Category Archives: Technical

Configuring DNAT for Google DNS servers on Technicolor routers

Howdy all,

Stole the commands from: https://support.unlocator.com/customer/portal/articles/1501508-how-to-set-up-technicolor-router-for-chromecast

Add static routes for google dns servers Code:
nat mapadd intf=LocalNetwork type=napt outside_addr=8.8.4.4 inside_addr=192.168.1.254 outside_port=53 inside_port=53
nat mapadd intf=LocalNetwork type=napt outside_addr=8.8.8.8 inside_addr=192.168.1.254 outside_port=53 inside_port=53

save!
saveall

This will make sure all requests for Google’s DNS servers will be redirected to the router (which could have some other DNS servers, maybe some SmartDNS servers?).

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Yeah…the future of vCloud Director

Howdy,

I’ve been working with the vCloud Director for some time now. Now, late last year I started hearing some rumors that the future for the said product wasn’t all that bright.

Meh, I said. VMware won’t kill this product, It’s used by service providers and enterprises around the globe !

After reading loads of blogs and articles I came to the conclusion that the product would be staying with us for a long, long time.

Great I said – Let’s put our weight behind it and tell the world how awesome it is !

Boy was I wrong. Well…..at least I felt like VMware had thrown a snowball in the face of all the smaller service providers running vCloud.

The vCloud Director will be available for service providers for foreseeable future. However it will end up being “headless”, meaning that the web front is going away. Instead we will have the APIs to create our own interface on top of the vCloud Director.

I’m not sure when the product will be EoL’ed for enterprise customers. But vCAC would be the product they should be looking at instead.

The good thing is that most of the larger providers already have written their own interface. And there are even 3 or more commercial front ends available right now.

The bad thing is that the smaller ones will either have to write their own front end, buy a front end or start looking into other products.

Anyway – VMware: Not cool bro….not cool !

Maybe this would be the right time to start looking at an OpenStack powered front end for vSphere ?

Bgrds,
Finnzi

The death of vCloud Director have been greatly exaggerated !

Howdy,

Just saw this blog at blogs.vmware.com about the future of vCloud Director.

I had heard some rumors from the field (and the internetz) that vCAC would take over for the vCloud Director in the near future.

However it seems that vCloud Director will keep on going strong and the vCAC will be marketed towards the enterprises. Which is actually pretty cool I think.

At some point these products will probably collapse as one (or be built from pretty much the same code base).

Just found this blog interesting, especially after hearing about the death of the vCD 😉

Bgrds,
Finnzi

VMware: Datastore Clusters, StorageDRS and Thin Provisioning

Howdy all,

I recently migrated some VMs to use Thin Provisioned VMDKs since they had been provisioned with way too much diskspace. Our current setup only uses stand-alone VMFS volumes so it is a manual process to migrate the machines between datastores if and when the datastores are almost full. So I started thinking about datastore clusters (which I think are a pretty cool thing). How would this be managed in datastore clusters ?

After spending large amount of time googling and reading up on vSphere documentation I was still not 100% sure on how this worked exactly. So I sent a message to Larus Hjartarson (@lhjartarson).

Of course he had the answer 🙂

So – I decided to write this here so I would at least remember this:

StorageDRS will monitor the disk space. You choose the high-watermark for the datastore cluster. You also choose the watermark for how much would be gained from moving a VMDK from datastore X to Y.
StorageDRS will then monitor the datastore cluster every 8 hours (or any given time you configured). If it finds that datastore X or Y is nearing high-watermark and gain X percentage by migrating VMDKs to another datastore in the cluster it will either notify you or take action by migrating the VMDKs (by default it only notifies you).

Now, let’s go implement datastore clusters !

Bgrds,
Finnzi

PernixData FVP v1.0

Howdy all,

PernixData just released version 1.0 of the much awaited FVP. It’s a host based read/write caching solution for the VMware ESXi hypervisor.

What this means in basic terms that you can have a cluster of ESXi hosts, each with a PCIe flash card (capable of hundreds of thousands of IOPS) and those flash cards will do read/write caching for your VM’s that sit on your EMC/IBM/InsertWhatEverSanVendorHere based datastores.

The list price is 7500$ for each host (Unlimited VMs) – compare that to buying SSDs for EasyTier, FAST Cache etc and I bet this is the cheaper solution….really ! 🙂

I don’t have a environment where I can test this, but please, check out this video by Jason Nash where he shows in a quick way how to install the PernixData solution and get it working in a already-running ESXi environment.

Also – Please check out Frank Denneman’s blog to get some more technical info on how PernixData FVP works….this could be the next big thing in virtual environments ! 🙂

Here is also a quick’n’dirty version on how PernixData came to be.

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Illumos – A project worth betting your stuff on ?

Howdy all,

I have been spending quite a bit of time reading up on Illumos lately due to my interest in Nexentastor. After seeing OpenSolaris die due to Oracle’s closing of the Solaris source code I thought most of the community would probably never touch it again. Which I thought was sad, even though I have never really like Solaris. But that is mostly due to the fact that I have never had enough cause to spend my time learning enough about it.

But Solaris is a very good operating system. No one can deny this.

Enter Illumos. A source code distribution that was forked from OpenSolaris that plays a central role in quite a number of products. SmartOS, Nexentastor, OmniOS and others are now all backed by the project. And the companies behind those projects keep committing new stuff to Illumos. That is awesome !

So, open source ZFS will live on. Which means we will see new features being implemented into ZFS (and other Solaris components) in Illumos.

Take a look at this talk here.

My point here is simple. Illumos is here to stay and you can be sure that those products that are backed by Illumos are built up
on something that ain’t going nowhere !

Prove me wrong and I’ll buy you a beer if you happen to be in Hafnarfjordur, Iceland sometime !

Bgrds,
Finnzi

Nexentastor Enterprise – Quite an interesting product !

Howdy all,

Lately I’ve been researching SAN storage (Let’s face it…I loooove storage;)). Not exactly for any special project but we had a meeting with a HP service provider here in Iceland. We were shown some 3Par slides, prices etc. I gotta give those guys some credit….I think the 3Par StoreServ 7000 is a brilliant product. There….I said it.

However I also starting reading up on Nexentastor Enterprise. Where have I been for the last years !
I got the “pleasure” of inheriting a Nexenta Community Edition box in a previous job. Man….I always disliked that box quite a bit. Never mind that….However after reading up on Nexentastor Enterprise Edition I wish I had known anything…anything at all about that product ! I would have switched over in a jiffy.

For those that don’t know anything about Nexentastor it is a software distribution (Based on Illumos kernel packaged with the Debian packaging tools) that runs on commodity hardware. It can offer iSCSI, NFS or FC based storage from everything from SATA to high end SAS drives. Just grab some (supported) JBODS, make sure you are running a supported firmware and some HBA and NICS and you are good to go. It can use SSD/Flash disks for a read and write caching (L2ARC/ZIL) and can push amazing amounts of IOPS/Mbps from cheap hardware.

Hopefully I will be able to test a Nexentastor installation on enterprise grade hardware soon enough to get some feel for how it performs as well as to see how the HA features work.

If this thing flies as high as Nexenta and some partners tell me then the good old enterprise storage vendors might have to start worrying about those guys, at least it looks like a killer product !

Check out the Nexenta webpage.

Bgrds,
Finnzi