Scott Lowe's Blog
What I had hoped to be able to publish today would be an article describing
how to configure and use ESX's software iSCSI initiator as a failover path
for Fibre Channel, so that if the Fibre Channel fabric completely failed VM
traffic would automatically failover to software iSCSI. I thought that this
would be a great, low-cost way to add another layer of redundancy to your
VMware ESX environment. Unfortunately, I can't make it work.
A 200GB LUN visible to ESX over both Fibre Channel (FC) and software iSCSI A
VM, stored on this LUN, running Windows Server 2003 R2
Initial tests led me to believe that it would indeed work. I verified that
both the FC path as well as the iSCSI path were listed as separate paths for
the same LUN. Without placing any load on the VM, I pulled the FC connection
from the back of the server. The VM stayed up, and I was able to ... (more)
Scott Lowe's Blog
One of my projects over the recent holiday was to rebuild the home network.
Working on a home network is a different sort of beast than working on a
network for a company. There are different challenges to be addressed. After
research, I settled on the use of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (”Hardy Heron”) for the
server build.
My primary goals for this “home network rebuild” were the following:
Rebuild the home server with a newer version of Linux, and possibly switch to
a different distribution. Continue to provide DNS, DHCP, HTTP, and HTTP
proxying/content filtering services ... (more)
Scott Lowe's Blog
There appear to be basically two views on how virtualization will affect the
future development of operating systems and computing environments in the
personal computing space. One camp believes that virtualization functionality
will be present within the operating system. The other camp believes it will
be outside the operating system, perhaps in the form of a hypervisor or thin
virtualization layer that resides “below” the OS and governs access to
hardware.
There appear to be basically two views on how virtualization will affect the
future development of opera... (more)
Scott Lowe's Blog
In The Four Horsemen of the Virtualization Security Apocalypse, Chris Hoff
shines a great big spotlight on the dark side of virtualization security (or
virtsec, as its increasingly being known). To quote from Hoff’s
article:
"Short of the notions I’ve discussed previously regarding instantiating
the vSwitches into hardware and loading physical servers with accelerators
and offloaders for security functions, there aren’t a lot of people
talking about this impending set of challenges or the solutions in the short
or long term.
This should be ca... (more)
Scott Lowe's Blog
The way to really view VMware Virtual Datacenter OS (VDC-OS) is not as a
“datacenter OS”, because it’s not intended to provide automation of
non-virtual resources. Instead, look at VDC-OS as a framework. Within this
framework are sets of services that can be extended or modified in very
standardized ways (via APIs and SDKs) to provide different functionality for
the applications running within that framework.
What VMware is working on is an OS for the virtual datacenter, not a virtual
OS for the datacenter. The distinction is important. VDC-OS isn’t intended
to ... (more)
Scott Lowe is a senior engineer with ePlus, a local reseller/VAR in Raleigh, NC, where he specializes in server virtualization, storage, and related enterprise technologies. He has been in the IT field for more than 15 years, starting out with desktop support. Along the way, he has worked as an instructor, a technical trainer and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), systems administrator, IT manager, and as Chief Technology Officer for a small start-up.
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