Having owned a couple of the Iomega IX4-200D’s for nearly a year I have been impressed with the build quality of the units, what I haven’t been overly impressed with was the performance of it, don’t get me wrong the IX4 is a home based storage platform and for that it works wonders but as a SAN\NAS storage device to be used as a datastore for my VMware vSphere environment it can cause me issues if I try powering on multiple VM’s at once (obviously I use Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown rules for the most part) I can have serious performance issues.
When Iomega announced the release of the PX4 and PX6 I was initially pleased with the idea of a 6 drive NAS that was capable of using a mix of SSD and Platter based disks but the more I looked at the PX6 the more I balked at the price when compared to the performance figures I had seen for it. Paying out the £650 (the cheapest I had found the Diskless PX6 out there, including the 20% discounted price that’s available on Simon Seagraves site couldn’t beat that price) started to sound like a bad idea to me.
I then decided to see if I could actually build a unit for myself (as some of you are aware I have tested a number of NAS\SAN software based solutions out there already) so I did some investigating and surprised myself with how little there is in the way of cheap performance hardware available BUT, saying that I have found out it is possible to build yourself a PX6 replacement NAS device a lot cheaper than it would cost to purchase the Iomega unit. ** I will caveat this here, I understand that the newer IX4 and PX4/6 units out there do offer more than just network storage but for my needs I need a device that can handle both iSCSI and NFS as well as SSD and Platter based disks. It also needed to be able to perform better than the IX4 and HP MicroServer I currently own.
Category: Home Labs
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Building an Iomega PX6 Replacement – Part One
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Installing Raxco PerfectDisk 12 – vSphere Bundle Trial
I have been a big fan of the Raxco products for a while now so when I heard that they had a new product about to launch I decided to do a blog post about it.
Raxco launched PerfectDisk12 in June of this year but have already released two Service Packs for the product (one in each subsequent month), I started testing with build 275 but have now upgraded to the latest release (Build 285).
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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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ThinApp’d vSphere Client Error – “The type initializer for ‘xr’ threw an exception”
I have been using the ThinApp’d version of the vSphere client that I created on my desktop PC rather than installing the thick client, it’s obviously smaller and cleaner and until recently hadn’t caused me any issues.
I was installing the Xangati OVF and decided to add the vDS (vNetwork Distributed Switch) to my homelab environment when I got this message.
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Datastore Browser Issue – Unable to browse the contents of any datastore
I recently came across an issue where I had to remove a Template and add it again because I was getting an error if I tried to edit the settings of it when it was converted back to a VM, the only fix I have found for this has been to remove the VM from the inventory and re-add it via the datastore browser.
As I haven’t had to do this much (in fact this was the first time I did have to do this) I haven’t come across the particular issue where when I tried to re-add the VM back in to vCenter I tried browsing to my datastore and discovered it was blank.
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Configuring Openfiler 2.99 and ESXi to use iSCSI Storage
On one of the certification forums I post on I saw that one of the members over there was having some trouble configuring iSCSI on both Openfiler and ESXi, whatever he was doing wasn’t allowing him to allocate the storage to the ESXi server.
In these two videos I will demonstrate how to configure both Openfiler 2.99 and ESXi 4.1 so that you can present the iSCSI volumes as a datastore.
This first video shows how to configure Openfiler, this includes creating your raid array, configuring volume groups and volumes as well as network access.
Configuring iSCSI using Openfiler 2.99 from My-TechVideos.com on Vimeo.
This second video shows you how to configure your ESXi server to use the iSCSI storage volume created in the previous video but these same steps are used to configure any iSCSI storage.
Configuring ESXi to use Openfiler 2.99 iSCSI storage from My-TechVideos.com on Vimeo.
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vCenter Converter error “the esx host managed by VMware vCenter Server is disconnected”
I experienced this error today when trying to use vCenter Converter to P2V my Windows Home Server 2011 server to my vSphere cluster, I was getting concerned because the host I was trying to P2V was definitely powered on and working (it’s the host that has my vCenter server on and I was connected to it via the vSphere client).
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ThinApp – How to virtualise the vSphere Client (4.1u1)
As promised yesterday here is a quick tutorial showing how to ThinApp the vSphere client, so as to reduce the package size as much as possible the work was carried out on a fully patched Windows XP SP3 machine with the J# redist installed as well.
The entire process from start to finish took about 30 minutes so I have edited the video to cut out long and boring installation routines.
A couple of things to note is that I never managed to get my client down to the same size that VMware have but to my defence this is my first attempt at using ThinApp but I did get it down to a respectable 133mb and also that this is my first attempt at video creation, also this video doesn’t contain any sound but future releases will do.
One thing missing from the video is that testing of the client was carried out on a Windows 7 virtual machine, this machine had no additional software installed on it (unlike the XP machine that had the J# redist).
If there are any questions please don’t hesitate to ask.
ThinApp’d vSphere Client 4.1u1 from My-TechVideos.com on Vimeo.
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VMware ThinApp 4.6 Starter Bundle Licensing Issues
About six months back when VMware had a deal going where if you purchased VMware Workstation you also received a license for VMware ThinApp Starter Bundle I decided to take the plunge and made the purchase (it was also at the time when workstation had a $50 discount going on).
Before now I hadn’t really had any reason to install ThinApp but recently I had decided to try my hand at packaging up the vSphere client using ThinApp (like VMware have done with the 4.1 release but my aim was to do it with the 4.1u1 release).
Last night I decided to install ThinApp on a dedicated ThinApp machine (Windows XP SP3) but ran into an issue when it came to actually licensing the application.
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vSphere Remote Management Applications for the iPad and iPhone
As most of you are aware VMware released the vSphere Client for the iPad back in March, the client itself is fairly limited in what it offers but as a freebie offering isn’t too bad. I wanted to see however how it compared to other vSphere apps for the iPad\iPhone.
With that in mind I downloaded or purchased three vSphere Remote Management Applications.
1. VMware vSphere Client for iPad
3. Project Eureka LLC’s iVMControl
