Everything-Virtual

Category: Openfiler

  • 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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  • Installing Openfiler 2.3 onto a USB Flash Drive

    Having played with a number of different flavours of NAS\SAN software on my HP MicroServer one of the limiting factors I found with Openfiler was the fact you had to install it onto a fixed disk, for the most part this isn’t an issue but when you’re talking about the MicroServer and it’s 4 fixed SATA drives (actually 5 if you want to use the single SATA port designed for a CD\DVD drive) then you can find yourself limited on disk usage if you need to dedicate one of the four drives for the Openfiler OS rather than using it as a RAID member.

    I started looking around at the possibility of installing Openfiler onto a USB drive, something that isn’t openly supported on 2.3 and managed to find enough information out there to put together a USB device that can be used for booting Openfiler.

    There are a few decisions that need to be made at the offset, mainly on the size USB flash drive to be used, using something too small will cause issues later on, using something too large will obviously just waste space.

    For my testing I used a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer Blade which has been a great little device that’s already being used in my vSphere hosts successfully and it fits into the MicroServer very nicely.

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