I upped the RAM on my system that streams out the music as it had been topping out with my updated virus scanning software at 98%. I basically tripled the memory from 8gb RAM to 24gb RAM which also should do better handling more streams as well. I may increase more but we shall see. That was the only resource being consumed totally and not its at 11% usage where it was 89% and above before. CPU usage amd network resources are still strong it was only memory that was the issue.
The memory would have been very quick normally but my existing rails don’t quite fit my new servers I have gotten recently and I haven’t had time to do any custom adaptations and the systems were stacked on each other. My music streaming software that needed the memory was of course at the bottom of the stack so I ended up taking down my entire site so I wouldn’t cause data corruption or a huge outage I wouldn’t be able to take care of right easily.
Now memory update is done and more to come as I get mys environment updated some more!
February 16, 2019
by dhoytt Comments Off on New Virtual Environment Almost Set
My new XCP-ng environment is just about completely set I just need one more 8tb SAS drive with the same geometry to put into one of the pools on my FreeNAS server. One of the prior 8tb drives was a Sun\Oracle branded and its LFF geometry was slightly off of the other 8tb same model Hitachi drives so I will move that 8tb SAS to a workstation and new one into the pool for VM’s.
I needed to make sure my new XCP-ng Hypervisors hardware was updated to the newest firmware levels after testing initial functionality with XCP-ng with the Dell r710’s I picked up for the Hypervisors. Initially trying to update the r710’s vie iDrac produced all types of failures even uploading the packages into iDrac. Then trying to update the r710’s via the cli of XCP-ng didn’t have all the libraries needed for the firmware scripts from Dell to work. I tried Openmanage as well.
Here’s a list of errors I received:
“The firmware image file is not valid for iDRAC firmware update”,
the file copied to the partition did not match the original file
Trying to update through iDrac after extracting the iDrac firmware file.
Well you get the picture so what I ultimately decided to do was take one of my spare hard drives I have put it inf a hot swap tray for the r710 migrate all of the VM’s to the other XCP-ng server,take out the boot drive and other drives in the r710 and install Centos 7 to the drive and then run the firmware update scripts from Dell from Centos 7. This worked very well without the errors except to install the needed libraries via yum.
I then just moved all of the VM’s to the other XCP-ng hypervisor and then updated the other r710 from a minimal Centos7 OS install as well.
The big deal about updating my firmware was to make sure that whatever IPMI platform (iDrac from DEll, ILO from HP or IPMI Supermicro) I used was fully updated and useful for when I’m out of town. I chose Dell servers with iDrac because that’s what has the best price point at this time in the surplus market. For some reason there are very little HP servers though I prefer their ILO over Dell’s iDrac.
Now that firmware and bios updates of the hardware are handled onward to make further improvements and other projects!
February 16, 2019
by dhoytt Comments Off on New Virtual Environment Almost Set
My new XCP-ng environment is just about completely set I just need one more 8tb SAS drive with the same geometry to put into one of the pools on my FreeNAS server. One of the prior 8tb drives was a Sun\Oracle branded and its LFF geometry was slightly off of the other 8tb same model Hitachi drives so I will move that 8tb SAS to a workstation and new one into the pool for VM’s.
I needed to make sure my new XCP-ng Hypervisors hardware was updated to the newest firmware levels after testing initial functionality with XCP-ng with the Dell r710’s I picked up for the Hypervisors. Initially trying to update the r710’s vie iDrac produced all types of failures even uploading the packages into iDrac. Then trying to update the r710’s via the cli of XCP-ng didn’t have all the libraries needed for the firmware scripts from Dell to work. I tried Openmanage as well.
Here’s a list of errors I received:
“The firmware image file is not valid for iDRAC firmware update”,
the file copied to the partition did not match the original file
Trying to update through iDrac after extracting the iDrac firmware file.
Well you get the picture so what I ultimately decided to do was take one of my spare hard drives I have put it inf a hot swap tray for the r710 migrate all of the VM’s to the other XCP-ng server,take out the boot drive and other drives in the r710 and install Centos 7 to the drive and then run the firmware update scripts from Dell from Centos 7. This worked very well without the errors except to install the needed libraries via yum.
I then just moved all of the VM’s to the other XCP-ng hypervisor and then updated the other r710 from a minimal Centos7 OS install as well.
The big deal about updating my firmware was to make sure that whatever IPMI platform (iDrac from DEll, ILO from HP or IPMI Supermicro) I used was fully updated and useful for when I’m out of town. I chose Dell servers with iDrac because that’s what has the best price point at this time in the surplus market. For some reason there are very little HP servers though I prefer their ILO over Dell’s iDrac.
Now that firmware and bios updates of the hardware are handled onward to make further improvements and other projects!
February 3, 2019
by dhoytt Comments Off on Taught a Valuable Lesson Super Bowl Day
With my Rams, a team I have followed since I was in elementary school in the Super Bowl I was debating going to my normal Super Bowl party. I then decide I’m going and will take some pulled pork and maybe some prime rib made all the rubs and sauces, cleaned my Traeger then brine and injected the pork butt and got ready to throw the meat on the grill in the early morning then go back to bed. Well my Trager controller didn’t power up at all and the I had to start the troubleshooting @ 3:30 AM.
I grabbed my lantern and hand held spot light I use for fishing. The GFI wasn’t popped, electric outlet was powering other devices I plugged in, took the controller loose fuse wasn’t blown and everything was connected.
Called Traeger support a few hours later and they went over my troubleshooting steps and mentioned something I thought I checked but hadn’t fully checked which was to make sure that my pellets I had left in weren’t wet. I had dug my hand in and all pellets were dry to feel and didn’t feel wet.
I went to Emigh Ace hardware and picked up a controller a place I normally get my pellets. I had been there yesterday and talked to them about upgrading my controller to one with wireless but my model I couldn’t updated to wireless. I didn’t know yesterday my controller was out when I was there.
So this morning replaced my controller which didn’t take long but kept my pellets in that seemed dry but the controller kept stopping and giving errors. So I scooped up all my pellets and there was very minimal wet dust on the auger bit deep down that takes the pellets into the place the pellets burn that was a bit hardened. I got my Wet Vac and vacuumed that out put back in a few pellets and everything started working correctly!
The lesson learned is empty your Traeger pellets when its wet outside even without a direct hit from rain as the dust will absorb the moisture in the air and cause your Traeger issues. I was unable to attend my Super Bowl party because I wanted to be awake to watch my favorite team in the Super Bowl and cook my prepped meat, plus had to but a new controlled because I didn’t take my pellets out of the Traeger in between my grill usages.
WEll GO RAMS!!
February 2, 2019
by dhoytt Comments Off on Moving FreeNAS and XCP-ng into Position Migrating VM’s to XCP-ng
Well I moved my new FreeNAS along with one of my new XCP-ng hypervisors into the racks to start taking over my environment for storage and my new virtualization. I’ll detail the technical aspect later. I hooked both up to my storage networks and copied and migrated some little used test VM’s from my Xenserver 7.1 environment without any issues using XCP-ng Center win Windows 10. Both were migrated cross pool to new storage so that was nice. I really didn’t add anything to an SR connected to my FreeNAS system . I need to create some iSCSI targets and though that doesn’t take long I didn’t feel like it since I was sneezing non-stop after getting behind my dusty racks (another part of this whole project I need to tackle) and was sneezing hard enough I didn’t want to be near a wall for fear of hitting my head and needed to make a store run to pick up medicine.
I basically just transferred from local storage f my XenServer 7.1 pool to the local pool of my XCP-ng pool.
Next steps will be to migrate a live VM to the new XCP-ng environment and then retiring my old Xenserver hypervisor and the old physical hardware. I also have some old VM’s in a VMWare 5.5 ESXi environment I need to export over.
Well time for bed and I am still cramming projects in but some will not get work done since my Rams are in the Super Bowl and will be ready to watch them Saturday. I decided my projects and time spent on my computer room, solar install, cameras setup with Zoneminder, smart home, landscaping was better used here than for Super Bowl tickets and that whole weekend. Just a timing issue but go RAMS Sunday is yours!
January 29, 2019
by dhoytt Comments Off on Switching to XCP-ng Hypervisor
I had started testing and working stoppng and going with oVirt for the past month or so as my new hardware has started coming in but I’ve now switched my attention to XCP-ng. I have gotten som much further in one late evening with XCP-ng than a month plus with oVirt. I’m now ready to move my NAS running FreeNAS in place once I get another drive as someone sent an 8TB SAS drive without any shock padding so I have to return that back and get from another source.
Testing with oVirt I had issues just getting the management Host Engine VM to stay up or even install. With XCP-ng install went fine to my new server, NICS came up (I had to login and manually start the NIC’s for Ovirt via CLI.
Yes I’m familar with XCP-ng as I had been working with Xen, XCP and Xenserver and XCP-ng is the latest commnity version restart its seems of XCP since Citrix removed so many features suddenly from the community version last year.
Its so great so far in a few hours I have already setup the hypervisor shared out iSCSI paths from FreeNAS, started using Xen Orchestra wed UI and then discovered XCP-ng Center for windows that mirrors Xen Center. Looked arounf quite a bit on the CLI mostly looking at NFS options. Created VM’s and they are installing very fast using my NFS library OS ISO’s going to my iSCSI SR’s.
I also discovered that I could import my current XenServer enviornment into this XCP-ng community Center as well as use the Xen Orchestra premium web UI for a brief time that seems to have some cool VM ipmort features I may be able to use to import my VM’s from my old enviornment I hope.
I really had no idea they had been doing so much with this XCP-ng and it looks like they have a very actice community!
Wow its really late and I need to go to bed I have a ton of projects and things I need to do other than this but this is huge as well.
More later on this XCP-ng!
January 27, 2019
by dhoytt Comments Off on UPS Battery Update
Updated one of my Liebert GTX UPS and the extension cabinet. Did this earlier than I wanted since the UPS went into total failure as it seems all the batteries have reached end of life obviously as evidenced by the visual swelling this is not one of the UPS that I had replaced the batteries on after buying from someone who had bought out a decommissioned data center.
I’m still updating other aspects of my infrastructure like NAS that’s running FreeNAS, hypervisors (testing Ovirt), rebuilding Zoneminder server, installing additional cameras for security, updating my network backbone, and building a smart environment the Open Source way. So this UPS going out was not in the plans until later. The effectiveness of the UPS wasn’t at peak so the batteries conditions explain the bad uptime for small outages it should withstand.
Here’s some after and before pictures of the UPS batteries and systems I have in place currently.
January 27, 2019
by dhoytt Comments Off on Pics From L.A.Rams 2019 Playoff Game Against the Cowboys
Some pictures from the L.A. Rams 2019 playoff win against the Dallas Cowboys! Been a Rams fan for a very long time and it’s great to have them back in California!
I also have some pics from the hotel I stayed in the Millennium Biltmore in downtown L.A.
GO RAMS beat the Patriots in the Super Bowl! I have a lot to do so it seems I will not make the Super Bowl but will be watching and yelling!
January 26, 2019
by dhoytt Comments Off on My New Favorite Kitchen Utensil
My new favorite kitchen utensil. Chops items into workable sizes a great compliment to the mandolin. A time saver for days like today where I was up all night and having a late breakfast in the afternoon.
