Comments for Greg Porter's Blog

Comment on Need inexpensive iSCSI? Try NexentaStor! by greg.porter

greg.porter — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:54:13 +0000

Hi, thanks for writing. No, I never saw anything like that. I’ve used Nexenta as an iSCSI back end for XenServer a couple of times. I ran Windows virtual machines on the XenServer. I ran iometer on the vm’s for days or weeks at a time. This would exercise the vm’s “C: drive” which was really the iSCSI presented by Nexenta. The access times, speed, etc. reported by iometer was smooth and steady. On better hardware, iometer reported faster access, but I never saw an intermittent response from iSCSI on Nexenta.

Hmm, googling a bit, seems like people are having issues with WD Green drives showing bursty behavior, see http://mattconnolly.wordpress.com/2010/06/30/western-digital-green-lemon/ or http://jmlittle.blogspot.com/2010/03/wd-caviar-green-drives-and-zfs.html or http://opensolaris.org/jive/thread.jspa?threadID=129274&tstart=225.

If you have some other make of drive laying around, try using that and see if the bursty behavior persists. If some other drive is fine, and the WD Green ones do it, then I’d say it’s a WD issue.

Comment on Need inexpensive iSCSI? Try NexentaStor! by Adams

Adams — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:01:19 +0000

Hi,
Thank you for the article. I’m testing NexentaStor on self-build server with 2×2TB WD Green disks and Intel Pro/1000 PT Server NIC. I run the tests in Windows Server 2008 on XenServer 5.6. When using CIFS share, the data transfer is fluent (according to task manager) and uses the NIC very well. But when using the iSCSI, the transfer is not fluent, nor responsive. It is like: nothing nothing spike nothing nothing spike. The transfer speed of spikes is much higher than the CIFS speed but then there is delay for few seconds. Tryied turning off Writeback cache but it resulted in transfer speed of few MB/s. Have you experienced anything like this?

Comment on Hmm, I wonder if I can use these workstations as “servers”… by IT

IT — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 21:37:57 +0000

FYI for everyone who has xw4600 and reads the above…

While it is true you can enable the virtualization via the security option in the bios, researching the topic online will show that this will work on for *SOME* xw4600s. It appears there is more than one variant of the Intel CPUs and depending on the chip inside it may or may not support VTx and/or VTd.

I happen to have a xw4600 and no matter what option or bios setting I tried, virtualization would not work. Even though it was listed as supporting it.

For reference see the following HP article, http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447626+1281043602914+28353475&threadId=1239545

Comment on Hmm, I wonder if I can use these workstations as “servers”… by greg.porter

greg.porter — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:20:37 +0000

Bravo. Quite right. Thanks. (I would have thought the virtualization settings would be in a (non-existent) virtualization section). Security? WTF?

xw4600 works fine as a hypervisor.

Comment on More on Nexenta by greg.porter

greg.porter — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 15:17:24 +0000

Bravo. Quite right. Thanks.

Comment on More on Nexenta by Werner

Werner — Mon, 17 May 2010 18:39:27 +0000

> I like the built in patcher in the Openfiler GUI. I’m not sure how Nexenta does patching.

Just run “$ setup appliance upgrade nms” to upgrade the Web UI or “$ setup appliance upgrade” to upgrade the base OS software in Nexenta Community Edition. Both commands should be run as ‘root’.

Comment on Hmm, I wonder if I can use these workstations as “servers”… by Jason Robertson

Jason Robertson — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:30:49 +0000

In the BIOS of hp xw4600 the Virtualisation settings XEN requires are under the Security Option.

Comment on System Acceptance by Charles DeCraene

Charles DeCraene — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:33:04 +0000

RIMOPOFL!! I don’t know much about real life but it sure makes sense!! Thank you, Greg!!!

Comment on Hands-on with a Dell/Equallogic PS5000E iSCSI array by Jose

Jose — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 05:07:46 +0000

1-BLADE M1000
2-SERVER MODEL M600
1-EQUAL LOGIC PS 6000
1-SWITCH PowerConnect 2464
10-UTP-CERTIFIED CAT-6
ALL CONNECTED WORKSTATIONS 1-GB
Keep all STANDARD INFRASTRUCTURE

THIS IS A PART OF WHICH I HAVE IN MY OTHER DATA CENTER EQUIPMENT ARE MORE SERVER 2850 and Dell PowerConnect with doors at 1-GB,

MY PROBLEM IS THAT I WANT TO INTEGRATE THE BLED PS 600 LOGIC EQUAL TO DRIVE THE M600 WHERE ARE THE DATABASE THAT IS WHAT HAPPENS …? On integration than I have now, OK … THAT WHEN PLACED THE LINKS FROM THE LOGIC EQUAL TO THE SWITCH AND SWITCH TO THE BLADE M600 WHERE ARE BOTH HAVE PROBLEMS READING AND WRITING TO THE DATABASE, WHICH RISES UP A 100% READING AND WRITING TO 100% BY VOLUME OF DATA THAT Writes SIMUNTANE IN EQUAL LOGIC PROBLEM AND DETERMINE WHICH TEAM IS EQUAL TO BRING LOGIC AND DATABASE TO disk with the M600 DE 10.2 KY IF I HAVE A BETTER ANSWER, WHAT WOULD THE BEST SOLUTION TO LOCATE THE LOGIC EQUAL AS MY DATA STORAGE USING TWO WITHOUT ME increases both the writing and reading ENGINE DATABASE.
IF ANYONE CAN HELP ME PLEASE WRITE

Comment on Notes on using Openfiler with Xenserver by greg.porter

greg.porter — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 02:14:18 +0000

Yes, you’re right on. I found I also had to tweak /etc/lvm/lvm.conf. See my updated wiki pages, I’ve incorporated these fixes. I also added a blog post on this topic.

Thanks!