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• Benchmarking a file server

  - by Joel Coel

  I'm working on building a new file server... a simple Windows Server box with a few terabytes of disk space to share on the LAN. Pain for current hard drive prices aside :( -- I would like to get some benchmarks for this device under load compared to our old server. The old server was installed in 2005 and had 5 136GB 10K disks in RAID 5. The new server has 8 1TB disks in two RAID 10 volumes (plus a hot spare for each volume), but they're only 7.2K rpm, and of course with a much larger cache size. I'd like to get an idea of the performance expectations of the new server relative to the old. Where do I get started? I'd like to know both raw potential under different kinds of load for each server, as well an idea of what our real-world load looks like and how it will translate. Will disk load even matter, or will performance be more driven by the network connection? I could probably fumble through some disk i/o and wait counters in performance monitor, but I don't really know what to look for, which counters to watch, or for how long and when. FWIW, I'm expecting a nice improvement because of the benefits of having two different volumes and the better RAID 10 performance vs RAID 5, in spite of using slower disks... but I'd like to get an idea of how much.

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• gpfs: adding a new nsd server to a cluster

  - by alessandra

  I have a gpfs cluster composed by 10 linux nodes, managed by a primary server A, which also act as nsd server for a first stack of disks. I attached a new jbod to one of the nodes (call it node B), which I would like to become a nsd server for this new stack of disks, but still be included in the cluster so that the disks are available to all the nodes. Node B is connected to the cluster via ethernet. How can I make the new nsd seen by all the nodes of the cluster? I can create the new nsd but when trying to create the filesystem on node B it the command mmcrfs times out. It looks like the nodes of the cluster cannot understand the filesystem location even if I specify them attached to server B in the description file. Would it be better to remove node B from the cluster, create a cluster on its own with its attached filesystem and connect it remotely with the previous cluster? Or a clustered NFS solution would apply better? Can you please give me any suggestion?

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• Dell Poweredge 1950 with Perc 5i keeps losing raid config -> "Foreign Configuration Found"

  - by nosage

  The quick and dirty: the machine is a Dell Poweredge 1950, dual xeon quad cores, 8GB of ram, 2 2TB seagate SATAs in (supposed to be raid1) using a Perc 5i raid card. They are hot-swappable with a back-plane. I can build the raid fine and after a little while an install of server 08 r2 will blue screen and restart. When it comes up the raid controller says "Foreign Configuration Found." When I go into the raid configuration panel there is no raid listed but I can import the "foreign config", and the OS will boot up fine, until it blue screens again after a little while. The issue is OS independent. I have tried swapping raid cards, swapping the RAM module on the raid card and swapping the raid battery, all to no avail. Its almost as if there is a loose connection from the raid card to the back plane and both of disks get lost and the raid card drops the config. But it sees the disks fine when it boots back up. The raid card uses a SCSI SAS cable to connect to the back-plane so I guess the next step is to replace that, but... then I might as well replace the back-plane with a SCSI SAS to sata breakout cable, but... then I need a way to power the disks. Sorry for the wall of txt but it would be great to get some thoughts from people who worked with perc raid cards or poweredge servers with this type of issue before. Ironically I want to get this system up and running so I can work on MCITP labs. Thank you for any/all help and feel free to ask questions!

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• mac terminal run a file of commands

  - by Ilan Tal

  I am coming from Linux and trying to get a Mac to do what I want it to do. The question is what is the best tool to use. I want to mount (unmount) several remote disks. If I go into a terminal I can do the trick by mount -t smbfs //username:pass@addr /Users/me/RemoteDisks/mnt1 Since I want to mount several disks I would like to put all of the information into a file, store it in Documents/subfolder and make a link to it on the desktop (or somewhere better, if there is a better place). At the moment I have manually run the appropriate command in the terminal and the remote disk is mounted and I see its contents. What I need is a one click method to run a file to mount all the disks. I tried Apple script but that didn't like my commands. I don't know exactly what it is expecting to see and perhaps Apple script is the wrong tool. I have no problems in Linux, but the Mac is new to me and I don't know what I should be using. Thanks, Ilan

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• Resize a RAID 1 volume on OSX Snow Leopard - how? (Note: software raid)

  - by Emmel

  I've scoured the Internet in search of an answer to this question, and as usual with OSX-related topics, I often don't find any deep-dive technical explanations sufficient enough to feel confident doing dangerous things. Here is my question: I have a Mac Pro, running OSX 10.6.2. I have, as my main root/boot disk, a RAID 1 volume called "Mirror1". Mirror1 is comprised of two 1 TB disks. Mirror1, however, is fixed at 640 GB. That's because, I originally took a 640GB disk, bought a terabyte disk, mirrored it (using diskutil appleraid enable...), when it synced I removed the 640GB and replaced it with a second 1 TB disk, and synced again. Voila! A single 640 GB replaced by two 1 TB disks in a mirror.. Actually, no. There's still something missing from the equation: Mirror1 needs to be expanded from 640GB to 1 TB to match the partition sizes on each of those disks. How do I do this? Perhaps the diskutil output will help: -> diskutil list /dev/disk0 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_RAID 999.9 GB disk0s2 3: Apple_Boot Boot OSX 134.2 MB disk0s3 /dev/disk1 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk1 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1 2: Apple_RAID 999.9 GB disk1s2 3: Apple_Boot Boot OSX 134.2 MB disk1s3 /dev/disk2 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *640.1 GB disk2 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1 2: Apple_HFS Mac Disk 2 536.7 GB disk2s2 3: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 103.1 GB disk2s3 /dev/disk3 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: Apple_HFS Mirror1 *639.8 GB disk3 -> diskutil appleraid list AppleRAID sets (1 found) =============================================================================== Name: Macintosh HD Unique ID: 1953F864-B474-4EB6-8E69-41834EBD0247 Type: Mirror Status: Online Size: 639.8 GB (639791038464 Bytes) Rebuild: manual Device Node: disk3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Device Node UUID Status ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0 disk1s2 25109BAE-5697-40EA-B612-0217851444F7 Online 1 disk0s2 11B83AB0-8148-4DB6-8761-DEF08C855F8D Online =============================================================================== Thanks in advance.

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• Creating RAID1 on Windows Server causes not enough disk space error

  - by northpole

  I have three disks. Disk0 (boot), Disk1 and Disk2. Disk 1 and 2 are both unformatted and unallocated drives. I am trying to mirror Disk0 to Disk1. They are both Dynamic and are both the same size (1TB). When I select Disk1 to be the mirror I get the error "There is not enough space available on the disk(s) to complete this operation". I have spent several hours searching for a solution but have not found one. Why do I get this error when they are both the same size? EDIT: Shrinking the volume size on the boot disk by 100MB allowed me to get past this error. From what I read the mirror drive needs to be the same size or larger than the boot drive. So I am confused why that change worked. However, I now get the error " all disks holding extents for a given volume must have the same sector size and the sector size must be valid". I believe this is because the drives are different and one has 512B and the other is the Advanced Drive that is 4KB. What the different sector sizes cause both problems? If I got the same disks would both issues go away?

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• How harmful is a hard disk spin cycle?

  - by Gilles

  It is conventional wisdom¹ that each time you spin a hard disk down and back up, you shave some time off its life expectancy. The topic has been discussed before: Is turning off hard disks harmful? What's the effect of standby (spindown) mode on modern hard drives? Common explanations for why spindowns and spinups are harmful are that they induce more stress on the mechanical parts than ordinary running, and that they cause heat variations that are harmful to the device mechanics. Is there any data showing quantitatively how bad a spin cycle is? That is, how much life expectancy does a spin cycle cost? Or, more practically, if I know that I'm not going to need a disk for X seconds, how large should X be to warrant spinning down? ¹ But conventional wisdom has been wrong before; for example, it is commonly held that hard disks should be kept as cool as possible, but the one published study on the topic shows that cooler drives actually fail more. This study is no help here since all the disks surveyed were powered on 24/7.

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• How to configure VirtualBox server for performance at home

  - by BluJai

  I currently have two physical Ubuntu Server 10.10 servers at home: one serves as our firewall/router/DHCP/VPN server and the other performs double-duty as a file server and a VirtualBox host for an Ubuntu Desktop 10.10 machine which I use from remote connections (via NoMachine) for many thin-client purposes which are irrelevant to my question. What I'd like to accomplish is to consolidate the two physical machines into one which is a dedicated VirtualBox host (most likely running Ubuntu Server 10.10). Note that I'd like to stick with VirtualBox (if possible) because I'm most comfortable with it and use it on a daily basis at both home and work. Specifically, I plan to have one VM set up as file server, another as the firewall/router/DHCP/VPN (or possibly split those a bit) and a third, which is the only current VM (already VirtualBox), which is the thin-client host. My question comes down to performance and/or recommendations about the file server VM. The file server hosts about 6 terabytes of data across 4 drives. What I'd like to do is use raw disk access from the VM directly to the existing disks. However, I'm curious what performance advantage/disadvantage that would have as compared to using shared folders from the VM host and basically just have the whole drive served as a shared folder to the VM which would then serve it to the other machines on the network. I don't know if virtual disks would even work in this scenario and I certainly wouldn't want a drive to be filled with just a single file which is 1.5 TB (disk image). To add understanding of context, but not to get additional advice, I want to virtualize these machines because I intend to regularly use the snapshot capabilities of VirtualBox for the system disks (which will be virtual drives) of the VMs and I have some physical space/power needs to address (as I mentioned, this is at home).

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• How to configure VirtualBox server for performance at home

  - by BluJai

  I currently have two physical Ubuntu Server 10.10 servers at home: one serves as our firewall/router/DHCP/VPN server and the other performs double-duty as a file server and a VirtualBox host for an Ubuntu Desktop 10.10 machine which I use from remote connections (via NoMachine) for many thin-client purposes which are irrelevant to my question. What I'd like to accomplish is to consolidate the two physical machines into one which is a dedicated VirtualBox host (most likely running Ubuntu Server 10.10). Note that I'd like to stick with VirtualBox (if possible) because I'm most comfortable with it and use it on a daily basis at both home and work. Specifically, I plan to have one VM set up as file server, another as the firewall/router/DHCP/VPN (or possibly split those a bit) and a third, which is the only current VM (already VirtualBox), which is the thin-client host. My question comes down to performance and/or recommendations about the file server VM. The file server hosts about 6 terabytes of data across 4 drives. What I'd like to do is use raw disk access from the VM directly to the existing disks. However, I'm curious what performance advantage/disadvantage that would have as compared to using shared folders from the VM host and basically just have the whole drive served as a shared folder to the VM which would then serve it to the other machines on the network. I don't know if virtual disks would even work in this scenario and I certainly wouldn't want a drive to be filled with just a single file which is 1.5 TB (disk image). To add understanding of context, but not to get additional advice, I want to virtualize these machines because I intend to regularly use the snapshot capabilities of VirtualBox for the system disks (which will be virtual drives) of the VMs and I have some physical space/power needs to address (as I mentioned, this is at home).

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• How harmful is a hard disk spin cycle?

  - by Gilles

  It is conventional wisdom¹ that each time you spin a hard disk down and back up, you shave some time off its life expectancy. The topic has been discussed before: Is turning off hard disks harmful? What's the effect of standby (spindown) mode on modern hard drives? Common explanations for why spindowns and spinups are harmful are that they induce more stress on the mechanical parts than ordinary running, and that they cause heat variations that are harmful to the device mechanics. Is there any data showing quantitatively how bad a spin cycle is? That is, how much life expectancy does a spin cycle cost? Or, more practically, if I know that I'm not going to need a disk for X seconds, how large should X be to warrant spinning down? ¹ But conventional wisdom has been wrong before; for example, it is commonly held that hard disks should be kept as cool as possible, but the one published study on the topic shows that cooler drives actually fail more. This study is no help here since all the disks surveyed were powered on 24/7.

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• Ubuntu Server mdadm drbd ocfs2 kvm hangs under heavy file reading

  - by Stefano Annese

  I have deployed four ubuntu 10.04 server. They are coupled two by two in a cluster scenario. on both sides we have software raid1 disks, drbd8 and OCFS2 and on top of it some kvm machines run with qcow2 disks. I followed this: Link corosync is just used for DRBD and OCFS, the kvm machines are run "manually" When it works is fine: good performances, good I/O, but at a given time one of the two cluster started hanging. Then we tried with just one server turned on and it hangs the same. It seems to happen when an heavy READ in one of the virtual machines occurs, that is during rsyn backup. When the fact occurs the virtual machines are not reachable any more and the real server responds with good delay to the ping but no screen and no ssh is available. All we can do is force shutdown (hold the button) and restart and when it turns on again the raid on which relay drbd is resyncing. All the time it hangs we see such fact. After a couple of week of pain on one side this morning also the other cluster hung, but it has different moteherboard, ram, kvm instances. What is similar is reading for rsync scenario and Western Digital RAID Edistion disks on both side. Can anybody give me some input to solve such issue?

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• install Win7 SP1 with bcdedit failing

  - by Albert

  I'm getting the error 0x800F0A12 which is described here. bcdedit says: C:\>bcdedit.exe Der Speicher für die Startkonfigurationsdaten konnte nicht geöffnet werden. Das System kann die angegebene Datei nicht finden. (English: Couldn't open the start configuration. Couldn't find the file.) (off topic: how can I get those messages in English?) I played around and I assume that is because the system partition C:\ is not on the first BIOS disk. There are 4 disks in my PC. On one of them (shown as the 4th in Windows drive manager) contains Windows, whereby the system-reserved NTFS partition is the first primary and the second primary is my main Windows system partition. A few more partitions follow with other (non-NTFS) stuff. I was able to set the first two disks offline (via the Windows drive manager). For the 3rd disk, it says that it cannot set the BIOS 0 disk offline. How can I ignore that and still install SP1? I don't want to rewire/resetup my disks.

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• Formula to calculate probability of unrecoverable read error during RAID rebuild

  - by OlafM

  I need to compare the reliability of different RAID systems with either consumer or enterprise drives. The formula to have the probability of success of a rebuild, ignoring mechanical problems, is simple: error_probability = 1 - (1-per_bit_error_rate)^bit_read and with 3 TB drives I get 38% probability to experience an URE (unrecoverable read error) for a 2+1 disks RAID5 (4.7% for enterprise drives) 21% for a RAID1 (2.4% for enterprise drives) 51% probability of error during recovery for the 3+1 RAID5 often used by users of SOHO products like Synologys. Most people don't know about this. Calculating the error for single disk tolerance is easy, my question concerns systems tolerant to multiple disks failures (RAID6/Z2, RAIDZ3 and RAID1 with multiple disks). If only the first disk is used for rebuild and the second one is read again from the beginning in case or an URE, then the error probability is the one calculated above squared (14.5% for consumer RAID5 2+1, 4.5% for consumer RAID1 1+2). However, I suppose (at least in ZFS that has full checksums!) that the second parity/available disk is read only where needed, meaning that only few sectors are needed: how many UREs can possibly happen in the first disk? not many, otherwise the error probability for single-disk tolerance systems would skyrocket even more than I calculated. If I'm correct, a second parity disk would practically lower the risk to extremely low values. Am I correct?

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• Is current SATA 6 gb/s equipment simply unreliable?

  - by korkman

  I have a 45-disk array of Seagate Barracuda 3 TB ST3000DM001 (yes these are desktop drives I'm aware of that) in a Supermicro sc847 JBOD, connected via LSI 9285. I have found a solution for the problem description below by reducing speed via MegaCli -PhySetLinkSpeed -phy0 2 -a0; for i in $(seq 48); do MegaCli -PhySetLinkSpeed -phy${i} 2 -a0; done and rebooting. The question remains: Is this typical for current 6 gb/s equipment? Is this the sad state of SATA storage? Or is some of my equipment (the sff-8088 cables come to mind) bad? The Problem was: Synchronizing HW RAID-6, disks kept offlining. Fetching SMART values reveiled that those which offlined did not increase powered-on hours anymore. That is, their firmware (CC4C) seems to crash. Digging into the matter by switching to Software RAID-6, with the disks passed-through, I got tons of kernel messages scattered across all disks, with 6 gb/s: sd 0:0:9:0: [sdb] Sense Key : No Sense [current] Info fld=0x0 sd 0:0:9:0: [sdb] Add. Sense: No additional sense information And finally, when a disk offlines: megasas: [ 5]waiting for 160 commands to complete ... megasas: [35]waiting for 159 commands to complete ... megasas: [155]waiting for 156 commands to complete ... megaraid_sas: pending commands remain after waiting, will reset adapter. Ugly controller reset here, then minutes later: megaraid_sas: Reset successful. sd 0:0:28:0: Device offlined - not ready after error recovery ... sd 0:0:28:0: [sdu] Unhandled error code sd 0:0:28:0: [sdu] Result: hostbyte=DID_ERROR driverbyte=DRIVER_OK sd 0:0:28:0: [sdu] CDB: Read(10): 28 00 23 21 2f 40 00 00 70 00 sd 0:0:28:0: [sdu] killing request Reduced speed to 3 gb/s like written above, all problems vanished.

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• RAID administration in Debian Lenny

  - by Siim K

  I've got an old box that I don't want to scrap yet because it's got a nice working 5-disk RAID assembly. I want to create 2 arrays: RAID 1 with 2 disks and RAID 5 with the other 3 disks. The RAID card is Intel SRCU31L. I can create the RAID 1 volume in the console that you access with Ctrl+C at startup. But it only allows for creation of one volume so I can't do anything with the 3 remaining disks. I installed Debian Lenny on the RAID 1 volume and it worked out nicely. What utilites could I now use to create/manage the RAID volumes in Debian Linux? I installed the raidutils package but get an error when trying to fetch a list: #raidutil -L controller or #raidutil -L physical # raidutil -L controller osdOpenEngine : 11/08/110-18:16:08 Fatal error, no active controller device files found. Engine connect failed: Open What could I try to get this thing working? Can you suggest any other tools? Command #lspci -vv gives me this about the controller: 00:06.1 I2O: Intel Corporation Integrated RAID (rev 02) (prog-if 01) Subsystem: Intel Corporation Device 0001 Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV+ VGASnoop- ParErr- Step ping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx- Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort - <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx- Latency: 64, Cache Line Size: 32 bytes Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 26 Region 0: Memory at f9800000 (32-bit, prefetchable) [size=8M] [virtual] Expansion ROM at 30020000 [disabled] [size=64K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: PCI_I2O Kernel modules: i2o_core

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• Resize a RAID 1 volume on OS X Snow Leopard - how? (Note: software raid)

  - by Emmel

  I've scoured the Internet in search of an answer to this question, and as usual with OSX-related topics, I often don't find any deep-dive technical explanations sufficient enough to feel confident doing dangerous things. Here is my question: I have a Mac Pro, running OS X 10.6.2. I have, as my main root/boot disk, a RAID 1 volume called "Mirror1". Mirror1 is comprised of two 1 TB disks. Mirror1, however, is fixed at 640 GB. That's because, I originally took a 640GB disk, bought a terabyte disk, mirrored it (using diskutil appleraid enable), when it synced I removed the 640GB and replaced it with a second 1 TB disk, and synced again. Voila! A single 640 GB replaced by two 1 TB disks in a mirror.. Actually, no. There's still something missing from the equation: Mirror1 needs to be expanded from 640GB to 1 TB to match the partition sizes on each of those disks. How do I do this? Perhaps the diskutil output will help: -> diskutil list /dev/disk0 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_RAID 999.9 GB disk0s2 3: Apple_Boot Boot OSX 134.2 MB disk0s3 /dev/disk1 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk1 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1 2: Apple_RAID 999.9 GB disk1s2 3: Apple_Boot Boot OSX 134.2 MB disk1s3 /dev/disk2 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *640.1 GB disk2 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1 2: Apple_HFS Mac Disk 2 536.7 GB disk2s2 3: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 103.1 GB disk2s3 /dev/disk3 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: Apple_HFS Mirror1 *639.8 GB disk3 -> diskutil appleraid list AppleRAID sets (1 found) =============================================================================== Name: Macintosh HD Unique ID: 1953F864-B474-4EB6-8E69-41834EBD0247 Type: Mirror Status: Online Size: 639.8 GB (639791038464 Bytes) Rebuild: manual Device Node: disk3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Device Node UUID Status ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0 disk1s2 25109BAE-5697-40EA-B612-0217851444F7 Online 1 disk0s2 11B83AB0-8148-4DB6-8761-DEF08C855F8D Online =============================================================================== Thanks in advance.

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• Resize a RAID 1 volume on OS X Snow Leopard - how? (Note: software raid)

  - by Emmel

  I've scoured the Internet in search of an answer to this question, and as usual with OSX-related topics, I often don't find any deep-dive technical explanations sufficient enough to feel confident doing dangerous things. Here is my question: I have a Mac Pro, running OS X 10.6.2. I have, as my main root/boot disk, a RAID 1 volume called "Mirror1". Mirror1 is comprised of two 1 TB disks. Mirror1, however, is fixed at 640 GB. That's because, I originally took a 640GB disk, bought a terabyte disk, mirrored it (using diskutil appleraid enable), when it synced I removed the 640GB and replaced it with a second 1 TB disk, and synced again. Voila! A single 640 GB replaced by two 1 TB disks in a mirror.. Actually, no. There's still something missing from the equation: Mirror1 needs to be expanded from 640GB to 1 TB to match the partition sizes on each of those disks. How do I do this? Perhaps the diskutil output will help: -> diskutil list /dev/disk0 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_RAID 999.9 GB disk0s2 3: Apple_Boot Boot OSX 134.2 MB disk0s3 /dev/disk1 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk1 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1 2: Apple_RAID 999.9 GB disk1s2 3: Apple_Boot Boot OSX 134.2 MB disk1s3 /dev/disk2 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *640.1 GB disk2 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1 2: Apple_HFS Mac Disk 2 536.7 GB disk2s2 3: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 103.1 GB disk2s3 /dev/disk3 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: Apple_HFS Mirror1 *639.8 GB disk3 -> diskutil appleraid list AppleRAID sets (1 found) =============================================================================== Name: Macintosh HD Unique ID: 1953F864-B474-4EB6-8E69-41834EBD0247 Type: Mirror Status: Online Size: 639.8 GB (639791038464 Bytes) Rebuild: manual Device Node: disk3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Device Node UUID Status ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0 disk1s2 25109BAE-5697-40EA-B612-0217851444F7 Online 1 disk0s2 11B83AB0-8148-4DB6-8761-DEF08C855F8D Online =============================================================================== Thanks in advance.

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• Performance tweaks and upgrades for VMWare Server 2

  - by sjohnston

  Our software department has a server running VMWare Server 2. We typically have 8-10 VMs running as test environments (Win XP and Server 08) for various versions of our software, and one VM that is used as a build server (Win XP). The host is running Server 2003 R2. It has 32GB RAM, 8 core Xeon 3.16GHz CPU, one disk for host OS and two raid disks for VMs. The majority of the time, this setup behaves very well and there are no complaints. Other times, the VMs can be very laggy. This is sometimes, but not always, correlated to heavy load on the build server. I'm a software developer, not an IT pro, but it seems to me that this machine should be beefy enough to handle this many VMs. Is this occasional performance hit likely just because we're hitting the limits of the hardware, or should I be looking for another culprit? From what I've read, I'm guessing if there's a bottleneck, it's probably disk I/O with all these VMs running off two disks (especially the build server). Would spreading the VMs over more disks, and/or switching to SSDs give us a significant performance boost? Other things I've read may increase performance: single virtual processor per VM removing/disabling unused virtual hardware preallocated disk space not using snapshots setting a reserved memory limit on the host and disabling VM memory swapping Can anyone confirm or deny if any of these improve performance? What other good tweaks have I missed?

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• What are the replacement options for an IDE hard disk for a DOS based system?

  - by dummzeuch

  I have got a few "embedded" systems running MSDOS 6.2 which boot from and store data to IDE hard disks. Since these drives are nearing their end of life, the question arises how we can replace them. The requirements are: DOS must be able to install and boot from these drives. They must be able to sustain heavy (mostly) write access. If possible, they should be able to survive moderate vibrations (not too bad since the current hard disks have survived several years of that) I considered the following options so far: other ide hard drives: Unfortunately modern IDE drives are too large so DOS cannot boot from them even if I create small partitions. Older IDE drives are just that: old, so they are probably not the most reliable ones any more. SSDs: There are a few SSDs with IDE interface available. I have not yet tried them. Does anybody have any experience with them? They look like the ideal replacement provided that DOS can boot from them and that writing speed does not deteriorate too much (the old hard disks are no race cars either). Compact Flash: There are adapters for using CF with IDE controllers and they work fine. DOS can boot from them and they have no problems at all with vibrations. What I am not sure about is their durability. DOS uses FAT so some very few sectors are written every time the medium is being written to. IDE to SATA converters: I have no idea whether they are any good. Has anybody tried them? It might be an option to use one of these to connect an SATA SSD to the system. Are there any alternatives that I have missed? (We are working on replacing these systems, but it will still take a few years.)

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• SATA DVD drive refuses to read movie DVDs

  - by poke

  Hey, I have a problem with my DVD Drive (Asus DRW-2014L1T, most current firmware installed) on Windows 7 x64. When I insert a DVD movie and Windows starts to access the drive (for autoplay, or when I manually click on the drive icon), my computer hangs up in a particular way, while trying to read the disk. Explorer stops reacting and several programs won't run or their launch is horribly delayed (like the device manager). In th end, I can't access the movie and can't even eject the disk (probably because Windows is still trying to access it). To get the disk out of the drive I then have to reboot (which sometimes doesn't work either) and eject the disk before Windows boots. BIOS recognizes the drive just fine, and Windows is also able to read data disks (tried it with some software disks), but just refuses any movies. I have checked the region code in the device manager, but it is correct. My notebook is reading the disks just fine btw.. I remember having the same problem with an older drive as well, but I don't remember what I did to make it work again (maybe I didn't even fix the problem back then). I do remember however that booting with the disk inserted made Windows recognize the disk, however this doesn't work in this situation either. Do you have any idea what to do to fix that problem?

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• Bad performance with Linux software RAID5 and LUKS encryption

  - by Philipp Wendler

  I have set up a Linux software RAID5 on three hard drives and want to encrypt it with cryptsetup/LUKS. My tests showed that the encryption leads to a massive performance decrease that I cannot explain. The RAID5 is able to write 187 MB/s [1] without encryption. With encryption on top of it, write speed is down to about 40 MB/s. The RAID has a chunk size of 512K and a write intent bitmap. I used -c aes-xts-plain -s 512 --align-payload=2048 as the parameters for cryptsetup luksFormat, so the payload should be aligned to 2048 blocks of 512 bytes (i.e., 1MB). cryptsetup luksDump shows a payload offset of 4096. So I think the alignment is correct and fits to the RAID chunk size. The CPU is not the bottleneck, as it has hardware support for AES (aesni_intel). If I write on another drive (an SSD with LVM) that is also encrypted, I do have a write speed of 150 MB/s. top shows that the CPU usage is indeed very low, only the RAID5 xor takes 14%. I also tried putting a filesystem (ext4) directly on the unencrypted RAID so see if the layering is problem. The filesystem decreases the performance a little bit as expected, but by far not that much (write speed varying, but 100 MB/s). Summary: Disks + RAID5: good Disks + RAID5 + ext4: good Disks + RAID5 + encryption: bad SSD + encryption + LVM + ext4: good The read performance is not affected by the encryption, it is 207 MB/s without and 205 MB/s with encryption (also showing that CPU power is not the problem). What can I do to improve the write performance of the encrypted RAID? [1] All speed measurements were done with several runs of dd if=/dev/zero of=DEV bs=100M count=100 (i.e., writing 10G in blocks of 100M). Edit: If this helps: I'm using Ubuntu 11.04 64bit with Linux 2.6.38. Edit2: The performance stays approximately the same if I pass a block size of 4KB, 1MB or 10MB to dd.

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• Data recovery from corrupt Ubuntu partition/directory (question about a previous answer)

  - by JoshMaurice

  I have an Ubuntu installation that won't boot anymore. I asked my previous question about it here: http://superuser.com/questions/15916/ubuntu-chkdsk-equivalent Bolotov replied: As I see from your previous question you can boot Windows so you could use dskprobe from Windows XP Service Pack 2 Support Tools to make sure that fs type is correct ... but it's already correct fs type 7 is NTFS. Message "The type of the filesystem is RAW. CHKDSK is not available for RAW drives." means that windows can't determine fs type for some reason. As we see fs type is correct. To run Chkdsk on your Windows partition you can install Windows Recovery Console, boot in recovery console and check your disk. After checking the disk you will gain access to you c:\ubuntu\disks. I think you can mount your linux partition (which is in file) as usual loop-back device: mount -o loop [path to your linux-loopback-partition] But you should mount windows patrition first. So now I'd like to know: Within the recovery console I will be issuing the commands "chkdsk -r" and then "mount -o loop [path to windows partition]" and then "mount -o loop c:\ubuntu\disks", correct? I do have a ("corrupt and unreadable") c:\ubuntu\disks directory so that appears to be the correct path to the linux partition; do you know the path to the windows partition? would that be just "c:\"?

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• New PC: win7 install issues with 2x3TB in RAID1

  - by goober

  Background / Components Not sure what I've done wrong. Built one PC before successfully in a similar way but this one seems to be struggling. I have the following components: ASUS P8Z68-V/Pro Gen 3 (updated to latest firmware) 16GB (2x8GB) RAM corsair hx850 power supply 2x3TB drives on the intel z68 controller 1x128GB SSD on the Marvel controller sapphire 7950 The problem I set up my 3 TB disks in RAID1 controller appears to recognize them fine during boot as one 2.7TB raid1 volume windows setup sees two disks, both 746 GB, but will only let me install to one and appears to work fine. windows appears to install fine after installer reboots, I receive "windows failed to start" error referencing code 0xc000000e and "\Windows\system32\winload.exe every time I do an install, a new additional "win7" entry is added to the boot menu; all lead to this error. What I've tried: updated the BIOS to the latest firmware attempted to repair the install tried clearing / removing raid / re-raiding drives tried formatting the drives during install attempted to clear the menu Of entries (can't figure out how to do that) No matter how many times I destroy the raid array, format the disks, etc. the boot entries keep piling up. Any idea where I'm going wrong?

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• Resize a RAID 1 volume on OSX Snow Leopard - how? (Note: software raid)

  - by Emmel

  I've scoured the Internet in search of an answer to this question, and as usual with OSX-related topics, I often don't find any deep-dive technical explanations sufficient enough to feel confident doing dangerous things. Here is my question: I have a Mac Pro, running OSX 10.6.2. I have, as my main root/boot disk, a RAID 1 volume called "Mirror1". Mirror1 is comprised of two 1 TB disks. Mirror1, however, is fixed at 640 GB. That's because, I originally took a 640GB disk, bought a terabyte disk, mirrored it (using diskutil appleraid enable...), when it synced I removed the 640GB and replaced it with a second 1 TB disk, and synced again. Voila! A single 640 GB replaced by two 1 TB disks in a mirror.. Actually, no. There's still something missing from the equation: Mirror1 needs to be expanded from 640GB to 1 TB to match the partition sizes on each of those disks. How do I do this? Perhaps the diskutil output will help: -> diskutil list /dev/disk0 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk0 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk0s1 2: Apple_RAID 999.9 GB disk0s2 3: Apple_Boot Boot OSX 134.2 MB disk0s3 /dev/disk1 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *1.0 TB disk1 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk1s1 2: Apple_RAID 999.9 GB disk1s2 3: Apple_Boot Boot OSX 134.2 MB disk1s3 /dev/disk2 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme *640.1 GB disk2 1: EFI 209.7 MB disk2s1 2: Apple_HFS Mac Disk 2 536.7 GB disk2s2 3: Microsoft Basic Data BOOTCAMP 103.1 GB disk2s3 /dev/disk3 #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: Apple_HFS Mirror1 *639.8 GB disk3 -> diskutil appleraid list AppleRAID sets (1 found) =============================================================================== Name: Macintosh HD Unique ID: 1953F864-B474-4EB6-8E69-41834EBD0247 Type: Mirror Status: Online Size: 639.8 GB (639791038464 Bytes) Rebuild: manual Device Node: disk3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Device Node UUID Status ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 0 disk1s2 25109BAE-5697-40EA-B612-0217851444F7 Online 1 disk0s2 11B83AB0-8148-4DB6-8761-DEF08C855F8D Online =============================================================================== Thanks in advance.

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• Windows drive letters A: and B:

  - by Workshop Alex

  This is a question that just popped into my mind and I can't help but wonder why it's still common for a Windows installation to be installed on C: with all other drive letters going up from D: to Z:. In the early MS-DOS times, all we had were floppy disks and they were at A:. When the 3.5 inch floppy started to replace the 5.25 floppy, many people had an A: and B: drive. Then the hard disk became popular and the hard disk was at C: because A: and B: were taken. Then the 5.25 floppy disappeared and most computers had a gap between A: and C:. Nowadays, the 3.5 floppy is just too outdated so A: disappeared too. All disks now start at C:. Yeah, I know I can assign my own drive letters and I've done so with my data disks. My installation disk will just continue to be stuck at C: and I don't really mind. I have no problems with drive letters. But why do the new Windows versions just continue to install themselves by default on C: instead of assigning the letter A: to the boot hard disk?

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