My Dream System (I think)

[joeschmuck]

Well I did remove some software but since I cannot find a place to download the original megaraid_scsi driver, I guess I'll need to do a fresh install. Time to backup my data first (this will take forever with how slow the drives are now).

 

[Black Ninja]

Well I did remove some software but since I cannot find a place to download the original megaraid_scsi driver, I guess I'll need to do a fresh install. Time to backup my data first (this will take forever with how slow the drives are now).

Exactly. Think how rewarding will be when everything is working and you have the redundancy.:)
Swaping failed drive is much easier than with freenas, you won't need to do anything but physically swapping the drive, and your system will keep running in then mean time which equals happy family, remember ?:)

 

[joeschmuck]

Well I have neve made a backup of my ESXi configuration so now it's time to figure that out since I don't feel like re-configuring everything again, at least not tonight. Well I'm not doing anything more tonight. Maybe tomorrow or Friday.

 

[Mlovelace]

Well I have neve made a backup of my ESXi configuration so now it's time to figure that out since I don't feel like re-configuring everything again, at least not tonight. Well I'm not doing anything more tonight. Maybe tomorrow or Friday.

You'll need to install vsphere powercli on your PC, then follow the instructions in the KB.

https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/PowerCLI/PowerCLI41U1/html/Get-VMHostFirmware.html

 

[joeschmuck]

You'll need to install vsphere powercli on your PC, then follow the instructions in the KB.

https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/PowerCLI/PowerCLI41U1/html/Get-VMHostFirmware.html

Thanks. I'll be doing that tomorrow. Time for bed so I can wake up in 5 hours and go to work.

 

[Black Ninja]

Well I have neve made a backup of my ESXi configuration so now it's time to figure that out since I don't feel like re-configuring everything again, at least not tonight. Well I'm not doing anything more tonight. Maybe tomorrow or Friday.

I never do esxi configuration backup. Like somebody said earlier ( I think that was jgreco) there isn't much to lose in esxi configuration reinstall. Your VMs are the one that take time to install and setup, but you have a backup of those and they are ready for instant deployment. The esxi itself I only set the ip, ntp time settings, and rename my vswitches. Everything else has to do the VM's themselves, unless there is much more complicated setup you have to do with the esxi itself.

 

[Black Ninja]

Thanks. I'll be doing that tomorrow. Time for bed so I can wake up in 5 hours and go to work.

Do you wake up very early in the morning ?

 

[joeschmuck]

Do you wake up very early in the morning ?

I'm typically at work between 4:45 and 5:15 AM each day. Some days I get lots of sleep (6 or more hours) but normally I get about 5 hours of sleep. I get to recover on the weekends when I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 7 or 8 AM. I'm still not old enough to take a nape during the afternoon but there are days where it would be nice I think.

The esxi itself I only set the ip, ntp time settings, and rename my vswitches. Everything else has to do the VM's themselves, unless there is much more complicated setup you have to do with the esxi itself.

Yea, guess you are correct for the most part. I do have all the pass-thru stuff to configure, and configure it properly of course so the VMs do work right. Configure the NUT (upsmon) settings as well. It's not a lot but a backup and recovery would be nice.

 

[joeschmuck]

I went and reinstalled ESXi but I want to do some performance tests on the hard drives before I start altering things. I already know that the RAID controller is much slower than the MB SATA ports alone but I want to find out by how much and then what happens once I install the LSI driver. With any luck nothing will change. So now I need to figure out how to test the internal speed of the drive in the machine and I'm sure it's gonna be easy once I look it up. I'm thinking just installing Ubuntu in a VM and then run the Disk utility for speed.

 

[joeschmuck]

And an important update with respect to ESXi, my Supermicro Motherboard (may apply to others), and UEFI vs. Legacy Boot Options.

So when I first installed ESXi, I had a monitor connected to the system. All was fine. Now I'm installing ESXi and no monitor, I'm using IPMI only. Well while ESXi is loading, if you are using UEFI, there will be a message "Multiboot could not setup the video subsystem" and the screen will go blank. Well I could not find a solution on Google (what a shocker) but just knew that I've gotten this to work in the past. So I set my boot options to Legacy Only and it was like magic. Now I do not get that same error message and I can see the screen via IPMI.

 

[Black Ninja]

So I set my boot options to Legacy Only and it was like magic

There you go. I haven't even try to install ESXI in UEFI mode , but that's just me I don't like the UEFI in a first place.

 

[joeschmuck]

Testing with and without the LSIprovider installed. This is only for my two SSDs attached the the Dell PERC H310 controller in a RAID1 setup. The test was done in a default Ubuntu Try session and a 17GB VM drive. All tests were repeated several time and ESXi was reinstalled several times because I couldn't believe the results. To summarize, installing the LSIprovider file slows the system down considerably. So I can live with this for now. I will need to find another way to check the drive status, maybe once a month I will need to jump into the PERC H310 card to check the status manually.

Code:

Without the LSIprovider installed:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test.dat bs=1024k count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 76.1029 s, 138 MB/s

dd if=test.dat of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 26.4325 s, 397 MB/s

With the LSIprovider installed:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test.dat bs=1024k count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 130.47 s, 80.4 MB/s

dd if=test.dat of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 253.054 s, 41.4 MB/s

There you go. I haven't even try to install ESXI in UEFI mode , but that's just me I don't like the UEFI in a first place.

Yea, I don't like UEFI myself. I'm sure it has it's purpose.

 

[Black Ninja]

Testing with and without the LSIprovider installed. This is only for my two SSDs attached the the Dell PERC H310 controller in a RAID1 setup. The test was done in a default Ubuntu Try session and a 17GB VM drive. All tests were repeated several time and ESXi was reinstalled several times because I couldn't believe the results. To summarize, installing the LSIprovider file slows the system down considerably. So I can live with this for now. I will need to find another way to check the drive status, maybe once a month I will need to jump into the PERC H310 card to check the status manually.

Code:

Without the LSIprovider installed:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test.dat bs=1024k count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 76.1029 s, 138 MB/s

dd if=test.dat of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 26.4325 s, 397 MB/s

With the LSIprovider installed:
dd if=/dev/zero of=test.dat bs=1024k count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 130.47 s, 80.4 MB/s

dd if=test.dat of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10000
10000+0 records in
10000+0 records out
10485760000 bytes (10 GB) copied, 253.054 s, 41.4 MB/s

That is very interesting. I would expect that "megaraid_sas" driver was causing the slow down not the "lsiprovider", since first one is actually THE DRIVER while second is for monitoring. But I already installed both when I notice the slow down and never got a chance to try each each one individually cause I have another computer disaster that I have to take care of first.

Have you tried with each driver individually to test which one is the one exactly responsible for the slow down ?

P.S. I wish I was able to do testing parallel with you, but my disaster I have to fix first.

 

[Black Ninja]

Yea, I don't like UEFI myself. I'm sure it has it's purpose.

For other people: for Windows 10 and things like that, that I have nothing to do with.

For me: the only thing I use it for is to flash controllers. It's has a great shell utility build in for that purpose.

 

[Dice]

I'm typically at work between 4:45 and 5:15 AM each day. Some days I get lots of sleep (6 or more hours) but normally I get about 5 hours of sleep. I get to recover on the weekends when I go to bed at midnight and wake up at 7 or 8 AM. I'm still not old enough to take a nape during the afternoon but there are days where it would be nice I think.

Damn I wish I could function on similar amounts of sleep. I imagine how much more stuff I could get done if that was the case x)

 

[joeschmuck]

Have you tried with each driver individually to test which one is the one exactly responsible for the slow down ?

I have not tested that and I'm likely not to since without the LSIprovider I would not be able to monitor the hardware in the first place, as I understand it. Maybe I need a different LSIprovider file? But I've wasted enough time on this and it's time to just call it a day. I think the goal would be to get an email if there were something wrong but that doesn't seem to be an option for the setup I'm using.

I will be rebuilding my Sophos VM to make the hard drive smaller, from 80GB down to 40GB becasue after all this time running Sophos, I've never used more than 10% of the drive. I can always increase it's size if needed but I have found out that I cannot shrink a flat file and that ESXi cannot create a thin file:(.

I also need to finish restoring my configuration and such. Today with it being one of the hottest days in my area, I'll stay inside for the most part and work on the ESXi server.

 

[Black Ninja]

I can always increase it's size if needed but I have found out that I cannot shrink a flat file and that ESXi cannot create a thin file:(.

Oh I learn that the hard way. I had to redo all my VM's from 500GB hdd to 40GB cause I used to use think provisioning on esxi so it didn't matter how big is the file since Esxi thin provisioning will only use what is actually used, but when I need to use thick and expand the 500GB there is a problem with space.
Bottom line is: yes it's extremely easy to expand small hdd to bigger if late needed ,but it's almost impossible to reliable shrink it back. Having a 2 virtual hdds one for os one for data is also good option for some cases where you keep your os on small virtual hdd and add later additional virtual hdd , that could be as big as you want. And if you don't need so mush space you can just remove the second virtual hdd and just leave the os virtual hdd which will be smaller , just what your os needed.

 

[joeschmuck]

I am considering a change again, this time maybe a pair of cheap 120GB SSDs as my ESXi boot drives and not having any other data on them. But who am I kidding, if there is free space to do something with, I'll use it. I just can't help myself.

Just got back from taking my daughter out for lunch so now I can start working on the ESXi machine again and return it to it's full glory. Once that is done I will need to learn more about VLANs and see if my RT-AC68W router which is currently setup as an AP, can be operated as a VLAN. I want to make two separate wireless networks but still share the network printer on the main network. I have some steep obstacles to overcome and lots of Google searching in order to make it happen. I'm thinking I may need to just buy a new dedicated AP that can handle VLANs but that is not what I want of course.

So time to restore the ESXi machine to it's full functionality. BTW, the NUT (upsmon) file, even though it was updated it still requires a user to force ESXi updates once it's installed. The othyer option is to remove the NUT client and then update ESXi (my preferred method so far).

 

[Black Ninja]

I am considering a change again, this time maybe a pair of cheap 120GB SSDs as my ESXi boot drives and not having any other data on them.

You know what I do: To preserve my esxi boot drive healthy from constant reads/writes my VM's do I don't place VM's on them too. But I place all my ISO files for various OS on the boot drive. That way I can put some good use of the space there and in the same time , not involve them in the heavy loads that VM's puts on them, since they are used only occasionally.

 

[joeschmuck]

You know what I do: To preserve my esxi boot drive healthy from constant reads/writes my VM's do I don't place VM's on them too. But I place all my ISO files for various OS on the boot drive. That way I can put some good use of the space there and in the same time , not involve them in the heavy loads that VM's puts on them, since they are used only occasionally.

I like the way you think! ;)

EDIT: However my Sophos will still be on the boot device because it's mirrored with the RAID card and the entire purpose of the RAID card was to ensure the internet functionality remains operational at all costs. Also, FreeNAS will be on the same drive too, just because it doesn't use much space and it is also valuable to me, well my data is valuable. I don't need any other VMs on the boot device.