Monthly Archives: May 2012

New Theme

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I thought it was time to try a new theme as the original one was looking a bit tired but I am not sure if I like it yet (okay I undid it). We are experimenting with this in the office so it was a good time to do it.

An update on my laptop P2V is that I managed to get my virtual copy working, thanks to tips in the following URL: http://communities.vmware.com/message/2030146.

I think the only setting I changed was the ATAPI one, all the others being set as described already but I will check again more carefully.

UKOUG / LOSUG May 2012

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Late, but as promised, a quick blog on Dr. Clive King’s presentation to the OpenSolaris User Group in September.

Another great talk which will particularly stick in my mind for the anecdote about the customer who bought larger and larger systems to solve performance problems and ultimately found out that RAM was being artificially limited by a system setting. Ouch. That came from Clive’s tip #1: don’t copy /etc/system settings!

I noted down 10 tips in total and got links to other good blogs like Gerry Haskin’s blog.

By the time the room got hot and stuffy, we were into the realms of chip performance, large pages and MMU traps so we had covered a large spectrum.

If I do any Solaris performance tuning in the future, this talk will certainly be my starting point.

Briforum London 2012

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This is a first. Typing this blog on the train at Charing Cross at the end of the second day of Briforum London 2012.  Great Briforum BTW. I am setting myself a target of submitting a talk to Techtarget for next year, probably on Numecent’s application Jukebox.

Some great conversations, demos, meetings. I will be absorbing the content for a while. Am conscious that I am overdue writing up the last OUOUG meeting and that I tentatively said I would prepare a cloud talk for a conference soon.

I hope I can get both those tasks off my list soon, and Blog in more detail about BriForum.

VDI IOPs simulation

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One of the things I am working on at the moment is a VDI design based on a smallish branch office architecture. If you are familiar with VDI, you will know that one of the key metrics is the number of IOPs that the back-end storage needs to support. Historically, VDI projects underestimated this figure or the storage was unable to deliver what was required.

What would be useful is an I/O simulator, a disk subsystem on which you could tweak the IOPs performance to see what effect it had on guests. This idea has been looked at very successfully by Jim Moyle with the Atlantis ILIO product and he has written some great papers on the results.

But I wondered if a basic form of simulation could be done using VMware’s storage IO control (SIOC) or one of the storage appliances available from the virtual appliance marketplace (StorMagic and FalconStor are two options on the front page of the VA marketplace).

It would be worth investigating these options which may pay great dividends in a VDI design exercise. The Rolls-Royce solution would be a complete simulation of every layer in the VDI stack, of course. Network, broker, server and storage.

Rescue Me

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Thanks to the Ubuntu boot recovery program I was able to get back my bootable Ubuntu fairly easily. Although I had to cut a CD to do it as my original USB Ubuntu was 32 bit and my installed system 64 bit. The recovery tool would not repair a 64 bit system when running from 32. Booting the recovery CD normally did not work either, but safe mode did.

At least as an added bonus it detected and added a menu item for OpenIndiana although it detected it as Xen.