APC daemon for your UPS

You’ve just purchased a  UPS and realized that it has no support for your current linux operating system.  "Just what am I going to do to power down my server in a power event?" you wondered….

Apcupsd to the rescue
Thanks to the open source community, there is a dependable daemon that runs on your unix based server to monitor events from USB, Serial and even via Network.

This is a nice little script written in perl to monitor incoming signals from your APC device.  It even comes with a neat little feature to trigger other Apcupsd on the network for shutdown events.

I’ve integrated this with our SMS machine by adding in a few lines of code allowing it to send off SMS notifications to us in the event of Power failures.

You can download the daemon here.

VMWare Server 2 is OUT!

The long waited VMWare server 2 has finally grew out from its release candidate status into full production release.  There are 3 versions available from the download site; of which a choice of RPM or a TAR version:

 

VMware Server 2 Version 2.0.0 | 116503 – 09/23/08
Windows	575 MB EXE image
Linux 32bit	534 MB RPM image
Linux 32bit	535 MB TAR image
Linux 64bit	503 MB RPM image
Linux 64bit	505 MB TAR image

Downloading the files would require registration which provides a license allowing users to use up to 10 windows/linux host combined.

I just can’t wait to see what enhancement they’ve made since the last candidate release; it was really a hassle from the installation process all the way till removal.  Nothing seemed to work!

I’ve prepared a Dell Optiplex 755 for this test and had installed CentOS5 64bit as the base Os.  Installation looks straight forward with the RPM build, looking good with no obstacles throughout the process.

This version works much better then I’ve expected; it allows VLAN support(via Host network driver) which was only possible with any-any-update in the earlier version.  Processor affinity doesn’t seem to work and its still limited to 2 vCPU per guest. Provisioning reserved ram for guests is not working properly in the VI Client.

I’m going to leave this box in our server room and convince our developers to start running test machines on it.  Will update once I’ve gotten more stuff.. hmm maybe a IO test?  Sounds evil… lets try.

Tips:
You can access to server via the VI client by adding the port number 8333 at the back of the IP address.

Inside EMC 3-20

EMC guys came over to our office the other day and claim that one of the SP is faulty even though there were no amber lights indicating the fault.

Unisys was the appointed service vendor over here and during the hardware replacement, I managed to take a few snapshots of the unit.

 

As seen from the picture above, the iSCSI module is connected to box via a daughterboard.  I supposed the CPU is right underneath the big cooper heat-sink but I haven’t got a chance to remove the heat-sink to reveal the CPU make and model.

One thing for sure, this thing uses 2 x 1Gb DDR2 ECC rams and with 2 more slots to spare.  These rams will be used for both the Read/Write cache and adding in extras will boost the performance significantly.  Having said that, I’m beginning to wonder the difference between the CX3-20 and the Top-Of-The range model CX3-80 which is sharing the same chassis; izzit just the ram or what?

Shrinking VMFS in ESX

http://spininfo.homelinux.com/news/Virtual_Machine_and_Guest_OS/2007/04/19/How_to_shrink_or_grow_(extend)_a_virtual_machines_disk

Now where is that command to shrink VMFS files in ESX3.5? Well, sadly there is no such command as yet and the method which I used is to shrink it first and then clone over to another smaller VMFS.

SPININFO, the site above provides great step by step information and solutions for resizing VMFS; do drop over and have a look.

Software which I’ve used for this purpose:

a. Gparted    – To resize the partition in the VMFS
b. Clonezilla  – To duplicate the data into a smaller VMFS 

1. Create an additional Virtual Harddrive with the new size in the guest server which you would need to shrink.

2. Using Gparted, shrink the partition to the desired size.

3. Boot up the Machine once into the OS to ensure everything is working. *skipping this step will cause cloning to fail later on.

4. Using Clonezilla, clone the repartitioned drive to the new harddrive.  *Under clonezilla, uncheck the default -g-auto option. Choose Y to clone the Boot Loader.

 

Done.  Don’t forget to perform some test like scandisk to check for disk/data integrity.