Clearspace Server Syndication Feed

Find the service tag of a Dell server from the ESX console

2010-05-21T20:15:06Z

Today I needed to look up the warranty info on one of my ESX servers -- I knew I had it in a spreadsheet somewhere, but it turned to be quicker to just look it up from the console using "dmidecode". The service tag is listed as the Serial Number under System Information.

This works for regular Linux servers too:

[root@myesxserver root]# /usr/sbin/dmidecode |grep -A4 "System Information"

System Information

Manufacturer: Dell Inc.

Product Name: PowerEdge R710

Version: Not Specified

Serial Number: Hxxxxx1

Virtualization/Sysadmin Links -- 3/8/2010

2010-03-09T07:50:26Z

A few links related to virualization and/or systems administration that I recently found interesting enough to bookmark (from my del.icio.us feed)

--mds

(you can also follow me on Twitter)

Matthew Snodderly's VMWorld Blog

2010-03-09T07:29:36Z

Actual location of this blog is here: http://www.vmworld.com/blogs/matthew.snodderly

--Matt

(see also: LinkedIn, Twitter)

Partition alignment for VMware guests

2010-02-07T04:34:09Z

At an EMC class I took recently, the instructor claimed that in testing she had done, correctly aligning the partitions on a physical Windows server resulted in 30% performance gains. I'm not sure what, if anything the gain is for aligning the partitions in virtual disks, assuming the underlying VMFS LUNs are aligned (which by default they will be if they're created under ESX 3+ or vSphere).

That being said, this is the advice from the "Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 4.0" guide:

Make sure the system partitions within the guest are aligned. For further information you might want to

refer to the literature from the operating system vendor regarding appropriate tools to use as well as

recommendations from the array vendor.

(from http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere4.0.pdf)

Accordingly, I have my Windows VM templates configured with aligned partitions. See http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa995867(EXCHG.65).aspx and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929491 for info on aligning windows partitions.

This is a potentially useful tool -- a powershell script to check the partition alignment of your Windows VMs. (via Scott Lowe )

I haven't adjusted the partition alignment on my Linux VM templates yet. That's on my To Do list, hopefully for some time in the near future. I plan to do some before and after performance testing, and I'll post the results here when I do.

--mds

About Matt

2010-02-07T04:13:09Z

Other places you can find me on the web:

Matt's home page: http://area51a.net/mds/

Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/msnodderly

Del.icio.us bookmarks: http://del.icio.us/msnodderly

Google reader: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/msnodderly

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/msnodderly

Puppet + git

2010-01-27T19:08:43Z

This is an interesting idea -- instead of running puppet in traditional client-server mode where the configuration is pushed from the server, replacing the puppetmaster server with a git repository, and let the managed servers pull their configs from git.

Scaling Puppet with distributed version control

Practical Patterns in Automated Infrastructure

2010-01-25T21:38:04Z

http://www.devopsdays.org/ghent09/presentations/agile-infrastructure-teyo-tyree/project/project.html

sysadmin 2.0