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Just when I thought I had done a pretty complete tuneup on the storage path from Veeam backup to an Iomega IX2-200 NAS, two things came up I wanted to test. The first one (why didn’t I think of that) is to set compression to “low”, saving CPU cycles and hopefully getting more throughput. The second one was starting a second job on the same Veeam VM to the same target storage.

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In my quest to get the most out of my home lab setup when it comes to backup speeds to my IX2-200 (see Veeam Backup part 1- Optimizing IX2-200 backup speeds) today I will configure jumbo frames on my environment, and I will show how each of the possible connection options to the IX2-200 can be configured for jumbo frames.

A small history on network frames, and especially the Jumbo Ones

There are many stories going round about jumbo frames. Some say it is not worth while, others say it is the difference between day and night. But what are jumbo frames in the first place? Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to Veeam’s Happy Holidays gift, I now have a license for several Veeam products. The one I really wanted to try in my home lab was Veeam Backup and Replication.

In this blogpost, I will try various ways to connect the Veeam appliance to my Iomega IX2-200 NAS box. This setup is very tiny indeed, but it clearly shows the options you have and how they perform compared to each other. Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I had another one of those great little problems. A VM refused to have its snapshot removed. Not because the snapshot was too big, it just failed.

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Since I see “top 10” lists appear everywhere, I decided to follow in line and produce my own top 10 posts of the year 2010:

1. Performance impact when using VMware snapshots
2. Throughput part 2: RAID types and segment sizes
3. Throughput part 3: Data alignment
4. Throughput part 1: The Basics
5. vscsiStats into the third dimension: Surface charts!
6. VMware HA, slotsizes and constraints
7. Breaking VMware Views sound barrier with Sun Open Storage (part 1)
8. Ye Olde Snapshot
9. VMware Infrastructure Resource Settings Sagas
10. Scaling VMware hot-backups (using esXpress)

My view on things

It is great to see what interests people the most. Read the rest of this entry »

The year 2010 certainly has been a very restless year for me. Lost some dear people, gained some new life around me too. The company I worked for, Dataman (www.dataman.nl) went bankrupt. I agreed to be part of a merger where employees from Dataman would merge with iTricity (www.itricity.nl).
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For those of you (like me 🙂 ) who are dying to see… The first episode of Chad’s World is online! Check it out here: Chad’s World

The issue mentioned in one of my previous blogposts (see ESXi and EMC CLARiiON registration issue) now has a workaround! The problem is that the host profiles of vSphere mix up the vmk0 and vmk1 interfaces, after which the CLARiiON tries to communicate through the wrong VMkernel interface with ESXi.

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Hi all,

I just uploaded a video of my Dutch VMUG 2010 event presentation. No audio, but just a quick fly through the slides:
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