Alaska

Alaska
Originally uploaded by jmourik

Jan

Sitka, ak

Sitka, ak
Originally uploaded by jmourik

Jan

Residence Inn

Residence Inn
Originally uploaded by jmourik

Virtual Machines II

The FreeNas option I talked about in my previous post about virtual machines seemed like a fun thing to try. So I downloaded a FreeNas VMware image and added it to my inventory. After setting it up and adding a 10Gb disk, I wanted to auto mount it in my Linux VM. Took me a bit of googling, but I got it done:

> mkdir /u01/freenas_10gb

Then I added this line to /etc/fstab (see http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/ar01s04.html ):

10.10.10.10:/mnt/FreeNas_10Gb /u01/freenas_10gb nfs rw 0 0

where 10.10.10.10 is the ip address of my FreeNas server (VM). after reboot I was happy to see:

[root@rac1 ~]# df -k
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 16067440 7416848 7826604 49% /
/dev/sda1 147764 11940 128195 9% /boot
tmpfs 1037800 0 1037800 0% /dev/shm
10.10.10.10:/mnt/FreeNas_10Gb 10154144 1920 9339904 1% /u01/freenas_10gb

[root@rac1 ~]# ls /u01/freenas_10gb
FreeNAS-SUG.pdf

Nice!

Virtual Machines

Lately I've been playing with virtual machines a bit. I've installed VMware Server on both my laptop and desktop, and VirtualBox just on my laptop. Both these products are easy to use, and haven't given me any problems with the host OS so far. I'm running XP on the laptop, Vista 64bit on the desktop. I must admit I favor VirtualBox a bit though, mainly because it seems to work also when I'm not on the network. In that case VMware refuses to start my virtual machines. But maybe that's also my fault. Also VirtualBox seems to be a bit faster on my laptop. Also, the shared folder feature in VirtualBox is a big plus to me, this is something VMware doesn't want to give us for free. The OS installed in the VMs is Oracle Enterprise Linux.
I did some benchmarking this week using some old unix benchmark tool, Unixbench . It was fast to download and easy to run, you see. These are the results:

As you can see, VirtualBox ran 15~20% faster on my laptop. Also, hardware virtualization did help this benchmark. Quite a bit!

The drawback of VirtualBox is that it doesn't support shared disks. I'm setting up a virtual Oracle RAC cluster on my desktop, so the two VMs need to be able to share disks. So that's the main reason I'm using VMware. I guess I could use VirtualBox and add a third VM running FreeNAS. Hmmm, that might be fun! After all, I do have a quad core :-)

One thing I noticed on my laptop, with hardware virtualization enabled (in the bios), XP hangs when I try to put it into hibernation. This works fine when I turn it off.

Btw, I just ran unixbench in both my VMs at the same time, and the final scores were 224.2 and 228.0! Not bad!

Bayou Bend

Bayou Bend
Originally uploaded by jmourik

Symposium time!

Symposium time!
Originally uploaded by jmourik