tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-81787350760347140062011-08-18T18:16:09.908+02:00tips and tricks, news, reviews, tutorials about Linux and various Unixes, VMware, virtualization, scripting ...David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.comBlogger1231100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-80914881473042267882011-05-24T14:03:00.000+02:002011-05-24T14:03:49.986+02:00

Here I wrote about availability of VMware VDR in almost all the editions of vSphere - newly in Standard edition as well. VDR provides agent-less backups of  virtual machines and in-line block based destination deduplication. This license change applies for all installations or upgrades to the latest release 4.1 update 1 of ESXi hypervisor. The  screenshot below shows the licensed features of

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-21855506399990537112011-05-17T01:22:00.002+02:002011-05-17T08:46:10.385+02:00

I'm a big fan of CentOS project. I use it in production and I recommend it to the others as an enterprise ready Linux distro. I have to admit that I was quite disappointed by the behaviour of  project developers who weren't able to tell the community the reasons why the upcoming releases were and are so overdue. I was used to downloading CentOS  images one or two months after the current RHEL

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-68291623175573212952011-05-15T23:03:00.000+02:002011-05-15T23:03:07.820+02:00

How do you backup your virtual infrastructure based on VMware platform? Do you still rely on VCB? Even if the VCB is still supported and it is compatible with the latest ESX/ESXi hypervisor at version 4.1u1 it should be discontinued from the next release. So what backup tool to use in the future?  VMware vDR is considered to be its successor and in my opinion, the latest release is working

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-73089464106308916942011-05-10T15:30:00.000+02:002011-05-10T15:30:48.345+02:00

Recently, I had to cope with configuring some reverse zones for subnets where the netmask is like 26 or 20 (IPv4). It's quite straightforward to do it with class C networks when it is sufficient to  reverse the order of network base of the address,  join the result with special domain in-addr.arpa and  create a reversed mapped zone file finally. If we had a network 192.168.1.0/24 then the

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-87423126903623532642011-05-03T16:20:00.000+02:002011-05-03T16:20:54.269+02:00

The kernel modules required for booting the system up are part of an initial  ramdisk which is automatically loaded into the memory by a boot loader. The ramdisk contains enough modules to mount the root filesystem and to initialize essential devices like keyboard, console or   various expansion cards.  The boot process  then continues with running the init process. During the next phase, the

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-68962706737977207292011-02-24T14:06:00.000+01:002011-02-24T14:06:45.869+01:00

What is the fastest way to retrieve log files from an ESXi host? In my opinion, the best way is to configure remote logging via syslog server but this requires host reboot to apply configuration changes (KB1016621). The alternative method is to forward log files to different datastore. If  you don't have prepared syslog server for remote logging you can use vsphere client and generate system log

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-49749009387942297802011-02-08T22:11:00.005+01:002011-02-08T22:17:37.061+01:00

If you are using vMA (vSphere Management Assistant) for some specific management tasks like UPS monitoring  or running a scheduled backup script from cron daemon, you may experience an error similar to this one:Can't load '/usr/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/libvmatargetlib_perl.so' for module vmatargetlib_perl: libtypes.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory at /usr/lib64/perl5

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-29140470369562152792011-01-21T02:00:00.000+01:002011-01-21T02:00:00.300+01:00

During the series of articles about VCB usage I supposed that all the presented VCB command examples are running smoothly and without errors. But this is not always true. There can  be a lot of reason why it is not working as expected, e.g. wrong permissions assigned to VCB backup user, misconfigured SAN which doesn't allow to access VMFS volumes or  unspecified problem with creating virtual

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-1499887652200148222011-01-18T15:59:00.010+01:002011-01-18T16:57:25.964+01:00

How many times I was in a situation I needed to update a server with RHEL installed but I wasn't at site and I didn't have a way how to reboot the server after installing a new kernel or glibc package on it reliably? Yes, I have a test environment and I'm testing the updates on it but many installations are too critical to just run yum update -y and then shutdown -r now. On top of that, there

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-44528649672259656962011-01-18T15:38:00.008+01:002011-01-18T17:02:38.655+01:00

After almost a whole year, I would like to awake my blog from a sleep and begin to publish articles more regularly. During the previous period I was too busy at work and I couldn't afford to take care of it as I would like. On the other hand, I had an opportunity to participate on some interesting projects and I needed to solve many unusual tasks. Everything was written down and now it

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-45005619834899119102010-08-31T14:12:00.006+02:002010-08-31T14:59:33.552+02:00

It's a few months since RHEL 5.5 was released (march, 2010). Despite this, I would like to point out the major changes and additions compared to the previous release RHEL 5.4. So what's new:Kickstart installation - it is possible to exclude package groups in the same way like single packages.KVM guests and Cluster Suite - management of KVM based virtual guests with Cluster Suite is

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-55772151065432326252010-07-30T12:27:00.005+02:002010-07-30T12:51:42.533+02:00

I have decided to update my current VMware workstation 7.0.1 installation I have on my desktop to the latest available release 7.1. Further follows a quick comparison of the most interesting features and enhancements between these two releases:WS7.1 officially support many latest versions of well-known Linux distros like RHEL/Debian/UbuntuWS7.1 supports OVF1.1 via ovftool which is part of the

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-45563325250840852672010-06-24T16:19:00.006+02:002010-06-24T17:15:04.557+02:00

I have decided to write a brief summary of new features and enhancements which are available with the first service pack of Novell's SLES 11. I need to know the major differences between GA and SP1 release during my every day work and perhaps, it will help you in the same way like me. The original post about SLES11 GA is here. So, what's new?it is based on GNU/Linux kernel 2.6.32it provides web

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-20352370820753052702009-10-12T01:00:00.001+02:002009-10-12T01:00:00.696+02:00

The second edition of VMware SRM, officially named as VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manger 4, was released recently. The product is responsible for automated disaster recovery of complex virtual environments. The recent version is fully compatible with VMware vSphere platform and provides these new important features:many-to-one failover - this means that one site is able to recover from multiple

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-26504570955927106772009-09-29T14:58:00.007+02:002011-01-25T09:48:18.809+01:00

In the beginning of the year, I wrote this article about some problems between older VMware server 1.0.x and newer Linux distributions. The problem is related to the vmware kernel modules whose source code are not compatible with newer Linux kernels. I was surprised with one thing. When I upgraded VMware Server from version 1.0.8 to 1.0.9, VMware Server console stopped working. The new version

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-58975974211650059132009-09-02T14:10:00.011+02:002009-09-02T14:45:22.338+02:00

Today, it was released a next minor version of Red Hat's flagship Linux distribution RHEL 5.4. Here it is a brief summary of new features and updates:KVM hypervisor - Full support of Kernel-based Virtual Machine is included now. XEN support is included as well, but you can't use both XEN and KVM at the same time. Each hypervisor requires different kernel. You need to have 64b machine to run KVM.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-19977280696729187042009-08-20T23:00:00.002+02:002009-08-20T23:00:01.392+02:00

Hotplug of virtual hardware is attractive feature of VMware ESX 3.x/4.x. In case of ESX 3.x it is limited to hotadd of virtual disk to a running virtual machine only. With next generation of VMware vSphere hypervisor you are able to hotadd of memory or CPU to a machine if guest operating system supports it.I was surprised during vSphere evaluation how it pretty works. I used to hotadd of virtual

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-18018230128034324922009-08-19T12:22:00.006+02:002009-08-20T08:34:03.847+02:00

Sometimes, you need to run some commands during your Linux server startup. And you don't want to waste time with preparing valid init script now. The common task is to load some kernel module or to change speed of network interface and so on.Red Hat distributions provides for this task rc.local script. You can find it in the directory /etc/rc.d. The script is executed after all the other init

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-68391772754759474992009-06-10T08:47:00.001+02:002009-06-10T09:05:22.843+02:00

The seventh update of Solaris 10 was released on May. It contains support of Intel Nehalem CPU and some ZFS enhancements. I added it to the summary of Solaris updates .Here it is:Solaris 10 1/06 (u1) - GRUB bootloader, iSCSI initiator, fcinfo commandSolaris 10 6/06 (u2) - ZFS filesystemSolaris 10 11/06 (u3) - Solaris Trusted Extensions, LDomsSolaris 10 8/07 (u4) - full TCP/IP stack in zones,

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-15067723457146775092009-06-09T01:00:00.019+02:002009-06-09T01:00:00.829+02:00

Citrix released their virtualization solution named XenServer (from version 5, article XenServer is free) for free but only the time will show if it was a right decision. At first glance, it seems like a marvelous thing but there are some facts which should be investigated first. Together with XenServer, it was released central management solution XenCenter.Let's have a look at their rival

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-86012400159275377232009-05-28T16:00:00.005+02:002009-05-28T16:00:00.456+02:00

OVF or Open Virtualization Format is an open DMTF standard with intention to package and distribute virtual machines or virtual appliances among various hypervisors independently on hypervisor and CPU architecture.VMware supports OVF format and actively participate on its development . It is supported on ESX 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 but the implementation doesn't support full OVF feature set.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-51627279070436129342009-05-21T11:00:00.001+02:002009-05-21T12:18:03.861+02:00

VMware High Availability provides protection against physical servers failures running ESX hypervisors. If one host in HA cluster fails then failed virtual machines are restarted on another alive host from cluster. It ensures the host has enough resources to fulfill requirements of newly booted virtual machines. It is able to monitor virtual machine activity by checking its heartbeat as well and

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-71059060683627011162009-05-19T15:20:00.003+02:002009-05-19T15:30:07.016+02:00

Yesterday, a next minor version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 was released. The new version 4.8 contains the foloowing updates and enhancements:optimized drivers for RHEL 4 guests running on KVM hypervizorSAMBA update for better interoperability with Windows worldnew kernel tunables for better performanceFor details, there are official release notes published at redhat.com.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-49352304176283346622009-04-29T11:03:00.007+02:002009-05-21T10:58:37.177+02:00

Yesterday, VMware uncovered new pricing and licensing model of vSphere 4.0 platform. In my opinion, VMware is trying to strictly split up the virtualization market into two parts - SMB and enterprise. I have a feeling from the table of features below that there is growing a hole between them. The competitors should catch the chance to fill it up.SMB editions - ESXi Single Server, Essentials and

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-56562705657771681912009-04-16T18:00:00.001+02:002009-04-16T18:00:00.212+02:00

Kdump is official GNU/Linux kernel crash dumping mechanism. It is part of vanilla kernel. Before it, there exists some projects like LKCD for performing such things. But they weren't part of mainline kernel so you needed to patch the kernel or to rely on Linux distribution to include it. In the event of LKCD, it was difficult to configure it, especially which device to use for dumping.The first

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-46553860316339036052009-04-15T13:36:00.005+02:002009-04-15T13:50:29.951+02:00

Sun has released a new line of servers and blade modules based on Intel Xeon 5500-series processors. The new pieces are:Sun Fire X2270 (1RU, 1 or 2 CPUs)Sun Fire X4170 (1RU, 1 or 2 CPUs)Sun Fire X4270 (2RU, 1 or 2 CPUs, 16 2.5" disks)Sun Fire X4275 (2RU, 1 or 2 CPUs, 12 3.5" disks)Sun Blade X6270 (1 or 2 CPUs)Sun Blade X6275 (4 CPUs)The official announcement of new servers with additional details

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-11859286723024805872009-04-08T16:15:00.002+02:002009-05-06T17:19:11.060+02:00

The next version of Sun's desktop hypervisor VirtualBox was released. The new version 2.2 brings the following important changes:OpenGL 3D acceleration for Linux/OpenSolaris guestsOVF appliance import/exportUSB and shared folder support for OpenSolarishost-only networking modeMore details are in official changelog.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-44144964961053121752009-04-01T22:00:00.000+02:002009-04-01T22:00:00.805+02:00

VMware ESX hypervisor has supported only SCSI internal drives for a long time. The third update of ESX hypervisor introduced support for some SATA controllers like Intel ICH-7. The newest fourth update contains support of ICH-9 and ICH-10 chipsets as well. The same holds for ESXi platform.The big difference is what SATA mode is supported. For example, the ICH-7 chipset is supported in IDE/ATA

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-36362441863096540422009-04-01T12:56:00.005+02:002009-04-01T13:38:03.324+02:00

The fourth update of VMware ESX platform was released. It contains many hardware enhancements like support of new Intel Xeon 5500 procesors, SATA controllers or network interface cards. It supports new guests as well like SLES 11 released recently. The official release notes provide more comprehensive information.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-10039342235111231692009-03-24T15:36:00.009+01:002009-04-08T16:22:08.771+02:00

Good news for SLES fans. The next major release of the product was released today. Together with SLES 11 was released enterprise-ready desktop SLED 11. Other two new products were announced as well:SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension - the products integrates clustering filesystem OCFS2, cluster-aware volume manger cLVM2, distributed replicated block device DRBD and Pacemaker

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-64274026904195927612009-03-24T10:31:00.003+01:002009-03-24T10:43:52.098+01:00

If you need to assign an already registered SLES 10 system to a new or different subscription the quickest way how to do it is to use suse_register command from console:suse_register -i -fThe -f switch forces registration and -i runs registration interactively. The registration form will be available via lynx text web browser. Prepare your activation code and finish the registration.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-39158245762727335222009-03-12T02:00:00.010+01:002009-03-12T02:00:00.521+01:00

The generic form of kexec command looks likekexec -l kernel_image --initrd=kernel_initrd --append=command_line_optionsThe command has available many other options but the presented ones are the most important. To start kernel reset, runkexec -eHow does it work? Linux kernel is placed in memory at defined address offset. On x86 architecture, it begins at 0x100000. Kexec is capable to call and run

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-3901145623071384892009-03-10T02:00:00.008+01:002009-03-10T02:00:00.090+01:00

Kexec is a GNU/Linux kernel feature which allows to perform kernel reboots faster. The time savings around a few minutes are the result of not performing BIOS procedures and hardware reinitialization (each hardware part - like SCSI/FC HBAs - may have own BIOS and POST which takes some amount of time to finish). As we have cold or warm reset we can newly say we have kernel reset.The GNU/Linux boot

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-5001584470386811122009-03-06T01:00:00.001+01:002009-05-21T10:59:01.249+02:00

The next major release of VMware ESX platform is being prepared. The platform newly called as vSphere 4.0 is going to be based on six stones which provide:vCompute - virtualization layer, hypervisor, live migrationvStorage - storage management, replicationvNetwork - network management, distributed switch, Cisco Nexus switchAvailability - clustering, data protectionSecurity - VMsafe APIs, vShield

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-63344993791224959022009-03-05T10:30:00.003+01:002009-03-05T10:45:20.979+01:00

As you know, XenServer Enterprise Edition was realased for free. The license key for enterprise features and installation media are available from the download page. The new free XenServer will be released at March 25. The provided license provides high availability and StorageLink features from incoming Citrix Essentials for XenServer as well. The update to new version will be possible.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-26528272705517430932009-03-04T01:00:00.002+01:002009-03-04T08:53:18.460+01:00

I have added another article dedicated to VMware VCB and backups over Samba or Windows shares. Here is updated list of them:VM identification - how to identify a virtual machine you intend to backup? The command vcbvmname is the answer.VM full backup - how to perform a full backup of the chosen virtual machine? The vcbmounter command can do it.VM full backup data access - how to retrieve data

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-63980361320144315652009-02-27T16:16:00.010+01:002009-02-27T16:24:53.204+01:00

In the previous article about VMware VCB, I wrote about full backups to NFS shares. For completeness, I decided to write another one dedicated to backups to Samba or Windows shares.The idea of backup is the same. Let's have a Samba server available at IP address 192.168.1.1. The exported directory for backups is backup-smb and the user which has write access to this share is backup.Before we

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-42498638512151267372009-02-23T22:42:00.010+01:002009-02-23T23:41:17.448+01:00

It's unbelievable! Citrix decided to release their XEN based hypervisor and complete virtualization solution named XenServer for free a few hours ago (official announcement is here). The product was available in three editions until recently - Express, Standard, Enterprise and Platinum. The differences are outlined in the following table:The Express edition was free of charge so far but it was

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-43959076104222220752009-02-18T09:45:00.006+01:002009-02-23T23:40:54.006+01:00

The previous version of Converter was at 3.0.3 for a long time. The new standalone version is much similar to the one included in Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 (VI 3.5).Before it, there were available two editions - Starter and Enterprise where the second one is part of VI 3.5. Here are the additional features of Enterprise edition compared to Starter:it supports multiple migration jobsit supports

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-30375988887077037372009-02-09T01:01:00.000+01:002009-02-09T01:01:00.463+01:00

Proper alignment of filesystem on disk partition may bring some I/O performance improvements. Typically, the reason for it is caused by creating RAID device underneath the accessed disk which can stripe data in chunks of some defined size. The typical size of chunk is 64KB. As you know, no partition is placed at the raw beginning of disk because there needs to be written some metadata like MBR

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-42129591815694478312009-02-03T14:00:00.002+01:002009-05-06T17:17:19.188+02:00

While management system Ops Center 2.0 was released recently, it seems Sun has some issues with their XEN based hypervisor. According to this article published by french magazine LeMagIT it is going to be released in second quarter 2009.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-76446498200036244032009-02-03T03:29:00.001+01:002009-02-03T03:29:00.369+01:00

I was considering to write this article a while because it doesn't fit in any type of article I have published before. And it isn't my primary business to discuss various open source licensing here. The thing is, it is useful to understand the role of them but it is often quite difficult to imagine what they just want to say. Sometimes, I have a feeling you need a lawyer education to understand

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-52644618565452919912009-01-28T02:00:00.000+01:002009-01-28T02:00:00.666+01:00

Our final step is to move the system from SP1 to SP2. I have to mention the choice you can use zypper tool from now. The command syntax and parameters are almost the same. Nevertheless, I'm going to continue with rug.It holds the same for SLES 10 SP2. It is separated product with separated update source tree. Let's begin.Again, subscribe to SP2 update and install source and to available

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-24215040689169193072009-01-26T10:40:00.005+01:002009-01-26T10:53:28.173+01:00

It seems VirtualCenter Server for GNU/Linux is being prepared and might be released with the next version of Virtual Infrastructure or its successor called VMware vSphere 4.0. It's going to be presented at the incoming virtualisation event VMworld Europe 2009. The official abstract of technical session covering this topic is published at VMworld Europe 2009 website.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-89695098964639682322009-01-22T15:19:00.005+01:002009-01-22T21:24:30.644+01:00

The next minor update of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was released recently. About its predecessor - RHEL 5.2 - I wrote here a few months ago.So what news does it bring? Let's have a look at some of them:it's mainly update release - there are updated packages providing auditd, NetworkManger or sudoit contains many virtualization enhancements - the number of supported physical CPUs or maximum memory

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-72446035989291729282009-01-20T02:00:00.004+01:002009-01-22T21:22:03.629+01:00

Keep in mind, SLES 10 GA and SLES 10 SP1 are treated as separated products. We need to subscribe to new installation and update sources and repeat the previous steps with some little additions. My installation source of SLES 10 SP1 is part of update server. The update server is synchronized from official Novell update server with YUP proxy.Subscribe to SLES 10 SP1 installation and update source,

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-71590158151177476072009-01-15T16:59:00.005+01:002009-05-06T17:17:19.189+02:00

Sun released their unified multiplatform management system for physical and virtual servers a few months ago but they still lacks of their own hypervisor called xVM. The release of xVM Server is planned during the first quarter of 2009 and it seems to be delayed now. Nevertheless, we can make some conclusion about the product now:it supports MS Windows, Linux and Solaris guestsit is vmware

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-20353670252812913442009-01-14T02:00:00.001+01:002009-01-22T21:22:03.629+01:00

Among basic administration tasks of Linux system administration belongs its regular update. Each distribution has its own way how to perform it. Update of SLES 10 is not as straightforward as many of us expect so I decided to make a summary of this procedure.I'll be doing it with rug command, not via graphical YaST. From SLES 10 SP1 you can use zypper command which is much faster than rug and it

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-49732375591617685892009-01-08T15:37:00.011+01:002009-01-22T21:22:43.378+01:00

I decided to upgrade my laptop system from almost "prehistoric" openSuSE 10.1 to the newest version 11.1. It was quite successful but I had to resolve an issue with VMware Server 1.0.8 which I am used to using in my work a lot.The whole configuration process crashed on vmware kernel modules compilation. The kernel version in new openSUSE is 2.6.27.7. As there aren't precompiled modules for it

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-69773859541674852342009-01-06T10:34:00.010+01:002009-01-22T21:19:28.396+01:00

There is a question how to configure ntpd time synchronization daemon inside Linux domU. Is it better to guarantee the proper time of dom0 via ntpd and rely on automatic time synchronization between domU and dom0? Or is it preferable to make the domU clock independent of dom0?I'm not sure with the right answer. I'm used to configuring ntpd daemon of each Linux system the same way. That means one

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-17314506885769644252008-12-18T13:25:00.003+01:002009-05-06T17:19:11.061+02:00

Sun has released new major version of Sun xVM VirtualBox product recently. The version 2.1.0 contains some interesting enhancements like:experimental support of 64b guest on 32b hostexperimental 3D accelration via OpenGLVMware VMDK virtual disks are supported nowexperimental support of LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI HBAs (used with VMDK disks)And that's not everything. There are many other things

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-57737434178074725422008-12-11T20:44:00.016+01:002009-01-06T10:03:35.363+01:00

I finished another installation of virtualized environment recently. I had to get rid of old machines and to deploy virtualization on couple of new SUN Blade 6250 modules (installed in SUN Blade 6000 Modular System) connected to SUN StorageTek 2510 iSCSI disk array. The final solution had to pass high-availability conditions.The VMware ESX Server 3.5 hypervisor was installed on both of blades

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-32892581323470646612008-12-03T10:54:00.005+01:002009-01-22T21:14:04.505+01:00

It's no surprise that many system administrators are still using this simple rule of thumb for sizing their system's swap size:the swap space should be as large as twice amount of system operating memoryI belonged to them. But is it still really necessary to follow that rule when our machines are equipped with gigabytes of RAM now? Sure, it is waste of disk space. If I have a machine with 32 GB

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-75240720213919937662008-11-13T10:02:00.006+01:002009-09-02T14:46:12.986+02:00

It's unbelievable but it's true! Red Hat in cooperation with AMD performs virtual machine live migration between different platforms - from Intel CPU to AMD cpu. You know, there are many difficulties to achieve it - like various extensions, instructions and so on.So far, it was possible to migrate between processors of different family of one vendor only. Now, Red Hat can do it with RHEL and KVM

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-15288286468603099962008-11-10T21:01:00.002+01:002008-11-10T21:25:19.167+01:00

Today, it was released the third update of VMware ESX platform, respectively. The third update of VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 was released a month ago. Interesting release policy. Perhaps, it has something to do with the "power on VM bug" (details here) which was critical around the August 12. After that, VMware announced some changes in the quality assurance of their products.Now, what the third

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-65853300118786834052008-11-06T12:30:00.000+01:002008-11-06T12:33:43.459+01:00

I have written a series of articles about VMware VCB usage. They are concerned about main VCB principles. The backup procedures are performed via VCB command line utilities. It's not bad idea to make a quick list of articles for better orientation among them:VM identification - how to identify a virtual machine you intend to backup? The command vcbvmname is the answer.VM full backup - how to

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-72087565033883742632008-11-04T10:45:00.003+01:002009-01-22T21:24:30.645+01:00

The new version of Solaris 10 was released by Sun recently. Its name is Solaris 10 10/08 or Update 6. The most expected new feature is support of booting from ZFS filesystem. I added it to the summary of Solaris updates as I presented here. So, here it is:Solaris 10 1/06 (u1) - GRUB bootloader, iSCSI initiator, fcinfo commandSolaris 10 6/06 (u2) - ZFS filesystemSolaris 10 11/06 (u3) - Solaris

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-60856101465300995312008-10-30T15:00:00.003+01:002008-10-30T17:13:28.056+01:00

The last question remains - how to restore the fully backuped virtual machine as we made it in the previous article? The virtual machine is stored at the NFS server and we need to get it back to the ESX host. There are many possible scenarios to do it - e.g., the original machine is corrupted and you have to restore it from backup. Or you don't have VirtualCenter Server available and you would

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-89810935589601537862008-10-27T12:30:00.001+01:002009-02-27T15:49:56.808+01:00

Let's go to practice a bit. Let's have a NFS server in the network available. And we would like to backup virtual machines (VMs) from one of our ESX hosts directly to it, without usage of any specialized backup software.I don't have to forget to say that VCB is available in your ESX host. There is installed VMware-esx-backuptools package which contains almost all the mentioned commands before -

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-59716238695680366212008-10-27T10:00:00.000+01:002009-01-22T21:24:30.646+01:00

Will it be VMware? Or Microsoft? Or even Oracle? I think it is not right to say it will be this company or that. But it is clear that we can form some virtualization selection now which defines the leaders of actual virtualization market. I am pleased to use for it a screenshot provided by Gartner:The most interesting part of the screenshot compares the number of deployed virtual machines by the

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-84461890531391508782008-10-22T04:00:00.000+02:002009-01-22T21:24:30.646+01:00

I needed some quick list of features available in particular update of Solaris 10. As you may know, the Solaris 10 was released in 2005. Since that time, there were realeased 5 updates in total which are bringing new features to the OS. The sixth update might be released during the October, 2008. The following list is my mentioned quick list of important features:Solaris 10 1/06 (u1) - GRUB

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-4859201930817120262008-10-20T08:00:00.001+02:002009-01-22T21:24:30.646+01:00

Let's decompose the ibnetdiscover output a bit. The first paragraph begins with Switch keyword. The switch has GUID 0x144f00006e9794. The channel adapter begins with Ca keyword. Their GUIDs are 0x3ba0001003de4 (node node2) and 0x3ba0001007ba8 (node node1). The second one corresponds with the node displayed by the ibstat above. You had to notice that there are many numbers in the square brackets.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-51298213579922870322008-10-17T09:18:00.007+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.535+01:00

I summarized the main differences between VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors in these two articles:Differences between VMware ESXi and ESXTechnical differences between VMware ESXi and ESXAdditionally, the main source of information to the topic should be in the article published at VMware knowledge base:VMware ESX and ESXi ComparisonThis article was updated recently and contains the most actual

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-78218115695277007182008-10-16T14:00:00.002+02:002009-01-22T21:24:30.647+01:00

It's almost two months ago when I began to write about advanced diagnostics of IB networks. In the end of the article, I suggested to start the IB subnet manager. So let's do it with the init script:/etc/init.d/opensmd startNow, we are ready to compare the outputs of the commands when the IB subnet manager wasn't running and when it is running. There should be noticeable differences because

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-55959919667111460782008-10-13T02:00:00.001+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.536+01:00

Yes, the article headline is right. As you already know, there are a lot of discussions what is the difference between VMware VMotion and Microsoft Hyper-V Quick Migration. VMware VMotion is enterprise proven feature which allows to hot migrate a running virtual machine among ESX nodes forming a high availability cluster.The Hyper-V Quick Migration is much simpler. It suspends the machine, cold

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-84085841171671564562008-10-07T02:00:00.004+02:002009-01-22T21:22:03.629+01:00

Have you ever needed to update some remote SLES10 system from your local update server (e.g. YUP server)? There may be many reasons for such situation. For example, the remote system can have unstable Internet connectivity to connect to the Novell servers or no connectivity at all with ability to see your local update server via VPN network only. You are able to imagine other situations, of

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-31362404319547788432008-10-01T02:00:00.001+02:002008-10-01T02:00:01.751+02:00

The performance of full backup running over LAN network is not optimal because it requires to copy virtual machine disks locally. That may take some time. The usage of SAN or Hot-Add mode is far better in such situations.The file-level backup is more suitable for LAN networks because it doesn't export any disks. It is able to mount the disk directly and you can access its filesystem without

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-16137213532365621322008-09-24T17:00:00.001+02:002009-01-22T21:24:30.647+01:00

Let's celebrate it! VMware just released a next major version of their VMware Server. Quickly, let's go through the new features and other changes:New operating systems support - it supports operating systems recently released like Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista or RHEL5 .64b operating system support - finally, we have stable support of 64b guests on 64b hardware. VMware Server runs

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-86540184637926350182008-09-24T02:00:00.002+02:002008-09-24T02:00:00.983+02:00

The full backup of virtual machine vcb-backup was finished and we have its virtual disk available locally now. We can backup it directly or we can access its filesystem and backup selected filesystem structure only (e.g. we want to backup some application data only).The virtual disk and the whole virtual machine is available in the c:\mnt\vcb-backup\ directory. It contains everything what we

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-69667559121941229952008-09-19T10:08:00.012+02:002008-09-25T12:16:03.570+02:00

Let's choose the virtual machine called vcb-backup and perform its backup. Before we proceed, we should stop to explain that VCB is capable of doing two types of backup:full backupfile-level backupThe file-level backup is available for Windows operating systems only. The full backup means to backup virtual machine images. You can use it with every type of virtual machine.Next thing, we need to

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-36208251332438997712008-09-17T15:24:00.011+02:002008-10-30T17:16:31.026+01:00

Before we begin the backup process of selected virtual machine, we need to identify it so that VCB can contact VirtualCenter server and start the backup session. This step is simple and requires to run the vcbvmname command. The VirtualCenter server contacts particular ESX hosts and send a list of hosted virtual machines back. Follows the example of command usage:vcbVmName.exe -h VC_IP -u

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-67591496361930046842008-09-12T13:39:00.003+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.537+01:00

What next will VMware release after VMware ESX 3.5? This is a natural question and I think it's not surprise that it might be VMware ESX 4.0 or something like this. The surprise is what the next generation of ESX might bring to us. Let's have a look at some of the new features:the service console and the kernel should run in 64-bit mode nativelyVMware VirtualSMP should support 8 virtual logical

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-87247057314972114172008-09-11T15:11:00.008+02:002008-09-29T11:12:52.957+02:00

Do you know about some useful guide which introduces VCB commands? In my case, I haven't find any yet. I found some articles about the topic which helped me a bit but no one was usable as a reference guide. So, I am still missing such a guide. Unfortunately, the basic usage of VCB commands is comprehensible.I don't want to write anything advanced for now. Just basics, no SAN, no backup agents.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-5325984431359800412008-09-08T20:16:00.003+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.538+01:00

Hm, the competitor never sleeps, we could say after Microsoft revealed the plan to release Hyper-V Server 2008 platform without Windows (read more at microsoft.com). I'm not able to imagine it but Microsoft developed a minimal version of Windows with the most necessary parts of OS - kernel and drivers - which are loaded in the parent partition. It should be similar to VMware ESXi which is not

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-43934268614826141592008-09-04T14:15:00.003+02:002009-05-06T17:19:11.061+02:00

Today, Sun released new major version of their desktop virtualization product Sun VirtualBox 2.0. Newly, it supports 64-bit guests (only Windows Vista and RHEL5), Microsoft VHD virtual disk format, AMD RVI or Python API.It can be downloaded from www.sun.com. The official release notes is available as well.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-71736981003845155662008-09-03T02:00:00.000+02:002009-01-22T21:22:03.630+01:00

If you install VMware server 1.x at your Linux workstation you may encounter the dependency issue between installed VMware libraries and available system libraries like this (lines are broken):(vmware:30311): libgnomevfs-WARNING **:Cannot load module `/opt/gnome/lib/gnome-vfs-2.0/modules/libfile.so'(/usr/lib/vmware/lib/libgcc_s.so.1/libgcc_s.so.1:version `GCC_4.2.0' not found (required by /usr/

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-9025054588751167342008-09-01T02:00:00.000+02:002009-01-22T21:14:04.505+01:00

I didn't have a luck when I was looking for ext2online utility to resize ext3 filesystem online on RHEL 5.x (it is available on RHEL 4.x). Online means to resize it without requirement to unmount the filesystem. I went through the release notes but I didn't find any notes about it. Perhaps, I didn't read them carefully.The ext2online tool can be used to resize ext2 filesystem but it has to be

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-51462335230573953152008-08-28T10:33:00.008+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.539+01:00

I have spent some time with looking for more details about VMware ESXi compared to VMware ESX. I summarized the main differences in this article but I think it's not complete. There have to be more features missing in ESXi because of service console removal. So, what next did I discover?ESXi is supported on smaller set of certified hardware because it is standalone system and it doesn't depend on

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-39769570174786014152008-08-26T01:00:00.001+02:002009-01-22T21:24:30.649+01:00

Last week, VMware released another candidate of oncoming Server 2.0 denoted as RC 2. Because I'm using the current stable version 1.0.6 in my testing environment a lot, I'm looking forward to the new one as well. It should bring a lot of new useful features among which belongs:support of USB 2.0 devices - it will be more comfortable to use high-speed USB memory sticksonline disk capacity

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-90215588510185828322008-08-20T14:10:00.000+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.540+01:00

The VMware ESX 3.x is missing wget package so you can't use wget command to download anything from the Internet as you wish. In spite of wget, the service console provides lwp-* tools which are simple perl scripts based on LWP and URI perl modules and which allow to do some basic tasks around the HTTP protocol.The tools are part of perl-libwww-perl package. The package is installed by default.

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-62860748297341897832008-08-14T06:00:00.000+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.542+01:00

In my opinion, the easiest way how to find out the ESX host version, is to log in to the service console and use the esxupdate command. The major version can be found in the file /etc/vmware-release. For example, it may contain:VMware ESX Server 3So, the major version is 3.x. To determine minor version is a little complicated. Run this command from service console:esxupdate queryAnd try to

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-153928607167687392008-08-12T17:04:00.012+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.542+01:00

What a coincidence! Me and my colleague were preparing a server with VMware Infrastructure Update 2 yesterday. Just another simple scenario, we were thinking. We just wanted to run some checks if it is suitable for production usage. Everything went smoothly. But when my colleague began his job, things went worse. His task was easy - install some new virtual machines in prepared environment and

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-21812085722650777092008-08-05T10:00:00.001+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.544+01:00

VMware ESXi hypervisor is free of charge now but what are the reasons to use it instead of VMware ESX? And what advantages does it have?The most important advantage is you don't need to pay for it. Furthermore, it supports all VMware Infrastructure features if you buy proper licences - you can vmotion virtual machines, schedule resources, backup them via VCB and so on. If you really want to save

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-39828917280454784202008-08-04T13:17:00.014+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.545+01:00

VMware ESXi 3.5 update 2 is totally free now. It comes out from VMware Infrastructure and has a lot of features in common. The hypervisor can be downloaded from www.vmware.com.I was interested in reasons why the hypervisor was released for free. And I must admit the company keeps still the same rule - what provides competitors we provide for free.The competitor is Microsoft and their Hyper-V

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-85045105432644143452008-07-30T14:35:00.003+02:002009-01-22T21:24:30.651+01:00

I will continue from the point where I finished last time. The remaining diagnostics tools depend on sysfs interface. The provided information is extracted from this filesystem. If you don't remember the meaning of each entry under the /sys/class/infiniband directory use these tools.The IB subnet manager is not running is one of the IB network issues. The IB nodes don't have assigned any LIDs

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-84914570199075676432008-07-25T12:00:00.001+02:002009-01-22T21:24:30.651+01:00

I am going to close the article series about Infiniband technology on RHEL platform (check the previous posts 1, 2, 3) with posts intended to the IB troubleshooting. I would like to introduce a basic diagnostic steps of IB environment which may help you to uncover errors and misconfiguration.The most of troubles you may meet with are traceable via OFED diagnostics tools. They are part of

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-44177766080482723982008-07-23T08:51:00.006+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.547+01:00

During a few days or weeks, VMware should release their lightweight hypervisor VMware ESXi for free. It is an enterprise-class hypervisor with footprint about 32MB which is integrated into modern servers through e.g. solid state disks. The small footprint is achieved by dropping so-called Console Operating System (based on RHEL 3). It includes basic functionalities like vSMP or VMFS and for

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-87530608930526351902008-07-22T11:00:00.000+02:002008-07-22T11:00:01.321+02:00

Have you ever wanted to check the content of the first virtual console without switching to it with "Ctrl+Alt+F1" shortcut from your desktop session? Or the second console of a remote server? Or would you like to send something to the user who is working at the third virtual console (not via wall command)?The GNU/Linux kernel provides two character devices for such tasks:/dev/ttyX - represents X

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-11715237014093550112008-07-18T16:16:00.001+02:002008-09-04T08:18:07.669+02:00

As I written in the previous post, the /etc/init.d/openibd init script is in charge of starting Infiniband (IB) network. The script parses the /etc/ofed/openibd.conf configuration file where you can specify which ULPs should be initialized. By default, all ULPs I mentioned last time - ipoib, srp, sdp - are enabled.The opensm IB network manager is controlled with the /etc/init.d/opensmd init

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-33836918384450441692008-07-15T13:13:00.017+02:002008-09-04T08:20:47.570+02:00

Sometimes it happens that I'm not able to uninstall a RPM package because of some internal SPEC file errors related to the scriptlets. Last time it happened when I was uninstalling the HP OpenView Storage Data Protector packages from a RHEL server. By mistake, I uninstalled one package which was a dependency of another package and after that I wasn't able to uninstall it due to that dependency

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-81024084324985462662008-07-11T13:02:00.016+02:002009-01-22T21:24:30.652+01:00

We had to wait for upcoming AMD Opteron servers from Sun a few months since the new quad-core AMD processors, code named Barcelona, were released. Now, it would be a few days when Sun officially announced here the availibility of the second generation of their AMD servers and new storage arrays, together called as "next generation open storage hardware". More about the Open Storage hardware and

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-80141356375435599062008-07-07T12:00:00.013+02:002009-05-06T17:18:14.927+02:00

Let's continue with software introduction. As I wrote the switch is equipped with the ALOM remote management. There is an universal set of commands for platform independent management like password, poweroff, setupsc, resetsc and so on and then a set of commands which are more specific to the platform. In the case of our IB switch there are two such commands:setbp - for setting so-called

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-70184366727793446602008-07-01T00:00:00.009+02:002009-01-22T21:19:28.400+01:00

In my two previous articles, I summarized a few facts about the Infiniband support in RHEL distros and included protocols - you can go through them from the following links - RHEL and Infiniband support and Infiniband, RDP, SDP.... Let's be more particular now.My scenario was based on two servers Sun Fire X4200 M2 and one Infiniband (IB) switch Sun IB Switch 9P. The servers had installed

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-8427884308405000882008-06-20T00:00:00.006+02:002009-09-02T14:46:48.774+02:00

Wow, the situation around Red Hat's attitude to the virtualization maze seems to be more clear now. I thought that Red Hat is going to support solutions based on XEN hypervisor. In 2007, they released RHEL 5.0 and it was their first distro with integration of XEN hypervisor. And I was looking forward to it.But Red Hat considered the XEN to be immature as well. According to the article published

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-58802046440891264982008-06-16T12:00:00.004+02:002009-05-06T17:18:14.928+02:00

A few weeks ago, I have to prepare another Sun Fire X4600 M2 servers for our customer. The configuration was quite straightforward. Anyway, I had to solve a little pitfall with server ILOM and BIOS update. Let's take a look at it.The servers were preinstalled with ILOM/BIOS from Sun Fire X4600 M2 Software 2.0 (or SW2.0) which was released during May, 2008. This release contains ILOM version

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-2664897137593193892008-06-11T12:07:00.015+02:002009-01-22T21:18:48.581+01:00

An interesting article about XEN hypervisor and support of full virtualization (or HVM) was published in the last Red Hat Magazine release. It summarizes three useful commands how to find if your system supports it (run these commands from dom0):is your Intel CPU utilizing VT-x extension?grep -i vmx /proc/cpuinfois your AMD CPU utilizing Secure Virtual machine (or SVM) extension?grep -i svm /

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-73183518563046791772008-06-09T14:00:00.001+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.549+01:00

It's a pity that VMware ESX server 3.x doesn't support USB bus and so your virtual machines are not able to access the USB devices directly while the VMware Server or VMware Workstation is. However, there are some applications which depend on such devices, for example they require to check a licence file stored in USB token. There are many threads published at VMware communities about it. Let's

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-86497479484688513632008-06-06T15:06:00.002+02:002009-01-22T21:24:30.653+01:00

If you don't have enough spare time to look for and go through some interesting papers about VMware Infrastructure 3.5 check the review published at www.virtualization.info. It's really useful reading containing everything you need to know at first glance. The document also contains this nice summary of available Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 editions:

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-8342020485518338702008-06-04T14:43:00.003+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.550+01:00

So, as we said the snapshot is really useful stuff. But when you take one you need to keep in mind a few rules which should help you to maintain it.At first, it is useful to know the behaviour of our virtual machine. Maybe, it is growing fast one and that means the snapshot will grow fast as well. The question is how fast. Let's think about a virtual machine whose virtual disk is 10GB large. Then

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8178735076034714006.post-884550811488677302008-06-02T13:59:00.003+02:002009-01-23T10:21:10.553+01:00

As everybody knows who is in charge of any Virtual Infrastructure installation VMware ESX server allows to do snapshots of virtual machines. Simply, a snapshot of virtual machine is a saving of its current state which provides a way how to return from a future state to the saved states (the wikipedia is a good source for more information). The snapshot of virtual machine is able to keep its

David Sumskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08319307373855262437noreply@blogger.com0