Seems like there is some kind of network bandwidth. Seem to see over 200+MBs of sporadic reads from the system when LARC is enabled.
Archive for the ‘Esxi’ Category
ESXI–Disk Reads Benchmarking
Sunday, April 10th, 2011
ESXI Mysterious Network Bandwidth
Sunday, April 10th, 2011Sometime back, I identified a network bottleneck between ESXI and my openfiler application. There I realised that one of my NICs seem to be only communicating with OpenFiler at 100 Mbps.
I quickly narrowed down the problem to my MOBO NIC being not as good as the Intel ones… and set off wanting to replace it.
Today before I replaced, it I did a reinstallation of ESXI on my thumbdrive and Lo and Behold:
Well did some googling and it seems that there might be the following problems:
Network Cable Not Properly Crimped
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1561188
Cat5 are not rated to gigabit. And the quality of even cat5e patch cables needs to be very good.. gigabit uses all 4 pairs to connect.
Yeah! That solved all my problems. Check out my ESXI Network Adaptors! All Gigabyte Quality!
Backing up ESXI–USB Flash Drive
Sunday, April 10th, 2011
Backing up ESXI USB Flash Drive. I was a little paranoid. There were a few boxes in my office that could be converted into an ESXI hosts simply by booting up from a USB disk. I kept a USB disk for each box.
Also, as new hardware is wired to the ESXI boxes, the configuration of the ESXI on the Flash Drive will change. To keep snapshots of such changes, I actually kept multiple USB Flash Drives for each device.
It was really stupid.
Today, I finally did some googling on how we can backup USB Flash Drives… and got my answer:
- Acronis True Drive Image
And… hey, I had that software all along. Time to convert all my ESXI backups into Acronis images….
Configuration Backup
Well besides backing up on the thumbdrive, we might want to backup the configuration of ESXI itself. Might save us some trouble from adding all the virtual machines again…
http://professionalvmware.com/2010/05/how-to-backup-esxi-configuration-the-missing-piece/
(Especially useful when u are always going about repairing or installing ESXI updates)
Well tested it out.. and yeap.. did restore the VMs configuration and license…
Some simple scripts after installing the VMWare CLI (which I dump in my bin folder):
backup-esxi.bat
set DATESTAMP=%DATE:~10,4%_%DATE:~4,2%_%DATE:~7,2%
set filename= "F:\Isos\Hypervisors\server_%DATESTAMP%.bak"
vicfg-cfgbackup.pl -save -server 192.168.1.2 -username root -password bugbear123 %filename%
restore-esxi.bat
set filename= "F:\Isos\Hypervisors\%1%"
vicfg-cfgbackup.pl -load -server 192.168.1.2 -username root -password bugbear123 %filename%
Installing ESXI on M4A89TD PRO/USB3
Saturday, April 9th, 2011
Wanted to get a new motherboard with more SATA cables and extension slots for my home made NAS/SAN. But since I got the board, might as well do the ESXI community some good by testing if the hardware is compatible with ESXI 4.0.
Well, I managed to install it… so I guess it must be! Got it installed on Esxi 4.1 Update 1 (10 Feb 2010).
There might hit 2 snags though in the installation though:
Problem 1: System hangs at loading module usb
Solution 1: Disable C1E Support in BIOS. Press Delete to enter Bios. Go to Advanced. Go to CPU Configuration and Disable C1E Support (4th Option)
No idea why this is so but got some help from a useful post at:
http://communities.vmware.com/thread/272255
Problem 2: Unable to load module /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/vmfs
Well, if you are like me, trying to cheapo and get lucky by hoping that you can get by without the Intel PRO/1000 GT Adaptor, you will probably encounter the above error.
Soution 2: Plug in some Intel NIC that is supported by VMWare. We should also try disabling the motherboard’s in-built LAN.
http://communities.vmware.com/message/1571740
Hope this will help some other ESXI tinkerers.
Hurray! I contributed a bit back by posting at the forum:
http://www.vm-help.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=13&t=2954&e=0
But I wonder why they did not include my motherboard in the main compatibility list at:
OpenFiler with Esxi
Friday, April 8th, 2011One of the main attractions of using OpenFiler together with my Esxi is that it allows me to easily scale the deployment of Esxi. Suddenly, my servers become somewhat like akin to blade servers. Each ESXI box can comprise solely of CPU and RAM. No Storage!
That is just so cool. But of course, on top of being cool, such deployment offers great flexibility. It allows the easy movement of Virtual Machines from one Esxi Host to another. If one ESXI host is running low on resources, i.e. CPU or RAM, I can easily suspend the instance. Remove it from the Esxi host configuration. Add it into the destination Esxi host configuration. And resume operations.
Tada! The entire VM migrated across. (Personally tried it out last night.. and it really worked. Had to lah… too cool already.)
Hmmm… this sounds a bit like a poor man’s way of V-Motion?
Experiences with Esxi and OpenFiler
Thursday, April 7th, 2011The last few weeks had been terribly interesting. I was busy ordering stuff from the US from both New Egg and Amazon. It all started when the Sim Lim uncle wanted to charge me like 5k SGD to build a server with 32GB Ram. I wanted 64GB and did not want to pay that kind of a price… and so… the adventure began…
