Archive for the ‘Xen’ Category

Exporting Tape Autoloaders via iSCSI

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

A while ago I posted about {{post id="iscsi-for-scsi-device-passthrough-under-xen-enterprise" text="exporting a tape drive via iSCSI"}} to enable windows VMs to backup to a SCSI tape drive under Citrix Xenserver. I spent a couple of hours googling for whether or not you could do the same thing with a tape ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Resizing domU partitions with Xen Enterprise 3.2

Friday, July 27th, 2007

I recently had to resize the root partition of a sarge domU under Xen Enterprise 3.2. The various xe tools and the xen enterprise console let you resize the disk image, but they don't resize the filesystem for you. If it's not the root filesystem, you can resize it ...

Xensource and VMWare performance comparison

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

I was discussing Xensource with a potential client a few weeks ago, and was fairly surprised when they pulled out a performance comparison of VMWare and Xen, which showed VMware massively outperforming Xen in several tests. On further inspection, it was fairly obvious that VMWare's tests used the open-source version ...