Everything-Virtual

Category: Iomega IX4

  • Condusiv V-locity VM Testing

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    During the recent vForum event at Wembley I had an interesting meeting with Condusiv Technologies (formally Executive Software\ Diskeeper).

    They were showing off the latest release of V-Locity VM.

    V-locity VM is classed as a Performance Accelerator which offers benefits such as :-

  • Increase application performance by 50%
  • Reduce latency by 50% for faster file access
  • Eliminate bottlenecks without expensive hardware
  • True "set and forget" management

    What struck me was the performance potential for VM’s running on potentially limiting storage (it happens, in fact our storage at work is about on par with the performance one of our guys get’s from a Synology Diskstation 1513+ and yes we have fine tuned and tweaked).

    I had a chat with their Technical Director and asked about an NFR or Evaluation license to allow me to do some testing in my home lab to see what kind of performance improvements can be gained from running V-locity VM in my environment.

    It should be noted that the V-locity software is limited to the Microsoft platform of OS’s starting with Windows XP (SP2) all the way up to Windows 2012, it also supports both vSphere (ESX\i 4.0 or later) and HyperV as the host virtualisation platform.

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  • Restoring the IX4 – Firmware and Bootstrap issues

    I was recently sent a request to re-upload my IX4 Acronis image again, this image can be used to image replacement disks to put into an IX4 (as Iomega don’t officially support non Iomega purchased disks). As I no longer had the original TIB file I decided to load up my old 500gb drives (they sit on my shelf gathering dust) and once I was happy that the IX4 didn’t have any fixed IP addresses was going to take an image of the drive and provide it again.

    This is where things started to go wrong, placing the disks into the IX4 they would stick at 95% and wouldn’t go beyond that, in-fact even loading a single drive prompted the same results. It was then that I had an idea, I already figured out that the bootstrap for the IX4 doesn’t actually only reside on the disk (it was the initial assumption when people tried putting blank disks into the IX4), instead the bootstrap is loaded into NVR and then looks at the makeup of the disk and continues to load the disk up if it matches what it expects to see. (more…)

  • Iomega IX4 – Non Cloud to Cloud Upgrades are not a good idea

    Questions have been asked whether this was possible and for a short period of time Iomega even published instructions on their site on how to do it (but quickly pulled them, more on that later).

    The differences between the non – cloud and cloud edition Iomega IX4’s seem pretty non-existent (I actually couldn’t find any difference apart from the version of EMC LifeLine running between the two devices), so in theory it should have been possible to upgrade the older IX4 to the newer version of the OS.

    When Iomega released the new version of the IX4 software to fix the issues with the OSX Time Machine not running correctly if you had updated to Lion I decided to have a look at the feasibility of upgrading to the cloud edition on one of my test devices.

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  • De-bricking the Iomega IX4-200d

    I recently had a couple of comments on some of my IX4-200d posts asking for some assistance with the IX4, this chap (Johan) had experienced a failure of some sort that left his IX4 dead as a dodo (you all know the signs, a red LED of death and a graphic on the front of the unit that brings a lump to your throat.

    In the case of Johan he had either tried upgrading all the drives on his unit at once (formatting them in the process) or had a catastrophic hardware failure that ensured the disks were wiped clean (Johan, please post a comment here for clarification purposes). Anyway, his request was to see if it would be possible to take a copy of my NAS OS partition and sending it over to him. Now I have to admit that I was a bit loath to take out the disks from either of my two 8TB units as I really didn’t want to risk losing the data but as luck would have it I still had the original 500gb drives from when I upgraded my IX4 earlier on in the year so I told Johan that I would see what I could do.

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  • How to upgrade your Iomega IX4-200D Disks

    As some of you may have read previously I had a number of issues when I tried previously to upgrade my 2TB IX4 to make it into a 6TB IX4, whilst the disks were read and configured correctly, no matter what I tried I couldn’t configure any Data Protection on them.

    Over the weekend I had to remove a disk from one of my test systems due to an ongoing SMART issue with the drive, the drive itself is showing up OK with my BIOS but using a USB boot disk running SMART scanning software (Parted Magic) I discovered an issue with the Spin Up Time Attribute that was causing me issues with NexentaStor (it was dropping the drive which is what caused me to do some in depth diags).

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  • Home Lab NAS/SAN Shoot-Out Part 1

    In this new NAS\SAN Shoot-Out series I will be testing available NAS\SAN solutions out there for those of you wanting a free\cheap home based Lab NAS\SAN solution for your vSphere labs.

    I will be providing the testing results of the following software solutions:-

    Iomega IX4-200D

    Openfiler (2.99)

    FreeNAS (7.2 and 8.0RC5)

    NexentaStor (3.0.4)

    OpenIndiana (Build 148 – using napp-it)

    Oracle Solaris 11 Express (using napp-it)

    Open-E DSS (6)

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  • IX4 Remote Access – Don’t use Jumbo Frames

    Hi all, as some of you may know I recently experienced issues with my IX4 whilst using the paid for TZO subscription service for remote access, having diagnosed the fault down to one of two different avenues.

    1, Jumbo Frames

    2, Bonded NICs

    I disabled both and over the last two weeks have re-enabled NIC teaming, I can now advise you that during that period I had one issue with the device losing connectivity (not the old message, something new this time that I am putting down to my changing things on my Netgear switch rather than the IX4), since the reboot (over a week ago now) I haven’t experienced any further issues with the performance or availability of the device.

  • Iomega IX4 v Openfiler Performance Testing

    Running my own home based lab I had struggled to find out which storage solution was going to be the best for me, I had multiple choices with the types of storage I could use (I own the following storage enabled\capable hardware; Buffalo TeraStation Pro 2, Iomega IX4-200d 2TB and HP’s MicroServer running Openfiler 2.3).

    Over the last couple of weeks I have been carrying out various tests to see which device I would be using as my NAS\SAN solution and which device would end up being the location to store my Veeam Backups on.

    All three devices run software raid, although I am about to try and fit an IBM M1015 SAS\SATA Controller in to my HP MicroServer (with the Advanced Key to allow Raid 5 and 50)) so both the Iomega and HP were similar where raid types were concerned. The Terastation is an already operational device that has existing data on it and could only be tested using NFS, it’s never really been in contention where SAN\NAS devices for ESXi was concerned.

    Where I wasn’t sure about was whether I would be better off using RAID’s 0, 5 or 10 (obviously I am aware of the resilience issues with RAID 0 but I do have to consider the performance capacity of it as I do want to run a small VMware View lab here as well), not only was there a decision on the RAID types but also should I go down the iSCSI or NFS route as well.

    Having read a number of informative blog and forum posts I knew that to satisfy my own thirst for knowledge I was going to have to perform my own lab testing.

    Lab Setup

    OS TYPE: Windows XP SP3 VM on ESXi 4.1 using a 40gb thick provisioned disk
    CPU Count \ Ram: 1 vCPU, 512MB ram
    ESXi HOST: Lenovo TS200, 16GB RAM; 1x X3440 @ 2.5ghz  (a single ESXi 4.1 host with a single running Iometer VM was used during testing).

    STORAGE TYPE

    Iomega IX4-200d 2TB NAS, 4x 500gb,  JBOD – iSCSI, JBOD – NFS, RAID 10 – iSCSI, RAID 10 –NFS, RAID 5 – iSCSI and finally RAID5 – NFS ** Software RAID only **

    Buffalo TeraStation Pro 2, 4 x 1500gb, RAID 5 – NFS (this is an existing storage device with existing data on it so I could only test with NFS and the existing RAID set, the device isn’t iSCSI enabled).

    HP MicroServer, 2gb ram, 4 x 1500gb + the original servers 1.6tb disk for the Openfiler OS install, RAID 5 – iSCSI, RAID5 – NFS, RAID 10 – iSCSI, RAID 10 –NFS, RAID 0 – iSCSI and finally RAID 0 – NFS.

    Storage Hardware: Software based iSCSI and NFS.

    Networking: NetGear TS724T 24 x 1 GB Ethernet switch

    Iometer Test Script

    To allow for consistent results throughout the testing, the following test criteria were followed:

    1, One Windows XP SP3 with Iometer was used to monitor performance across the three platforms.

    2, I utilised the Iometer script that can be found via the VMTN Storage Performance thread here, the test script was downloaded from here.

    The Iometer script tests the following:-

    TEST NAME: Max Throughput-100%Read

    size,% of size,% reads,% random,delay,burst,align,reply

    32768,100,100,0,0,1,0,0

    TEST NAME: RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read

    size,% of size,% reads,% random,delay,burst,align,reply

    8192,100,65,60,0,1,0,0

    TEST NAME: Max Throughput-50%Read

    size,% of size,% reads,% random,delay,burst,align,reply

    32768,100,50,0,0,1,0,0

    TEST NAME: Random-8k-70%Read

    size,% of size,% reads,% random,delay,burst,align,reply

    8192,100,70,100,0,1,0,0

    Two runs for each configuration were performed to consolidate results.

    Lab Results

    After a long week or so (not only did I have to test each device twice, I also had to move the VM between devices which also took up time) I have come up with the following results.

    Iomega IX4-200D Results

    Openfiler 2.3 Results

    TeraStation Pro II Results

    Conclusions

    Having looked at the results the overall position is clear, the Iomega IX4-200D is now going to be my Veeam backup destination whilst my HP MicroServer is going to be my centralised storage host for ESXi, I now have to decide whether to go for the R0 or R10 iSCSI approach as they offer the best performance, at this stage I am tempted to go for the Raid 10 approach however because the disks in the server aren’t new. Over the next few months I will see how the reliability of the solution is and take it from there.

    One thing I can add however is that over the next couple of days I will be attempting to fit my M1015 RAID controller in there and seeing how that performs, once fitted I will re do the Openfiler tests and post an update.

  • Iomega IX4 Remote Access – Update

    An update to my previous post.

    Having purchased the subscription for the TZO Remote Access for the NAS device I eventually had to open a support call with TZO because the SSL certificate still wasn’t downloaded to the device.

    The only way that I actually managed to get the device to re-enable Remote Access was to completely wipe the unit, thereby returning it to factory default, that’s ok if it’s a new device and doesn’t contain data but when you have 4tb of data on the unit it starts making life a little difficult (luckily for me the IX4 is my backup unit, it stores replicated data from my old Terastation unit), with a little bit of worry I wiped the unit and started from scratch.

    Having the all clear from TZO that the certificate had now been issued by the supplier I was advised to reboot the NAS unit, I did that and all of a sudden my URL was coming back a being secured (yay). I now just needed to import the data from my Terastation again… 🙁

    Jump forward 3 weeks, in those three weeks I have had countless emails from my NAS telling me that it was having issues with the TZO client not being able to confirm the external IP address for the unit, it as concerning as I had already port forwarded 443 via my router to the NAS box.

    A little further investigation and some minor changes appear to have resolved my issues (I used to get emails 5 or 6 times a day, so far in the last 14 hours I haven’t received any so fingers crossed). The cause? Well to try and speed up my data transfer across my switched network I had enabled jumbo frames as well as bonded the two interfaces together (jumbo frames enabled on the switch and NAS), disabling both appears to have fixed the issues, at the moment I want to leave it for a couple of days before I start trouble shooting to see whether it was the bonded or jumbo frames that did it but my gut is going with jumbo frames.

    So far all is well and good (I can tell you that jumbo frames improved the data sync by about 2 days).

  • Iomega IX4 Remote Access…. or not!!

    The Iomega IX4 is a handy little unit that comes bundled with a whole load of loveliness, well actually it would do if the loveliness actually worked correctly.

    Over the weekend I purchased a subscription from TZO to allow for remote access to my IX4 8TB unit. Included in that purchase was a 1 year SSL subsciption for the domain name My-HomeNas.com, unfortunately said SSL certificate has never downloaded to the NAS. I am now in the position where not only does the NAS throw up errors all the time but I also can’t actually re-enable Remote Access on it.

    Everytime I try to enable Remote Access using the Paid Subscription (Already Own) settings the NAS will just sit there with a processing screen. A support desk entry over at TZO resulted in a reply and the ticket being closed (even tho the email asked me to reply to them when the NAS had been rebooted) and it left me with the task of wiping the NAS again to see if that allowed me to configure Remote Access again.

    I am currently left with a NAS device that’s trying to rebuild the Disk Structure (clearing the config on the unit) but unfortunately that appears as if it’s going to take days to complete.

    Overall I am not that impressed with the Iomega NAS line, so far I had my first unit turn up DOA, the second one wouldn’t let me upgrade the disks (I know, it’s not factory supported anyway) and now the 8tb unit won’t actually let me enable Remote Access successfully. The only time it did work over the weekend (with the certificate error) the device kept stalling when trying to remotely access a 50mb file (whereas using the same net connection on a WHS server allowed the file to be retrieved very quickly (I love my 50\5mb Up\Down speeds :D)).