Whither the Mac Mini?

 Posted on May 7, 2014  |  Erik

I’ve been a fan of the Mac Mini for ages now and with the ability to run (albeit unsupported) VMware ESXi makes it a wonderfully useful method for hosting multiple virtual machines including OS X VMs. It is my favorite home lab machine. It consumes hardly any power (11W-85W), is tiny, requires no big external power brick, has only a discreet white LED. The current issue is that it hasn’t evolved in ages with the last update dating back to October 2012 which has been keeping me from buying a new one for upgrading my home lab. [Read More]

Mac Mini Hosting

 Posted on February 25, 2014  |  Erik

Backstory Up until now, I’ve been handling my own hosting via my home DSL service for a number of years now, with a few VPS instances and Squarespace service for some other web sites. One key component is my mail server, currently hosted on OS X Server in a VM running on ESXi at home. I had an unfortunate incident where the local telco cut off my DSL line by accident and as a result I was without internet connectivity for almost three weeks starting around Christmas. [Read More]

Mac Mini Hosting (step by step)

 Posted on February 25, 2014  |  Erik

Basic ESXi configuration For this you’ll need a windows machine to run the VI-Client (although you can do most of it from the command line, this will be much easier via the client if you’re just starting with ESXi). As as alternate method, you could download the vCenter Linux Appliance in evaluation mode and run it as a local virtual machine using Fusion or something else locally. Then you would manage the ESXi server with this machine and you can use the web interface from your browser to do the configuration. [Read More]

Mac Mini Hosting (ZFS loopback)

 Posted on February 25, 2014  |  Erik

ZFS I’ve been a fan of ZFS storage for a while now and I find it particularly useful in this type of standalone environment. One of my constant preoccupations (personally and professionally) is data protection from both a backup and disaster recovery perspective. So in this case, I’m going to create a VM locally that is going to play the role of a storage server that will publish NFS shares to the ESXi server internally. [Read More]

Awesome birthday present

 Posted on January 28, 2014  |  Erik

And now my computer bag is no longer a spaghetti collection of miscellaneous cables and stuff. This is the Book Book Travel Journal from Twelve South. So now I have the near complete mobile kit with: USB to 30 pin USB to lightning USB to MicroUSB USB to Ethernet Several SD cards USB SD card reader DisplayPort to VGA iPad 30pin to VGA Power adaptor for the MacBook Presenter Remote with laser pointer [Read More]

Can't format a VMFS-5 volume on an existing disk?

 Posted on January 23, 2014  |  Erik

If you are cobbling together a home lab for ESXi, sometimes you’ll be reusing various disks that have been used in other computers with other operating systems. This can cause a problem for ESXi when you want to format a disk as a VMFS volume if there is an existing partition table and you want to format it using GPT for VMFS-5 and there is an existing MBR partition. When you try to format the disk you’ll get an error like: [Read More]

Mavericks NFS alert

 Posted on October 23, 2013  |  Erik

Just a quick note to help those that are upgrading to Mavericks and use NFS automounts. By default, Mavericks will use NFS4 which uses a different security model so you may end up with what appears to be a regular mount, but it’s pretty much empty. Don’t worry the data hasn’t gone away or been deleted. It’s just that the user mapping doesn’t just cross check the local and remote UID of the user the same way, especially if you’re using PAM to grab UIDs from an LDAP directory. [Read More]

Windows battery life & secondary impacts

 Posted on October 21, 2013  |  Erik

Yet another article in the ongoing issue concerning the lackluster battery performance of Windows on portable computers, this time from Jeff Atwood of Codinghorror, with Anand Lal Shimpi of Anandtech weighing in on the situation. What I find most interesting about this problem is not so much the problem posed to those using Windows based laptops (I feel for you), but rather the comparison with OS X on identical hardware. When you isolate the issue to identical use cases on identical hardware, you eliminate the screen, the networking, the keyboard backlighting, and so on. [Read More]

It’s all a matter of perspective

 Posted on October 18, 2013  |  Erik

I’m just catching up on my development RSS feeds and ran across yet another insightful technical article by Mike Ash. I’m finding this quite funny as I just gave a presentation at the Infralys (soon to be integrated in Ackacia!) hosted Rendezvous de la Virtualisation 2013 discussing the impact of SSD and flash storage arriving in the storage stack. Here are the slides for those interested. In my presentation the coolest, most way out there SSD storage technology is the Diablo Memory Channel storage, where they put NAND chips onto cards that get attached to the RDIMM slots in your server. [Read More]

Dump to tape from VMFS

 Posted on October 2, 2013  |  Erik

A recurring issue that I see in a few instances are places that still have requirements to externalize backups to tape for long-term storage (please don’t use the archive word). But on the other hand, it’s clear that disk to disk backup solutions that leverage the VADP protocols are considerably more efficient tools for VMware environments. Now assuming you have a decent budget, I highly recommend Veeam Backup & Replication as a complete solution that now integrates tape externalization. [Read More]