Somewhere out there!

From Storagemojo:

 

Some significant differences from prior studies:

• Workloads more write oriented. Read/write byte ratios and are now only 2 to 1 compared to the 4-1 or higher ratios reported earlier.
• Workloads less read-centric. Read/write workloads are now 30x more common.
• Most bytes transferred sequentially. These runs are 10x the length found in the old studies.
• Files 10x bigger.
• Files live 10x longer. Less than half are deleted within a day of creation.

Cool new findings

• Files rarely re-opened. Over 66% are re-opened once and 95% fewer than 5 times.
• Over 60% of file re-opens are within a minute of the first open.
• Less than 1% of clients account for 50% of requests.
• Infrequent file sharing. Over 76% of files are opened by just 1 client.
• Concurrent file sharing very rare. As the prior point suggests, only 5% of files are opened by multiple clients and 90% of those are read only.
• Most file types have no common access pattern.

Another interesting finding: 91% of VMWare Virtual Disk (vmdk) files accesses were small sequential reads – not the larger sequential accesses I’d expect.

And there’s this: over 90% of the active storage was untouched during the study. That makes it official: data is getting cooler.

Redhat has acquired Qumranet the developers of KVM. Will be interesting to see how this plays out in the Linux virtualisation world.

I haven’t tried KVM yet as I’ve been too busy and Xen is more mature – but many of the accounts I’ve read seem to indicate that for Linux its performance is very good maybe better in some cases than Xen. Management is another issue, but that is just a matter of time and development enegry.

From lwn.

I’ve been playing around with Chrome from Google for a short while and what I’ve seen so far I like.

Best feature to me so far is the seperate memory spaces for each tab – I actually like this idea. Firefox is a real PITA when it comes to memory. Especially on a laptop with long running firefox processes, and being able to kill a tab and see the memory completely go is good. I’m not sure how exactly Chrome works – but if the application code is cached and only the data specific to each tab is in separate process and memory space then it is probably efficient enough.

It will be interesting when more of the plugins from Firefox get portable or written for Chrome. I’d also like to see a portable version.

Check out the Chrome Book at Google Books – has some useful information.

For now I think I will be using Chrome and Firefox together. Chrome is definitely a very good replacement for Prism which still suffers from Firefox issues. Running Gmail in Chrome with application shortcuts is very easy. And the method is uses to load links from Gmail and GReader in the main window is very cool.

Often when using multiple screens with a laptop then traveling away with just the single laptop screen applications my remember the second screen and disappear when windowed. Often you can “get them back” by maximizing the window.

A better method is to:

There’s a simple trick to get around this. First make sure you’ve alt-tabbed to the window, or clicked on it once to bring it into focus. Then right-click on the taskbar and choose Move

At this point, you should notice that your cursor changes to the “Move” cursor, but you still can’t move anything.

Just hit any one of the arrow keys (Left, Right, Down, Up), move your mouse, and the window should magically “pop” back onto the screen.

Note: For keyboard savvy people, you can just alt-tab to the window, use Alt+Space, then M, then Arrow key, and then move your mouse.

AideRSS and their GoogleReader Firefox extension seem to a good way to increase your productivity when reading feeds with GoogleReader.

Here are a couple useful ESXi hints:

• ESXi 3.5 does ship with the ability to run SSH, but this is disabled by default (and is not supported) – from.
• ESXi and what it does NOT have compared to regular ESX 3.5
• Upgrade ESX eval to ESXi.
• Some Basic ESXi questions.
• 8.04 and ESX.
• Motherboards and unsupported servers that work with ESX 3.5 and / or ESXi 3.5 Installable
• 
  Running ESX 3i Installable from a USB Flash Drive

.

Market is changing constantly – this is a big move on VMwares parts but follows on their previous strategy with GSX/Server and VMware player:
VMware ESXi Hypervisor Now Free – VMware

Check out the download link at the end of the press release.

Occansion in Linux when running a VPN you want to generate traffic from the VPN server node. By default Linux uses the IP of the interface used to route a package. The might often complicated the routing tables required at client networks.

A solution to fix this issue is to use Linux source/policy routing. For example, for node with IP 192.168.10.1 and VPN server IP 172.29.148.1, route to subnet 192.168.9.0/24 out 172.29.148.1 via 172.29.148.2 with src (source) IP 192.168.10.1:


sudo ip route add to 192.168.9.0/24 src 192.168.10.1 via 172.29.148.2


This KB article from Microsoft might be useful with Windows failed to run an Update:

Method 1: Register the Wups2.dll file in Windows
To register the Wups2.dll file in Windows, follow these steps:
1. Stop the Automatic Updates service. To do this, follow these steps:
a. Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
b. At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
net stop wuauserv
2. Register the Wups2.dll file. To do this, follow these steps:
a. At the command prompt, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
regsvr32 %windir%\system32\wups2.dll
Note For a computer that is running Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, type the following command, and then press ENTER:
regsvr32 %windir%\syswow64\wups2.dll
b. Click OK on each verification message that you receive.
3. Start the Automatic Updates service. To do this, type the following command at the command prompt, and then press ENTER:
net start wuauserv
4. Exit the command prompt. To do this type exit, and then press ENTER.

Some links on migrating from Vmware to XenServer. Particularily converting vmdk to xva, and dealing with removing Vmware Tools.

• Thread: Howto for migration from VMWare ESX
• Virtual Disk Migration Utility 1.1
• Converting a Physical Disk to a VMWare Virtual Disk
• Thread: VMware Linux guest to Xen
• VMWare to Xen Migration
• Thread: Migrate VM under VMWare Workstation 6 to XenServer
• Thread: v2xva failure in converting .vmdk files? – phantom disks in vmx can make v2xva fail.
• VMware KB #1308 – Cleaning Up After Incomplete Uninstallation on a Windows Host– removing Vmware Tools can be troublesome. Check this kb article and also note the following location in the registry.
• VMware server memory controller service failed to start

The vmmemctl.sys driver is missing from your system or the registry contains the wrong image path. The \??\ is normal in the path.

If you selected the default path for the VMware Tools, your registry imagepath should look like the example below.

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\VMMEMCTL]