VMware has a nice feature where you can add memory and CPUs on the fly without rebooting the server. It works like a charm in Windows, but it did not work out of the box in Linux.
Jan
21
2012
Memory hotplug in Linux
Jan
21
2012
Ubuntu boot issues
One issue I ran into while upgrading from Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 was the infamous “nuking initramfs contents: directory not empty”. At that time I did not do much about it as the previous kernel worked fine. However, today my router refused to boot any of the installed kernels. As the issue has been there since 2.6.38-11-server, it was about time to figure out what was wrong.
Oct
03
2011
Playing around with Citrix XenServer
I recently had the pleasure of playing around with Citrix XenServer/XenCenter. I tried to mimic another setup based upon VMware to compare features and see whether we could use XenServer instead of V Mware. Although it might not be a fair comparison since VMware is at least 2-3 times more expensive, I have become a bit spoiled with VMware’s enterprise features and expect the competition to provide the same features. Anyways, since XenServer 6.0 is just out, it was about time to take another look at it.
Aug
22
2011
Aug
16
2011
Aug
09
2011
Dirty mod_cache hack
Let us say that you have a couple of Apache HTTPd servers in front and a number of machines running Windows IIS in the backend, all connected through a number of load balanced addresses. Say that said setup is running Apache HTTPd 1.3.x, which is getting pretty old, and that you want to upgrade it to 2.2.x. What could possibly go wrong?
Aug
07
2011
Getting WordPress to behave
First of all, a little disclaimer: I believe that WordPress is a nice Open Source project – and it is awesome that they are giving it away for free. It makes it easy for anyone to publish content on the internet. However, it has a couple of issues that makes it a bit of an issue to use on high-volume sites. Here I will present a couple of tricks to make it behave a bit better.
Aug
07
2011
Aug
07
2011
Installing ESXi 4.1 from an USB stick
As I wrote in the previous post, I recently bought a mini-iTX card with an Intel Core i3 to replace my aging firewall/router. It so happens that it fully supports VMware ESXi as well, so I loaded it up and are running the router/firewall as a virtual machine. Now, installing VMware ESXi 4.1 from an USB stick was a bit of a problem and it was not that well documented on the Internet neither. So, here are my notes on how to install ESXi 4.1 from an USB stick.
Aug
07
2011
Whitebox ESXi
I remember the first time I got my hands on VMware ESXi. It was the 3.5 version and it quickly became apparent to me that this was the feature. Long gone was the chubby ESX COS which I used before. Of course, having a full COS (Linux) had its benefits, but it did little to simplify the use if virtualization technology. It required a lot of configuration (especially when things went bad), and, since it was a fully working Linux distro, we had to patch it very often to reduce the number of security threats.
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