Redhat LE 6 Beta – iSCSI install?!

I must have glazed over this previously. Since I haven’t done many RHEL installs, don’t own any licenses, etc. I’ve installed 5 before, but I don’t remember these options just so blatantly obvious. Now you have tons of options to choose from: Multipath devices, regular SAN devices, and FCoE/iSCSI protocols. I’ll see what else it’s got to offer later, but here’s the stuff:

EMC Celerra VSA: Adding More Storage

I thought with the VSA that came out and its improved performance, that I would start using this instead of OpenFiler. One thing I had never done before was of course adding more harddrives and storage to it, it turned out to be a bit different than I had originally imagine. I will give credit where credit is due, Chad’s videos explain everything, but I’m doing this for myself and people who can’t watch Youtube videos at work, or just like a simple text copy of the instructions.

Adding iSCSI storage to KVM with Virsh(CLI)

As a follow up to my previous post, here’s one way of doing it via virsh.

My Experiences with Xen on Ubuntu(Semi-rant)

I can understand that nothing is easy the first time around, but this is completely different. There is such a huge learning curve for Xen. I think it’s due to the lack of proper documentation.

New Virt-Manager

I hadn’t used it in awhile, but I wanted to write up a post about Xen, so I ended up launching it only to find a surprise. Ubuntu Lucid Lynx has updated to 0.8.2 of Virt-Manager, which included a new interface design. Here are a few screens.

Adding iSCSI storage to KVM

I’m really surprised that I’m the one writing this as there we no flat out simple guides available, maybe it’s just because I’m new to the whole iSCSI thing. Awhile back when I first was testing multiple storage types with KVM, I never got my head around iSCSI when I had an OpenFiler VM up. It’s actually quite simple.

KVM CLI Administration basics

Now on to administrating a KVM VM(termed Domain) via the CLI interface. If you’re used to using commandline tools, Virsh is its own shell, so everything is done inside of it instead of Bash.

Basic KVM administration

Thought I’d write this up tonight to bore me to sleep. Here is a basic guide to creating and editing a virtual machine using KVM’s management tools.

Where has Xen been and gone? KVM is winning the game.

Another new news article about Fedora 13 having some new features for migrating Xen over to KVM. While I haven’t used Xen, mostly due to the older system requirements that I’m just not willing to go to, I know it did have some advanced features.

I’ve been using KVM for about 6 months off and on. For the most part I’ve found it really great in terms of speed compared to VMWare Workstation and VMWare Server 2. I’m usually a partaker of new technology, so I end up using pre-alpha/alpha builds of distributions such as Ubuntu. From what I tried earlier last month, there was a large regression in disk IO performance compared to earlier versions of KVM in previous kernels .30 and above.  This might just be me though.

I definitely think KVM is a step up though. While the GUI managers are lacking, the CLI tools are pretty thorough, if you’re used to editing vmx files, you’ll be sort of used to editing the configurations for KVM machines, they’re in an XML format with simple layouts for configurations. I’ll probably do a post on this later this week.

EXT3′s performance

I am absolutely astounded by the latest article from Phoronix. While some of the margins for EXT3 and 4 are close, some of them compared to others are as clear as day. EXT4 was supposed to be a small change in how some of the functions work, but apparently there was a lot more going under the hood with this.