When one wants to achieve fast provisioning of virtual machines, some solutions might come into account. The one I prefer uses Linux LVM snapshot capabilities to duplicate one working machine into few.
This can happen, of course, only if the host running VMware-Server is Linux.
LVM snapshots have one vast disadvantage
I was playing a bit with iSCSI initiator (client) and decided to see how complicated it is to setup a shared storage (for my purposes) through iSCSI. This proves to be quite easy… On the server: 1. Download iSCSI Enterprise Target from here, or you can install scsi-target-utils from Centos5 repository 2. Compile (if required)…
I had one of my computers die a short while ago. I wanted to get the data inside its disk into another computer. Using the magical and rather cheap USB2SATA I was able to connect the disk, however, the disk was part of a software mirror (md device) and had LVM on it. Gets a…
Modern Linux LVM offers great abilities to maintain snapshots of existing logical volumes. Unlike NetApp “Write Anywhere File Layout” (WAFL), Linux LVM uses “Copy-on-Write” (COW) to allow snapshots. The process, in general, can be described in this pdf document. I have issues several small tests, just to get real-life estimations of what is the actual…
I’ve had a belief for quite a while now that Linux, unlike other types of systems, was unable to produce any I/O SNMP information. I only recently found out that it was partially true – all production-level distros, such as RedHat (and Centos, for that matter) were unable to produce any output for any SNMP…
HP MSA1000 is an entry-level disk storage capable of communicating via different types of interfaces, such as SCSI and FC, and can allow FC failover. This FC failover, however, is controller failover and not path failover. It means that if the primary controller fails entirely, the backup controller will “kick in”. However, if a multi-path…
