On working from home….
by Jesse on Jan.14, 2008, under Consulting
You know – there is something to be said for working from home. I get to pick my hours, I get to relax in shorts and a T-Shirt when most of my colleagues are out there in at the very least some form of “Business Casual” attire.
But sometimes I prefer being in the mix of it. For one thing, I find it’s easier to get things done when I don’t have three kids stomping around the house starting fights with each-other. (Usually just outside my office door so I can’t help but hear them) I also have too many of my own “pet” projects that I’m much more interested in completing than the stupid Visio diagram I have to do for a very basic install because the customer requested it.
For the most part things work out. For the rest of the time, well I end up blogging instead of Visio’ing. 
So I bought a Dell PowerVault 224F array on Ebay last week. 14 drives, Fibrechannel, the whole nine yards. I also found a bunch of 18G seagate drives that are in reasonable shape (they are all passing the initial smoke test at least, I’ve yet to put data on them.)
I’ve always suspected that making the move to Fibrechannel in the house was going to be a pain, but if I want to play with things such as VMotion or virtual clusters, I’m going to need some form of shared back-end. SCSI works, but is a pain in the tail with all the different flavours, is it Ultra 160 or Ultra320? LVD, HVD, BVD? Is the termination correct? Did a bend a $%&@% pin when I plugged the damned cable in behind the rack in the dark?
So I picked up the array and drives, I have an old Brocade switch floating around that has it’s full compliment of licenses (you need TL mode to go from Loop to FCSW), a lot of old (but still sealed, for what it’s worth) Qlogic PCI Controllers for the servers (so I can take advantage of the load-balancing that comes with VMWare 3.5) and am going to give it a try.
Eventually my goal is to have all my VM’s running on their own individual drives, and all VM’s shared between the two servers for both load and redundancy.
</jg>
January 15th, 2008 on 8:42 am
How about iSCSI?
January 15th, 2008 on 10:37 am
Thought about that, and I guess I could have put together a server using OpenFiler or some such as easily as a FC Disk array.
January 18th, 2008 on 8:04 pm
Bah@iSCSI and FC. Overhead for no reason. We’ve been doing LOTS of vmware+NFS installations lately, and you’d be shocked how great it works. That’s what I’m running at home right now actually. NFS luns presented off my opensolaris fileserver.
January 23rd, 2008 on 10:49 am
if I had a real network switch I would – I’ve got a bunch of Cisco 10/100 switches in inventory but push too much traffic for those.
I’m going to give it a try though, just because I’ve been getting a lot of iSCSI engagements of late and really need to understand more about the how/why.
February 14th, 2008 on 4:41 pm
You have your own fibre channel array and network at home – nice one! And there was me starting to believe all the chatter and hype that only a small portion of even the enterprise customers were going to use FC going forward and everyone else was going to adopt iSCSI, FCoE…… yda yada yada.
I was actually thinking of getting a small FC setup like that in my home office, but my other half will only let me do that if I get solar panels on the roof to provide the required power (rising energy prices and all). So I wont be holding my breath
February 15th, 2008 on 2:40 pm
LOL – it’s not a *REAL* array – I gave up a lot to try this out. RAID is one thing. (Which is why I’m doing full backups every night)
Now if EMC would like to give up a CX3-10 for eval purposes, I’m you’re guy. I’ve done ACT and have an extensive R&D background, I know how to do Test/Acceptance and evaluations.
Seriously – the funny part is that the main thing I had hoped to get out of this wasn’t for the FC aspect of it, it was for the VMWare. I’m currently playing with VirtualCenter, VMotion, and the like, trying to figure out the gotchas involved in it. See my latest post.