These are my links for February 4th through February 6th:
These are my links for January 9th through January 11th:
Just did an install of the 9.04 desktop. Very clean. Intend to do some testing with kvm, virtual box and win4lin.
Recent issues and 18 months of experience have shown me that shared storage for a small (2-4 node) virtualisation cluster is hard.
It is still practical and possible to build a shared storage cluster using Solaris, rather than buying super experience appliance storage. But you must always spec at least two storage nodes, otherwise you lock yourself into a structure that can be difficult to change. That includes changes that involve upgrades.
Virtualisation technology has moved a long way in the last couple years. And while I’m still formulating a new approach, there are many more options for flexible micro virtualisation clusters.
I’ve started running KVM recently and I’ll post a review at some point. I’m finding it very flexible and much much easier to use that Xen.
There are still a few questions regarding file caches and disk images. In general I’m happy that it’s ready for production.
Image by Trey Piepmeier via Flickr
Useful article on template windows vmware images. One point of great note:
As a result of point (4), your OS disk is now perfectly aligned with the storage layer below it, increasing disk I/O performance. This is actually a server OS problem that applies to all of Microsoft’s pre-Windows Server 2008 server operating sustems, and Windows XP. A simple explanation is that systems like to write data in 64k chunks onto disks with 64k sectors. However, they create their very first chunk at only 63k in size. That means every subsequent chuck writes at least 1k to the previous sector, resulting in every read and write going to two sectors and resulting in two I/Os per operation instead of just one I/O. This is what you’ve just corrected in (4).
How Intel’s New Xeons Help Virtualization – Technology News by ExtremeTech
On Monday, Intel launched its “Dunnington” six-core processor, AKA the “Xeon 7400,” designed to dramatically improve the performance of virtualization applications.
These new 6 core processors will be interesting, increase potential processing density to match the reduced cost of memory dentisty.
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