qstat -u aleonard -s z
Paul Manning, from VMware, in response to a question I asked in the VI:OPS forums:
The current best practice for NFS is to not seperate the VM swap space from the VMhome directory on a NFS datastore. The reason for the originial recommendation was just good old fashioned conservitiveness.
More at the forum post, including more on the reasoning for the old recommendation of separating swap when using NFS – thanks, Paul, you made my day.
Quick notes on configuring LDAP in Fishworks, gleaned from my experience working with the VMware simulator:
As I noted in my “quick walk” post’s comments, I had difficulty getting LDAP working initially on my corporate Active Directory network. The crux for me turned out to be getting the LDAP Schema Definitions correct. Here are the settings that worked correctly for me, authenticating against an AD instance with the schema extended by Microsoft’s Services for Unix add-on (other LDAP schemata will, of course, need different mappings):
USERS
Search descriptor: Don’t leave this blank – according to the Fishworks documentation this “sets the LDAP search descriptor, attribute mappings and object class mappings for users and groups. By default, the search descriptor for users is ou=people,dc=example,dc=com, and for groups is ou=group,dc=example,dc=com” – so what you enter will be site-specific.
Attribute mappings:
Object class mappings:
GROUPS
Search descriptor: Again, don’t leave this blank – enter the appropriate value for your site.
Attribute mappings:
Object class mappings:
How did I know that the schema definition mappings were the problem? The logs gave it away: Maintenance -> Logs -> System, where I saw messages similar to the following: “libsldap: Status: 0 Mesg: Unable to set value: schema map already existed for ‘User’.”
How did I know that I had the schema definitions working? Share settings that I had created using numeric UIDs and GIDs automatically became mapped to the correct user and group names.
I’ll update this post if I find additional configuration that may be necessary.
(In the spirit of Joerg Moellenkamp’s thought experiments:)
That virtualized Fishworks appliance got me thinking: What if you combined this with this? Yeah, managing Elastic Block Store devices would require some changes, but, if you needed a NAS for your EC2 instances…
A picture is worth a thousand words, right?
That was easy...
Below is a quick walkthrough of my experience booting and installing the Fishworks VMware appliance; my thoughts follow.
Read the rest of this entry »
With surprisingly little buzz (outside of sun.com) – must be that darned economy – Sun launched its new Fishworks product line yesterday: Three hardware products, several of them with flash drives, and an impressive looking user interface, which appears at first glace to surpass anything NetApp offers. Here’s a quick rundown of features from Mike Shapiro on blogs.sun.com:
A few comments: Looks like all of the usual ZFS features are there, with a few additions – in particular, I wasn’t aware that the virus scanning project existed, and I didn’t know that NDMP was far enough along to be included in a production release. Additionally, from looking at various Sun blogs, I believe that the remote replication feature is zfs send/recv, not AVS. Finally, from the nomenclature (“2008.11″), I’d guess that the software is based on the forthcoming release of OpenSolaris, not the recently released update to Solaris 10.
Read the rest of this entry »
You know, when this feature isn’t experimental any more:
Now when did VMWare say that I’d be able to automatically Storage VMotion my VMs off those hot, power-sucking Fibre Channel drives to SATA drives so I can power down my first tier storage overnight again?