Server Rebuild

So last night I began the process of moving my VMs (test domain controller, two Oracle DBs) onto the new server i7-3770 ESXi server from the old HP xw8200 machine.

VMWare vCentre Converter does the job - simply a matter of pointing it at the VM file and the ESXi server and letting it go. The only problem was the first VM (the main DB) took a little over 8 hours to complete!

I use the domain controller as an SSH hub as well as for testing so I thought I'd copy the VM before I began. This also took 2 hours! It was only 15GBs or so. Hmm there is something going on here. A disk speed test shows the old server drive bandwidth at a little less than 4MB/s - that's pitiful!

So I kill some apps, I pull the server apart and go looking for loose SATA connectors etc but no luck.

I noticed that in the device manager there are the two ultra ATA storage controllers and two primary/secondary channels. The Primary/Secondary channel devices, in their Advanced Settings tab said the transfer mode selected was DMA if available but the current transfer mode was PIO. Hmm that's not right.

I dig a bit further (which involved downloading and re-installing device drivers from HP, lots of rebooting and poking things). Eventually I find in the BIOS that the configuration of the drives is PIO. I found an article saying that after updating from 2.02 - 2.04 these settings can be messed up and the performance suffers. It recommended using the option to reset the BIOS to defaults so I did this.

Resetting the BIOS to defaults didn't seem to help much and it did enable the damned SCSI adapter (which I don't use and don't have a driver installed for). I shutdown and dive back into the BIOS configuration. I changed both the default settings and the settings for each drive so it read 16 blocks at a time and it uses Max UDMA. I reboot and this works! Disk speed back up to 20MB/s. Copied 40GB of data from an IDE disk to a SATA disk in about 40 minutes or so. I kicked off the next conversion and this is running much more quickly!

I also started work on the UPS configuration. Turns out Cyberpower have a 'business' edition of their software suite that works on linux and ESXi. It comes as an 'Agent', 'Client' and 'Centre', From what I can tell you need an Agent to talk to the UPS (as mine is USB. Some have network cards) and you install a client on each VM (or computer) that you want to shutdown when the power goes.

To get ESXi itself to shutdown (and to get it to talk to the USB connection) you have to install a (free) VMWare Management Assistant (vMA) image. It is just Linux with extra tools for managing the ESX server.

The next trick was getting the installer in there. You have to copy it into a folder somewhere on the data store and then use vifs command inside the vMA to get it into the vMA VM. Then you can install it.

I gave the vMA a fixed IP address and then when i installed the client I just point them at the IP of the vMA and then can get information on the state of the UPS.

Ok the rebuild is getting closer to completion!