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  • Central Storage for windows user accounts homedirs .. hardware/software needed?

    - by mtkoan
    We have ~120+ users in our network, and are endeavoring to centralize logon authentication and home directory storage server-side. Most of the users are Windows 2000/XP machines, and a few running Mac OS X. Ideally the solution will be open-source-- can this all be managed from a Linux server running LDAP and Samba? Or would a hacked-NAS Box with a FreeNAS or similar suffice? Or is Micro$oft's Active Directory really the preference here. Is it viable to store PST files on this server for users to read from and write to? They are very large ~1.5gb. We have no mail server (or money) capable of Exchange or IMAP, only an old POP3. What kind of hardware horsepower and network architecture should we have for this kind of thing?

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  • SAN for Medium Business - Where to start? [closed]

    - by Henson
    I've always run Linux on my home computers, and done PC repair for years, but this is my first experience with needing to buy a SAN. I thought I was knowledgeable, but I feel a bit lost. I need to be able to support 25 VMs, which are currently managed through vSphere. The company I'm at is growing quickly though, so I'd like to plan for the future. Ideally, I want a solution that I can just tack arrays onto and manage as one large, iSCSI drive. Suggestions? Good resources? If I can find something that appears to software as one large drive, am I better off going with a solution like FreeNAS or Starwind, or an all-in-one proprietary solution like NetApp? Cost, is (of course, and always I'm sure) an issue.

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  • Why might one hard disk perform slower than another?

    - by Styne666
    I have just bought two WD 3TB Reds (WD30EFRX) for a FreeNAS box and whilst doing burn-in testing it seems like one is consistently taking about 10% longer than the other. So far I've done: a dd read test of the whole device, a long SMART test and it's currently halfway through a badblocks -wvs. The second device is lagging behind the first on all of them. I'm running these commands on Debian stable in two Konsole tabs. Is there a reason this could be considered normal behaviour or is it worth running the tests independantly? They're both plugged in to the LSI 2308 (IT mode) on a Supermicro X10SL7-F.

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  • Auto-mount in fstab no longer working until manually running 'sudo mount -a'

    - by Brett Alton
    I have 3 SMB shared drives I need to connect to for work purposes. I had Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick and had all my drives loaded into fstab to be auto-mounted. Everything worked fine for a while but just before I upgraded to 11.04 Natty, the fstab auto-mount stopped working. Unfortunately I don't know what changed I made to my machine or what update installed that made this occur. /etc/fstab {snip} //192.168.7.3/apache_proj/ /home/brett/Desktop/apache smbfs guest,rw,iocharset=utf8,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0 //192.168.7.3/apache_54321/ /home/brett/Desktop/54321 smbfs guest,rw,iocharset=utf8,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0 //freenas.local/shared/ /home/brett/Desktop/shared smbfs guest,rw,iocharset=utf8,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0 //lamp/www/ /home/brett/Desktop/lamp smbfs username={snip},password={snip},rw,iocharset=utf8,uid=1000,gid=1000 0 0 When the machine boots, I run this command to get them to mount: $ sudo umount /home/brett/Desktop/54321 /home/brett/Desktop/shared /home/brett/Desktop/apache; sudo mount -a [sudo] password for brett: umount: /home/brett/Desktop/54321: not mounted umount: /home/brett/Desktop/shared: not mounted umount: /home/brett/Desktop/apache: not mounted Warning: mapping 'guest' to 'guest,sec=none' Warning: mapping 'guest' to 'guest,sec=none' Warning: mapping 'guest' to 'guest,sec=none' mount error: could not resolve address for lamp: No address associated with hostname (I run that umount as a just-in-case). I looked through dmesg and some error logs and couldn't see why fstab was failing on my mounts. I see that my 'lamp' directive is failing, but that's because the machine is currently down.

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  • Ethernet card not detected on Ubuntu Server 12.04

    - by Dana
    My onboard ethernet isn't detected after a re-install of Server 12.04. For reasons I won't get into here, I had to put the server's drive into another machine to install Ubuntu, then swap back into the server. So the server starts up fine, except for the "Waiting for network configuration". I read in another article that Server, by default, doesn't handle new mac addresses for hardware changes dynamically, unlike Ubuntu Desktop, but a look at /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules shows only one ethernet interface. Shouldn't it show both the old, and the new? lspci -vv shows an ethernet interface, so what the heck is going on? I should mention that the onboard LAN is enabled in the BIOS. And I know this isn't important, but all this started when I changed some network configuration settings in webmin before the re-install. It couldn't download any updates, so I tinkered a little. Broke, it, installed FreeNAS, which worked, but I didn't like it, then went back to Ubuntu Server, and now I'm in this pickle. Thanks for any advice!

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  • Error when installing ubuntu-zfs

    - by ubiquibacon
    I'm switching from FreeNAS to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. After a vanilla install of Ubuntu has been completed I run the following commands in the order shown to install ZFS: apt-get install python-software-properties add-apt-repository ppa:zfs-native/stable apt-get -y -q update && apt-get -y -q upgrade apt-get install ubuntu-zfs When the last command is run ZFS is installed and seems to be working correctly... mostly (more on that later). However, when the last command is run I get this error (full log here): configure: error: *** Please make sure the kmod spl devel <kernel> package for your *** distribution is installed then try again. If that fails you *** can specify the location of the spl objects with the *** '--with-spl-obj=PATH' option. What is this error and how do I fix it? Now I said mostly earlier because my pool's don't auto mount when the server restarts the way they should. All my reading (mostly from this page) indicates that mountall should just take care of the mounting. I have followed the instructions on that page and I cannot get mountall to work correctly. My pools will only auto mount on restart if I edit /etc/fstab or change the ZFS_MOUNT and ZFS_UNMOUNT options in /etc/default/zfs.

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  • How to mount a network drive?

    - by Relik
    Ok so I'm trying to set-up a home file server. I'm thinking about just setting it up as an FTP server, no particular reason other than I'm familiar with FTP and samba tends to be very frustrating. Basically the set-up I'm going for, is to be-able to create multiple user accounts for the server and restrict or allow access to specific folders on each user. FTP is the only way (that I know of) to accomplish a set-up like that. My question is how can I mount an FTP server as a drive in Ubuntu so that all my applications can access it just like any other driver or folder. An example would be downloading 12.10 via torrent when it comes out, I would like to be able to tell transmission to just download the file straight to my ftp server. I know how to do this in Windows, its actually very easy. But I cant figure it out in Ubuntu. I have tried using the "connect to server" option in nautilus, and it works, but it doesn’t give me the result I want, most applications don’t see the folder, while others can. Also I am open to options other than FTP if anyone has any suggestions. I've looked into FreeNAS but that doesn’t seem to allow me to control the user accounts the way I want to. Then after all is said and done I would still need a way to mount the shares as a drive in Ubuntu. The ability to mount network drives in windows is one of my favourite features, but seeing how Ubuntu is now my daily OS and has been for about 4 years, I really need a way to accomplish the same thing in Ubuntu. Also a GUI would be preferable, seeing as there will be multiple people using this server, I would like it to be as easy as possible. EDIT: this link here seems to be almost exactly what I'm wanting to do, if I could find a GUI that can do this ill be almost set. then I would just need to find a way to hide specific folders from certain users.

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  • DIY NAS - links for Instructions

    - by Kaushik Gopal
    Good folk of SU, I'm planning to build a NAS (Network Access Storage). I'm planning to do it cheap (:read Old PC Config + Open source software). I was looking for good DIY links . Before you shoot this down as a Repost, I'm only looking for good links containing detailed instructions for setting up a NAS. I did a fair bit of searching and found these links (so please suggest others. While these links are great they delve more on the hardware side, i'm looking for more instructions in the software side). For the sake of the interwebs: Ubuntu: http://snarfquest.com/wiki/index.php/Setting_up_a_Home_NAS http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/content/view/27962/77/ http://jonpeck.blogspot.com/2006/11/how-to-configure-80-fileserver-in-45.html FreeNAS http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/webmaster/article.php/3719706 http://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/homemade_nas.aspxhttp://www.codeproject.com/KB/system/homemade_nas.aspx There was one at rubbervir.us that everyone points to, but apparently the site has gone down. A couple of other queries: Is Printer/Scanner sharing a possibility with NAS devices? Many talk of torrent support with NAS Devices, a little more light on this? Does this mean, an auto download of torrent through a feed into NAS, or just support for storing Torrent download files onto the NAS(don't see the difference between the latter and a normal file tranfer)

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  • subdomains to different VMs on one IP address

    - by efbenson
    I have a setup at home with an ESXi server Freenas server and several win7 clients. I have a domain refactoringme.com I set the @ and WWW domain record to my (current) IP address. I then forwarded port 80 to my local win2k3 server on my Linksys router and used host name matching to run the 5 test sites I have. That all works. Now I want to use the turnkey machines and move to dedicated VM servers. One for a wiki one for SVN etc. So how do I get www.refactoringme.com to go to one internal IP address and wiki.refactoringme.com to different internal IP address, while they both use the same external IP address? I added the additional record for wiki to my domain and pointed it to @. I figured it had to be involving a real firewall. So I installed PFSense on a VM and set it on the DMZ on my Linksys. From this point I haven't had any luck. I thought that maybe it would be in the DNS Forwarder or maybe in the Rules sections but neither have worked. Am I doing it wrong or on the right track but am missing something. Thanks for all the help.

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  • Using ZFS or XFS on a Xen guest running Linux

    - by zoot
    Background: I'm investigating the viability of using a filesystem other than ext3/4, with the ability to run snapshots for backup and rollback purposes. The servers under consideration are mailbox server nodes running on Linode's Xen based VPS platform. I'm particularly drawn to the various published benefits which ZFS offers in terms of data integrity and this year's stable release of native ZFS support in Linux - http://zfsonlinux.org ZFS appears to be the more thorough option in terms of benefits and simplicity (instead of LVM+XFS). Please note that I have little experience with ZFS (which I use on a local FreeNAS installation) and none with XFS, hence the post. To date, my servers are using ext3 filesystems, not managed under LVM. Question in detail: So, I have two questions. (1) Which of the two filesystems would be the better choice for the best of all of the following 3 aspects, running on a Xen Linux guest? Snapshots Data Integrity Performance (2) If ZFS is a viable option, is it practical to use ZRAID across Xen disk images to further enhance the solution for data integrity? Note: I'm reluctant to consider btrfs, given the many warnings I've read about in using it on production systems.

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  • Are ZFS snapshots + S3 a viable backup system for several VMs and general fileserver storage?

    - by AllanA
    I've been tasked with setting up a backup system for my small office (around 12 people). Most of our production stuff is on the AWS cloud, so what I need to back up are some small office/development files (under 100G right now), plus our operational VMs and development, which round out to a bit under 1T. I just need something reliable, convenient, and straightforward. I'm comfortable with Linux, FreeBSD, and to some extent Solaris 10, so I'm leaning toward a full server rather than an appliance system ala Openfiler or FreeNAS. What I'm contemplating is a small fileserver for general storage and nightly backups of the virtual machines, followed up by an offsite backup to Amazon's S3 storage service. It'd be the usual incremental backups nightly and full backup weekly. My question is if using ZFS snapshots, both locally and dumped to S3 via 'zfs send [-i]', is a viable backup tool? Or should I stick to using Duplicity, or some other method entirely? ZFS snapshots on the internal fileserver/backup machine sound like a perfect way to provide quick and convenient data recovery, so I'm likely to go with that for local redundancy. (If you folks see scenarios where relying on ZFS snapshots would be worse than a more traditional archiving backup, feel free to convince me.) But are snapshots flexible enough to lean on for recovery from the loss of my backup server? Or am I better off with something more traditional? (feel free to recommend free or commercial backup solutions you favor.)

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  • Linux file server for an inexperienced admin

    - by Pat
    A charity I volunteer for wants a file server for their mostly Windows machines (about five XP and 7 machines, with some Mac laptops every now and then). For the server, I have a PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo 3GHz proc, 4GB of DDR2 400MHz RAM, and a 500 GB HDD. (I should point out that they do not currently have any server - they are just using Windows to share a folder on one of the PCs.) What is a linux distro that is easy to configure for Windows file serving yet stable and secure enough to protect sensitive data without an expert sysadmin? I'm guessing that a Debian distro would probably fit the security bill, but I don't know of any tailored to novice sysadmins. Also, are there any killer apps for making this easy to administer and set up (as a Windows file server, in particular - this answer is a good example)? Would FreeNAS be sufficient? Once it's all set up, what are the minimum measures I need to take to keep the data secure? I found this somewhat helpful answer, but it's not specific to my question of just getting a secure file server up, running, and maintained.

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  • 2 Computers, same network, different outgoing speeds when uploading to internet?

    - by user117339
    I have 2 work machines in my office, a PowerMac G5 and a MacBook Air. Both behind an IPCop firewall. The PowerMac is connected through a gigabit switch, the MacBook Air is connected through a Netgear 802.11g access point that is then plugged into the gigabit switch. There is also a FreeNAS box, both machines are able to read and write files to it at close to their pipe speeds. The main problem is when I am trying to upload files to the internet at large. The G5 is only hitting 0.1 - 0.25 Mbps. The Macbook is able to hit 2-3 Mbps. The setup (G5 / IPCop / Network) has been the same for 5 years. The issues with the internet speed started about 3 months ago. I hadn't tested on the Macbook at this point. I had complained to the ISP, they said their modem needed a firmware update, did that nothing changed. Reset IPCop, turned off squid, etc. No changes. The ISP switched the office over to a better plan with a theoretical 6 Mbps up, still no change. At this point I tried testing the Macbook, and lo and behold there's the speed. But why? I have tried changing out everything, cables, switches, using another ethernet port on the G5, wiping the system, using DHCP, using manual IPs, changing DNS servers, etc. Nothing works. I figured that if there was something horribly wrong with the network, then internally I would find a similar issue, but that is perfect. iperf, ping, etc show no dropped packets and near saturation of the internal network. I'm at a loss as to what the heck is going on. Any ideas would be appreciated! Below are some screenshots of speedtest.net: G5: Macbook Air:

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  • Expendable, Redundant, Easily recoverable

    - by MeIr
    I am desperate at this point, I have been looking for "Big storage" solution for a while on my own and I can't find anything that would suite my needs. But now push came to shove. Current situation: I have about 6TB data storage (already full) - Drobo. Yesterday Drobo died on me and it put me into bad situation - I can't recover my data without buying another Drobo. From extensive research online I realized that Drobo is not the safest bet and by now it seems very poor choice. I ordered new Drobo to try to get my data back, however I don't want to be in the same situation later and continuing using Drobo promises this event to re-occur. What I am looking for: 1) Inexpensive setup. 2) Dynamically extendable - add more drives and/or replace a drive with bigger capacity. 3) Redundant - setup against 1-3 drive failure, will depend on total number of drives. For the sake of argument let's assume for every 4 drives one should be able to fail without data loss. 4) Easy data recovery - let's say unforeseen happens, I would like to be able to recover information without buying new tools or replacements - example: new Drobo. 5) Should be USB or Network Attach Storage 6) No demand on speed. Doesn't have to be fast, I am not doing video editing on the setup. However if option exists, would be nice to have a decent speed. After thoughts: I reviewed few options and FreeNAS looks nice, but it doesn't have #2 - Dynamic extendability. There are work around with Pools but it seems a bit complicated and unnecessary. More over it seems like data safety is a big question - saw some horror stories. Please advise on what options I have and what seems like an optimal solution (if any). I don't care if it has to be Windows or Linux box or any other OS and/or software that has to run on top, but simple solution is more attractive. Thank you! P.S: Feel free to ignore "After thoughts".

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  • Thoughts on home NAS server

    - by user826955
    I currently have a NAS with a 2x2TB HDD 1x16GB SSD layout on a mini-itx atom board. The NAS is in a Lian Li PC-Q07 case. On this system I was running freebsd 8 with a gmirror raid 1 setup, which was enough for my needs. So far I was using the NAS for: Fileserver with AFP protocol (only mac clients used) SVN server hosting all my source trees of my projects JIRA (performance was okay-ish) Timemachine backup for the macs The power consumption was about 38W, although I did not put HDDs asleep when unused (I think this is not possible in a raid setup). I liked the NAS because: the performance was good through gigabit LAN (enough for my needs) power consumption was good its a pretty small case and fits in one of my cupboards I disliked the NAS a bit because: it was a bit noisy, the Q07 case vibrated a good amount because of the HDDs. I switched the NAS off every evening I do not have a real backup of the data on the NAS, only the internal raid 1 as safety. I really dont want to loose my source trees under no circumstances, so I would really be sleeping better if I knew I had regular backups somewhere. Recently, the board seemed to have died, I can't boot anymore. Thus, I was thinking about a redesign of my NAS (I still have to find out what parts are broken, I probably need to replace the mainboard and SSD. HDDs seem to be okay). First of all, I was wondering what other users have as backup for their NAS? Are you actually using a second NAS, and regularly copying over the data to have it safe? Or is there any better solution to this? I was thinking about getting a cheap NAS like the synology DS112j with only one disk, and use rsync or something similar to regularly copy data over to the second NAS (wake the second NAS upon start, shut it down after copy). Although this approach seems somewhat weird, It would have the benefit (?) that I could use a single disk instead of raid in the main NAS, and put the disk asleep when idle, and have the NAS running 24/7 with low energy consumption (I found no way to do this with a gmirror setup). Is there any recommended backup solution for a small NAS? Then I was thinking about a different raid setup. Since I have to buy a new mainboard as well as SSD, I might as well switch over to a i3 board with more ram, and also switch to ZFS. I am not familar with ZFS, I've never used it, but I read and hear much about it. Would it be viable to set up a ZFS storage with only 2 disks? Can I easily extend this storage with more disks, once I choose to add some? I could maybe get a new case like the Fractal Design Array R2 which has more 3,5" slots. I could as well get another 2 disks, but I would prefer sticking with the existing 2 for enegery/heat/noise reasons. Should I go for a ZFS storage or stick to my gmirror setup? I would also like to keep freebsd as operating system, and also I dont need any web gui or something (that is, I dont need/want to use FreeNAS or Openfiler etc). Does anyone maybe have a sample setup in use so I can compare energy consumption/noise/software setup? Any guidance towards the NAS of my dreams (silent, low energy, safe w/ backups) much appreciated.

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  • File Server - Storage configuration: RAID vs LVM vs ZFS something else... ?

    - by privatehuff
    We are a small company that does video editing, among other things, and need a place to keep backup copies of large media files and make it easy to share them. I've got a box set up with Ubuntu Server and 4 x 500 GB drives. They're currently set up with Samba as four shared folders that Mac/Windows workstations can see fine, but I want a better solution. There are two major reasons for this: 500 GB is not really big enough (some projects are larger) It is cumbersome to manage the current setup, because individual hard drives have different amounts of free space and duplicated data (for backup). It is confusing now and that will only get worse once there are multiple servers. ("the project is on sever2 in share4" etc) So, I need a way to combine hard drives in such a way as to avoid complete data loss with the failure of a single drive, and so users see only a single share on each server. I've done linux software RAID5 and had a bad experience with it, but would try it again. LVM looks ok but it seems like no one uses it. ZFS seems interesting but it is relatively "new". What is the most efficient and least risky way to to combine the hdd's that is convenient for my users? Edit: The Goal here is basically to create servers that contain an arbitrary number of hard drives but limit complexity from an end-user perspective. (i.e. they see one "folder" per server) Backing up data is not an issue here, but how each solution responds to hardware failure is a serious concern. That is why I lump RAID, LVM, ZFS, and who-knows-what together. My prior experience with RAID5 was also on an Ubuntu Server box and there was a tricky and unlikely set of circumstances that led to complete data loss. I could avoid that again but was left with a feeling that I was adding an unnecessary additional point of failure to the system. I haven't used RAID10 but we are on commodity hardware and the most data drives per box is pretty much fixed at 6. We've got a lot of 500 GB drives and 1.5 TB is pretty small. (Still an option for at least one server, however) I have no experience with LVM and have read conflicting reports on how it handles drive failure. If a (non-striped) LVM setup could handle a single drive failing and only loose whichever files had a portion stored on that drive (and stored most files on a single drive only) we could even live with that. But as long as I have to learn something totally new, I may as well go all the way to ZFS. Unlike LVM, though, I would also have to change my operating system (?) so that increases the distance between where I am and where I want to be. I used a version of solaris at uni and wouldn't mind it terribly, though. On the other end on the IT spectrum, I think I may also explore FreeNAS and/or Openfiler, but that doesn't really solve the how-to-combine-drives issue.

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  • Eine komplette Virtualisierungslandschaft auf dem eigenen Laptop – So geht’s

    - by Manuel Hossfeld
    Eine komplette Virtualisierungslandschaftauf dem eigenen Laptop – So geht’s Wenn man sich mit dem Virtualisierungsprodukt Oracle VM in der aktuellen Version 3.x näher befassen möchte, bietet es sich natürlich an, eine eigene Umgebung zu Lern- und Testzwecken zu installieren. Doch leichter gesagt als getan: Bei näherer Betrachtung der Architektur wird man schnell feststellen, dass mehrere Rechner benötigt werden, um überhaupt alle Komponenten abbilden zu können: Zum einen gilt es, den oder die OVM Server selbst zu installieren. Das ist recht leicht und schnell erledigt, aber da Oracle VM ein „Typ 1 Hypervisor ist“ - also direkt auf dem Rechner („bare metal“) installiert wird – ist der eigenen Arbeits-PC oder Laptop dafür recht ungeeignet. (Eine Dual-Boot Umgebung wäre zwar denkbar, aber recht unpraktisch.) Zum anderen wird auch ein Rechner benötigt, auf dem der OVM Manager installiert wird. Im Gegensatz zum OVM Server erfolgt dessen Installation nicht „bare metal“, sondern auf einem bestehenden Oracle Linux. Aber was tun, wenn man gerade keinen Linux-Server griffbereit hat und auch keine extra Hardware dafür opfern will? Möchte man alle Funktionen von Oracle VM austesten, so sollte man zusätzlich über einen Shared Storag everüfugen. Dieser kann wahlweise über NFS oder über ein SAN (per iSCSI oder FibreChannel) angebunden werden. Zwar braucht man zum Testen nicht zwingend entsprechende „echte“ Storage-Hardware, aber auch die „Simulation“ entsprechender Komponenten erfordert zusätzliche Hardware mit entsprechendem freien Plattenplatz.(Alternativ können auch fertige „Software Storage Appliances“ wie z.B. OpenFiler oder FreeNAS verwendet werden). Angenommen, es stehen tatsächlich keine „echte“ Server- und Storage Hardware zur Verfügung, so benötigt man für die oben genannten drei Punkte  drei bzw. vier Rechner (PCs, Laptops...) - je nachdem ob man einen oder zwei OVM Server starten möchte. Erfreulicherweise geht es aber auch mit deutlich weniger Aufwand: Wie bereits kurz im Blogpost anlässlich des letzten OVM-Releases 3.1.1 beschrieben, ist die aktuelle Version in der Lage, selbst vollständig innerhalb von VirtualBox als Gast zu laufen. Wer bei dieser „doppelten Virtualisierung“ nun an das Prinzip der russischen Matroschka-Puppen denkt, liegt genau richtig. Oracle VM VirtualBox stellt dabei gewissermaßen die äußere Hülle dar – und da es sich bei VirtualBox im Gegensatz zu Oracle VM Server um einen „Typ 2 Hypervisor“ handelt, funktioniert dieser Ansatz auch auf einem „normalen“ Arbeits-PC bzw. Laptop, ohne dessen eigentliche Betriebsystem komplett zu überschreiben. Doch das beste dabei ist: Die Installation der jeweiligen VirtualBox VMs muss man nicht selber durchführen. Der OVM Manager als auch der OVM Server stehen bereits als vorgefertigte „VirtualBox Appliances“ im Oracle Technology Network zum Download zur Verfügung und müssen im Grunde nur noch importiert und konfiguriert werden. Das folgende Schaubild verdeutlicht das Prinzip: Die dunkelgrünen Bereiche stellen jeweils Instanzen der eben erwähnten VirtualBox Appliances für OVM Server und OVM Manager dar. (Hier im Bild sind zwei OVM Server zu sehen, als Minimum würde natürlich auch einer genügen. Dann können aber viele Features wie z.B. OVM HA nicht ausprobieren werden.) Als cleveren Trick zur Einsparung einer weiteren VM für Storage-Zwecke hat Wim Coekaerts (Senior Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering bei Oracle), der „Erbauer“ der VirtualBox Appliances, die OVM Manager Appliance bereits so vorbereitet, dass diese gleichzeitig als NFS-Share (oder ggf. sogar als iSCSI Target) dienen kann. Dies beschreibt er auch kurz auf seinem Blog. Die hellgrünen Ovale stellen die VMs dar, welche dann innerhalb einer der virtualisierten OVM Server laufen können. Aufgrund der Tatsache, dass durch diese „doppelte Virtualisierung“ die Fähigkeit zur Hardware-Virtualisierung verloren geht, können diese „Nutz-VMs“ demzufolge nur paravirtualisiert sein (PVM). Die hier in blau eingezeichneten Netzwerk-Schnittstellen sind virtuelle Interfaces, welche beliebig innerhalb von VirtualBox eingerichtet werden können. Wer die verschiedenen Netzwerk-Rollen innerhalb von Oracle VM im Detail ausprobieren will, kann hier natürlich auch mehr als zwei dieser Interfaces konfigurieren. Die Vorteile dieser Lösung für Test- und Demozwecke liegen auf der Hand: Mit lediglich einem PC bzw. Laptop auf dem VirtualBox installiert ist, können alle oben genannten Komponenten installiert und genutzt werden – genügend RAM vorausgesetzt. Als Minimum darf hier 8GB gelten. Soll auf der „Host-Umgebung“ (also dem PC auf dem VirtualBox läuft) nebenbei noch gearbeiten werden und/oder mehrere „Nutz-VMs“ in dieser simulierten OVM-Server-Umgebung laufen, empfehlen sich natürlich eher 16GB oder mehr. Da die nötigen Schritte zum Installieren und initialen Konfigurieren der Umgebung ausführlich in einem entsprechenden Paper beschrieben sind, möchte ich im Rest dieses Artikels noch einige zusätzliche Tipps und Details erwähnen, welche einem das Leben etwas leichter machen können: Um möglichst entstpannt und mit zusätzlichen „Sicherheitsnetz“ an die Konfiguration der Umgebung herangehen zu können, empfiehlt es sich, ausgiebigen Gebrauch von der in VirtualBox eingebauten Funktionalität der VM Snapshots zu machen. Dies ermöglicht nicht nur ein Zurücksetzen falls einmal etwas schiefgehen sollte, sondern auch ein beliebiges Wiederholen von bereits absolvierten Teilschritten (z.B. um eine andere Idee oder Variante der Umgebung auszuprobieren). Sowohl bei den gerade erwähnten Snapshots als auch bei den VMs selbst sollte man aussagekräftige Namen verwenden. So ist sichergestellt, dass man nicht durcheinander kommt und auch nach ein paar Wochen noch weiß, welche Umgebung man da eigentlich vor sich hat. Dies beinhaltet auch die genaue Versions- und Buildnr. des jeweiligen OVM-Releases. (Siehe dazu auch folgenden Screenshot.) Weitere Informationen und Details zum aktuellen Zustand sowie Zweck der jeweiligen VMs kann in dem oft übersehenen Beschreibungsfeld hinterlegt werden. Es empfiehlt sich, bereits VOR der Installation einen Notizzettel (oder eine Textdatei) mit den geplanten IP-Adressen und Namen für die VMs zu erstellen. (Nicht vergessen: Auch der Server Pool benötigt eine eigene IP.) Dabei sollte man auch nochmal die tatsächlichen Netzwerke der zu verwendenden Virtualbox-Interfaces prüfen und notieren. Achtung: Es gibt im Rahmen der Installation einige Passworte, die vom Nutzer gesetzt werden können – und solche, die zunächst fest eingestellt sind. Zu letzterem gehört das Passwort für den ovs-agent sowie den root-User auf den OVM Servern, welche beide per Default „ovsroot“ lauten. (Alle weiteren Passwort-Informationen sind in dem „Read me first“ Dokument zu finden, welches auf dem Desktop der OVM Manager VM liegt.) Aufpassen muss man ggf. auch in der initialen „Interview-Phase“ welche die VirtualBox VMs durchlaufen, nachdem sie das erste mal gebootet werden. Zu diesem Zeitpunkt ist nämlich auf jeden Fall noch die amerikanische Tastaturbelegung aktiv, so dass man z.B. besser kein „y“ und „z“ in seinem selbst gewählten Passwort verwendet. Aufgrund der Tatsache, dass wie oben erwähnt der OVM Manager auch gleichzeitig den Shared Storage bereitstellt, sollte darauf geachtet werden, dass dessen VM vor den OVM Server VMs gestartet wird. (Andernfalls „findet“ der dem OVM Server Pool zugrundeliegende Cluster sein sog. „Server Pool File System“ nicht.)

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  • Troubleshooting latency spikes on ESXi NFS datastores

    - by exo_cw
    I'm experiencing fsync latencies of around five seconds on NFS datastores in ESXi, triggered by certain VMs. I suspect this might be caused by VMs using NCQ/TCQ, as this does not happen with virtual IDE drives. This can be reproduced using fsync-tester (by Ted Ts'o) and ioping. For example using a Grml live system with a 8GB disk: Linux 2.6.33-grml64: root@dynip211 /mnt/sda # ./fsync-tester fsync time: 5.0391 fsync time: 5.0438 fsync time: 5.0300 fsync time: 0.0231 fsync time: 0.0243 fsync time: 5.0382 fsync time: 5.0400 [... goes on like this ...] That is 5 seconds, not milliseconds. This is even creating IO-latencies on a different VM running on the same host and datastore: root@grml /mnt/sda/ioping-0.5 # ./ioping -i 0.3 -p 20 . 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=1 time=7.2 ms 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=2 time=0.9 ms 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=3 time=0.9 ms 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=4 time=0.9 ms 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=5 time=4809.0 ms 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=6 time=1.0 ms 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=7 time=1.2 ms 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=8 time=1.1 ms 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=9 time=1.3 ms 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=10 time=1.2 ms 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=11 time=1.0 ms 4096 bytes from . (reiserfs /dev/sda): request=12 time=4950.0 ms When I move the first VM to local storage it looks perfectly normal: root@dynip211 /mnt/sda # ./fsync-tester fsync time: 0.0191 fsync time: 0.0201 fsync time: 0.0203 fsync time: 0.0206 fsync time: 0.0192 fsync time: 0.0231 fsync time: 0.0201 [... tried that for one hour: no spike ...] Things I've tried that made no difference: Tested several ESXi Builds: 381591, 348481, 260247 Tested on different hardware, different Intel and AMD boxes Tested with different NFS servers, all show the same behavior: OpenIndiana b147 (ZFS sync always or disabled: no difference) OpenIndiana b148 (ZFS sync always or disabled: no difference) Linux 2.6.32 (sync or async: no difference) It makes no difference if the NFS server is on the same machine (as a virtual storage appliance) or on a different host Guest OS tested, showing problems: Windows 7 64 Bit (using CrystalDiskMark, latency spikes happen mostly during preparing phase) Linux 2.6.32 (fsync-tester + ioping) Linux 2.6.38 (fsync-tester + ioping) I could not reproduce this problem on Linux 2.6.18 VMs. Another workaround is to use virtual IDE disks (vs SCSI/SAS), but that is limiting performance and the number of drives per VM. Update 2011-06-30: The latency spikes seem to happen more often if the application writes in multiple small blocks before fsync. For example fsync-tester does this (strace output): pwrite(3, "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa"..., 1048576, 0) = 1048576 fsync(3) = 0 ioping does this while preparing the file: [lots of pwrites] pwrite(3, "********************************"..., 4096, 1036288) = 4096 pwrite(3, "********************************"..., 4096, 1040384) = 4096 pwrite(3, "********************************"..., 4096, 1044480) = 4096 fsync(3) = 0 The setup phase of ioping almost always hangs, while fsync-tester sometimes works fine. Is someone capable of updating fsync-tester to write multiple small blocks? My C skills suck ;) Update 2011-07-02: This problem does not occur with iSCSI. I tried this with the OpenIndiana COMSTAR iSCSI server. But iSCSI does not give you easy access to the VMDK files so you can move them between hosts with snapshots and rsync. Update 2011-07-06: This is part of a wireshark capture, captured by a third VM on the same vSwitch. This all happens on the same host, no physical network involved. I've started ioping around time 20. There were no packets sent until the five second delay was over: No. Time Source Destination Protocol Info 1082 16.164096 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 NFS V3 WRITE Call (Reply In 1085), FH:0x3eb56466 Offset:0 Len:84 FILE_SYNC 1083 16.164112 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 NFS V3 WRITE Call (Reply In 1086), FH:0x3eb56f66 Offset:0 Len:84 FILE_SYNC 1084 16.166060 192.168.250.20 192.168.250.10 TCP nfs > iclcnet-locate [ACK] Seq=445 Ack=1057 Win=32806 Len=0 TSV=432016 TSER=769110 1085 16.167678 192.168.250.20 192.168.250.10 NFS V3 WRITE Reply (Call In 1082) Len:84 FILE_SYNC 1086 16.168280 192.168.250.20 192.168.250.10 NFS V3 WRITE Reply (Call In 1083) Len:84 FILE_SYNC 1087 16.168417 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 TCP iclcnet-locate > nfs [ACK] Seq=1057 Ack=773 Win=4163 Len=0 TSV=769110 TSER=432016 1088 23.163028 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 NFS V3 GETATTR Call (Reply In 1089), FH:0x0bb04963 1089 23.164541 192.168.250.20 192.168.250.10 NFS V3 GETATTR Reply (Call In 1088) Directory mode:0777 uid:0 gid:0 1090 23.274252 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 TCP iclcnet-locate > nfs [ACK] Seq=1185 Ack=889 Win=4163 Len=0 TSV=769821 TSER=432716 1091 24.924188 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 RPC Continuation 1092 24.924210 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 RPC Continuation 1093 24.924216 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 RPC Continuation 1094 24.924225 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 RPC Continuation 1095 24.924555 192.168.250.20 192.168.250.10 TCP nfs > iclcnet_svinfo [ACK] Seq=6893 Ack=1118613 Win=32625 Len=0 TSV=432892 TSER=769986 1096 24.924626 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 RPC Continuation 1097 24.924635 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 RPC Continuation 1098 24.924643 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 RPC Continuation 1099 24.924649 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 RPC Continuation 1100 24.924653 192.168.250.10 192.168.250.20 RPC Continuation 2nd Update 2011-07-06: There seems to be some influence from TCP window sizes. I was not able to reproduce this problem using FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD) as a NFS server. The wireshark captures showed TCP window updates to 29127 bytes in regular intervals. I did not see them with OpenIndiana, which uses larger window sizes by default. I can no longer reproduce this problem if I set the following options in OpenIndiana and restart the NFS server: ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_recv_hiwat 8192 # default is 128000 ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_max_buf 1048575 # default is 1048576 But this kills performance: Writing from /dev/zero to a file with dd_rescue goes from 170MB/s to 80MB/s. Update 2011-07-07: I've uploaded this tcpdump capture (can be analyzed with wireshark). In this case 192.168.250.2 is the NFS server (OpenIndiana b148) and 192.168.250.10 is the ESXi host. Things I've tested during this capture: Started "ioping -w 5 -i 0.2 ." at time 30, 5 second hang in setup, completed at time 40. Started "ioping -w 5 -i 0.2 ." at time 60, 5 second hang in setup, completed at time 70. Started "fsync-tester" at time 90, with the following output, stopped at time 120: fsync time: 0.0248 fsync time: 5.0197 fsync time: 5.0287 fsync time: 5.0242 fsync time: 5.0225 fsync time: 0.0209 2nd Update 2011-07-07: Tested another NFS server VM, this time NexentaStor 3.0.5 community edition: Shows the same problems. Update 2011-07-31: I can also reproduce this problem on the new ESXi build 4.1.0.433742.

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