Comments for TekiNerd™

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by NotYetRated

NotYetRated — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 18:04:31 +0000

I am very sorry to revive an old topic, but I have a couple of questions if someone wouldn’t mind answering…

I currently run a Hp Mediasmart 470 WHS. I use it to back up my main pc, laptop, and brothers pc and laptop, as well ass for media storage.

On my main PC(running windows 7), I run a minecraft server in a virtual box(a linux distro). My WHS box is severely underpowered, so I am looking to upgrade. In the upgrade, it would be nice to merge my WHS with my minecraft server. I am interested in esxi, and having a separate virtualization for each, but am concerned about how the backup works for WHS.

Won’t my WHS hard drives be inside esxi, with its special formatting? If I end up losing a drive in the system, I understand that I can replace it and WHS can do its thing, but what about the data stored outside the WHS partition? So if I had say, my Minecraft data stored on 100 gigs of the disk, and 900 gigs in a WHS partition… How can I back up that 100 gigs of Minecraft data?

Comment on SSD Caching versus Tiering by High-performance laptops, especially in the hard drive - Page 2

High-performance laptops, especially in the hard drive - Page 2 — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 14:28:37 +0000

[...] using Intel SSD. I am sure you can find information for other manufactures. Another good article: SSD Caching versus Tiering understand caching techniques. [...]

Comment on SSD Caching versus Tiering by Andrew McCluskey

Andrew McCluskey — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 19:36:11 +0000

Thanks very much for this article. It was very useful to my research on whether I should get a caching ssd or a tiering ssd (I have a limited budget). The diagram also helped a lot!
Thanks,

Andrew

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by tinkererguy

tinkererguy — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 06:18:22 +0000

Matt, some video cards may work with vmdirectpath (passthrough), so it may be possible to achieve what you’re trying to do.

I tested MSI and ASRock Z68 motherboards with the Intel Core i7 2600 (not the 2600k), and they work with passthrough (I’m using it for USB 3.0 passthrough to format the 5TB external RAID as one big NTFS lump, getting around 2TB virtual drive size limits of ESXi 5.0).

Comment on Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) by tekinerd

tekinerd — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 02:37:43 +0000

In theory yes, though I’ve only played with dual Linux implementations. Each half looks just like an X86 server motherboard, each having access to the disks in the front section if SAS enabled. Now we have 10G LAN/iSCSI/FCoE controllers as the primary host side connection, dual blade servers in SBB certainly seem to make your 2008 cluster far more feasible.

The limitations are that you have to live with whatever RAID or SAS I/O controller they’ve integrated as you usually have no PCIe slots to play with. I’ve seen LSI’s 6G SAS IOC on some boards as well as PMC’s RAID controller in recent designs which are fine for JBOD server implementations.

Comment on Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) by Dan

Dan — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:34:32 +0000

Will a SBB chassis like Supermicro offers work in a Windows 2008 cluster for HA storage ?

This would be a game changer for me and reduce costs. If I could offer one box that is HA and only requires Windows that would be ideal.

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by Amareh swain

Amareh swain — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 16:27:06 +0000

Very nice writeup. very clear step by step guide. it really helped. Thanks a lot.

Comment on SSD Caching versus Tiering by SSD Tiering versus Caching: Part 2 | TekiNerd™

SSD Tiering versus Caching: Part 2 | TekiNerd™ — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 18:04:55 +0000

[...] that emerged from the show I’m glad to say matched what we described in our earlier blog (SSD Caching versus Tiering): caching makes a copy of frequently accessed data from a hard drive and places it in the SSD for [...]

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by tekinerd

tekinerd — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 04:27:07 +0000

Matt, if I’ve understood your question correctly, then 8G should be enough but you may have issues with running any specialist video peripherals under VMware ESXi unless they come with specific VMware drivers. I haven’t researched this, but I’m not sure if tv tuners are even supported in ESXi… so definitely do your homework before pushing forward with a virtualization project involving multimedia especially.

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by tekinerd

tekinerd — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 04:07:18 +0000

Yes you can move your OS to new hardware. I’ve been using the free VMware convertor utility for this which allows you to copy your virtual OS to another virtual server or workstation environment so long as it’s another VMware system. I’ll try to post something on this soon and my experiences.

VMware uses it’s own file system, so once you create a Windows OS as a virtual machine on top of ESXi, it’s no longer compatible as it uses VMFS vs NTFS. You’d have to run the conversion utility to transfer data or simply copy over the network to a standard NTFS drive.

I may be wrong here but an alternative if you want to retain NTFS compatibility may be to use Microsoft’s standalone HyperV hypervisor. Haven’t played with this too much yet so not sure how transferable this would be.