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Archive for February, 2008

Kickstarting CentOS 5.1 – Not from a yum repository any more

one comment

In the past, I’ve used our local mirror of the CentOS yum repository to kickstart machines booted using PXE; apparently, this no longer works with CentOS 5.1, although it did with 5.0. If you attempt to do so, after the initial PXE boot, you get the following message:


The CentOS installation tree in that directory does not seem to match your boot media.

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Written by Andy

February 15th, 2008 at 7:47 am

Posted in operating systems

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VMware’s Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance

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VMware has just released a paper entitled Comparison of Storage Protocol Performance (seen at Scale the Mind and blog.scottlowe.org); maybe this will help deflate some of the too-often repeated speculation that NFS is too slow for VMware ESX.
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Written by Andy

February 8th, 2008 at 9:18 pm

Posted in storage, virtualization

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My NetApp FAS2020 Makes Me Want To Cry

5 comments

poptart> version
NetApp Release 7.2.4L1: Wed Nov 21 00:49:33 PST 2007
poptart> aggr add aggr0 11
Aggregate size 8.48 TB exceeds limit 7.00 TB
aggr add: Can not add specified disks to the aggregate because the aggregate size limit for this system type would be exceeded.

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Written by Andy

February 7th, 2008 at 7:29 am

Posted in storage

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Stop, NetApp, You’re Killing Me

14 comments

I’ve recently bumped into a couple painful limits of Data ONTAP. The first is the widely-known 16TB limit on aggregate size – with each day, it’s increasingly stunning to me that they haven’t increased this yet: 16TB is big, but it just isn’t that big any more. Just as painful is the much less discussed limits on A-SIS volume size – for the 2020 we just purchased, it’s 0.5TB, which caught us by surprise. Our reseller – who forgot to mention the A-SIS limit to us before we purchased the filer – claims that this limit will be at least doubled in ONTAP 7.3; 1TB is still lame.
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Written by Andy

February 5th, 2008 at 8:15 am

Posted in storage

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