Butuz

In my experience Belkin USB adaptors are a total waste of time - they have horrific signal strength and drop on and off the network at will. Actually replaced our 4 with cat 5 wires. Butuz

Are you based in Wales Earthling? Butuz

Are you going for the job? Butuz

I would chalk it down to experience. What good is a formal complaint going to do you? You don't actually want to work there do you? Judging by what happened on interview I think you had a lucky escape! Butuz

It was the plan, but have changed this afternoon and I have been trying to set up exactly what you have been setting up (Eth0 on network, Eth 1 - 3 on Trunked private network) and have had same problems as you - with the web interface dropping off as soon as I commit changes. I have been having to resort to the CLI to destroy the private network datalink and then hey presto the web interface pops back on to the curriculum network. Hrmm Butuz

Deffo buy it from SUN. Have a word with Andy at Cutter maybe he can help with pricing. X7280A-2 Sun PCIe Dual Gigabit Ethernet UTP Low Profile Adapter, RoHS-6 Compliant £ 210.00 X4446A-Z Sun x4 PCIe Quad Gigabit Ethernet Low Profile Adapter for Rack Servers, RoHS-6 Compliant £ 440.00 I am also starting to think the in built 4 ports may not be enough! May be worth you looking at 10GBe Duke - would probably be alot better with regards to future proofing. Butuz

My Switch does not show Trunk Status in the Web interface, I have to use a hyper terminal connection on mine to configure trunking. Your set up looks to be the same as mine though. I do not have flow control enabled on the trunk ports - don't know if that makes a difference? Butuz

Yes that's what I am trying to work out now - the best way of connecting it all. As far as the connection from the 7110 to the Core Switch - It will be a 4GB trunk on it's own "SAN" VLAN. Each ESX Server will then have a 2GB Trunk to the SAN Vlan for NFS, and a 2GB trunk out on to the Curriculum/Admin VLAN for VMs. Butuz

Yes the NetApp box results are truly shocking!!! Was it being used / under load when you ran the tests??? It's a shame I don't have HP, DELL, Hitatchi SANs lying around - it would be VERY interesting to do a performance comparison. Butuz

Duke - I think your on the right track, what you did with RICs config file is exactly what I have done (download IOMETER, install, open RICs file, point at the correct hard drive, run and wait 10 mins). I think your investment in the 7410 shows in your performance stats. What's your exact 7410 config? My Results are as follows. Server Stats: Sun Fire X4150 running VMWare ESXi 3.5 Update 4 8 x 3.16Ghz Xeon Cores 16GB RAM 4 x 146GB SAS drives in Raid 10 Network Stats: HP ProCurve 2810-48G Switch 4 x 1GB Trunk to Fire X4150 4 x 1GB Trunk to Storage 7110 SAN data NOT vlanned off currently (i.e set up on curriculum network) Test VM Stats: Windows 2003 Std 32 Bit. 2GB RAM Allocated Test1 - Control Test using ESXi local Storage: Test uses local Fire 4150 4 x 146GB Internal Hard Drives in Raid 10 Total IOPS: 223.06 Total MBps: 2.31 Average Response: 4.48ms CPU Utilisation: 1.97% Test2 - NFS 7110 Test using Raid 0: Test uses remote 7110 14 x 146GB drive Raid0 Filesystem over NFS Total IOPS: 622.61 Total MBps: 6.93 Average Response: 1.60ms CPU Utilisation: 1.13% Test2 - NFS 7110 Test using Raid 6: Test uses remote 7110 14 x 146GB drive Raid6 Filesystem over NFS Total IOPS: 356.83 Total MBps: 3.84 Average Response: 2.80ms CPU Utilisation: 1.07% As you can see - very impressive results. Even the internal storage of the Fire X4150s is damned fast. This Sun stuff is pie hot! Butuz

Yes the ones I've ordered have contained new fuser units. Butuz

Yay managed to sort it - on the HP Procurve the trunk was not set to LACP mode Working now with a nice 4GB trunk!!! Butuz

Ric - how does one go about destroying the current network connections? And more importantly - how does one go about re-creating them! Butuz

Haha glad someone else is also "learning through breaking" I had my 7110 up and running on the curriculum network, gave it a static IP address for Eth0, and all was working shweet - even got a ESX box to talk to it via NFS and moved a test VM onto it and it was all working. Then I had the bad idea of trying to imrove things, trunk 4 connections I changed eth 0 thru eth 4 to aggregation and when i committed it it sat there and did nothing. Then I couldn't ping eth0's IP address, then my test VM dropped off the network, and the NFS storage pool dropped out of ESX. So now the box seems to be totally uncontactable. I can CLI in through the service console, and I've managed to use the CLI to view the connections etc, but I don't know what to do to get rid of the port aggregation and get it back to just eth0 on its own. Rick suggested the destroy command but I don't like the sound of that! i want to fix not destroy! Any ideas? It's weird as the CLI shows eth0 as up, the switch shows the connection as up, but i cant ping it or get to the graphical interface now Butuz

I think if you're quick you may be able to get a matching grant application in to Andy at Cutter (his username on these forums is linescanner). By not using a SAN you're missing out on one of the most important and beneficial reasons for virtualising - the ability to failover virtual machines from one physical host to another in a matter of minutes. I would reconsider not using a SAN to be honest - if one of your physical hosts fails for whatever reason all the VM's on it will be down, and stay down until it can be repaired / replaced (providing you have actually managed to back up your VM images!) Butuz

Wohoo Just had a lorry drop off 2 pallets from SUN OMG I've got to set all this up now Massive thanks to Andy @ Cutter Project and also SUN Microsystems!!! Butuz

Oh dear Butuz

Actually the price on those multi stands is very very good in my oppinion. I've seen single monitor stands go for that kind of cash. Butuz

Sorry - "automatically detect" was the wrong thing to say - what I meant was "automatically support" like Windows does. I.e "Control Panel > Power Options > UPS" select com port and job done. Butuz

It's a big step. I'd call it Edugeek 2.0! Good luck! Butuz

Good question. I too have APC UPSs with network card. I was under the assumption that the SUN SAN would automatically detect the UPS in the same way Windows does? Butuz

Eeeeeek! That's not good! I guess now is the time to really push for the new server room you've had declined before. Butuz

I think your SMT need to tackle in class behaviour management and also look at rooms that are not teacher base rooms and thus are not looked after in the expected manner? Buying hideously expensive nuclear proof PC's is just fighting the fire, you need to look at stopping kids from lighting the fires in the first place? Billing the parents for damage works a treat. Not sure if you'd be able to implement that? Butuz

Hoping to have a pair of X4150s and a pair of 7110s delivered any day now! Will be installing ESXi on one 4150 and Xen Server 5 on the other. Will be experimenting and performance testing with iSCSI and NFS. Butuz

Waiting for servers and SAN to arrive to do some performance testing. At the moment though am looking more towards Xen as the free version is easy to use and easy to manage multiple hosts (looking top use 2 hosts to start off with and then move to 4), unfortunatly we can not afford the HA and motion features. ESXi you can only manage one host at a time for free, which is not useful. Hyper V I have not really looked at to be honest. Butuz