Archive for January, 2010
My GNU Truck
I got a new GNU truck during the Cash for Clunkers bonanza. (GNU is one of the main organizations that built the tools we call Linux.) It’s a 2009 Toyota Tacoma Prerunner. It’s the first new car I’ve ever had, and I really like it. Read more
Most people use shared storage, like iSCSI, for their XenServer storage repositories to hold virtual machines. Virtual machines *MUST* be in a shared storage repository in order to enable XenMotion and other advanced features.
It is handy to have some local storage repositories available, mainly to hold backups of machines. For example, you could shutdown a running virtual machine, right click on it, select Copy, and select a local repository to hold the copy. Then if you lost your iSCSI server, you’d have a local copy of the virtual machine you could start until the the iSCSI server became available again.
The XenCenter management GUI doesn’t allow you to make local storage repositories. You have to use the command line. Luckily, it’s pretty easy. Here’s my updated XenServer wiki page on how to do this.
If there’s one things that disks do well, it’s fill up and run out of room. My Openfiler iSCSI volumes always seem to be filling up as the virtual machines that live in them grow or I make snapshots.
If there is free room in the volume group that a volume is housed in, it’s very easy to make a volume larger with Openfiler. See my updated Openfiler wiki pages for some notes on this.
I have some lots of rack mount stuff at home that I’d like to rack. I’ve been looking for a small, inexpensive solution, but I haven’t found any I like in my price range. Recently my friend John Bellardo suggested one of these:
3u rack from Innovation First
I have a Canon Pixma MX7600, a nice multifunction inkjet. I have it connected with USB.
If you Google a bit, you’ll find some crazy people trying to use the Mac OSX cups .ppd printer drivers for printers like this. I got the .dmg file and tried mounting the OSX drivers that come in it. Even when I did eventually get the silly Apple .dmg image to mount, the .ppd file didn’t work. Forget that method, and try this one. I use CentOS 5.4, but this should work on any Red Hat like distro that uses a rpm based installer…
If you’re careful, perhaps. “Real” servers have”enterprise” features, such as dedicated hardware RAID controllers. Workstations and consumer motherboards don’t.
I recently tried to run Openfiler and Citrix XenServer on some random workstations we had “laying around”, and discovered multiple issues like these…
A default install of Openfiler 2.3 has an issue when rebooted. On a default installation of Openfiler 2.3, clients cannot use iSCSI target disks after a reboot. In other words, it’ll work fine until you reboot it. This has been discussed at some length in Openfiler forums, and has an open bug filed against it.
Also note that it has nothing to do with using XenServer. The iscsi-target service will not properly restart after a reboot, period, whether you are using XenServer as a iSCSI client against the Openfiler target or not.
I added a section to my “Openfiler: The Missing Manual” that discusses what this looks like and how to fix it.
I passed the VCP4 test on Nov 25th, 2009. I didn’t actually get the VMware certification packet with my certificate until Jan 7, 2010, five weeks later.
See my post on what the VCP4 test was like if you’re interested.
I passed the test on Oct 5th, 2009. I didn’t actually get the VMware certification packet with my certificate until Jan 5, 2010, three months later.
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