Hardware

Raw Device Mapping of local SATA disks on ESXi

       680 words, 4 minutes

My brand new ESXi machine is a “standard” Intel Z68 powered PC. It has three disks inside: two SSD and a SATA disk. My idea is to use the first SSD to host some VM (production VM, virtual ESXi, virtual Hyper-V…) and to connect the two other disks to a FreeNAS virtual instance. This enables to present a ZFS storage to the virtual hypervisors. Here’s the way to attach two of the SATA drives to a single virtual machine using RDM technics. BTW, I’m using ESXi v5.0.0.

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The new box is here and ready

       102 words, 1 minutes

I ordered bits from everywhere in the world to get a new, quiet and fresh box. This idea is to replace the “old” Dell XPS M1330 with something better suited to virtualization. And here are the specs : H3.S Fanless Chassis, with 80W Open Frame Fanless PSU Zotac Z68-ITX WiFi (Z68ITX-A-E) Intel Sandy Bridge Core i5 2500T 2.5GHz 6MB 45W 32nm Quad Core G.Skill Kit Extreme3 2 x 8 Go PC12800 Ripjaws X CAS10 Samsung SSD (MMDOE28G5MPP) M4-CT064M4SSD2Crucial m4 2.5-inch (M4-CT064M4SSD2) WD Scorpio Blue (WDC WD2500BEVT-7) And here’s the baby pic:

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Transfer OpenBSD from one disk to another

       364 words, 2 minutes

For some reason, I need to switch my main (and only) disk running OpenBSD. As it is a production machine, I want to do it fast and painless. The system will go from the internal SSD disk to an external USB FlashVoyagerGT stick. Yeah, quite weird, but this is temporary :) Anyway, here are the directions.

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Quick speed test on ICYBOX IB-RD2262 USEb

       496 words, 3 minutes

As you may have noticed, I have installed a ICYBOX IB-RD2262 USEb on my MacBook Pro . It contains two 500GB SATA disks. You can either use the “RAID Master” provided tools to create the RAID system or use the Mac OS X native RAID system. The main difference is that, using RAID Master, you’ll only see the rendered RAID disk in “Disk Util” ; whereas you will see both disks and the RAID system if you use the standard OS X configuration. I wanted to check if there were any performance difference between native OS X configuration and RAID0/SPAN using RAID Master. Maybe using RAID Master, you benefit some hardware RAID system…

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Use an HSDPA 3G USB adapter with the Asus Transformer TF101

       823 words, 4 minutes

My Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 is quite nice to take on a ride. The only issue is that when there’s no WiFi around, there’s no Internet at all. I used to have a Novatel MiFi 2352 3G hotspot but it died. All I have left is a data-only SIM card and an Huawei E220 USB modem. By default, even with the dock keyboard, plugin the HSDPA USB adapter into the Transformer won’t lead far. But since I can root the Pad and install an alternate ROM, there are every likelihood that I can manage to access Internet via the 3G modem.

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