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
I’ve been meaning to put some of my thoughts on the HP MicroServer N40L for quite some time and just haven’t made the time to do it, so here goes. Long ago I was searching for a reason to purchase and play with HP’s MicroServers and got my chance when a client asked for an … 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
I use server Virtualization to make money. With the new licensing model that VMware has announced with vSphere 5 it appears that a typical setup will now cost more. Times are tough! What is a sysadmin to do? vSphere 4 will clearly remain viable for at least the near future. I have not taken the … 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. This time round, we are testing a Intel motherboard with a Pentium 4 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 6x74GB drives. This system was literally thrown together with spare parts laying … 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. This time round, we are testing a Intel motherboard with a Pentium 4 CPU, 2GB of RAM, and 7x500GB drives. This system was literally thrown together with spare parts laying … 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. This time round, I have a MSI motherboard with an AMD dual core CPU, 6GB of DDR2, and 5x2TB drives. With this build we went with the HITACHI Deskstar 7K3000 … Read more
In this post I would like to share some of my initial thoughts of the Netgate Hamakua. We were looking for a 1U half depth rack mount system to run pfSense 1.2.3 on. Although we haven’t mentioned it much here on the blog, we love working with pfSense. PfSense is a fork of the m0n0wall … Read more