I recently came across the opportunity to assist a client with installing their new Dell PowerEdge R730XD. Quite the beefy server config, 2x10core CPUs, 128GB of RAM, 12x4TB NL-SAS, you know, all the goodies. This machine is slated to replace an aging T610 that has seen better days performance-wise. I went ahead and put an … Read more
For a myriad of reasons, I have been looking at alternatives to VMware ESXi for a few months. Virtualizing a few machines here and there has proven educational. Learning the ropes of working with qemu/kvm, libvirt, and virsh has been challenging at times, but overall a pleasure to work with. Working with kvm is great … Read more
So you like Debian, and why wouldn’t you, it is great after all. Unfortunately, many laptops come from the factory sporting Broadcom-based chipsets. So inevitably I complete a Debian install and Broadcom takes the wind out of my sales. I then trudge over to http://wiki.debian.org/wl#Squeeze and go through the paces. Why? I do it over … Read more
So several months ago, I like the rest of the world, was notified that end of life (EOL) for Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala would happening. In the news blurb/mailing list, wherever I found it, I walked away thinking that security updates would cease to exist. In preparation for the upgrade, I went ahead and cloned … Read more
In my previous post on ZFS performance testing I ran through various tests on a particular test system that I had running at the time. That system has come and gone to a better place in the proverbial cloud. This go round, I have a similar server with a different ZFS configuration. Lets dive in … Read more
***Update*** This started a simple post to share a few results from various levels of zfs/array testing. Be sure to check back from time to time as I add additional configuration results. ***Begin Original Text*** I have been playing around with ZFS on various operating systems lately and have been trying to compare performance. I … Read more
For those that have never used crontab, it can be a daunting task to schedule a simple script. As with all things, I highly recommend that you learn the meanings of CLI programs and their usage etcetera. With that said, I wanted to check my crontab job against a generator of sorts just to be … Read more
Of course the first thing that I did tonight after receiving my 3ware 9650se was to install it in my ESXi 4.0 server and get it going. There are a few caveats that I expected and a few that I didn’t. Hopefully this post will help a few of you out there. Here are the … Read more