http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/ en-us 2005-03-17T16:38:07-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2005/03/another_network.html I was concerned with the previous network test that perhaps it was slower than what it should be because of the bandwidth to the outside machine. To alleviate that I bonded the two gigabit ethernet cards in that machine effectively... nekstrom 2005-03-17T16:38:07-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2005/03/initial_network.html After some headache and help from Devlin I was able to do some initial testing of the networking with VMWare. Devlin helped me get IOMeter compiled in Debian. Below are the graphs. The tests were run using iometer to read... Benchmark Tests nekstrom 2005-03-07T14:56:39-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2005/02/the_importance_1.html As an update to what I have been working on I have been running more IOMeter tests. This time with many more Virtual Machines. To do this latest set of tests I created a new Windows 2003 Enterprise Server image... Benchmark Tests nekstrom 2005-02-10T13:20:46-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2005/01/a_few_days_ago.html A few days ago I was talking to Devlin and he asked why we don't just run benchmarks on the VMs to see what performance they get. After thinking about that I decided it was a good idea. So today... Benchmark Tests nekstrom 2005-01-27T14:06:00-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2005/01/iometer.html I've done some further looking at IOMeter and it won't work for a monitoring tool for our overhead test. It is meant more as a benchmark tool. Meaning that it generates a work load on the system and sees how... Progress Update nekstrom 2005-01-25T14:34:26-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2005/01/overhead_test_i.html The overhead test configuration is progressing. Well actually it is ready to go. Over the last couple of days I figured out how to configure our labs switch, I also enabled the web configuration module for it so configuring it... Progress Update nekstrom 2005-01-20T13:43:40-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2005/01/overhead_test_p.html Dr. Windley came up with an idea to estimate the overhead created by VMWare. The setup is fairly simple. Have a load balancer in front of a group of virtual machines. The test is simple also, you run a simple... Progress Update nekstrom 2005-01-11T06:09:48-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2004/12/vmfs_and_test_d.html So I have learned a couple of things about VMFS. First it is a propriatary file system that is best suited for very large files, such as isos and disk images. This makes sense because its primary purpose is to... Progress Update nekstrom 2004-12-22T08:47:46-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2004/11/comparing_apple.html After some discussion between Devlin and I. I am starting to wonder if it will even be useful to load anything besides the ESX server on the other machine. The question arises on whether installing an OS on there will... Virtualization nekstrom 2004-11-23T10:27:53-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2004/11/waiting_for_the.html We are at an impass currently. Our biggest limiting factor is disk space. We have aquired various ISOs but have no where to put them so that they can be loaded. We also are limited in the number of... Progress Update nekstrom 2004-11-23T10:23:21-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2004/11/progress_well_s.html We've made some good progress this week. We have one ESX server up and running. Devlin sucessfully launched KNoppix in a virtual machine. So we know it works. We need to go through and document what it is that we... Progress Update nekstrom 2004-11-05T16:34:24-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2004/10/cheaper_servers.html I wonder if it would be possible to create distributed virtual machines. Meaning launch virtual machines on regular work stations that people are sitting in front of and basically syphone off the idle cpu cycles to perform the tasks normally... Ideas nekstrom 2004-10-29T14:25:18-07:00 http://blogs.eclab.byu.edu/nathan/archives/2004/10/distributed_com.html It seems that virtualization has much in common with distributed computing. One of the biggest problems it faces is scheduling. How to decide what to run where and when to do it. Another problem they both seem to face is... Ramblings nekstrom 2004-10-29T14:20:10-07:00