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Posts in Virtualization
Running Linux applications in Solaris Linux branded zones
While playing around with the latest version of Nevada this week, I decided to see how well Linux branded zones work. In case your not following the Sun development efforts, Linux branded zones allow you to run Linux ELF executables unmodified on Solaris hosts. This is pretty interesting, and I definitely wanted to take this technology for a test drive. After reading through the documentation in the brandz community, I BFU'ed my Nevada machine to the latest nightly build, and installed the packages listed on the brandz download page…
$ read more →Opensolaris now supports Xen Dom0
If you've been following the Xen movement, you might be interested in Sun's announcement that Solaris can now operate as Dom0 (the controlling domain). To celebrate the availability of Dom0 support, the Solaris Xen community has written several in-depth technical posts: Migrating Xen domains to new servers Saving and restoring a DomU Detailed description of how Xen handles page faults The current Solaris Xen implementation is definitely not production quality, and is missing some key features such as hardware supported virtualization and network checksum offload. Dom0 support is definitely exciting news, and will hopefully spark some additional interest in Solaris.
$ read more →Viewing VMWare ESX server configuration data from the command line
While poking around the ESX 3.0 service console last week, I came across the amazingly useful esxcfg-info utility. This utility can be used to extract statistics and configuration data for the network devices, hardware and storage that are attached to a server. To view the network configuration, you can invoke esxcfg-info with the "-n" option: To view the hardware present in a server, esxcfg-info can be invoked with the "-w" option: And for all of the storage folks out there, esxcfg-info provides the "-s" option to print the storage configuration: There are some other useful options, but I will let folks investigate those when they play around with this super useful utility.
$ read more →Viewing NIC information from the ESX server CLI
VMWare ESX server has a bunch of command line utilties to display and modify the ESX server configuration, and the vast majority of them are buried in the /usr/sbin directory. One useful utility is esxcfg-nics, which displays the NIC type, the virtual NIC name, and the current configuration of each NIC in a server: If you haven't had a chance to play with ESX server 3.X, I highly recommend pinging your VMWare sales team to get an eval.
$ read more →Viewing multipathing information with VMWare ESX Server 3.X
When fibre channel is used to connect a host to storage, multple paths (e.g. cables) can be used to allow the system to load-balanced fibre channel frames over one or more links. This allows a host to transparently handle link failures, and allows your host to keep chugging along when you perform SAN maintenance or a GBIC or SFP fails. To manage the available fibre channel paths, you need to use a multipathing solution (e.g., Sun's MPXIO, EMC's powerpath, or Veritas' DMP, etc.) on the server…
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