UNIX

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Are we in with the new Btrfs? (with NFS and ESXi)

July 28, 2011 in Storage, UNIX | No comments

Not so fast folks!

 

As always, we’re trying different things. I recently used some older parts and created a Server with 2.6.39 (Debian) that has a 3ware card and a Btrfs filesystem. LVM was placed on top of the 3ware partition and then Btrfs was put on top of that. The storage was shared out via NFS for an ESXi host.

I was expecting the system to work okay and it did for about a month. Eventually the volume needed more space, so the Btrfs volume was resized and life continued. About a week ago the system performance became unacceptable. VERY slow, high load averages, 80+% IO wait, etc. In addition, the VM would no longer boot because ESXi was complaining about disk IO timeouts! I was definitely experiencing some major performance issues. All of the hardware I was using was pretty much old, but tried and true. Being Btrfs was new on the scene and the strange behavior the kernel was displaying, I suspected the shiny Btrfs. I created a new Reiserfs (v3) volume, which in the past (and apparently still is) was my file-system of choice. I copied the VMDK and associated goodies to the new volume, shared it out, and ESXi was in heaven again.

So, what I have learned is:

1. Btrfs has some issues with NFS. The performance appeared perfecetly fine coping the data from Btrfs to Reiserfs, but accessing the data via NFS was awful.

2. Btrfs performance degrades over time. Initially the VM worked great. Over time, performance degraded until it was basically no longer usable.

I haven’t yet determined exactly why I experienced these issues with Btrfs, but Reiserfs seems to have solved it for now. I’ll definitely be looking for clues in the coming months.

Lastly, some data on backup times the VM logs. (The VM is responsible for backing up other servers. These times are for one small server that is backed up to the VM’s storage). The last 1 minute time is after switching to Reiserfs.

Duration: 1 min.
Duration: 1 min.
Duration: 1 min.
Duration: 0 min.
Duration: 1 min.
Duration: 1 min.
Duration: 1 min.
Duration: 3 min.
Duration: 1 min.
Duration: 8 min.
Duration: 10 min.
Duration: 39 min.
Duration: 12 min.
Duration: 59 min.
Duration: 109 min.
Duration: 66 min.
Duration: 3 min.
Duration: 240 min.
Duration: 297 min.
Duration: 298 min.
Duration: 657 min.
Duration: 375 min.
Duration: 2140 min.
Duration: 1 min.

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Installing Zabbix 1.8.x on CentOS The Easy Way!

December 23, 2009 in UNIX | 24 comments

Original Posting and Script

This is an updated script to install Zabbix 1.8.x on CentOS/Red Hat 5. I have tested it on CentOS 5.4. The script was made for Zabbix 1.8.0, but if you modify the ZBX_VER variable in the script, it should work on any version in the 1.8 series.

Basically, the script tries to do a few things and assumes some things:

  • Only run this for NEW installations, you will lose data if you run on an existing installation
  • Run at your own risk
  • Installs Zabbix 1.8.x on CentOS 5
  • Do not corrupt an existing system
  • Be able to run the script over and over in the event that it errors
  • Be somewhat flexible
  • The database server, web server, and zabbix server all run on one box

Click here to download it

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Installing Zabbix The Easy Way

November 14, 2008 in UNIX | 20 comments

Update: This has been updated for 1.8.x. Follow this link.

I was following the Zabbix forums and people are constantly having problems installing Zabbix.

To make things easier, I wrote a magic install script for CentOS/Red Hat 5. I have tested it on CentOS 5.2.

Basically, the script tries to do a few things and assumes some things:

  • Only run this for NEW installations, you will lose data if you run on an existing installation
  • Run at your own risk
  • Installs Zabbix 1.6.1 on CentOS 5.2
  • Do not corrupt an existing system
  • Be able to run the script over and over in the event that it errors
  • Be somewhat flexible
  • The database server, web server, and zabbix server all run on one box

One final note, I did peruse a few other CentOS install guides, all of which will probably work, but all of them follow many bad practices. The magic script does a far better job and requires less effort, go figure.

Click here to download it

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Installing Zabbix v1.6.1 on Debian Etch

November 12, 2008 in UNIX | 2 comments

As of this writing, Etch is the current “stable” version of Debian.

This is how to install Zabbix!

  1. Add an unstable deb-src repository to your sources.list. If you have problems later, make sure the following deb-src line is the only deb-src line in your sources.list file. 
    echo "deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ unstable main contrib non-free" >> /etc/apt/sources.list
  2. Update your package repository 
    apt-get update
  3. Install necessary packages for this compiling project 
    apt-get install libcurl3-dev build-essential automake1.9  libsnmp9-dev libiksemel-dev libopenipmi-dev libpq-dev
  4. Download source 
    cd /tmp
apt-get source zabbix
cd zabbix-1.6.1
  5. Modify source because etch doesn’t have libcurl4. Modify the control file (line 6) where it says “libcurl4-gnutls-dev” with “libcurl3-dev” 
    vi debian/control
  6. Compile source. If you’re missing packages, this command will tell you what other packages you need to install before this command works properly. 
    dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot
  7. Install fresh packages 
    cd ..
ls -l *deb
dpkg -i ./<zabbix package of your choice>.deb

All done. Remember, this guide doesn’t tell you how to use Zabbix. I suggest you look in the /usr/share/doc/zabbix* directories that the packages created. Also, read the documentation, forums, wiki, etc.

Enjoy.

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