Mike Trello’s Technology Musings
Home lab, virtualization, servers, storage, networking and whatever technology I’m tinkering with.
Recent Articles
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XBMC Live 10.0 on a Zotac ZBOX HD-ND02 linked to OpenFiler VM media library
Introduction During the previous post I described my CD-to-FLAC project. The purpose of that project is two-fold: 1) create a digital, loss-less backup of all our existing CD collection, and 2) be able to access this mountain of media and play it on our main stereo system. I was already looking to possibly replace my…
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Ripping CDS to FLAC using Vortexbox in a VM connected to OpenFiler NAS
My project the last several weeks has been to rip my CD collection to FLAC. This is so I have electronic backups of all my music, as well as to allow it to be easily played on the sound systems in the house. My previous post described how I set about ripping. This post will…
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Vortexbox music server in an ESXi VM hooked to OpenFiler
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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Rosewill RV350 350W Power Supply and my Backup Server
The external drive I have had an external harddrive on my desk for a number of years. It is a 320GB Western Digital drive in a Rosewill case. It used to store data backups but as my storage needs grew, and I consolidated my various externals into a single backup machine, there is rarely a…
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Multiple vCPU encoding performance in ESXi 4.1
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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Power Policy Settings in vSphere 4.1
The new Power Policy Settings in ESXi 4.1 Since the upgrade to VMWare’s ESxi 4.1, I have been curious as to how the newly added power policy settings would affect both system power usage and relative performance. This short post will look at how the various power settings affect my specific setup during idle time,…
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ESXi Windows NFS datastore inactive upon reboot
The problem The NFS datastore I recently created to hold the virtual machine backups from my home ESXi server showed as “inactive” upon a recent server reboot. This was unexpected but, after some Googling, definitely not unusual. A second reboot (why not?) still did not restore the connection. I needed to find a proper solution…
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Compressing Windows NFS share to simulate ESXi thin provisioning
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
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
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…