ServeTheHome.com

Recently creating a VMware ESXi virtual machine for NexentaStor was covered in a quick how-to guide. The next logical piece of the puzzle is this guide to getting NexentaStor installed in the virtual machine. There are, of course variations to the installation, so this guide will not cover every variation out there, but it should be more than sufficient to get a solid ESXi NexentaStor installation running and ready for more specific configuration. Read the full story

This is a simple guide to creating a VMware ESXi virtual machine for NexentaStor. Actual OS installation is very easy and will be covered in another piece. Just over a year ago I created The Big WHS on a platform of Windows Server 2008 R2 with Windows Home Server installed in Hyper-V. Simply put, this may have been the easiest installation ever since Hyper-V and Windows Home Server work well together. With the lack of a new Drive Extender technology in Windows VAIL server, many users are looking to other storage platforms to fill the void. Read the full story

Oftentimes people talk about passing a RAID controller/ HBA/ USB drive through to a guest OS in VMware ESXi (this guide is based on 4.1 and works for ESX too) using VMDirectPath I/O or disk through disk in Microsoft Hyper-V. This is especially useful when one either needs direct RAID controller/ HBA access for an operating system which is recommended for OpenSolaris/ FreeBSD solutions or USB access for an OS installation. It is a fairly simple process, so I figured I would provide a quick guide. Before embarking on this process, please note that the server will need to be restarted mid-process so this is not something that should be done on an ESX host with critical virtual machines running on the host. Read the full story

I got a note asking to update my original benchmark for the Patriot PS-100 32GB with results from the new Patriot PS-100 Firmware v2.008. Performance is said to be better and it is!

Update 6 June 2010: New Patriot PS-100 32GB Firmware v3.000 benchmarks are up.

The specs of the update are:

Firmware update #2.008

• Firmware v2.006 doesn’t support Active Protection feature in Lenovo laptops. Firmware 2.008 fixed it by enabling Active Protection identify bit.
• Some platforms had issue installing Windows 7 into SSD with firmware v2.006. The root cause is partial command will be NAK in background process and bank (0) is not loaded in PRAM. Firmware v2.008 has fixed this issue.
• Firmware v2.006 has power on and loading Windows XP issue with some NVIDIA chipsets. Firmware v2.008 fixed it by changing default setting to MDMA mode 2.
• In Apple Mac Book and Mac Book Pro, sometimes SSD with Firmware v2.006 will fail in reboot. Firmware v2.008 fixed this issue.

Quick Teaser: The results got better!

Read the full story