VMWare Performance Tweaks
December 23, 2008 by Steven McGrath · Leave a Comment
We have just completed a series of performance tweaks to VMWare Server 2 in order to address that “pausing” that users have been experiencing. We ask that if you see any further “pausing” that you file a ticket and notify us so that we can look into it further.
The tweaks that we performed were mainly to tune the conservative defaults of the host and also turn off the named file memory paging that seems to be causing a lot of the random “pausing”. One of two things will result from this, either the pausing will get worse, or will go away. We can only hope for the latter. If the issue gets worse then we will start looking into migrating from VMWare to a solution like Xen. If this is the case, then we will have to schedule a full day of downtime.
System Downtime 12/23 @ 9pm
December 23, 2008 by Steven McGrath · Leave a Comment
We will have a scheduled downtime for approximately 30 minutes at 9pm tonight. This is fix an issue with how VMWare is handling memory. In order to fix it, we had to modify some kernel perameters that requires the system to be rebooted. We apologise for the inconvenience.
CUGNet Upgrade Completed!
November 19, 2008 by Steven McGrath · Leave a Comment
Well, as you have more than likely noticed at this point, we have updated quite a few things tonight. A lot of back-end changes as well as some new pretty ones (that are still under construction). VMWare Server was upgraded to version 2.0 a couple of weeks ago. Once we completed that we started right away at building new VMs of the web and shell servers. These new servers are now 64bit and have been re-designed to support LDAP and our new LDAP-based DNS server out of the box. This will allow us to continue down the path of centrally managing everything for both easing configuration management as well as cleaning up the mess that was inherited from CUG 1.x.
The new website is a breath of fresh air as well. For as much as I loved using Mediawiki as our portal page, the limitations of what we could do were becoming more and more apparent. This new system should allow us to more efficiently tie into our support cycle, as well as (hopefully) creating an avenue to get us lazy admins to update everyone more often with what is going on.
So for those who are curious as to what’s still to do, here is our current list (note we are standardizing our toolset to use python):
- Finish new Website
- Design new CUGNet Logo (to go with website)
- Write user management tool
- Write vhost management tool
- Migrate fractured data-sets to a unified, cohesive structure