Everything-Virtual

Category: Home Labs

  • Free utilities for VMware administration

    Having just finished my VMware Install, Configure and Manage (ICM) course I wanted to offer my classmates some advice on free utilities to make their lives easier when it came to managing their vSphere environments.

    As the class are aware of my blog I have decided to also mention them here so that they can get the links to download them for themselves as well as offering links to other people who are interested.

    There are a number of decent free utilities out there that people aren’t aware of unless they actually go out and look for them, some of the utilities I use and recommend to others are the following, this list is by no means complete and will be updated over time.

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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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  • FreeNAS 8 isn’t ready or reliable

    Unfortunately whilst I really wanted to like FreeNAS 8 I can’t, because it’s so flaky. What you ask??

    I installed FreeNAS 8 yesterday morning and carried out some performance testing yesterday, it wasn’t particularly strenuous testing, infact it’s the same testing that I have been doing to all of the other storage solutions so far.

    The testing I did yesterday was the same test carried out for and by Vladan.

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  • Renaming a datastore fails with “The name ‘datastore_name’ already exists”

    In my recent experiments with various NAS\SAN solutions I suddenly came up across an issue where my usual name for my iSCSI datastore all of a sudden failed when trying to add it into my ESXi environment.

    Having decided to do some more SAN\NAS testing using several different solutions I had made the decision to power down all of my VM’s so that I was only using the single IOmeter VM, at the same time I had also decided to power down 2 of my ESXi servers so that I was using similar resources across all tested platforms. With the ESXi servers powered down I then had to move all of the VM’s to different storage, using Veeams’ FastSCP I copied the VM’s across from my existing Openfiler environment to my main IX4 rather than my ESXi dedicated one.

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  • Active Directory Web Services Event Log Errors – vCenter Server (4.1u1)

    I am going through a project at home to centralise my ESXi and Windows Event Logs using Splunk and Snare and part of that process was going through my Event logs to try and fix any niggling issues.

    Going through my vCenter event logs I discovered some errors in the ADWS logs that I did a Google for and came across a post from Gregg Robertson over on his site that resolved the issue.

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  • Additional testing for Vladan – Update #2

    Having seen Vladans Openfiler results yesterday I told him that I would re-run my tests using the same Iometer script that he used, just to make sure that the results he saw weren’t down to his hardware.

    Unfortunately his results were good (or rather.. bad)

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  • Home Lab NAS/SAN Shoot-Out Part 2

    In the second part of my series of testing home lab NAS/SAN solutions I tested Open-E’s DSS v6.

    I had been planning on testing the current release candidate of FreeNAS, RC5, unfortunately during initial testing this proved to be a little unreliable in it’s current state as you can’t mount iSCSI targets, even from the command line, NFS shares however do work ok. Until FreeNAS release a version that I am comfortable working with I am stopping testing with FreeNAS at this time.

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  • Openfiler 2.99 RAID 1 Creation Fix

    With the recent release of Openfiler 2.99 there has been an on-going issue with an inability to create certain software RAID arrays. This is present in the beta and final release of the software and was getting frustrating, however there is a fix.

    If you are going to be installing Openfiler 2.99 and discover that you’re not able to create software RAID 1 arrays then the following will resolve that for you.

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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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  • Veeam FastSCP Windows 64bit Fix

    Having installed Veeam FastSCP onto my Windows 7 (64) Ultimate workstation I was getting frustrated with the error messages I was getting "Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID [5F1555F0-0DBB-47F6-B10B-0AB0E1C1D8CE} failed due to the following error: 800700c1", a quick google search found the answer for me.

    Looking into the fix I found here I realised that it’s a tad long winded and bloated (no disrespect intended, as it is the fix). So I thought to myself, did I actually need all of that for the fix to work. The answer is no.

    Having looked at what was required (running "corflags "C:\Program Files (x86)\Veeam\Veeam Backup and FastSCP\VeeamShell.exe"  /32BIT+" to resolve the issue with FastSCP not working on any 64bit Windows OS resulted in the above error message when trying to copy files between Datastores) I decided to see what happens if I just took the corflags.exe file and ran that instead of having the entire SDK installed, the results were that the program now works.

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