Tools

I was discussing how to build a home made VSA cluster with Jimmy Dansbo a month ago while he was attending my VMware Install and Configure training course. He showed me some rough stages of his ideas and it was awesome. Jimmy is a very bright and clever guy, he told me he has designed his own OS years ago and I had never any doubt he would create something awesome again. This evening I've received the complete guide which describes how to build a poor mans storage Appliance (pmsApp).

VMware has released their vSphere Storage Appliance which seems like a nice alternative for small and medium sized setups to get shared storage without buying a SAN og NAS. It does however have a few drawbacks. It only runs in VMware. It is kind of expensive (you could probably buy a nice NAS for the same money).

The release of vSphere Storage Appliance did, however, give me the idea of creating a storage Appliance from open source software. The idea for pmsApp was born. The idea is that you have two (or more) virtualization hosts you want to set up in a cluster. This could be VMware ESXi, Proxmox PVE, VirtualBox or any other virtualization platform that is capable of clustering. In order to get a working cluster, you need shared storage, but you only have the local storage in each virtualization node. 

pmsApp will take local storage on a virtualization host and share it with pmsApp's on the other virtualization hosts to create shared storage that can be given back to the virtualization hosts through iSCSI or NFS. A bit more detail... Each pmsApp will join a HA cluster and export local storage as iSCSI targets. The main pmsApp in the HA cluster will join the exported storage in a sotware RAID and export that as NFS share or iSCSI target that can be used by the virtualization hosts as shared storage.

http://www.pmsapp.org/

vBenchmark is a simple application that allows you to measure key datacenter operational and efficiency metrics. Simply connect to your vCenter Server hosts and the application provides a snapshot of these metrics for your entire virtualized environment. Have you ever wondered how to quantify the benefits of virtualization to your management? If so, please consider using vBenchmark. vBenchmark measures the performance of a VMware virtualized infrastructure across three categories:

- Efficiency: for example, how much physical RAM are you saving by using virtualization?

- Operational Agility: for example, how much time do you take on average to provision a VM?

- Quality of Service: for example, how much downtime do you avoid by using availability features?

vBenchmark provides a succinct set of metrics in these categories for your VMware virtualized private cloud. Additionally, if you choose to contribute your metrics to the community repository, vBenchmark also allows you to compare your metrics against those of comparable companies in your peer group. The data you submit is anonymized and encrypted for secure  transmission.

Download vBenchmark