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Universal USB Installer aka UUI is a Live Linux Bootable USB Creator that allows you to choose from a selection of Linux Distributions to put on your USB Flash Drive. The Universal USB Installer is easy to use. Simply choose a Live Linux Distribution, the ISO file, your Flash Drive and, Click Install.
Upon completion, you should have a ready to run bootable USB Flash Drive with your select operating system installed. Other features include; (if available) – Ubuntu, Xubuntu, and Lubuntu Casper Persistence feature works with FAT32 or NTFS formatted drives. Larger than 4GB casper-rw is possible only when the USB drive is formatted with the NTFS filesystem. NOTE: To add multiple Linux Distributions, System Tools, Antivirus Utilities, and Windows Installers to your USB, try YUMI – Universal USB Installer (UUI) Screenshots Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.8.3.exe – July 29, 2018 – Changes Update to support Quick Save Live, Norton Bootable Recovery Tool, and Hiren's Boot CD PE. Created Disk Cloning and Recovery Tools Category.
IMPORTANT: The Windows to Go option requires the USB be formatted NTFS with 20GB free disk space to hold the virtual disk. See for more info. IMPORTANT NOTE: Your USB drive must be Fat32/NTFS formatted, otherwise Syslinux will fail and your drive will NOT Boot. Bootable USB Flash Drive Creation Requirements:. Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.8.3.exe.
Windows Vista/7/8/10 or WINE to create the USB (Win 98/XP/2K WILL NOT Work!).Fat32 or NTFS Formatted Flash Drive. MBR partition only GPT will not work!. PC with a BIOS that can boot from USB. Your Favorite Linux ISO Feel free to inform me of unlisted Live Linux distributions or version revisions, and I will do my best to update Universal USB Installer (UUI) to support them. Universal USB Installer Recent Changelog: 07/29/18 – Version 1.9.8.3: Update to support Quick Save Live, Norton Bootable Recovery Tool, and Hiren's Boot CD PE. Created Disk Cloning and Recovery Tools Category.
06/22/18 – Version 1.9.8.2: Update to support Kodachi, and newer Kasperski Rescue Disk. Add new category for Anonymous Tor Browsers. 04/25/18 – Version 1.9.8.1: Fix various broken links.
01/13/18 – Version 1.9.8.0: Update to support Super Grub2 Disk, All In One-System Rescue Toolkit, Gecko Linux, Q4OS, and Medicat. 09/27/17 – Version 1.9.7.9: Update to support PureOS, CentOS Installer, and Ubuntu Mini (Netboot Installer).
Fix broken Debian, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu links. 05/02/17 – Version 1.9.7.8: Update to support KDE Neon, Devuan, Vinari OS, and Ubuntu Budgie. 03/21/17 – Version 1.9.7.7: Added casper-rw creation progress banner. Corrected casper slider max size relative to fat32 or ntfs selection. 03/19/17 – Version 1.9.7.6: Correct broken Ubuntu and Linux Mint installer options when no format option is chosen. 03/13/17 – Version 1.9.7.5: Add filesystem type to drivelist.
Include message box to notify of NTFS filesystem requirement for Windows to Go option. 03/06/17 – Version 1.9.7.4: Add Windows to Go VHD option. Added more info for syslinux warning. Added Diskpart NTFS format option.
02/22/17 – Version 1.9.7.3: Temporarily limit format option to removable media. 02/09/17 – Version 1.9.7.2: Add Try via DD (Overwrites disk) and Try Unlisted Linux ISO (GRUB) options. Update to support Antergos. 02/02/17 – Version 1.9.7.1: Quick fix to correct Show All ISOs font. 12/23/16 – Version 1.9.7.0: Add Show All ISO option. Update Step 1,2,3 labels.
Replace empty spaces in filename with dashes. Update to newer GRUB4DOS. 12/13/16 – Version 1.9.6.9: Update Get Drives function to ignore system and network drives. Update to support ChaletOS, and Bunsenlabs.
10/03/16 – Version 1.9.6.8: Switch back to use 7-Zip 9.20. 09/24/16 – Version 1.9.6.7: Update to support Cyborg Linux.
Upgrade to 7-Zip 16.02. 06/29/16 – Version 1.9.6.6: Update to support Cub Linux. 06/17/16 – Version 1.9.6.5: Update to re-support Archbang, Archlinux, newer Dban, and CentOS. Added Syslinux 6.03. 04/05/16 – Version 1.9.6.4: Update Links, remove Archlinux until a fix is found, disable feature to close all open explorer windows when format option is selected. Update Syslinux 4.07 source. 12/30/15 – Version 1.9.6.3: Update to support Caine, Pentoo, Parrot Security OS, and Windows 10 Installer (untested).
10/28/15 – Version 1.9.6.2: Update Links, remove discontinued projects. 06/26/15 – Version 1.9.6.1: Update to support GRML 2014-11, CentOS 7, Runtime Live CD, and Clonezilla 2.4.2-10 05/05/15 – Version 1.9.6.0: Update to support Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca. Update several broken links 01/14/15 – Version 1.9.5.9: Update Links 11/19/14 – Version 1.9.5.8: Update to support Linux Lite 10/30/14 – Version 1.9.5.7: Update to support Ubuntu Mate, CentOS 7, ESET SysRescue Live, Linpus Lite, and mintyMac 09/12/14 – Version 1.9.5.6: Update to support Ubuntu, Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu 14.04.1 + 14.10, Linux Mint 17, and Debian Live 7.6 07/29/14 – Version 1.9.5.5: Update to support Peach OSI 06/29/14 – Version 1.9.5.4: Update to support newer syslinux version packed with Tails and Clonezilla. 05/29/14 – Version 1.9.5.3: Update Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, and Linux Mint Download Links. 01/16/14 – Version 1.9.5.2: Update to support Desinfect, Antivirus Live CD, Fedora 20, LXLE Desktop, Kon-Boot Purchased, Sparky, SolydX, and Manjaro Linux.
11/24/13 – Version 1.9.5.1: Modify chain.c32 to address Insane Primary (MBR) partition error. 11/22/13 – Version 1.9.5.0: Add OpenSuse 32/64bit Entries. 11/20/13 – Version 1.9.4.9: Fix broken Ubuntu Server options. 11/12/13 – Version 1.9.4.8: Fix broken Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10 entry. Reconfigure to auto detect ISO size. 11/09/13 – Version 1.9.4.7: Re-Enable Ubuntu Persistence Features. 11/07/13 – Version 1.9.4.6: Fixed TAILS and Kon-Boot entries.
Added Falcon 4 entry. 11/05/13 – Version 1.9.4.5: Wildcard selections to ease user choices, automate config append, and remove manually created config files. 10/17/13 – Version 1.9.4.4: Added Ubuntu, Edubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, and Xubuntu 13.10 09/16/13 – Version 1.9.4.3: Added AOMEI (Disk Cloning tool), and gNewSense. 09/12/13 – Version 1.9.4.2: Drop-down now displays Volume Label, and Capacity of each drive. 09/03/13 – Version 1.9.4.1: Update to support Ubuntu 12.04.3. 08/27/13 – Version 1.9.4.0: Update to support Fusion Linux 16, Peppermint 4. Add persistent option to Ubuntu 13.xx grub loopback.cfg file.
08/01/13 – Version 1.9.3.9: Update to support newer Avira Antivir Rescue Disk. 07/26/13 – Version 1.9.3.8: Update to support Deft Linux 8. 07/10/13 – Version 1.9.3.7: Update to support Knoppix 7.2, Sugar on a Stick 19, Fedora 19, Pear OS 7, Korora 19, and Antix 13.
06/26/13 – Version 1.9.3.6: Update to support Ophcrack 3.6.0, Fix broken Ubuntu Server 12.04.2 Installer/Alternate options. 06/04/13 – Version 1.9.3.5: Update to support Linux Mint 15, and Ubuntu Server 13.10/13.04 Installers.
05/14/13 – Version 1.9.3.4: Update to support Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu Gnome 13.04, and Debian Live 7. 04/25/13 – Version 1.9.3.3: Update to support final release of Ubuntu 13.04, Kubuntu 13.04, Lubuntu 13.04, Xubuntu 13.04, and Edubuntu 13.04.
04/17/13 – Version 1.9.3.2: Update to support REMnux, Linux Mint Debian 201303, Kubuntu 13.04, Lubuntu 13.04, Xubuntu 13.04, and Edubuntu 13.04. Fix some broken links. 03/21/13 – Version 1.9.3.1: Condense Code to make updates easier. Added support for Kali Linux and Tails 0.17. 03/14/13 – Version 1.9.3.0: Correct broken Ubuntu 13.04 i386 Desktop entry.
03/13/13 – Version 1.9.2.9: Update to support Mythbuntu 12.04.2 Desktop amd64, Debian Live 6.0.7. Implement another attempt to address 'Insane primary (MBR) partition. Can’t find myself on the drive I booted from' error.
Allow Spaces in Unlisted ISO Filenames. 03/12/13 – Version 1.9.2.8: Update to support Ubuntu 12.04.2 Desktop amd64, Ubuntu 12.04.2 DVD amd64, Edubuntu 12.04.2 amd64, and (G4L) Ghost for Linux. 03/08/13 – Version 1.9.2.7: Update to support Ultimate Boot CD 5.2.1, Comodo Rescue Disk 2.0.261647.1, and Elementry Luna. Switch back to Syslinux 4.06. See Additional Help Section for Insane Primary MBR messages. 02/25/13 – Version 1.9.2.6: Update to support Ubuntu 12.04.2.
Temporary switch to Syslinux 4.06-pre7 to prevent 'Insane primary (MBR) partition. Can’t find myself on the drive I booted from' errors. Minitab 16 free download full version crack.
Install To Usb Drive
02/15/13 – Version 1.9.2.5: Update to support Ubuntu 13.04, Archlinux 2013.02.01, XBMCbuntu 12, and Crunchbang 11. 01/18/13 – Version 1.9.2.4: Update to support Fedora 18. Fixed various broken links. 01/14/13 – Version 1.9.2.3: Update to support Tails 0.16 and Comodo Rescue Disk. 01/11/13 – Version 1.9.2.2: Update to support Debian 6.0.6. Correct several dead links.
Fix broken LMDE 201204 Install options. UUI – Universal USB Installer Troubleshooting, Issues, Bugs: The Windows to Go option requires the USB drive be NTFS formatted and have 20GB+ free space to hold the virtual disk. Many flash drives you might find at local department stores won't be fast enough. You'll need a Very Fast Flash Drive. When Windows boots from the USB for the first time, it'll go through the setup process and then reboot.
You'll need to boot using your Windows to Go flash drive a second time to finalize the setup process and finally boot into your full Portable Windows. UUI Expects the Volume Label of your USB drive to be UUI in order for OpenSUSE, CentOS and several other distributions to boot. UUI attempts to automatically create this Volume Label, however it can sometimes fail. Please ensure that the Volume Label of your USB remains UUI if you expect distributions to boot! If you're using Universal-USB-Installer-1.9.8.3.exe and you still receive Insane primary (MBR) partition notices, Insane primary (MBR) partition.
Can’t find myself on the drive I booted from Your USB drive may be improperly formatted, contains more than one partition or MBR, or your BIOS is not properly detecting the USB drive and its firmware needs to be updated. You can try An Error (1) occurred while executing syslinux. If you encounter a message stating An error (1) occurred while executing syslinux. Your USB drive won't be bootable. The most likely cause is that your USB drive is formatted as exFAT or some other unsupported format. You'll need to reformat as fat32 (currently preferred) or NTFS. My PC wont Boot from my Flash Drive, but supports USB boot!
Many Flash Drives ship USB-FDD formatted and some systems will not detect or even boot USB-FDD. I have found that most systems can however boot USB-ZIP, and or USB-HDD. If you are having a hard time getting your BIOS to detect your flash drive, you can try to format it as USB-HDD or USB-ZIP using BOOTICE , and then proceed to use Universal USB Installer to put your chosen Distro on USB. OTHER IMPORTANT NOTES:. If you're running a Windows Vista or 7 Installer from your USB, after the first reboot, remove the flash drive and let the pc complete from the hard disk.
When browsing for an ISO, UUI will only display ISO Files that match exactly what the tool is asking for. For example, if you chose to install Ubuntu 10.10 Desktop i386, you should not expect the tool to display your ubuntu-10.10- netbook-i386.iso as you have not chosen to install the netbook variant. Auto Detection: If you run Universal USB Installer from the same directory containing an installable ISO, the script should Auto Detect the ISO and bypass step 2.
Although you can use an NTFS formatted USB, Ubuntu based 'persistence' features will only work with a Fat16 or Fat32 formatted drive. Additionally some Linux Distributions will not boot from an NTFS formatted USB. This tool does not support installing and booting from multiple Linux Distributions. Only One Distribution can be installed per USB drive. However, the can be used to create a Multi System USB Device. To try an unlisted ISO, I.E.
'Ubuntu 9.10', choose one of the the last two options in Step 1, 'Try Unlisted Linux ISO'. Please inform me of unlisted 'Linux ISOs' you get to work via these options, and I'll add them. NOTE: OpenSUSE DVD ISOs that exceed 4GB will not work due to the Fat32 limitation. Ubuntu Server 'Failed to copy file from CD-ROM' Error (should be resolved)?
The Universal USB Installer does run well in WINE under Linux. However the Fat32 format option will not work, and syslinux must be installed manually onto the USB from within Linux.
You might also wish to try another.
Note that the hardware compatibility lists for Solaris 10 and for OpenSolaris should be considered inclusive for what is supported. The NexentaStor installer will also verify hardware compatibility before installation commences. For more information on the hardware compatibility, please visit NexentaStor.
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Click to expand.Making usb bootable for Solaris from Windows. Stop waisting time. Format usb FAT (not FAT32 OR NTFS) Go and download x86 usb live media Go to an download imageusb Install imageusb software When open Step 1 choose the usb unit you want make bootable Step 2 SELECT THE ACTION TO BE PERFOMED. Choose option WRITE TO USB DRIVE Step 3 SELECT THE IMAGE.
When browse to find file image choose the extension option ALL FILES to find your file with extension.usb Step 4 click WRITE and wait until the process finish. Reboot the computer and if everything went ok you are done.
When trying to install Nexenta b104-beta1 from my CD-Rom drive to my USB-HDD 40G Samsung, i got a error on screen after selecting the drive to install. 'Error Cannot create ZFS 'root' pool using disk(s) with error: cannot create 'syspool': no such pool or dataset. In my LOG screen we have:. Selected disk(s) for auto partitioning: c1t0d0. Selected 'zfs' configuration cannot create 'tmp': no such pool or dataset. Cannot create temporary ZFS pool on disk 'c1t0d0' cannot open 'tmp': no such pool. Cannot destroy temporary ZFS pool on disk 'c1tod0'.
Warning! Disk 'c1t0d0' is not labeled correctly: devid is missing. Slice0: / 4738 cylinders. Slice7: swap 122 cylinders. Error: Cannot create ZFS 'root' pool using disk(s) with error: n n cannot create 'syspool': no such pool or dataset n I and anilg (from #nexenta - irc.freenode.org) tried to workaround can you move to fs and do an 'ls /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0.'
ok /dev/rdsk/ c1t0d0p 0-4 /dev/rdsk/ c1t0d0s 0-15 ok. 'zpool create syspool c1t0d0p0'. Note this will destroy any filesystem in c1t0d0. Free cakewalk download full version. So be sure this is the USB drive you can see the light blinking etc.
Zpool create syspool c1t0d0p0 cannot create 'syspool': no such pool or dataset ls /dev/dsk/c1t0d0. c1t0d0p0-4 c1t0d0s0-15 ok. Zpool create syspool /dev/dsk/c1t0d0p0 zpool create syspool /dev/dsk/c1t0d0p0 cannot create 'syspool': no such pool or dataset how about zpool create syspool /dev/dsk/c1t0d0 wihtout the p0 same error well. We cant seem to be able to create a zfs pool on this USB disk for some reason do you have another machine wiht nexenta/ opensolaris? I have the cd installer and the usb disk so i can plug in another one not sure that will help because we're already tried to use the cd.
Can you file a bug, and reporting all taat we tried that. same error on the other machine.
I spent some time at Christmas upgrading my home lab in preparation for the new VCAP exams which are. In particular I needed to improve my shared storage and hoped that I could reuse old h/w instead of buying something new.
I’ve been using an Iomega IX2-200 for the last year but it’s performance is pretty pitiful so I usually reverted to local storage which rather defeated the purpose. I started off having a quick look around at my storage options for home labs;. Hardware appliances from, etc. There’s a great, comprehensive list at which includes both performance and cost comparisons. Software appliances such as, and Nexenta’s Community Edition.
Virtual appliances such as UberVSA, LeftHand, Netapp’s ONTAP Simulator (Netapp customer’s only and capacity limited). Or you can spin your own using a variety of base OSs: Oracle Solaris 11, Oracle Solaris 11 Express (free for non-commercial), FreeBSD (older version of ZFS), OpenIndiana and the upcoming which is a fork from the now discontinued OpenSolaris. An interesting project is which shows you how to build your own NAS server using ZFS – well worth a look! Has just published his ‘‘ which also looks very interesting and has an. Why pick Nexenta? I’d used OpenFiler and FreeNAS before (both are very capable) but with so much choice I didn’t have time to evaluate all the other options. Datacore and Starwind’s solutions rely on Windows rather than being bare metal (which was my preference) and I’ve been hearing and recently.
On the technical front the SSD caching and VAAI support make Nexenta stand out from the crowd. What does Nexenta provide?. An easy to setup. GUI based appliance which runs on standard x86 hardware (either bare metal or as a VM). It uses an advanced filesystem, ZFS, under the hood.
ZFS features data integrity (RAID equivalents), compression, deduplication, snapshots and more. Check out this post from on. Nexenta (via ZFS) offers various cache options which increase performance – combined with SSDs it’s potentially a killer feature! There are from and even (LSI in this case) but with Nexenta it’s available on commodity x86 hardware. VAAI support. This got my interest when I first read it – a free software appliance that supports VAAI? That’s got to be worth checking out!
Investigating a bit further it’s actually although it does support all four primitives. What are the different editions of Nexenta?. NexentaStor Enterprise (nexenta.com). As the name implies this is the ‘big boys’ version which you’re not going to run in your home lab unless money is no object, both from a hardware and licensing perspective. There’s a 45 day trial which is free to download. NOTE: This is not the same as the Community Edition!. NexentaStor Community Edition (known as CE, nexentastor.org).
This is what I’m running as it’s free to use for test/dev and has an 18TB capacity restriction. Not a problem for my 2TB home lab!.
NexentaStor Core (CLI only, nexenta.org). From what I can gather this is now. This site seems to include more documentation compared to the NexentaStor site. For base OS and general ZFS queries this site seems more useful. As of Feb 2012 the latest version is 3.1.2 but v4 is due out soon based on the Illumos build. My testing was completed using v3.1.1. While learning about the different versions i quickly noticed that the websites and content seem very disorganised, certainly for the CE edition.
It took a while to realise that different domains represented different products, and even then the content is occasionally on the wrong site. Nexenta was originally based on OpenSolaris but since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun (and their lack of ongoing development for OpenSolaris) Nexenta have been looking to, and hence the Illumos fork. Another of Nexenta’s key selling points is its use of ZFS.
This has been around for quite a few years – if you want some background on what ZFS can offer read this article on. It’s also worth mentioning that has just joined Nexenta – maybe storage and VDI are a good combination?
П˜‰ Installing NexentaStor on bare metal Having decided to run Nexenta I fell at the first hurdle – finding the download. I went to the NexentaStor.org homepage and clicked the green Download button which took me to a page detailing my options – ISO, VM images etc. I wanted the VM images but scrolling down only revealed the.ISOs and there was no sign of the VM images.
I then tried the ‘Downloads’ tab with no luck. Despite posting in the forums, I’ve still been unable to find them! There are some but they’re for the Enterprise edition. I decided that was better than nothing although the download speed was very slow (10kbps) so I had to leave it running overnight (that could have been Internet or ISP related although it’s been consistently slow on the three occasions I’ve tried it). Did I mention that the website seems at best disorganised? П™ x81 With my download complete and a newly minted CD in hand I started my ‘bare metal’ install on my whitebox server. I assumed the install would be a ‘next’, ‘next’ process but unfortunately there were a few gotchas;.
Running the ‘memory burn-in test’ from the Grub bootloader failed with an error. This happened on both physical servers and a virtual server so I’m guessing it’s just broken. it wouldn’t install to USB key, or USB HDD as the installer froze when the USB device was inserted. This seems to be a known issue (despite being ). Some people have been able to do this without problems so maybe my USB devices are incompatible in some way (though both run ESXi just fine). the installer froze for ages at the ‘Installing base appliance’ stage which is something too (see screenshot). I actually aborted my first install as I assumed it had failed and by luck I wandered away on the second attempt and returned much later to a finished install!.
during the install a serial number is generated which you need to register via nexenta.com (The keen eyed will have noticed that the URL refer’s to the commercial website and to the developer edition not the CE edition. Did I mention that the website’s confusing? Once past these niggling issues the install was fairly quick and painless (you can watch, and Tomi Hakala has a ).
I also made some user errors which the support team were very quick to help sort out so kudos to them. NOTE: It’s worth checking your hardware against the. There are some specific requirements if you’re using a VM (vt-d support).
Installing NexentaStor in a virtual machine Next I tried installing NexentaStor as a VM because it offered a few advantages;. more flexibility in how you carve up your hard disks. Nexenta requires you to dedicate a whole disk to volumes (or cache) but once you have a virtualisation layer you can easily work around that limitation. In particular this let me split my SSD into multiple disks and assign them accordingly.
allows me to run other workloads on the same ESXi host. ESXi will boot from USB leaving the internal HDD’s purely for VMs/NexentaStor With a fresh install of vSphere5 up and running I then ran through the install process (you can follow guides and ) using the same ISO image I used for the bare metal install. The process is essentially the same but there are a few key changes to be made afterwards;. A single vCPU seems to work better compared to multiple vCPUs (see the comments on this article originally about ).
Looking at (and ) this has been debated for a while – certainly a single vCPU worked better for me. There is also a which is hopefully going to be resolved soon (may be the same thing). Editing the /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl script for ESXi 5. VMtools can be installed but it does need tweaking to get it working. Run the VMtools installer (as per ) but when asked if you want to run /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl change the default yes to no.
Using your favourite editor (vi or nano etc) search for ‘SUNW’ and then comment out the block which checks for the SUNWuiu8 package. Save the file and then complete the installation by running /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl (full ). There’s no support for the VMXNET3 vNIC (but ).
Even with the above tweaks I found performance was severely lacking. I posted on the Nexenta forums and also found this but found no resolution. After quite a bit of digging I found the which states; ‘A ZFS storage OS needs real hardware access to disk controller and attached disks for performance and failure handling reasons.
We can virtualize the OS itself but we must allow exclusive pass-through access to a disk-controller and disks via vt-d.’ In vSphere parlance this means you need VMDirectPath to make the most of ZFS. Unfortunately my aging motherboard and chipset didn’t support vt-d which seemed to be a showstopper. Finally (and more out of curiosity) I tried a workaround whereby you and to my surprise (given the mantra ) performance improved significantly even though the disk controller is still virtualized. In the next article in the series I’ll cover my benchmarking results for both bare metal and virtual configurations along with some configuration issues. I’ll also cover my general thoughts about NexentaStor and whether it’s going to provide the storage for my home lab in the future Further reading (official Nexenta blog) (plus Pivot3 and Diskeeper) Twitterers you might want to follow if you’re interested in Nexenta;. (official).
(she runs the support forums for Nexenta probably amongst other things). (Nexenta employee). (new Nexenta employee). (vExpert/VCI).
Thanks for the feedback Nismo. You’re right that both can be installed in a VM or a physical machine but I’ve just been reading the whitepapers and from what I can see you still need an underlying OS (such as Windows, RedHat Linux etc) to install either Datacore SANSymphony-V or Starwind’s iSCSI SAN. When I say ‘bare metal’ I mean the storage software is both OS and application combined, in which case neither Datacore or Starwind’s offerings are bare metal. That of course has it’s benefits as the server isn’t necessarily dedicated to storage which is typically the case with a bare metal storage appliance.
The auto-tiering offered by SANSymphony looks interesting so hopefully I’ll get some time to take a closer look and post an article sometime in the future. The end user may not care of course – if the performance and features are there it’s a matter of semantics (and possibly licensing in the case of Windows!). Nexenta is after all a modified version of OpenSolaris with an application installed on top – just rolled into a single deployment. For those wishing to check for themselves here are the and the.
You forgot to mention raw disk RDMs as a way to circumvent the hardware compatibility issue. So long as the controller is supported in vSphere, your SCSI pass through should provide better disk management and access support. It is important to note that ZFS likes raw disk access for many reasons, but disk management is huge (I.e.
What do you do with a failed non-raid VMFS volume attached to a VSA when using vmdk files, etc) While a single vCPU VSA is OK for mirror, don’t expect to get the most out of RAIDz configurations that way. ZFS is highly threaded – think in line compression, per vdev threading, in line dedupe, etc. – and will use what CPU resources you give it within reason. Don’t sweat the high idle CPU especially if doing device translation (I.e. Virtual SCSI adaptrt) as most of your CPU is being used by device emulation – not the NexentaStor OS. NexentaStor is very trace heavy and monitors what’s happening to the disk and volume fairly aggressively.
In a VSA application, consider this the cost of data integrity and move on Good write up. Thanks for the info and also for your blog posts – I’ve learned much of what I know about Nexenta from them! I have mentioned RDM’s in the article (just before the Further Reading section) but more as a performance enhancement than compatibility (though both are valid). As you say the case for RDM’s goes further than performance/compatability – if you choose to use VMFS there’s an extra layer of complexity and you can’t so easily move/recover your RAIDz datasets. I’ve got a followup post in the wings which goes into some of my benchmarking, though it won’t be anything you haven’t seen before and I’m sure you’ll have some useful feedback. The high idle CPU is frustrating but until I get newer h/w which supports VMDirectPath I’ve no equipment to test with. For now I’m running bare metal so less of an issue.
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