Hi, I’ve lately had little to do with VMware, mainly because Xen has become free and with the pricing of modern servers, Xen makes sense for small business over VMware. So we’ve been doing a lot of Citrix XenServer work. Furthermore, we are a Hitachi partner so we sell Hitachi SANs. The most recent Hitachi [...]
Posts under ‘Xen’
Free Citrix XenServer
Citrix have announced their free XenServer Enterprise product as promised – it will be available on March 25. However, by downloading the software at htt://www.citrix.com/freexenserver, they will provide you with a license key which will enable the features of Citrix XenServer, and two key of the upcoming Citrix Essentials for XenServer: High availability StorageLink technology [...]
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 [...]
A comparison of important features between Citrix XenServer 5, Microsoft Hyper-V 1.0 and ESXi 3.5u3
I think I’ve got about a dozen emails asking for a simple comparison table, and frankly I think the value of such things are nil because they cannot possibly cover everything. But, just to get it out there, here’s a table that I quickly threw together, based on the excellent work in this blog So [...]
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 [...]
VMware partnerexchange – Sydney, Australia
I’m at the VMware partnerexchange day at the Darling Harbour-based Sydney Convention Centre, and just watched the Hypervisors – Understanding the Differences presentation, and it just seems to me that VMware are literally trying to push shit up-hill. Yes, we’re all aware that feature-wise VMware is better. Most performance benchmarks I’ve seen show that VMware [...]
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 [...]
Citrix Xen 4.1 multi-pathing with EMC storage array
EMC does not natively support multipathing via Powerpath on Citrix Xen 4.1 But Linux, does have native multipathing support via the /etc/multipath.conf file: ## This is the /etc/multipath.conf file recommended for ## EMC storage devices. ## ## OS : SLES 9 SP3 ## Arrays : CLARiiON and SYMMETRIX ## ## The blacklist is the enumeration [...]
Installing OracleVM in VMware Workstation
It’s easy enough – download OracleVM from Oracle’s website Install it using the Other Linux 2.6Â (64-bit) OS option in VMware Workstation When it finishes installing, log in as root anddo the following: Run: cd /etc/yum.repos.d/ Run: wget http://vault.centos.org/4.4/CentOS-Base.repo Run: yum -y install rpm-build make gcc After that’s done, install the VMware Tools for Linux [...]
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 [...]