As previously discussed, we recently purchased an MD3000i iSCSI SAN from Dell. We are running the “free” VSphere ESXi 4 on 3 hosts. That’s right, no VCenter, no VCB, no VMotion, no SVM. So, how does one best approach moving these VM guests from local storage to our new lovely SAN? Well, we looked into the following possibilities: Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 29% [?]
Well, the time finally came. We bit the bullet and purchased a new Dell PowerEdge R710 and an MD3000i SAN for the office. The R710 will be a new VSphere ESXi 4 host that will take on a bulk of the production VM’s while one of the remaining 2950’s will remain a smaller production host and the third 2950 will be a test and development box.
So you can see the MD3000i with the faceplate off directly below the new R710. I’m tempted to leave the faceplate off so that the executives and visitors see more lights when they look in. For some reason, non-technical people tend to have a first reaction to hardware such that more lights is mo’ better. 
Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 18% [?]
This is just a quick post on another feature of Linodes I really adore. Disk image options allow you to do a number tasks with multiple disk images. One thing that is a huge help for me is the ability to resize a disk image. Now to do this, your linode needs to be powered off.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Today was spent working on creating a Drupal 6 version of a custom Drupal 5 module as part of a Drupal upgrade project. This module is similar to the image_attach module that is a contrib module package with the Image module. The difference is that the module allows you to designate categories for images by content_type and allows for the upload, selection, removal and ordering of images in each “image category”. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 3% [?]
On February 8th, 2010 Linode.com announced the availability of StackScripts. The StackScripts are described as:
StackScripts™ provide a flexible way to customize our distribution templates. They’re very easy to use — find a StackScript, answer its questions, and click deploy. When the deployment is first booted, the script is executed and does its thing. You can even watch its progress by viewing the console.
Popularity: 9% [?]
This video is from Atlanta Drupal User Group (ADUG) member Kent Lester, and his presentation on Open Publish – the Drupal distribution created by Phase2 Technology.
Popularity: 6% [?]
Thanks to this tip on the Taragana blog, I was introduced to the mysqlcheck command. In a pinch, the following command will check, repair and optimize all tables in all databases on your MySQL server instance.
mysqlcheck -u root -p --auto-repair --check --optimize --all-databases
mysqlcheck is available in MySQL 3.23.38 and later.
The official documentation for mysqlcheck says: “The mysqlcheck client performs table maintenance: It checks, repairs, optimizes, or analyzes tables.” Now, this must be run on a MySQL instance that is currently running, unlike the myisamchk tool. So, you may want to stop all access to your instance. If you are using it for websites, perhaps kill HTTPD for a few minutes some other means.
Popularity: 3% [?]
We have a few sites that exist on a MediaTemple DV 3.5 server. We’ve long been concerned about the lack of performance we are getting on this DV versus sites on a smaller Linode.com DV. We are not here to debate that today.
What we have done is to install APC on the MediaTemple DV in order to improve performance to some degree by taking advantage of op_code caching. Now, this is not a silver bullet for performance folks. This is just one piece of a total tuning exercise. Be forewarned.
Popularity: 10% [?]
