motogobi

EDIT: as of 3/1/2009, my free license for esXpress expired, and unfortunately – although the GUI interface still lists an available option as “FREE” as far as licensing goes – esXpress will not work in free mode after your trial license expires. They really need to update their GUI to reflect this and not just blame this on “There was an old document on the web site that had incorrect information, that has now been corrected.” Disappointing to say the least. With that said…

I run a decent-sized, fairly simple ESX environment as I’ve mentioned before – so simple, in fact, that the powers that be feel I’m fine admin’ing at all alone.

Something I’d been struggling with for a while was an easy, straightforward way to back up all the VMs that we have in place – and I had originally sought to rely on Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro. However, I’ve been using that product for a few weeks in evaluation and have come away disappointed – when trying to run multiple backups with the product installed on my VirtualCenter server, I ran into too many (seemingly) .NET-related errors to be reliable. Instead, I set up a second Windows machine dedicated to VM backups – a more expensive option, even considering Vizioncore’s relatively low price point.

Well, enter TechTarget’s Best Virtualization Products of 2008 in which they rate PHD Technologies’ esXpress, v3.1 at the top of the bunch – so I tried it out. And boy, color me impressed.

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Click for larger, more confusing view

Virtual Geek has an amazingly insightful post combining multiple presentations and points from representatives from EMC, MVWare, NetApp, Dell/Equalogic, HP/Lefthand, and some other folks in the business. As you can see by the names involved, we’re talking about most every major virtualization storage player in the industry today – and they’re here to help us make heads or tails of iSCSI storage. You’ll even be able to make sense of that diagram above after reading:

As discussed earlier, the ESX 3.x software initiator really only works on a single TCP connection for each target – so all traffic to a single iSCSI Target will use a single logical interface. Without extra design measures, it does limit the amount of IO available to each iSCSI target to roughly 120 – 160 MBs of read and write access.

This design does not limit the total amount of I/O bandwidth available to an ESX host configured with multiple GbE links for iSCSI traffic (or more generally VMKernel traffic) connecting to multiple datastores across multiple iSCSI targets, but does for a single iSCSI target without taking extra steps.

Here are the questions that customers usually ask themselves:

Question 1: How do I configure MPIO (in this case, VMware NMP) and my iSCSI targets and LUNs to get the most optimal use of my network infrastructure? How do I scale that up?

Question 2: If I have a single LUN that needs really high bandwidth – more than 160MBps and I can’t wait for the next major ESX version, how do I do that?

Question 3: Do I use the Software Initiator or the Hardware Initiator?

Question 4: Do I use Link Aggregation and if so, how?

Here are the answers you seek…

I’ve got an Xbox 360, mostly to become a millionaire in Forza Motorsport 2. Well, a little way’s back, the add-on hard drive failed with an E67 error indicating a bad external hard drive. So, there the Xbox sat, unused. What’s the point when you can’t save that Porsche 911 GT3 you just won?

And so I managed to stumble across this article on PCWorld, and in a certain moment of serindipity happened across a Western Digital Scorpio hard drive. Well, I tell you: once I downloaded HDDHackr and booted my machine to DOS off a USB stick, I was all set – 107gig usable hard drive space.

Now to earn all those Porsches, BMWs, Mercs, and Lotuses back…

So I’m interested in this ’cause I run a Mac at home for sanity’s sake. Gizmodo’s reporting about a particularly nasty (possible) result of hoovering that new copy of iWork ’09 that was announced a few weeks ago: OSX.Trojan.iServices.A.

This may be a first for the Mac software world, and it’s not cool at all: ill-gotten copies of iWork ’09 circulating on Torrent sites contain OSX.Trojan.iServices.A, which is something you don’t want.

The Trojan parks itself in your /System/Library/StartupItems folder with read-write-execute root privileges—from there it can phone home to a remote server and install additional nasties throughout your system. Right now, the only true fix is a full format and re-install, since its residual pieces can be spread far and wide. You can spot if your particular warez iWork is infected by searching for the iWorkServices.pkg inside the installer.

You know, Macs being invulnerable and all…

I don’t try to get too political here, but I’ve got to mark the date with a followup to a post made a couple of months ago.

I’m happy, and content, and excited, and proud. Well done, President Obama.

- mike

Notice the Madstad bracket – the first purchase any ‘strom owner needs to make.

As in: for everyone, really. You’ll need a MS Live account (otherwise known as a Hotmail account) to retrieve an install key if you can’t find one anywhere else

**cough** piratebay **cough**

but Microsoft fixed their issues from last week and opened up their most-awaited beta to pretty much all of us. Running it right now, and it’s sa-weet…

Gizmodo has a great getting-started guide for you to check out.

EDIT: Microsoft hasn’t head of things like TORRENT FILES, and so their web servers imploded today. Try again next week?

If you’re like me and you hate Vista, choosing instead to stick with XP until the bitter end, I think you’ll be happy to see the arrival of Windows 7.

After having used Windows 7 for the last week or so, I can tell you it’s going to be a very important milestone for Microsoft. It’s fast, it’s stable – even for a beta! – and it has much lighter hardware requirements than the bloated beast that Vista is.

After (probably) intentionally releasing the beta into the wild via various torrent trackers, Microsoft announced that they would make Windows 7 Beta 1 available for download today – but only to the first 2.5million people.

So here I sit, hitting F5 over and over and over…

Tilt-shift photography is the process by which an ordinary photo is manipulated to look more like photographs of models. And I have no idea how to do it. But using TiltShiftMaker.com,you can simply upload one of your photos to their website, adjust some things like the area of focus and color enhancement, and then download your (voila!) tilt-shifted photo. Cool stuff:

View of Ouray, CO from my birthday trip last year (click for larger version):

Tilt-shifted version (click for larger version):

via BoingBoing.net…

Announced today: Picasa is finally available for the Mac. Not that iPhoto wasn’t sort of slick, and made my first introduction to owning a Mac a really fun learning experience… but it’s just that Picasa is world’s better than iPhoto (or any other more expensive option like Lightroom).

Fully owning the fact that I’m all sorts of choked-up geek about this. One of the main reasons I wanted a laptop was the ability to take my photos with my everywhere – home to see my family, on trpis to upload stuff while on the road, etc. And I’ve always found iPhoto a little counfounding and a little too behind-the-scenes. Not any more with Picasa!

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