Zfs on Shane Cunningham

Monitor OpenIndiana/Solaris 11 with check_mk_agent and Nagios

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 07:12:09 +0000

Here’s a short how-to on monitoring OpenIndiana (Solaris 11) that is running ZFS using Nagios, check___mk and check_mk_agent. This awesome open source tool makes setting up your servers to be checked by Nagios super easy. In the past I would manually create or edit the Nagios .cfg files for my environment and install various agents depending on OS architecture on the servers I wanted to monitor. Even though I am not monitoring a ton of servers it still took quite a bit of time. Now I use check_mk and Open Monitoring Distribution. I plan to write-up a more detailed post on OMD soon, but I found it’s a very impressive bundled Nagios package with many important addons and can easily be installed on every major Linux distribution. On to monitoring Solaris 11.

Whitebox VM Lab & OpenSolaris with napp-it All-in-One

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 02:23:23 +0000

My first white box specifically for VMs was solid, but I wanted more flexibility with storage configurations. The passthrough on my ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3 would not work even when IOMMU was enabled. This seems to be quite common for AMD boards, some have the option in BIOS, but it doesn’t work. The plan was to boot ESXi off USB and use the other two controllers (on-board and LSI RAID card) for my storage configuration. So, after some research I found an AMD motherboard that had working IOMMU. The board I found was an ASRock 970 Extreme4 which works with ESXi and IOMMU for passing through devices to VMs. When I bought the ASRock motherboard I overlooked the fact it did not have onboard graphics, so make sure you have an extra GPU you can throw in for installing the hypervisor. I went with a really cheap PowerColor Green Radeon AX5450 1GB. My current build is below.

All-in-one ZFS SAN/NAS solution

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 03:34:35 +0000

Decided to stop using Hyper-V as my main hypervisor and go with ESXi or XenServer full time. Leaning towards ESXi as I know for sure my hardware is compatible. Also, adding an IBM BR10i controller flashed to IT mode, removes RAID and is JBOD. Plan to run ESXi/XenServer off a USB drive, use onboard controller for datastore and passthrough the IBM card for NFS access for my VMs. When my SAS cables come in I plan on going with OpenIndiana and napp-it for an all-in-one ZFS based SAN/NAS. Looking forward to trying it out, will be using this guide.