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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
September 5, 2010
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” [...]
August 27, 2010
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 [...]
August 22, 2010
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 [...]