joatBlog

Taking the plunge

In my pursuit of experimenting with as many virtualization options as possible, I'm upgrading my box to Ubuntu 10.4 (yeah, it's only Alpha at the moment) so that I can try out the Eucalyptus and Xen offerings. If I disappear for awhile, it's probably a safe bet that I've done something horribly wrong to my rig. More later.

Xen

Now have Xen installed/tweaked to the point where I like it. I will probably end up using Xen full time because:

my hardware isn't young enough to support native virtualization
OS virtualization doesn't support mixed environments
full virtualization tends to bog down on my older equipment (VirtualBox, VMware)
ESXi is overkill for my hard ware (need a second box for it to be useable)
KVM is a bit too light

That leaves Xen. I picked up "The Book of Xen" at the recent ShmooCon and have played with the CentOS version enough that I want to try the Debian version and play with DTC-Xen. If it allows access to some of my not-normally-supported-in-VM hardware (and it looks like it will), I'll probably make the switch permanent.

Stupid, stupid, stupid...

Note to self: when building Xen VMs, choose the manual IP configuration and add that IP to the exceptions list on the firewall (the part that I forgot). Took two hours to figure that out.

Update

Went to Shmoo, survived the snow storm (we need a snowpacolypse t-shirt), said hello to publishers, bought a few disks and a couple books, and argued with one speaker. Realized that a number of friends are afraid of snow (y'all are chicken!). Generally had a good time. Busted my hump all this week to make up for taking last Friday off.

Trying to figure out how to (safely) mention S.E.L.F. to wife. Gained some spouse points by putting together an intracate "some assembly required" desk for her. Torn between mentioning next conference or need for 2-meter transceiver.

Hope she's not reading this.

Comment system is down

The comment system is down (again). This time it's because Haloscan is closing their doors. I'm working on getting another one attached.

vmfs-fuse

Today, my thanks go to Christophe Fillot and Mike Hommey for writing vmfs-fuse. Y'all saved my bacon (or at least a few hours of my time) today.

For those that don't recognize the tool, vmfs-fuse allows you to mount VMFS formatted volumes under "regular" linux. I was backing out of an extremely large (1TB) ESXi install and, half-way through, I realized that I hadn't backed up one of the virtual machines. I ran up against a wall, trying to get the usual disk utilities to mount the volume and was looking at having to juggle hard drives and reinstall ESXi, just to get a folder copied. A search of Google and a Synaptic search later, and I'm copying the folder as I write this post.

So, if you're in a pinch and need to avoid having to install ESXi, just to get a file/folder copied, you might want to consider installing the vmfs-tools package (which contains vmfs-fuse).

ESXi 3.5 and 3c905c

I can confirm that ESXi 3.5 can "see" the 3com 3c509c NIC without modifification. You're more likely to run up against issues with the storage controller if you're running 3.5 on newer equipment. However, before you attempt to build a custom install disk, try tweaking the drive settings in the BIOS. I managed to get mine working after changing the RAID settings and reformatting the drives. Others have had luck with turning off AHCI.

Graphics added for ESXi install

Graphics have been added to the wiki for the ESXi 4.0 install on the HP e9170c. Enjoy!