Sunday, March 8, 2009

Citrix XenServer

I’ve been playing around with various virtualization products.  This past Feb 23, 2009 Citrix announced their XenServer product was going to be free.  I’ve been trying ESXi, Xen Opensolaris dom0, Windows 2008 Hyper-v and Hyper-V Server, so I figured I’d give XenServer a try.  I figured since it was a commercial product it likely was going to be fairly polished.  I’ve been using for a week or so now and am fairly impressed.

I’ve been fighting with my storage so I haven’t really had a chance to test out the real features but what I have seen so far I kind of like.  My experiences basically are this:

ESXi:  worked on my dual Opteron 246 machine.  But I only had 2GB of ram, so I couldn’t effectively put loads of vm’s on it.  However, ESXi didn’t work on any of my other hardware.  Kind of irritating but oddly enough, I’ve tried to run it again on my opteron machine and now for some reason it doesn’t work now.  I’ve also had mixed results running it on some hp equipment at work (like identical non-certified machines, 1 able to run it the other not while getting weird cpu heartbeat errors and freezing).  Anyhow, I’ve given up on ESXi for now.  VMWare although loads of people seem to love them, I’m thinking they are going to have troubles with all the pressure from Microsoft, Citrix, and xen.

Hyper-V Server and Windows 2008 Hyper-V:  I like this product.  It’s what we’re using at the office and seems to work well.  HVS is a nice free alternative for Windows guests.  Poor Linux/other OS support but not bad for a Windows environment.  It works well at the office though since we’re pretty much Windows and SLES.  Just run datacenter and you’re set.

Xen on opensolaris.  Didn’t work so well.  I got some vm’s running, but performance didnt seem there as I had some troubles getting paravirtualized vm’s going.  I kind of gave up as I was spending too much time working on them and XenServer was freed.

More later on Citrix XenServer.

Files Copy Performance

I copied my usual media collection up.  Using robocopy here is what I got:

 

               Total    Copied   Skipped  Mismatch    FAILED    Extras
    Dirs :       383       382         1         0         0         0
   Files :     12110     12110         0         0         0         0
   Bytes : 324.584 g 324.584 g         0         0         0         0
   Times :   2:09:01   2:08:11                       0:00:00   0:00:49

   Speed :            45309577 Bytes/sec.
   Speed :            2592.634 MegaBytes/min.

   Ended : Sun Mar 08 00:49:06 2009

So i got about 42MB/s which is about the same as my intel DP35DP mobo.  Which also was using the e1000g driver for the nic.  I guess I’m ok with this performance.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

New NIC

 

Ok.  I just undid these settings:

ip:dohwcksum = 0 setting in the /etc/system file

dd -set /dev/rge0 adv_asym_pause_cap 0

And swapped in a new NIC.  I’m done fooling around.  I popped in one of these:

Intel PRO/1000 PT Desktop Adapter PCIe.  This was recognized by opensolaris and uses e1000g.

I am testing a large copy and it seems to be going ok so far.  Not crazy fast or anything though.

Triggered a copy of my big media directory.  Heading to sleep now.  Will post some info on how it turned out tomorrow.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

problems with realtek

 

copying over 20+ GB to a cifs share causes my server to lose network connectivity.  others seem to have experienced this problem.  Seems like its the rge driver for the realteks.  I saw this web page with this problem.

I can cause the problem, tried a couple of the fixes…

ip:dohwcksum = 0 setting in the /etc/system file

didnt seem to fix it.

Tried this next.  seemed better, but will need more testing.

ndd -set /dev/rge0 adv_asym_pause_cap 0

Storage-nas package

wdespe@chakra:~# pkg install storage-nas
PHASE                                          ITEMS
Indexing Packages                            554/554
DOWNLOAD                                    PKGS       FILES     XFER (MB)
Completed                                    7/7       72/72     2.66/2.66

PHASE                                        ACTIONS
Install Phase                                221/221
Reading Existing Index                           9/9
Indexing Packages                                7/7
wdespe@chakra:~#

*** Should reboot here ****

wdespe@chakra:~# svcadm enable -r smb/server
svcadm: svc:/milestone/network depends on svc:/network/physical, which has multiple instances.

wdespe@chakra:/blue/iso# smbadm join -w workgroup
Successfully joined workgroup 'workgroup'

wdespe@chakra:~# zfs set sharesmb=name=iso blue/iso

To be able to authenticate you must configure Solaris to support password encryption for CIFS. To do this, open the /etc/pam.conf file and add the following entry:

other password required pam_smb_passwd.so.1 nowarn

 

 

wdespe@chakra:/blue/iso# passwd wdespe
New Password:
Re-enter new Password:
passwd: password successfully changed for wdespe
wdespe@chakra:/blue/iso#

 

*****  destroyed filesystems to restart

 

wdespe@chakra:~$ zfs set sharesmb=on blue/iso
cannot set property for 'blue/iso': permission denied
wdespe@chakra:~$ su
Password:
wdespe@chakra:~# zfs set sharesmb=on blue/iso
wdespe@chakra:~# zfs set sharesmb=name=iso blue/iso
wdespe@chakra:~# sharemgr show -vp
default nfs=()
zfs
    zfs/blue/iso smb=()
          iso=/blue/iso
wdespe@chakra:~#

 

wdespe@chakra:/blue/iso# sharectl set -p lmauth_level=2 smb

Opensolaris boot environments

wdespe@chakra:~# beadm list
BE          Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
--          ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
opensolaris NR     /          2.49G static 2009-03-04 20:40
wdespe@chakra:~#
wdespe@chakra:~# beadm create be1
wdespe@chakra:~# beadm list
BE          Active Mountpoint Space Policy Created
--          ------ ---------- ----- ------ -------
be1         -      -          38.0K static 2009-03-05 20:16
opensolaris NR     /          2.49G static 2009-03-04 20:40
wdespe@chakra:~#

http://dlc.sun.com/osol/docs/content/2008.11/snapupgrade/gentextid-300.html

More on opensolaris root mirroring

I found this also.  Seemed good.

 

wdespe@chakra:/boot/grub# installgrub stage1 stage2 /dev/rdsk/c6d0s0
stage1 written to partition 0 sector 0 (abs 16065)
stage2 written to partition 0, 267 sectors starting at 50 (abs 16115)
wdespe@chakra:/boot/grub#

 

I guess quite a bit has happened since I last wrote.  I purchased enough hardware to just build a pure storage device and have a dedicated virtualization server as well.  So, I picked up an open box special at Newegg.  I got an MSI Neo3-F for $58, so not too bad.  I picked it up because it appeared it was mostly compatible with opensolaris.  It seemed that Intel ICH10 are decently compatible.  It also had 8 SATA ports and supports 16GB of ram and a gigabit built in nic.  Although I have only 4GB for this, I figured it’d be good to have for later.

So after an hour or so of swapping parts around here is what I have:

 

  Storage Server Virtualization Server
CPU Celeron 430 Core 2 Duo E6300
mobo MSI P43 Neo4-F Intel DP35DP
RAM 4GB 8GB
Disk 2x160GB SATA Mirrored OS
2x1TB SATA RaidZ
2 x 300GB
OS Opensolaris 2008.11 Citrix Xenserver