ZFS dedupe!
Well, its been a few months since Sun announced ZFS getting dedupe functionality. Now I just need to get employed again, so I have the cash to build the home storage server I've been meaning to setup for some time now. Add another processor/memory heavy machine to run ESXi, and I'll have a nice little virtual machine lab setup so its easier to study for my certifications by having every OS handy to experiment and research with.
There’s a standard for everything!
When I installed Cat5e in my house 5 years ago, I didn't realize there were actual international telecom labeling standards, luckily, I only have a 12 port patch panel and 7 data jacks (currently) to relabel correctly. Once it warms up more, might be time for me to figure out how to run 2 lines (I'll take the 3 extra seconds to have redundancy, that's pro-active laziness, 10% more effort now, so its 50% less effort later) down to the garage, so I can setup a dedicated machine for car diagnostics without it relying on WiFi, and also have the option of media streaming devices for entertainment while working on my car.
Lifehacker has a great little media streaming howto right now…
Lifehacker has a small article on how to setup a specific nettop device to use XBMC to stream media to your TV. Fairly straight forward, and fairly inexpensive. I still prefer my TiVo/pyTiVo solution thats setup in my home right now, but for people who don't need to record live TV, their article should point you in the right direction to get something nice setup.
I occasionally have too much free time…
In the effort to reduce the accumulated clutter in my bedroom/office, I took a few minutes to decide if some things could be re-purposed elsewhere in the house. A spare thin client terminal, a LCD monitor and a keyboard/trackball combo were sitting near each other, and a thought occurred to me. I already have VMWare Server running on my desktop, hosting some VM's (virtual machines) for various certification and testing labs, so I setup another VM desktop, and carried the equipment downstairs. I hooked everything up and plugged the thin client into the home theater's data switch, and voila, a terminal to surf for recipes in the kitchen! Taking a step back, however it looked kinda ugly with the network cable running around the wall, so its temporarily removed until I can run a cable inside the common wall to a faceplate to tidy it up.
vSphere 4′s improved vCPU scheduling: performance improves across the board
VMWare's whitepaper posted in August, The CPU Scheduler in VMware ESX 4, shows how they have significantly improved the performance of their vCPU (virtual CPU core) scheduling at both light loads and heavy loads (performance stays about the same in between though). Light load performance improves through better scheduling on idle pCPUs (physical CPU core) with avoidance of unnecessary pCPU migrations, and heavy load performance improves thru less scheduling overhead, finer grained vCPU scheduling, along with better decision making for vCPU migrations between pCPUs.
In ESX 4, many improvements have been introduced in CPU scheduler. This includes further relaxed co-scheduling, lower lock-contention, and multi-core aware load balancing. Co-scheduling overhead has been further reduced by the accurate measurement of the co-scheduling skew, and by allowing more scheduling choices. Lower lock-contention is achieved by replacing scheduler cell-lock with finer-grained locks. By eliminating the scheduler-cell, a virtual machine can get higher aggregated cache capacity and memory bandwidth. Lastly, multi-core aware load balancing achieves high CPU utilization while minimizing the cost of migrations.
Microsoft releases Security Essentials Antivirus, for FREE!
Today Microsoft released their free anti-virus product, Security Essentials. It uses the same Forefront engine as their enterprise class products, slimmed down and simplified for the average home user. Its been tested against other free and commercial anti-virus solutions, with various conclusions drawn on its effectiveness. Overall, its a great product, and simple for currently unprotected Windows users to get and install. It will automatically update itself, has realtime scanning, and you can schedule quick or full scans for any time and day of the week.