Tuesday, November 29, 2011

iSCSI > NFS for VMWare - Just don't buy a Drobo

A while back I posted about fighting with VMWare ESXi to get an NFS share mounted as a datastore. Eventually we pulled the trigger on an iSCSI device to start our own little SAN. The SAN was a good idea, but the Drobo B800i that we bought was not. Even with the recommended hard drives the performance is very poor. We are using it to run our Exchange server but that's about all it can handle - even on a dedicated gigabit network with jumbo frames enabled. Apparently "VMWare Certified" does not mean all that much.

JitBit again

We've been using JitBit for about 6 months now and I'm pretty happy with it. It isn't very feature-rich but it keeps track of tickets just fine. There are probably equally good free solutions out there but now that we've paid up we might as well stick with it.

Quite a while ago I configured our old phone server as a monitoring box running Nagios and Cacti. The combination has been invaluable to me. There is nothing more satisfying than getting a call from a user about a problem and being able to say that you've already found and fixed it. The configuration requires a lot of manual work but it was definitely worth it.