General :: Best Filesystem Choices For NFS Storing VMware Disk Images?
May 17, 2010
Currently we use an iSCSI SAN as storage for several VMware ESXi servers. I am investigating the use of an NFS target on a Linux server for additional virtual machines. I am also open to the idea of using an alternative operating system (like OpenSolaris) if it will provide significant advantages.What Linux-based filesystem favours very large contiguous files (like VMware's disk images)? Alternatively, how have people found ZFS on OpenSolaris for this kind of workload?
I have a spare harddrive that I want to store my videos on. They are in mp4 format. I'm using cfdisk to create a new clean partition on the drive. What filesystem type should i make it (linux,HPFS/NTFS,FAT16...)
I have 2 images stored temporarily in home folder totaling 21 gigs. I recieved warning stating that home disrectory is full.
I used gparted and resized extended partition and home partition. When I look at disk usage it still says that I'm maxed out in /home/edward. How do I increase my share as I have plenty of space. Or, can I create a place for storing images? Also the images were created and placed there using clonezilla.
I am running an up to date Debian Lenny system with vmware 1.08 server installed.
When I run vmware, it appears to start normally. However, when I try to open a previously created image (from a different machine), everything is fine until I hit browse, which causes a screen to pop up that syas "The folder contents could not be displayed VFS error: Invlalid paramteres." and the following shows up on the command line:
I'm trying to create a Virtual Machine in VMWare Server for Linux. I'm at the part where it asks for an ISO image. The inventory is empty. I don't know what directory this actually corresponds to on my Linux system. I tried moving the .iso to my home directory but VMWare still does not see it.
So I have an external 100 gb drive which makes it easy to move all my files and folders etc.Is there a way to make a disk that will have all my settings browser choices etc?
Is it possible to install GRUB in the MBR of the only bootable disk in the system, but load configuration and images from another disk?Basically I want to install GRUB on /dev/sda, but menu and images will be under /dev/sdb2.Note: /dev/sdb is not bootable.
I've added a second drive to a system and I need to extend the lvm and the filesystem to the second disk. Is there a way to do this online with centos 5.5? I specifically need extending the actual ext3 filesystem which seems to be the trick part.
I'd like to make the ls -laR /media/myfs on Linux as fast as possible. I'll have 1 million files on the filesystem, 2TB of total file size, and some directories containing as much as 10000 files. Which filesystem should I use and how should I configure it?As far as I understand, the reason why ls -laR is slow because it has to stat(2) each inode (i.e. 1 million stat(2)s), and since inodes are distributed randomly on the disk, each stat(2) needs one disk seek.Here are some solutions I had in mind, none of which I am satisfied with:Create the filesystem on an SSD, because the seek operations on SSDs are fast. This wouldn't work, because a 2TB SSD doesn't exist, or it's prohibitively expensive.
Create a filesystem which spans on two block devices: an SSD and a disk; the disk contains file data, and the SSD contains all the metadata (including directory entries, inodes and POSIX extended attributes). Is there a filesystem which supports this? Would it survive a system crash (power outage)?Use find /media/myfs on ext2, ext3 or ext4, instead of ls -laR /media/myfs, because the former can the advantage of the d_type field (see in the getdents(2) man page), so it doesn't have to stat. Unfortunately, this doesn't meet my requirements, because I need all file sizes as well, which find /media/myfs doesn't print.Use a filesystem, such as VFAT, which stores inodes in the directory entries. I'd love this one, but VFAT is not reliable and flexible enough for me, and I don't know of any other filesystem which does that. Do you? Of course, storing inodes in the directory entries wouldn't work for files with a link count more than 1, but that's not a problem since I have only a few dozen such files in my use case.
Adjust some settings in /proc or sysctl so that inodes are locked to system memory forever. This would not speed up the first ls -laR /media/myfs, but it would make all subsequent invocations amazingly fast. How can I do this? I don't like this idea, because it doesn't speed up the first invocation, which currently takes 30 minutes. Also I'd like to lock the POSIX extended attributes in memory as well. What do I have to do for that?Use a filesystem which has an online defragmentation tool, which can be instructed to relocate inodes to the the beginning of the block device. Once the relocation is done, I can run dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/null bs=1M count=256 to get the beginning of the block device fetched to the kernel in-memory cache without seeking, and then the stat(2) operations would be fast, because they read from the cache. Is there a way to lock those inodes and/or blocks into memory once they have been read? Which filesystem has such a defragmentation tool?
I'm new to Fedora 14, vmware player. After getting Fedora up and running in VMware player. The disk size was 2.7 GB. After three hours of working with it, the disk size has bloated to 4.3 GB. I havent added software to account for the near doubling in size. How do I reduce the size back to 2.7GB range or lower. Im new to Fedora and superuser controls. Im removing more software than adding software. Is this a VMWARE problem or Fedora problem?
I've just bought a new SSD hard drive:Kingston SSDNow V-Series SNV125-S2/128GB 2.5'' 128GB SATA/300The question is which filesystem whould you recommand and why?BTRFS vs NILFS2 or EXT4?If you choose ext4 would you enable jurnalling?I'm very close to choose Btrfs.Any experience with running any of these on your SSD?
i am trying to create an image of Slackware OS but vmware is not able to detect the disk. it gives me below error, "Unable to detect disks or volumes on the source machine. Make sure that the source is a supported linux distribution." can some one tell me what do i need to do to create the image.
Yesterday I post this note, because I've an urgent issue with the filesystem in opensuse 11.4, used like VMWare guest OS, over VMware Server 2 for w2k3 64bit like a host) opensuse 11.4 Filesystem goes read-only in VMware
But, Novell have a fix published for SLES 10, with the 2.6.16.46-0.12 kernel version .
I'm using a Opensuse 11.4 with the 2.6.37.6-0.5-desktop kernel version. May be related with the LSI virtual scsi hardware?
Because exists a fix for SLES 9, 10, RedHat EL 4,5 and Ubuntu 7.10, but doesn't work in opensuse 11.4
Background: My mother's HP laptop had Ubuntu and Vista on it, Ubuntu my brother's doing. He decided he wanted to take off Ubuntu yesterday (he had forgotten the password), and deleted the partition that it was contained within. The computer now boots to this error.
Inventory: We no longer have the install disk for Windows Vista, he cannot tell me what version he used of Ubuntu, what partition it was on, any of the specs for the machine, or generally any information about the system. All I am aware of is that error on the boot-up screen. I have nothing else to work with.
I would like to remove Grub, and Ubuntu, and leave Windows intact (the request of the owner of the computer), but I have no idea what commands I could use to get rid of either when I can't access Windows, or how to properly remove them if I did access Windows.
I know that ImageMagick's convert program can be used as follows to convert a collection of images -- say, in PNG format -- to a PDF file:
convert *png output.pdf
The problem with this is that each image is then stretched to fit on one page, whereas I would like to keep the original dimensions of the images and put as many as possible on one page in the PDF file before moving on to another page.
I've been playing around with arch and ubuntu in virtual box, and after many... many installs i realized it'd be practical to just image the virtual drive and do it that way.
Now of course I could just copy the vdi file, but that's cheating.
Kind of like what is normally done with norton ghost, however I don't have money to be buying it, and so it's left me curious about what utilities similar to ghost there are our there.
How to deal with the disk images like daa, iso, etc. Is there any software to extract them. If there is any software then please provide me some information...
I am just spent half an hour hunting for a thing that should be totally available already:USB install images of Ubuntu, knoppix and all the others.And, the only good way are so far complicated tutorials where you extract the stuff from an CD image. Why??Hasn't everybody notices that CDs/DVDs are vanishing big time? That more and more systems don't have the readers anymore? Instead of following a 10 point instruction list, it would be nice to just be able to download a Ubuntu 8.10 or whatever USB image and be able to beam that DIRECTLY to a USB stick with a dd command.
Or am a missing something here? Does this exist?It should by no means be mariginal, considering how important USB stick in specific and flash memory in general have become.
I have been using VMware Player for some time to host Fedora VMware images on Windows XP. I have been using Fedora 11 and 12 (both 32 and 64 bit) and recently started to use Fedora 13.
I use as a base the images provided by thoughtpolice. http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/
I usually install VMware tools and also keep the images updated (yum update) which sometimes changes the kernel.
I have recently had problems with the snapshots not having a network when I restore them. So far I don't have the problem with Fedora 11 and do have it with Fedora 12 (but used not to). I do have it with Fedora 13.
In each case the problem goes away when I uninstall the VMware tools and comes back when I install them again.
One of the symptoms is that SElinux complains about not being able to do something with /var/run/vmware-active-nics.
It looks to me that something is incorrect in the actions being taken when the snapshot is being restored. It does not happen every time and sometimes the network restores itself.
The network can be restored by rebooting the image.
I'm trying to access the VMWare console from firefox using the VMWare plugin. The problem is that it doesn't work on Firefox version 3.6.8. So how can I access the console?
Oooookay, so basically the idea I have is that I would like to boot Windows XP over an AoE connection. This is no issue, however the problem comes when I want to have a single, read-only image as the base image and want to be able to boot multiple computers off this image.Licensing issues aside (let's assume that this complies with all licensing issues, or we can think of it as just a conceptual "how could we do this"), the basic issues are thus:Each boot of Windows will require a writable AoE device...The original disk image must be read-only to avoid changes in 1 boot affecting all boots(As far as I know) The AoE device must be a disk image, or some block device rather than a mounted file system (if this is not so, aufs could be used)So the long and the short of this, from what I can tell is that we need a read only device that we can write to.
At the end of a session, the changes to the device will be discarded, so these can be thought of as simple temporary sessions. This means that there is little concern with having changes to the original read-only image effecting the modifications to the "duplicate" images.
I would like to avoid duplicating the image for each instance, however if no solution can be reached then this could be a possibility (every boot, we can copy the image, give the fresh image to the new boot and remove when done)Optimally, changes to the filesystem will be written to a different filesystem (much like what aufs does, however as stated earlier, afaik aufs only deals with 2 mounted file systems, whereas we need the end result to be an image or block device)Sorry if I havn't explained this particularly well, however I've been trying to think of solutions, caveats and generally how to define the problem as I was writing. If you think that this idea is ridiculous because software x handles the problem better, I'd be very pleased to hear about it, but the basic requirement of temporary, network bootable windows xp sessions still applies.
I was wondering if it were possible to have a dual boot system (XP and Debian) where when you press, say F7, you will boot into windows or if your press F6 you will boot into Linux. I have a monitor that doesn't support the initial start-up graphics
I'm interested in storing my SSH keys and gpg keys on a smartcard for added security. However, I'm a bit uncertain on a few points, which are as follows:
How many keys can I get on a card? I assume both SSH and GPG can store keys on the card. Is there a limit to key size? I see a lot of cards saying they support 2048-bit keys, what about larger sizes? Hardware: can anyone recommend a card/reader combination that works well? I've done a fair amount of research and it seems PC/SC readers can be a bit iffy - is this your experience? Have I missed anything I should be asking? Are there any other hurdles?
I'm aware fsf europe give away cards with membership - I'm not sure I want to join, but... are these cards any good?
i'm using awk inside bash. i've got an array in awk called arrayinawk. everytime i call another awk command in bash i have to keep creating arrayinawk to work with it. is there anyway i can store arrayinawk in bash and just call the stored value next time i use awk?
I don't actually use Fedora Core 4. I need 3 background/font combinations as part of an assignment for a Computer Operating System class. I also need to know how various fonts and icons fair on different backgrounds as well as some tips for choosing backgrounds and fonts. I've found bits and pieces of information regarding fonts and font sizes; but, I'm coming up empty on the backgrounds.
