The Internet Home of Kevin L. Collins
Posts tagged vmware
Changes to the Laptop
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Image via CrunchBase
So I started to layout the changes required for the new NEI Intranet this morning. A couple of things came to mind and were quickly shot down.
During this planning and organizing session one thing came to the top: The new site would need to be compatible with both Internet Explorer 8+ and Safari (because of the widespread use of iPhones and iPads at the office).
This brought me the realization that my laptop, which is currently running Ubuntu Linux, really couldn’t be used to test the new code because I can’t use IE or Safari on Linux.
So, very shortly now, I’m going to back up my work to date and load Windows 7 on my laptop. That way I can load both IE and Safari along with my favorite Windows editor (notepad++) and use Putty to access the code on the development server. (I’m toying with the idea of using WAMP on the laptop instead, but that’ll come later.)
I know, I could use VMware or VirtualBox. But this machine barely has enough resources to run Ubuntu or Windows 7 alone. I think having even a small virtual machine for just testing would be enough to break its back.
Looking for a suitable shared storage unit – Openfiler
1For a couple of days, I’ve been trying to find a way to implement a shared storage unit for use with vmWare ESXi servers. I’ve been mostly looking at a free but pay for support product called “Openfiler“. From the list of features on Openfiler’s web site, it appears to be just exactly what I need. To be honest it does work as advertised and provides several ways for me to implement what I need.
But, there’s a problem. The problem may simply be caused by the way that I’ve done things to this point, but it’s something that may prevent me from deploying this setup in production. It’s performance.
Let me explain a bit. To date, I’ve always purchased servers with enough internal storage to fulfill their roles. This internal storage has been SCSI, SAS or SATA, but it’s always be directly attached to the server and has been very fast.
All of my tests, which have been non-scientific, have shown that moving data to and from the Openfiler box will take at least twice a long as the internal storage. What’s worse is that my tests don’t include the heavy load of multiple virtual machines running on the shared storage. My tests were done with a single virtual machine attached to the Openfiler box. Nor do my tests show the impact of taking volume snapshots that I would depend on for backup purposes.
Anyway, I’ve created a video of one of the simple tests that I performed this morning:
If anyone sees a problem (especially one that can eliminate the speed issue) with this setup, please provide feedback in your comments.