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VMware Workstation & Ubuntu 11.04 : Console Bug

June 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I have moved a new vApp I am building to Ubuntu 11.04 this last week. I had been coding via SSH for the most part. But just recently I noticed that I have been getting a blank console on the vApp. Turns out that doing a kernel upgrade early in the process made a setting in grub that gives a slick look to the boot process not work.

This is a Ubuntu bug with an easy fix:

Get into the VM (using SSH likely) and do the following steps:

  1. Open /etc/grub.d/10_linux
  2. Find and replace GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT vt.handoff=7″‘ with  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”$GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT”
  3. run “sudo update-grub2” and reboot.

Voilà, the console is back.

.nick

Filed Under: Fixes, Life/Work Tagged With: , , , ,

Workstation Upgrade : Network Bug

September 28, 2010 By 2 Comments

[printprofile]

I just recently updated my VMware Workstation software on my UBER-Workstation to 7.1.2 build-301548. The next time I fired up my lab I noticed I was unable to connect to any of my VM’s via my workstation. After making sure firewalls, listeners, and all other possible culprits were not the issue; I finally realized that something had happened with the Workstation upgrade.

My workstation is running Windows 7 x64 and I had just recently patched it also. Well with a little mucking about I found the fix to my exact issue. I had been using local Host-only networks with a virtual adapter for my UBER-workstation added to allow connections to the VM’s on that network.

Well evidently this was broken somehow. After a reboot, restarting VM’s, and all the simple steps I finally found the fix. Go into your Virtual Network Editor (pic 1) and go to each host network you have created. Uncheck the "Connect a host virtual adapter to this network" (pic 2) and click apply. Wait a couple seconds for the adapter to clear from Windows (you can watch the manage adapters page to be sure). Then recheck this same button and it will recreate the adapter. This fixed the issue for me immediately.

Let me know if anyone else ran into this also,

 

*** UPDATE ***
I still had problems with certain Windows 2008 VM’s even after the above. I noticed that the VMware Tools on each VM needed an update with the new Workstation. I updated the tools and after the second reboot they started pinging as well.

*************

.nick

Filed Under: Life/Work, Tools Tagged With: , , , ,

Home Lab Juice : RevoDrive

September 22, 2010 By 2 Comments

I do a lot of work on my home workstation. Because of that I had not pulled the trigger on a laptop SSD unlike 90% of my teammates. This week I have been working on a project that was pushing the edge of what my pair of WD VelociRaptor hard drives could push. I had 9 virtual machines with all kinds of fun stuff going on plus running the regular OS overhead.

RevoDrive_PCIe_SSDSo I was looking around at SSDs and stumbled upon the OCZ RevoDrive. Not something you would put into your laptop but seriously cool way of adding some serious horsepower to a workstation. I  checked the reviews and they basically said that only the Fusion IO cards would outstrip these bad boys one on one. And since I don’t like paying $40 a GB for storage I thought I would give this a go.

Today I received my RevoDrive (got to love Amazon day shipping) and popped it into my workstation. And all I can say is I am in love. Not only is this thing fast but I never realized how loud my VelociRaptors are (now that is a great out-of-context quote) until that stopped being hammered.

For those that like stats here is a ton of benchmarks I ran with IOMeter using 8 outstanding IO/s and a mix of test types (Click for bigger pic).

iops iops_rw

 

Looking at IOps you see what you expect. Tons of throughput for a set of MLC running in a RAID through a PCIe interface. You can also see that true to SSD patterns small random is where the money is at. The write spike about middle of the bottom picture is likely a fluke of the test.

mbps mbps_rw

Great MBps speed with almost 325 MBps peak on large block sequential.

art art_rw

This is by far my favorite sets of graphs. You know what is great about SSD? Linear response times… No hockey stick curve where that last VM makes everything fall over. There is not a single IO that doesn’t respond in less than 2.5ms. I think the SSD & PCIe combo is really effective here.

So if you have seen from the details above I am ecstatic about the new addition to my moneymaker. I did a couple things right off the bat:

  1. Moved pagefile to SSD drive only. I have 12GB of RAM but if I do start to swap it won’t be as rough.
  2. Moved all major IO (see Windows 2k8 / VSA) VM’s over.
  3. Wished I bought a bigger one because I am out of PCIe slots :(

The performance in my home lab is phenomenal now. Using resource monitor I watched my VM disk request response times go from 15-40 ms to <1 ms across the board. And this is with 9 virtual machines running tons of stuff including 4 SQL servers and two VSA’s replicating.

This card does not have TRIM/Garbage collection so we will see how my workload patterns affect performance over time. Supposedly there is a manual TRIM/Garbage collection tool on the horizon. Drop a comment with your configs or questions.

.nick

Filed Under: Tools Tagged With: , , , , ,