[Cialug] What should I be asking?

[Josh More]

Both Yum and Up2date have an "exclude" option in the config.
On Red Hat, I habitually set this to "php*, kernel*", as I need to
rebuild those every time.

I believe that YaST has a similar config, but I've never needed it on
SUSE so I don't know the syntax. 
 




-Josh More, RHCE, CISSP, NCLP, GIAC 
 morej at alliancetechnologies.net 
 515-245-7701



>>> Theron Conrey <theron.conrey at dice.com> 09/26/07 11:24 AM >>> 
Matt,

I'll assume that you're talking about using the Vmware ESX environment
and not the free server setup and answer from there.

Some things to consider:
        What type of storage are you using? Is it NFS, iSCSI or fiber? 
Given the fact they're all Windows VM's I'll assume that you're either
an iSCSI or fiber shop.

If you're iSCSI there are issues related to SCSI disk timeouts and
Linux VMs.  These aren't show stoppers by any means (we're an iSCSI
shop) but they do present some configuration challenges.  And example
would be the SCSI timeout settings.  This # is higher in windows (and
easier to change) than in Linux by default, and can cause issues if
you're using a journaling file system (ext2/3 as an example).  The last
thing you want is a "local disk" having SCSI IO lag and causing your
entire file system to go read only.  There are ways around this,
(downloading an updated driver to compile into your kernel from VMware,
link escapes me atm) and just requires some prior planning.

The kernel brings up another issue, in Xen (talking about the default
Xen configuration in RHEL5) paravirtualization is implemented, so the
danger of kernel updates isn't as prevalent, however, with a fully
virtualized environment such as VMware's ESX, a kernel upgrade on a VM
has the capacity to whack the network/SCSI drivers and cause the system
to go offline.

(still irritating is there a safe what with
YUM/puppy/whatever-redhat-is-doing-these-days to disable kernel upgrades
during updates from the mothership?)

In the past I've just run my own internal repo for updates to avoid
this issue.

Just a couple of one off things to think about prior to going down the
road.

-Theron




-----Original Message-----
From: cialug-bounces at cialug.org [mailto:cialug-bounces at cialug.org] On
Behalf Of Matt Millard
Sent: Wednesday, September 26, 2007 10:19 AM
To: Central Iowa Linux Users Group
Subject: [Cialug] What should I be asking?

I've got a meeting this afternoon to discuss adding RHEL to our fairly
large VMWare environment that is currently all Windows VM's.  I've
twittled the knobs on Xen running on RHEL5, but not more than doing a
single install.  I'm just curious what are some things that I should be
on the look out for in the VMWare environment that has been built around
only installing Windows servers?  Any suggestions would be greatly
appreciated.

So glad the VUG is starting up as I'll be getting in deeper sooner than
later!

Matt
---
  Matt Millard
  gocyclones at eml.cc
  http://photos.millardfam.com
  http://yepr.com/MattsItems

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