Update: July 26th, 2010: VmWare is having difficulties converting 75% of the servers to the cloud due to errors (perhaps in their conversion software). So our vendor (Peak 10) is investigating a 3rd party product to do the conversions. More information will be posted here once we know more.
Update: July 7th, 2010: My apologies for the problems with uploads/downloads on vWorker this morning. Very late last night (our time) several machines were converted to the cloud, but a few of them did not "take". So the technician at peak 10 (who is doing the conversions) switched us back to the physical machines. Unfortunately, he made a mistake and did not correctly switch on one of them which provided a root/directory required to allow downloads to work. This broke downloads/uploads overnight. When vWorker staff came in early this morning, they saw the problem and instructed peak 10 to turn back on the physical server. I just spoke with the technician and he and his team have been instructed as the importance of double checking all work, as well as working more slowly (doing less servers at a time) to prevent issues like this from occuring again. Also, rather than doing conversions of important servers in the middle of the night (when mistakes can occur), the cutovers will be done earlier in the night. I apologize as this was an inconvenience. It is a non-trivial task to convert over so many servers and we may continue to have a few more unexpected outages during this conversion process (for example, some of the Microsoft virtual machines are not converting well...possibly due to a driver issue/bug). However Peak 10 is now taking all steps possible to minimize those outages.
---------------------
My apologies, as there was a site outage on July 5th from about 8AM EST to about 1:30PM EST. Protectpoint, our firewall provider, had a technical issue which caused the site to become inaccessable. They fixed this issue around 1:30PM EST and are watching the machines more closely in case a repeat occurs.
Also, we have begun the first migration of servers to a cloud computing/virtual environment that will result in better performance and reliability. Upgrades are being performed from 6pm EST - 9pm EST throughout this week and will result in 5-30 minute interruptions each day as switchovers of systems occur. Again, my apologies for the inconvenience as we make these improvements.
Ian Ippolito
vWorker
The definitive source for vWorker.com site news, including resources for both employers and virtual workers. (Click here for other vWorker.com news.)
