Computer Servers | Part-2

Computer Servers 

Part-2

Architecture of servers

While we have seen just a overview of some basic understanding of Servers and their use, lets know some next steps. 

A Form Factor

The term form factor in computers refers to the size, shape, and the overall packaging of the computer device or servers itself. Servers typically come in one of three different form factors such as;

• Tower Server
• Rack Mount Server
• Blade servers

Well the blade server has advantage over other tower server and rack mount server is that are very thin and less space consumption as the entire server is contained or embedded on a single card. That card is mounted alongside with other blade servers and that whole cluster of these blade servers altogether were fitted in a single blade chassis. 

In case of this blade server technology a single power supply is being used and a built in KVM (Keyboard video mouse) a single console to control all the blade cards. So the server becomes more managed with use of minimum cables.

Server Management and Performance Management

While managing the server each operating system vendor has their own in-built tools to help in managing that particular operating system. Also, there are some third-party tools used for this. The same tool is also being used for configuring the server. Most commonly tools are used as Task Manager, where all the tasks and processes were listed. Whether the processes are running or stopped can be identified. There are different aspects of performance in case of servers. Some performance monitoring tools come in-built and some comes with third-party. The performance monitoring tools used for servers, have the parameters to monitor are such as CPU utilization, memory utilization, bandwidth utilization, Physical memory utilization, network utilization, latency monitoring and physical disk space utilization etc.

Let in example of one windows server, we can able to analyse what is using the processor, the % of interrupt time, the % of processor time on a real time basis. The performance data can be seen in real time or from a log file.  Similarly what is using the disk and how many disk space is free and % of the disk space is used, etc. Performance management very key things to keep track for a server. 

Server Event Logs

Collecting event logs is one of the most important job for a server administrator, by using any form of event logging tool. The tool says what is and has been going on with your server. 

Let take example of Microsoft, Windows server 2019. The tool that available with this server OS is called Event Viewer. You can type “event viewer” at search box or go to server manager tools, there are options such as custom views, windows views, application and services log etc. When we click on the windows logs there are several options show below as Application log, security log, set up log, system log and forwarded event. Going in system log and scrolling down we can see different coloured things (Red, yellow) coming through as far as errors and warnings. On right clicking you can ger the event properties. Additionally, you can get help regarding the event online from internet through the properties field. 

-DR