General Information on the bin

The Changing Face of Enterprise Support

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Now let me preface this post by saying…

I am writing this article from my professional experiences, inside of a software company which provided enterprise support for its products, as well as from the perspective of the Enterprise Customer. I am intentionally discarding all experiences with support as a home user, and even as a small business owner. This is specific to Enterprise Support, consumer support plays by different rules.

Adventures in ZFS: Time Slider is not Expiring Snapshots on Imported Zpools

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

A few days ago someone contacted me with an interesting issue with regards to the ZFS automatic snapshots, facilitatedby the time slider service.

The Situation

OpenSolaris machine with zpool exported. Time slider was working prior to export.
Solaris 11 Express fresh install with zpool imported.

The Symptoms

Basically the core of the issue was that the zpool was from an OpenSolaris machine, in lieu of doing an upgrade from OpenSolaris to Solaris 11 Express, the zpool was exported and imported into a machine which was already running Solaris 11 Express. Upon the import new snapshots were being created by the time slider service however old ones were not being expired. You can still manually delete snapshots.

Adventures in ZFS: Faulted Cache Devices

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000

We recently had an issue with Crucial M4 Solid State Disks when using them with ZFS on Solaris 11 Express (snv_151a). Basically the disks were showing a whole bunch of write errors and had been “FAULTED” by ZFS. Now to make this problem even worse when we tried to zfs clear them it locked up my SSH session, as well as subsequent sessions, it would allow me to initiate subsequent sessions (and authenticate), however would not deliver me to the prompt. Additionally when I went onto the console if I ran a “zfs list, zpool list, or zpool status” it would lock up the shell every time. When I say lock up, I mean lock up, no CTRL + C or Z or anything. So since these devices were cache devices only this wasn’t the end of the world for us.

So You Want to Learn ZFS Part One

Mon, 04 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Enterprise Storage is currently broken. IT departments big and small spend way too much money on completely ineffective storage solutions which only partially fulfil the companies storage need. All the while having to justify massive expenditures to the business which do not meet the need. Essentially IT departments everywhere have become storage sales reps, sure we work with vendors who provide us with quotes, but when the rubber meets the road it is the IT department which is selling the storage to the business. If any of you have ever been in this position as I have and literally felt sick to your stomach because you knew it was all wrong, then this article is for you. This article does not provide an Enterprise Storage cure-all. What it does provide is an interesting look at a solution which really revolutionises the entire Enterprise Storage model. More importantly it allows you the flexibility, features, and densities needed to make it far superior to any modern day Enterprise Storage solution. Also it is pretty darn cheap.

Linux-KVM: Migrating Hyper-V VHD Images to KVM

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000

I have always been a big fan of Hyper-V, and was actually a Virtualization MVP 2 years in a row. However recently I haven’t been able to get past the really poor support for Linux on the Hyper-V platform. We run a large number of hypervisors in our international sales offices (15+) and have a need to run both Linux and Windows on them. This has necessitated our switch to Linux-KVM as their Windows support is far better than Hyper-V’s Linux support. As such with an upcoming trip planned to our European offices I have been planning exactly how our migration will look, of course the first iteration of this plan consisted of me deploying replacement VMs on the KVM stack then migrating to the VMs individually. Though this plan was lengthy and cumbersome it would work.