AoE (ATA over Ethernet) benchmarks on my home network

June 15, 2011

This week I stumbled upon a technology that was new to me: AoE, or ATA over Ethernet. This protocol was being hyped as a faster, much cheaper alternative to iSCSCI and NFS. In a nutshell, AoE “is a network protocol, designed for simple, high-performance access of SATA devices over Ethernet”.   I found a short description [...]

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Vortexbox music server in an ESXi VM hooked to OpenFiler

January 18, 2011

The story About four years ago I got started on a project to rip all my music CDs to FLAC. About seventy albums in, that project got put on hold. We moved the study from our spare bedroom to the basement when our boy arrived, and the CDs got scattered into numerous dark recesses of [...]

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Multiple vCPU encoding performance in ESXi 4.1

October 9, 2010

Background This is a continuation of my post about vSphere 4.1′s new Power Policy settings. This post will look more closely at how adding additional vCPUs to an encoding process can impact its performance, and whether the power settings make that big a difference on a more heavily-loaded system. An excellent document on the vSphere [...]

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Compressing Windows NFS share to simulate ESXi thin provisioning

September 5, 2010
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The problem In an effort to automate backups of some of my VMWare ESXi virtual machines, I configured a Windows Services for Unix (WSFU) share as a datastore, and set up GhettoVCB to backup the machines to the share. The problem that I discovered with this approach is that WSFU does not retain the “thin” [...]

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Using ghettoVCB.sh to backup ESXi 4.1 VMs to NFS Datastore

August 27, 2010
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Introduction I recently created an NFS datastore on ESXi, linked to a Windows Services for Unix (WSFU) share on my backup, Windows XP machine. The purpose of the datastore was to store virtual machine backups. The next step in the process is to configure ghettoVCB to perform the VM backups. ghettoVCB Details of ghettoVCB can [...]

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Setting up an NFS share to receive ESXi 4.1 VM Backups

August 22, 2010
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Introduction All the datastores on my ESXi box are local currently. In order for me to effectively back up virtual machines, an external datastore was needed. I chose to use Network File System (NFS). None of my virtual machines are mission critical but I do have several that would require some effort to reinstall and [...]

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