Monthly Archives: January 2016

Virtualization thoughts

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I started my experimentation with virtualization back in 2008. and back then I started with  Xen. It was the virtualization option that OpenSuSe 11.1 had built in, then in 2009 I switched to Xen Server as a dedicated hypervisor to gain the clever GUI for managing the VMs.
A couple of years later I decided that Xen Server wasn’t meeting some needs, mainly because most pre-made disk images were only made for VMWare’s ESXi platform and very few were available for Xen.
In 2011 I switched to ESXi 5.1. Ever since then, I’ve ran a handful of VMs, but looking back I really wasn’t taking advantage of the capabilies of ESXi. Even now I’m not. However I’ve been stuck using it (in Dec 2015 switched to ESXi 6.0) because it was all I knew to get virtual environments set up. Continue reading →

ESXi and unraid

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I had some teething pains getting the ESXi server running (I think some hardware incompatibilities) but for now (knock on wood) everything is stable. At one point i was really considering switching over to an Intel server to avoid comparability issues, but that comes at the price of new hardware 🙁

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=22553.0 :Discussion of running UnRAID under ESXi on an AMD platform.

For future expansion, an eight port HBA SATA card would be welcome (to allow for more drives)

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=43026.msg410578#msg410578 :A great post on SATA HBA controllers and their performance

 

FreeNAS tuning and benchmarking

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To be able to trully test the performance of the drives in a NAS I need a proper tool that runs on the NAS unit itself. I’ve seen a lot bench-marking done with bonnie++ but installing it in FreeNAS wasn’t straightforward.
First you need to install a jail, then you compile the program from source. FreeNAS is set up quite nicely to do this, so it’s not too much trouble, but figuring out this info took some time.
Some links for future reference:
https://blog.pivotal.io/labs/labs/high-performing-mid-range-nas-server
https://doc.freenas.org/9.3/freenas_jails.html
http://louwrentius.com/74tb-diy-nas-based-on-zfs-on-linux.html