As an update to this post, the vmfs-tools project has been operating for a while and, unlike the previous driver – these guys have made it possible to read VMFS extents. Cheers, Leo
Posts under ‘Linux’
Do you have horrible iSCSI/VM network performance?
Update – 02/06/2009: VMware have a KB article on the matter — Read this article by Tom Sightler. It’s absolutely brilliant as he tracks down his awful onboard NIC performance to an IRQ interrupt sharing arrangement with the kernel USB module. Removal of that module increased his onboard Broadcom performance to that of the off-board [...]
Adding a second root account to an ESX server
Thanks to VM Guru for the article Sometimes you need another root account for an administrator and don’t want to start using key-pair relationships to log in remotely. Here’s how you do it: Run the following command on the Service Console: adduser -u 0 -o -g 0 -G 0,1,2,3,4,6,10 -M root2 (If you need to [...]
VM Template best practices (Linux)
Update!!! – 2/06/2009 If your Linux server is a Ubuntu VM, enable the avoidance of persistent MAC bindings for VMware NICs, as per this post Update!!! – 12/11/2008 VMware doesn’t really provide best practices for VMs because it’s a matter of taste. So I’ll let you know how you can build templates that optimise your [...]
Free VDI via SSL gateway
While doing my network re-organization, I came up with yet another hare-brained idea – a completely free VDI solution, accessible via the web, over SSL, with no client other than a simple Java applet/client that self-installs on connection. For those who don’t understand – I’m combining a VDI-like broker with a Citrix-like access gateway that [...]
Apologies for the downtime
To readers of this blog, my apologies. I had a bit of unscheduled downtime due to a suicidal router. I managed to bring everything back up quickly but took the opportunity to secure things a little and get things functioning better at the back-end. I’ve set up multiple VPNs, using OpenVPN 2.1 beta which allows [...]
Updated: Cooking your own ESX/Modifying the ESX installation media
Hi, Thanks to a couple of posters from VM4RU, and specifically 3apa3a-b-ta3e, I have updated my post Cooking your own ESX/Modifying the ESX installation media to include apcpusd for network shutdown of APC PowerChute devices. The configuration is still left up to the installer, but at least it’s integrated into the ESX install and generic [...]
My bad – got caught by myself
Look at the below post where I say that bad work caused low performance. Seems I’m guilty myself. In both articles on deploying our iSCSI SAN (Article 1 and Article 2) I forgot to include instructions on the jumbo-frames support. If you run RedHat or RedHat derived GNU/Linux distributions, you will need to modify the [...]
Mirroring our iSCSI SAN, continuing on…
We’re continuing on from this post (The sound of one Right Hand clapping… part 1) and we’re now going to mirror our iSCSI volumes between two iSCSI servers. It’s not fail-over yet – it’s just mirroring for DR purposes, cluster round-robin and fail-over/fail-back will come a little later. So, build two of the iSCSI servers [...]
The sound of one Right Hand clapping… part 1
Building an iSCSI server So we’ve all heard about LeftHand Networks’ “SAN” appliance, and the XSI one. High-end SANs, they are not. Some kind of miracle, they are not iSCSI servers are not difficult to set up network-based disk replication is not hard to set up. I’ve heard all about how good these things are [...]