Archive for the ‘NSP’ Category

OSS Network Imaging / Install services

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

I'm very interested in the topic of network deployments of operating systems, specifically the various Microsoft OSs, as I can already install linux via PXEboot. There's two main groups of software in this field - unattended or scripted installs, and imaged installs. A while ago I found a tool called Unattended, ...

HP AiO iSCSI and Citrix Xenserver

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

A couple of our clients have HP AiO1200 iSCSI systems. These are nice enough units, especially for entry level iSCSI SANs. They're in a slightly modified HP DL320s chassis, and run Windows 2003 Storage Server, as well as some custom built HP management tools. I've never had an easy run when ...

Linux iSCSI stacks and multiple initiators per target LUN

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

I've used a few hardware based iSCSI stacks for Xenserver shared storage backends, but never had spare hardware to run up software based stacks. This is rather backwards from the usual way people would test things I guess, but it's how it worked out for us. However, we're now getting some ...

Week of Xenserver Bugs

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

Over the last week I've been required to fix four different bugs relating to Xenserver. Not all were major bugs, not all were even Xenserver's fault. DVD drive missing The first bug, and actually one that first showed itself several months ago, is that the option to attach the server's DVD drive ...

Thoughts on OSX

Monday, March 24th, 2008

I recently got a new laptop for work - the base model Macbook Pro. Slightly unfortunately, I got it about three weeks before the refresh, but I don't really care about the fairly minor changes. The slight CPU speed bump isn't really worth worrying about, although the new penryn based ...

Xenserver Enterprise + Fibrechannel storage = live migration

Wednesday, November 28th, 2007

I finally got round to booking time at the IBM demo center to have a fiddle with Xen Enterprise on shared storage. They've got a good range of entry-level kit at the demo center, but the important bits (for me anyway) were a Bladecenter H chassis with some HS21 blades ...

Benchmarks of an Intel SRSC16 RAID controller

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

One of our clients gave us an Intel server with an Intel SRSC16 SATA RAID controller and a 500 GB +hotspare RAID1 set up on it, to install XenServer Express 4.0.1 system. While building the system up for him, I noticed abysmal write perfomance. It was taking around ...

VMWare responds to XenSource, MS Threat?

Friday, October 5th, 2007

Five weeks or so ago VMWare accounced massive price cuts for their existing products. Today I read that VMWare are redefining their product range completely. The article has more detailed information, but the basic gist is that VMWare is releasing a new entry-level SKU, not manageable via VirtualCenter (and thus not ...

iSCSI for SCSI device passthrough under Xen Enterprise

Thursday, September 20th, 2007

I recently had to add a SCSI tape drive to a Xen Enterprise server, and needed to use BackupExec under one of the Windows domU's as the backup software. Luckily, Greig did this a few months ago already using the iSCSI Enterprise Target, and put his notes up ...

Has VMWare seen the writing on the wall?

Thursday, August 30th, 2007

As seen here, VMWare is set to slash the pricing for VMWare ESX and VirtualCenter for the SME market - three copies of ESX and a limited copy of VirtualCenter, for the nice round price of $3k US - a significant price cut. This is hot on the heels of ...