blog.storming

I needed to followup on my test results with the Iomega IX4-200d SSD iometer testing to see what could be going on.. see http://blog.randyjcress.com/2009/12/howtokillanix4-200dwithssdiometertests1.html for the first set of numbers, but I will duplicate them here for comparision purposes. The main goal was to keep the (4) Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128GB SSD Drives in a hardware RAID10 array throughout the testing process. I will drop the millisecond avg and max because it matters, but isn't the focal point.. Group_A : Iomega IX4-200d RAID10 SSD drives, 1Gb/s iSCSI to VMware ESX 4.0.0 bld 208167 with Windows Server 2008 x86 VM. Group_B: Iomega IX4-200d RAID5 1TB mechanical disk, 1Gb/s iSCSI to VMware ESX 4.0.0 bld 208167 with Windows Server 2003 VM - http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=909 Group_C: RAID10 SSD Drives with LSI Logic PCIe MegaRAID SAS 8204ELP on Windows 7 Enterprise x64 direct IOMeter tests on the SYSTEM volume (C:) Group_D: RAID10 SSD Drives with LSI Logic ...

After reading the emails on COFEE and DECAF because of some odd newsletter I am subscribed to and then seeing the following post: http://windowsir.blogspot.com/2009/12/lions-and-tigers-and-decafoh-my.html I figured it would only be prudent to give it a shot.. First impression.. Is this whole thing a 2009 end of year joke? While I understand it has value, here are some simple steps to side-step decaf or just understand is weakness.. It runs in the systray, right-click, maximize and close it. That was easy. Or if you don't want to touch anything on the system, just rename your tools.. I didn't take the time to join the forum and search is disabled for guests, but the signatures.dat file isn't utilizing MD5 or SHA-1 hashes. It's just plain and simple process name matching.. Tested tools that you can try yourself.. autoruns.exe, pslist.exe, pskill.exe, windd.exe, PasswareKitEnterprise.exe Note the case-sensitivity in the PasswareKitEnterprise.exe.. I renamed N...

In response to Gabe's Virtual World post on his IX4-200D testing @ http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=909 and the follow-up from Ewan's blog: http://ewan.to/post/307847803/thoughts-on-iomega-ix4-200d-performance-tests My test environment is: Host: VMware ESX 4.0.0 bld 208167 2Gb/s etherchannel VM: Windows Server 2008 x86 NAS: Iomeda IX4-200d with (4) Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128GB SSD - RAID10 IOMeter with OpenPerformanceTest.icf Test 001a - Max Throughput 100% read 1891.9 IOPS 59.1 MB/s 32.4 Ms Avg 139.2 Ms Max Test 001b - RealLife-60%Rand-65%Read 179.2 IOPS 1.4 MB/s 332.0 Ms Avg 17150.3 Ms Max Test 001c - Max Throughput-50%Read 1589.9 IOPs 49.7 MB/s 38.1 Ms Avg 296.5 Ms Max Test 001d - Random-8k-70%Read - NO RESULTS - Kills the NAS iSCSI with the ESX vmkernel's log of: vmkernel: 0:01:12:59.532 cpu5:4116)WARNING: ScsiDeviceIO: 1266: Failed to issue command (0x16) on device naa.5000144f84161597: Timeout Rescanning the VMFS volumes...

This should be the first in a few very interesting findings while trying to reduce backup windows and disk/tape storage requirements for a fully virtualized environment in vSphere 4.0 with Veeam 4.1. Ok, I figured this would have some impact after reading about zeroing free space on an NTFS volume.. Single server test on a VM (HW ver 7) that is 3 years old: (bound to be alot of deleted data from windows updates and software upgrades) ServerA - 8GB C:, 10GB E: - 18GB Total Provisioned Space Pre-zeroing free space: Backup Time: 5:03, Total .vbk size: 5,852,222 KB Post-zeroing free space: Backup Time: 4:23, Total .vbk size: 4,139,682 KB Full 1st run backup time savings: 13% (40 seconds) Full 1st run backup disk space savings: 29% (1,712,540 KB) Two unique jobs were created in Veeam using optimal compression, VSS, and Change Block Tracking (CBT) was not turned on. The tool used to zero the free space was the Systernals: SDelete from 2005! (" sdelete -c c: ...

Where blog.storming meets brain.storming.. Here is a sample of what can be achieved with a Windows XP Pro SP3 Virtual Machine running on a Windows 7 x64 laptop with VMware Workstation 7 with 4GB RAM carved into a 2GB RAMDisk and 384MB VM: http://j.mp/8kkdeN (if you can spare 75 seconds to watch the video) Next step is to run Windows 2008 x64 with 16-32GB RAM and a 24GB RAMDisk serving a Citrix Provisioning Services volume to a PXE Boot client connected with a full 1GB/s ethernet link..