

In our last article we discussed performance tuning of Hyper-V storage I/O. In this article we’ll focus on network I/O performance best practices.

Hyper-V supports synthetic and emulated network adapters in the virtual machines, but in general the synthetic devices offer much better performance and also reduce CPU overhead. Both types of adapters are connected to a Hyper-V virtual network switch. If you need external network connectivity you can connect the virtual switch(es) to a physical network adapter.

Let’s start by taking a look at synthetic network adapter configuration.

This is the second of two articles about open source ecommerce software that we hope will help web developers and system administrators in selecting what is best for their needs. The first article  Top 10 Open Source eCommerce Software (Joomla and Drupal) reviewed: HikaShop, SimpleCaddy, OpenCart, redSHOP and RokQuickCart.

The following article details our own analysis of the last 5 vendors in our article series.

At Monitis we want to make the lives of web developers and system administrators easy!

We have reviewed the 10 most popular open source ecommerce platforms for Joomla and Drupal and would like to share our thoughts with you. In our two articles there is a list and short analysis of the 10 open source ecommerce software products to help guide you in finding a solution that best suits your needs.

Our first article will cover the following 5 products/vendors: Hikashop, SimpleCaddy, OpenCart, redShop and RokQuickCart.

1. Performance Tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Hardware Selection
This is a followup to a previous article that got substantial reads, Performance Tuning Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V: Hardware Selection. Several future posts will delve deeper into this topic. This post walks you through selecting the optimal hardware on which to run Hyper-V. Recommendations are given for selecting the right processor, memory, network adapter, storage, and installation process. If you’re interested in running Windows 2008 in a virtual environment, these tips can save you a lot of headaches.

In our last article we focused on tuning processor and memory, and in this article we’ll look at tuning the performance of Hyper-V and in particular at aspects that of the storage system used by your Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V solution.

Supported Technology

Hyper-V supports so-called synthetic and emulated storage devices in virtual machines, where the synthetic devices generally offer better throughput and response times as well as reduced CPU overhead. The exception to this statement is if a filter driver can be loaded and reroutes I/Os to the synthetic storage device. Virtual hard disks (VHDs) can be backed by three types of VHD files or raw disks. This article describes the different options and considerations for tuning storage I/O performance.

This is our second article in our series about tuning performance of your Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V environment. In our first article we discussed the considerations you should make when selecting the hardware components for your Hyper-V server(s).

We mentioned in our first article that the way the hypervisor virtualizes the physical processors is by time-slicing between the virtual processors. Obviously, moving a workload into a virtual machine increases CPU usage. In this article we’ll discuss how to optimize the processor(s).

Often times when implementing a monitoring solution where, and how to get started can be overwhelming.  It can be especially overwhelming with powerful tools, because you can truly monitor anything.   This series of articles will take a look at some strategies to implement monitoring into your company in a stepped approach, as well as how Monitis can make your life easier.

Overview:  Start Small and Go Big!

Getting started with some monitoring tools can be pretty risky and require an investment that you may not feel comfortable making.  You may find out too late that it does not meet all of your needs.  With Monitis and a stepped approach, there is little to no risk in getting started.  Monitis is “Month to Month” and you pay only for what you use.  Getting started takes only a few minutes, but where should you start?