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Category Archives: Virtualisation

Xen, LVM, CentOS, and a large hammer.

At work we’ve been trying to do more comprehensive release testing, on the basis that it’s a Good Idea to make sure our stuff works. Part of this is testing the deploy process. Our software is installed into Linux appliance servers that are used specifically for this one purpose. One of our products works well [...]

Posted 04 December 2009 † John § Software § Technology § Testing § VMWare § Xen ‡ Comments (0) °

Post-mortem

Somewhat late, here’s the run-down on what went wrong with our big upgrade. The executive summary is: very little. Saturday’s hardware upgrades went reasonably well, although we did discover that the hardware just doesn’t like 2GB DIMMs, and caused a minor panic by forgetting to activate the second disk in the BIOS. The RAM issue [...]

Posted 08 April 2008 † John § Hardware § Hosting § Xen ‡ Comments (0) °

The Plan

I’m on the train to London now, using the internet thanks to National Express including it for free on their trains. I’d be online anyway, since I can always use my phone as a modem (as an aside, that, plus 3G support, are all that’s stopping me from getting an iPhone when my T-Mobile contract [...]

Posted 29 March 2008 † John § Hardware § Hosting § Xen ‡ Comments (0) °

Confusing

Sometimes, this industry confuses me. For example, HP’s DL140, which is a perfectly nice 1u rack server, costs just over £600 (including VAT – we’re not VAT registered) here at Insight. On that same page you can see the cost of adding in a second matching processor. Just under £600. By their logic, the entire [...]

Posted 23 February 2008 † John § Hardware § Money § Xen ‡ Comments (0) °

Virtual

A lot of what I’m going to write about here will be about virtualisation. My day job involves a lot of work with VMWare – Server, Workstation, and Infrastructure/ESX. My home workstation – a Mac OS X-running iMac – has VMWare Fusion to let me access Windows apps and test Linux set-ups. But where I’m [...]

Posted 23 February 2008 † John § VMWare § Xen ‡ Comments (0) °