Krypted » VMware

Checking Free Space in vSphere

admin — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 15:00:55 +0000

Most of us will be familiar with the df command. But in ESX, you use the vdf command, located in /usr/sbin. Running the vdf command will net you similar output to what you see with df. Simply run the following to see free space on each of your disks:

vdf -h

You can also list all of your data stores to correlate the vdf output with esxcfg:

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-scsidevs -c

Or to list LUNs:

/usr/sbin/esxcfg-mpath -L

BTW, if you’re running out of free space, in my experience, first look to your snapshots and check how much space they’re consuming…Similar Articles:

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Goodbye OpenSolaris/OpenStorage, Hello OpenFiler/OpenDedup

admin — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 15:00:23 +0000

I’ve read a number of reports over the past couple of days that indicate the demise of Project Wonderland and Open Solaris. As it is open source I would not be surprised to see the project continue, even if forked and retitled in some way. Oracle will continue selling Solaris, but “nothing is for free” is about to take on a whole new meaning. For now it seems that any plans around packaging services around the FOSS stack surrounding former Sun products should be put on hold until further official announcements are made.

“So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

–Hunter S. Thompson

Goodbye Sun. You will be sorely missed.

Moving on. For what it is worth I’m in the process of migrating the non-Mac SAN portion of my home lab to Debian with a little OpenDedup and OpenFiler until I can decide which to centralize my VMs onto. For now I’m mostly looking to see how much deduplication occurs with the VMs. I ran into an issue where the VMs were unstable with my OpenDedup volume. I was able to fix this by disabling deduplication. To do so, you edit the VOLUMENAME-volume-cfg.xml file (transposing your volume name for VOLUMENAME), editing the dedup-files=”true” to read dedup-files=”false”.

Turned out that my issue was in part a latency issue with the location of the deduplication database, which I then mv’d to an SSD drive and edited the dedup-db-store and meta-db-store to point at the new location. Then I re-enabled dedup-files and my VMs were working again. I also ended up increasing my max-open-files to 2048, also in that same file. The other issue was with the fact that I was doing inline deduplication. To fix that, I switched to batch deduplication. According to the documentation this is preferred for most environments that aren’t backup targets.

Overall I’ve been pretty happy with OpenDedup and really only just begun testing OpenFiler. In my initial tests I’m very satisfied with the block level replication, the ease with which you create iSCSI targets and snapshots. I’m actually finding the transition to OpenFiler easier than the learning curve was with OpenStorage (how hard can anything with a GUI really be?), although I am intrigued by the savings with OpenDedup and given its learning curve, continue to tinker when I can.

Final note, if you want to run a snapshot of your OpenDedup volume, use the following (assuming your data destination is /my/destination and the source location that you will be creating a snapshot of is /my/source) then use or script the following to run on timed intervals:

setfattr -n user.cmd.snapshot -v 5555:/my/destination /my/source

When I did this there was a slight amount of latency created, although that might be less noticeable when used on better hardware…Similar Articles:

VMware Acquires Zimbra

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:18:47 +0000

See the Zimbra site for more information:
http://www.zimbra.com

Mail has to live somewhere – might as well be on an EMC…Similar Articles:

Monitoring Amazon ec2 Instances

admin — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:00:00 +0000

InterMapper has a solution for monitoring instances of the popular Amazon cloud solution, ec2. Using InterMapper’s Cloud Monitor, you can monitor up to 5 virtual machines that are running for free. If you are just getting started and find that you would like some visibility into the performance of your ec2 instances then this solution is one that will allow you to get into the testing and management without having to incur a large expenditure.

And Cloud Monitor is build on top of Amazon’s Cloud Watch, meaning that it provides the most granular and up-to-date stats available for your instances, based on Amazon’s own tools. I’ve been finding that when you’re transitioning assets into ec2 that Cloud Monitor is a great tool to have at your disposal!

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Click-Matrix Leads to Death of a Trackpad

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:00:39 +0000

While preparing an image for the latest MacBook Pro we were going through a click-matrix and I noticed a funny usability issue. Basically, when you fire up VMware and log into the virtual machine, the trackpad keeps getting hit by little hands, which doesn’t work very well in typing class. I don’t ask why a piece of software is used in a VM vs. Boot Camp, etc. I just see a design consideration and look for a way to make it better. And in this case, the way to make it better was to disable that trackpad while someone was typing. And to assist, we found this handy-dandy little tool called touchfreeze, which does just that.
http://code.google.com/p/touchfreeze/Similar Articles:

VirtualBox 3.1 Out & Tested

admin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:12:14 +0000

The latest version of VirtualBox is out and it supports a whole slew of bug fixes. In fact, the latest VirtualBox fixes a very specific problem that I’ve been struggling with, which is the fact that iSCSI LUNs greater than 2 Terabytes would not mount (not that I have many LUNs greater than 2TB in my lab but occasionally it does come up). When running on Mac OS X, the following other bug fixes are also included:

X11 based hosts: allow the user to specify their own scan code layout (bug #2302)
Mac OS X hosts: don’t auto show the menu and dock in fullscreen (bug #4866)
Mac OS X hosts (64 bit): don’t interpret mouse wheel events as left click (bug #5049)
Mac OS X hosts: fixed a VM abort during shutdown under certain conditions

Overall, VirtualBox + OpenStorage continues to become a strong offering from Sun and in my labs at least it’s becoming more and more my weapon of choice for rapid provisioning of test VMs and the management of my lab storage. I’m not saying I would put hacked up versions of Mac OS X Server as a guest OS (on Apple hardware of course;) in VirtualBox into an actual production environment, BTW (nor condoning doing so in all seriousness)… Anyway, VirtualBox 3.1 is workin’ like a charm…Similar Articles:

Scripting Compellent

admin — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:00:06 +0000

As with EMC, Compellent allows you to manage servers, volumes, server folders, volume folders, views, and of course mappings programatically. This provides the automation minded engineer with a full-on suite for managing their Compellent-based SAN. All of this is made possible using CompCU.jar. I keep a scripts folder and keep the jar file there, which can initially be downloaded from the Compellent site. Unlike a traditional shell script the scripts are to be placed into a text file and replayed against the SAN.

If you are using VMware or Xen then you can combine the automation in Compellent along with the automation available with the command line interface for those solutions to accomplish some pretty nifty tasks. Simply call up the CompCU.jar inside shell scripts (or powershell scripts) doing automation in VMware to automatically duplicate LUNs and therefore virtual machines. Useful in lab environments and a number of other scenarios, CompCU.jar provides a nice environment and it’s pretty straight forward to use if you understand the underlying architecture that Compellent uses. For example, the following would run the commands listed in the file called myfile in sequence:
java -jar /scripts/CompCU.jar -s /scripts/myfile

c: run command
create x:Creates a LUN of -name
-s replay x:Runs verb against the Compellent of x type
createview: Verb used to create a view based on a replays
force: force event to occur
host: define
last: Repeats the last replay
move: Moves mapped views
name: Names a LUN
password: password to be used when user option is indicated
purge: Delete items from your Recycle Bin
readcache True/False: enables or disables readcache on a LUN
server x: x indicates the name or address of the server you are running your verb against
size x: indicates the size of a LUN
user: user to perform action as
view x: name views
viewexpire x: x sets the expiry for your views
volume x: identifies the volume to use with the verb
writecache True/False: enables or disables writecache on a LUN

One thing I’ve been doing is automating the creation of a volume, mounting it, backing up to it, unmounting it, vaulting it and then after an expiry time, deleting the volume. Without using CompCU.jar I’m not really sure it would have been possible! Although, Compellent also has a PowerShell command set that offers up even more granularity and can help keep you from having to send data into a text file for the command to run in java while offering more functionality in less commands. I am finding it a little more complicated to use so I just haven’t played with using PowerShell with it much, but will get back once I get around to it – but if you have any good commands feel free to post in the comments…Similar Articles:

Clariion/Navisphere CLI

admin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 19:49:31 +0000

A Clariion can be managed using the /opt/Navisphere/bin/navicli command. You can obtain information about the environment using the -h option followed by the IP address of the IP of the Clariion and then a number of get verbs. For example, to get all of the settings for the Clariion at 192.168.210.88:
navicli -h 192.168.210.88 getall

Or to get LUN information
navicli -h 192.168.210.88 getlun

You can also use getagent, getarrayuid, getcache, getconfig, getcontrol, getcrus, getdisk, getlog, getloop, getrg, getsniffer, getsp, getsptime and while it doesn’t start with get, lunmapinfo will obtain information about the LUN mappings. For example, to see a LUN mapped to a UID using the same host as above, you would use the following, replacing YOURUID with the UID for the storage group in question
navicli -h 192.168.210.88 storagegroup -list -uid YOURUID

One task I always do is to set the name of an array. For e
navicli -h 192.168.210.88 arrayname KRYPTED_CLARiiON

You can also use navicli to manage day to day operations. For example, to clear out logs and statistics you can use the following respectively:
navicli -h 192.168.210.88 clearlog
navicli -h 192.168.210.88 clearstats

And then you can of course configure any of the devices that you can get information for using the get* commands. For example, to create two RAID groups, you can use the createrg verb, followed by an ID for the group and then the disks that will be part of the RAID group (IDs can be obtained using the getdisk verb).
navicli -h 192.168.210.88 createrg 0 0_0_0 0_0_1 0_0_2 0_0_3 0_0_4
navicli -h 192.168.210.88 createrg 1 0_0_5 0_0_6 0_0_7 0_0_8 0_1_0

Once you have created RAID groups, you’ll want to use the bind verb on the new RAID groups, and in so doing tell them what RAID level to run at, with r0, r1 and rb being RAID 0, RAID 1 & RAID 5 respectively. For example to set RAID group 0 and 1 to RAID 5:
navicli -h 192.168.210.88 bind r5 0 -rg 0
navicli -h 192.168.210.88 bind r5 0 -rg 1

Note: The only flag we were really using was -h. But when you’re writing scripts against navicli it’s pretty helpful to use the -m which only shows values as the result of commands, which can cut down on the amount of scripting you have to do…

Note 2: If you’re working with an arbitrated loop then also make sure to review the navicli alpha command set. For example:
navicli -h 192.168.210.88 alpa -getSimilar Articles:

VMware Fusion 3 Right Around the Corner

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:00:35 +0000

VMware Fusion is now in pre-order for Fusion 3. What’s new?

64-bit support for Snow Leopard systems
Support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c
Unity works with Aero and Flip 3D to further support Windows 7
New migration tools
New command line options
Upgraded Virtual Machine Library
Built-in Automatic Updater
Reduced memory and CPU footprint

Additionally, it looks like we’ll be updating the mass deployment guide so if you have any updates or points of information that should be added, let us know!Similar Articles:

Media Temple No Longer Doing Xserve's

admin — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 02:07:38 +0000

For a brief period in time Media Temple was doing virtualized Mac OS X Server colocation, perfect for krypted.com. But alas, that program has been discontinued. So if you were hoping to check it out the time came and went to do so. Hopefully the new Parallels Server w/ Snow Leopard will pave the way for someone to start doing this: http://mediatemple.net/labs/xvSimilar Articles:

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