For the last couple of years I have been using FreeNAS 7.x for my go to simple fileshare tool within my ESX infrastructure.
Well as we all know that platform has reached the end of life, and at first the natural progression was to use FreeNAS 8. Well I liked it, but it has a completely different GUI, and I just could not get the hang of it.
So last month I found out there is a new branch of FreeNAS7, NAS4Free. I have just started to install it and get it configured, but I recommend using this web site to get a jump on things:
NAS4Free under ESXi at liquidobject.com
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
DLNA Servers for Windows
Know this is a little off base for my blog, but hey it is kind of virtual, and it is useful. The other day I picked up a new Blue-Ray player and it had DLNA capabilities, so I wanted to try it and test it out with a DLNA server.
Did some research with Wikipedia and the one product came to the front, Mezzemo. I gave it a try and while the software was easy to set up, I was having a very difficult time to get it to work with my Sony BDP-S590, and only 1 file was playing. Did some further research and there were many other persons saying that this model was giving it some problem.
So today I was doing some work with my DivX player and noticed that the DivX player has a streaming option. Confirmed it was a DLNA server and it is easy to setup
Well turned it on, added a folder and tried it. It works beautifully. I can play .AVI, MKV, MP4, and M4V files without any issue. Can fast-forward and rewind with no issues. Bar none, works with no issue, and I strongly recommend it. The only issue I could see is that I need to have the player running, unlike a service, but for perfectly playing files to a Blu-Ray player over wireless, that is a very, very small issue.
Did some research with Wikipedia and the one product came to the front, Mezzemo. I gave it a try and while the software was easy to set up, I was having a very difficult time to get it to work with my Sony BDP-S590, and only 1 file was playing. Did some further research and there were many other persons saying that this model was giving it some problem.
So today I was doing some work with my DivX player and noticed that the DivX player has a streaming option. Confirmed it was a DLNA server and it is easy to setup
Well turned it on, added a folder and tried it. It works beautifully. I can play .AVI, MKV, MP4, and M4V files without any issue. Can fast-forward and rewind with no issues. Bar none, works with no issue, and I strongly recommend it. The only issue I could see is that I need to have the player running, unlike a service, but for perfectly playing files to a Blu-Ray player over wireless, that is a very, very small issue.
Friday, November 16, 2012
High End Video Cards, IBM servers and Virtulization.
Today I found this announcement of new products for the dx360 M4
Now I normally don't use this model of computer, but just decided to look at it. So I looked at the specs of the server then saw the specs of two of the cards, the NVIDIA Tesla K20, and the NVIDIA VGX K1 / K2
The server can handle 2 half length full height cards, with 2 servers in a 2 u space, so that is 4 GPUs in 2U.
The K20 was just a number cruncher, nothing exciting there, could be used for mathematics, or large scale models or something like that. but the VGX K1 was interesting. It was a video card that is supposed to be used for virtualized workloads. From their website:
"VGX boards feature NVIDIA Kepler-based GPUs that, for the first time, allow hardware virtualization of the GPU. This means multiple users can share a single GPU, improving user density while providing true PC performance and compatibility."
Now that is interesting. What struck me as more interesting is this. The GPU is supported right now under the following OS's
..VMware. I am guessing that there might be an upgrade on the hypervisor's part for it to better handle virtual GPUs. For vSphere and for View. I don't think IBM would work on and develop a > $3500 video card for a server that no platform will support.
I guess we will have to wait and see.
Now I normally don't use this model of computer, but just decided to look at it. So I looked at the specs of the server then saw the specs of two of the cards, the NVIDIA Tesla K20, and the NVIDIA VGX K1 / K2
The server can handle 2 half length full height cards, with 2 servers in a 2 u space, so that is 4 GPUs in 2U.
The K20 was just a number cruncher, nothing exciting there, could be used for mathematics, or large scale models or something like that. but the VGX K1 was interesting. It was a video card that is supposed to be used for virtualized workloads. From their website:
"VGX boards feature NVIDIA Kepler-based GPUs that, for the first time, allow hardware virtualization of the GPU. This means multiple users can share a single GPU, improving user density while providing true PC performance and compatibility."
Now that is interesting. What struck me as more interesting is this. The GPU is supported right now under the following OS's
- XenDesktop with HDX 3D Pro
- XenServer
- XenDesktop with HDX
- XenServer with NVIDIA VGX Hypervisor
- RemoteFX
- Windows Server 2012
- VMware View with vSGA
- ESX
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Datacenter x64 Edition
- Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server with Xen x64 Edition
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server x64 Edition
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 x64 Edition
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 with Xen x64 Edition
- SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 x64 Edition
- VMware ESX 4.1, ESXi 4.1, and 5.0
..VMware. I am guessing that there might be an upgrade on the hypervisor's part for it to better handle virtual GPUs. For vSphere and for View. I don't think IBM would work on and develop a > $3500 video card for a server that no platform will support.
I guess we will have to wait and see.
Sunday, July 24, 2011
Building new Windows XP Guest
Currently I have the need to build a new Windows XP Guest in VirtualBox. So I figure that I want the latest and greatest so that I wont have to keep upgrading it.
On the OS side, I want it to be pre-installed with SP3, and possibly some or all of the patches
On the Virtual Hardware side I want for the Hard drive to be SATA, not IDE, and for the bridge to be ICH9, not PXII3.
My ultimate goal is for it to be point and shoot, no installing as IDE / PXII3 and convert, but to choose SATA / ICH9 straight from the start. Also want to do it without any other tools like nlite. Starting work today, lets see where this gets us
On the OS side, I want it to be pre-installed with SP3, and possibly some or all of the patches
On the Virtual Hardware side I want for the Hard drive to be SATA, not IDE, and for the bridge to be ICH9, not PXII3.
My ultimate goal is for it to be point and shoot, no installing as IDE / PXII3 and convert, but to choose SATA / ICH9 straight from the start. Also want to do it without any other tools like nlite. Starting work today, lets see where this gets us
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Cracking the contents of the VMware VMU vibs files
I was patching my ESXi server today with the VMware Host Update Utility and was thinking about a couple of things. First when I do an update the VMU first downloads a bunch of data to my C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VI Update\vmw, about 1.2GB of data.
I was thinking that if I wanted to switch back to using a scripting tool then I would have to re-download all of the patches again manually and then script it up. So I wanted the shortcut to see if I really needed to download it again. Inside the MetaData directory, there are four zip files; 4.0 ESX and ESXi, and 4.1 ESX and ESXi. and then in the vibs directory there are a bunch of vibs files ranging from 60 to 130 MB. Those had to be the patches.
Any search on how to open a VIBS file came up empty so I then looked at the Metadata zips again and opened them all up. Inside there is a file called Packages. Once I looked into it I noticed that it was all names of the patches, but was was most interesting was the filename was a .deb file.
So I renamed one of the .vibs file to a .deb copied it over to my Linux server and ran the command ar vx something.deb, and viola, it opened up and showed its contents.
Unfortunately for me, it looks like the contents inside the .deb / .vibs file is not easily compatible the downloaded manual patches, but I learned a little more on how the VMware VMU architecture works.
What I found very interesting was that even though it was for ESXi, these are debian patch packages, so still somewhere in that tiny ESXi Hypervisor, there is some Linux, however small.
Thanks to http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/01/28/how-to-extract-rpm-or-deb-packages/ on how to extract DEB packages
I was thinking that if I wanted to switch back to using a scripting tool then I would have to re-download all of the patches again manually and then script it up. So I wanted the shortcut to see if I really needed to download it again. Inside the MetaData directory, there are four zip files; 4.0 ESX and ESXi, and 4.1 ESX and ESXi. and then in the vibs directory there are a bunch of vibs files ranging from 60 to 130 MB. Those had to be the patches.
Any search on how to open a VIBS file came up empty so I then looked at the Metadata zips again and opened them all up. Inside there is a file called Packages. Once I looked into it I noticed that it was all names of the patches, but was was most interesting was the filename was a .deb file.
So I renamed one of the .vibs file to a .deb copied it over to my Linux server and ran the command ar vx something.deb, and viola, it opened up and showed its contents.
Unfortunately for me, it looks like the contents inside the .deb / .vibs file is not easily compatible the downloaded manual patches, but I learned a little more on how the VMware VMU architecture works.
What I found very interesting was that even though it was for ESXi, these are debian patch packages, so still somewhere in that tiny ESXi Hypervisor, there is some Linux, however small.
Thanks to http://www.g-loaded.eu/2008/01/28/how-to-extract-rpm-or-deb-packages/ on how to extract DEB packages
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Testing to see if aligned partitions on ESX - an Introduction
I have been looking at documents that detail speed improvements with ESX where the partitions are aligned. These documents detail and only deal with SAN paritions:
http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr_3593.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi_performance_tuning.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_partition_align.pdf
Now I don't have access to a SAN but wanted to develop and test this with my Direct Attached Storage (DAS) for my ESXi host. Here is the configuration of my ESX host:
Hypervisor OS: ESXi 4.0 Releasebuild 294855
Systemboard: Intel S5000PSL
SCSI Controller: IBM ServeRaid 6M - 128 MB cache
RAID for Testing: RAID5 built with 5 73GB 10K U320 disks.
RAID Stripe Size: 64KB
To do the testing I created two Windows 2003 guests with the following configurations:
OS: Windows 2003 Standard
Service Pack: SP2
Hotfixes: All hotfixes presented over Windows update as of 11/15/2010
Virtual Disk: 12 GB dynamic
Virtual Memory: 512MB
NTFS Format: default (4K)
The only difference is that for SERVERB, the disk was aligned to 64K as described in the documents, and SERVERA had no alignment.
I then tested the servers using iozone.org version 3.53. In order to isolate each server I rebooted the ESX host, then gave it 5 minutes to settle, and started up the Guest target alone with no other guests running with another 5 minutes of settle time before starting the testing.
The tests were done three times for each server and the results were averaged. Then the results for each aggregate server were compared as a percentage difference.
Now the big question, is it worth it. The short answer is yes, I saw an improvement on average of about 10 to 40% per test. There were points where the aligned disk was slower, but if you look at the aggregate of the data there is an improvement. I need to do some more cleanup of the data but I will be posting it soon.
http://media.netapp.com/documents/tr_3593.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi_performance_tuning.pdf
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_partition_align.pdf
Now I don't have access to a SAN but wanted to develop and test this with my Direct Attached Storage (DAS) for my ESXi host. Here is the configuration of my ESX host:
Hypervisor OS: ESXi 4.0 Releasebuild 294855
Systemboard: Intel S5000PSL
SCSI Controller: IBM ServeRaid 6M - 128 MB cache
RAID for Testing: RAID5 built with 5 73GB 10K U320 disks.
RAID Stripe Size: 64KB
To do the testing I created two Windows 2003 guests with the following configurations:
OS: Windows 2003 Standard
Service Pack: SP2
Hotfixes: All hotfixes presented over Windows update as of 11/15/2010
Virtual Disk: 12 GB dynamic
Virtual Memory: 512MB
NTFS Format: default (4K)
The only difference is that for SERVERB, the disk was aligned to 64K as described in the documents, and SERVERA had no alignment.
I then tested the servers using iozone.org version 3.53. In order to isolate each server I rebooted the ESX host, then gave it 5 minutes to settle, and started up the Guest target alone with no other guests running with another 5 minutes of settle time before starting the testing.
The tests were done three times for each server and the results were averaged. Then the results for each aggregate server were compared as a percentage difference.
Now the big question, is it worth it. The short answer is yes, I saw an improvement on average of about 10 to 40% per test. There were points where the aligned disk was slower, but if you look at the aggregate of the data there is an improvement. I need to do some more cleanup of the data but I will be posting it soon.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Installng Zabbix appliance into Virtualbox with VMDK to VDI conversion
OK, I know the title is a little long, but it is descriptive. Yesterday I stumbled across the Zabbix appliance and wanted to see what it could do.
Well I am still checking out Zabbix, but I wanted to see if I could run the Zabbix appliance using VirtualBox's native disk format VDI instead of the originally provided VMDK virtual disk.
First off adding the VMDK into VirtualBox is easy as cake
Now for the fun part; converting the file to VDI
Use the following command:
vboxmanage.exe clonehd\file.vmdk zabbix.vdi --format vdi
Now you just go to the Virtual Media Manager and attach the VDI and away you go. The one thing that I did learn is that you need to convert the VMDK to a VDI before you start up the machine the first time. So if you did the test with at the top of the article, just delete it and pull a new copy of the VMDK from the archive you download.
Well I am still checking out Zabbix, but I wanted to see if I could run the Zabbix appliance using VirtualBox's native disk format VDI instead of the originally provided VMDK virtual disk.
First off adding the VMDK into VirtualBox is easy as cake
- Download the appliance from www.zabbix.com
- Extract the VMDK and VMX files.
- By looking at the VMX file, you notice the parameters that are pertinent to create
- OS: Linux
- Version: OpenSUSE
- Memory: 512MB
- Storage Controller: SATA
- Network Attached Adapter: Bridged
- Adapter type Intel PRO/1000 MT
- Copy the VMDK to where you keep your VDI files, go to the Virtual Media Manager and add the disk to the list, then attach the disk to the SATA adapter and away you go.
Now for the fun part; converting the file to VDI
Use the following command:
vboxmanage.exe clonehd
Now you just go to the Virtual Media Manager and attach the VDI and away you go. The one thing that I did learn is that you need to convert the VMDK to a VDI before you start up the machine the first time. So if you did the test with at the top of the article, just delete it and pull a new copy of the VMDK from the archive you download.
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