The CANDIS Blog

I had a nasty shock this week with ESX3.

I was going about expanding virtual disks and reallocating resources for one client. Now, I have done this MANY times, so I thought that “the 2 day old backup is sufficient” and did not wait 3-4 hours for a new backup, right before what will be a 10 min task.

I went to expand the virtual disks from the COS and noticed that there were some “Virtual-Disk-000001-delta.vmdk” and “Virtual-Disk-000001.vmdk” files present.

“Oh, a snapshot is here for some reason..?”, I pondered. I then went into the VI3 management console, drilled down to said VPS and went to the snapshot manager, expecting to find a snapshot and then simply commit it to the main disk so I could get back to expanding.

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Thought I should write something tech for a change!

It is golden week here and all are away on break. So instead of forcing a staff member to come back, I thought I would take care of some stuff myself.

My problems started when a client who has a large advertising cluster, was running their main statistics database (for click fraud detection) on a Dell 1950 with only 1 SAS 15K drive.

I had suggested that this node, not being redundant like the tomcat servers be individually redundant, so DRAC card, redundant power and RAID.

Anyway, some new blades, Dell 1955′s arrived for the cluster and I thought, well, lets save the client some money, image the old 1950 DB server and load it onto a new 1955 server?

I thought this would be simple with Acronis.

No it wasn’t.

It turns out that a 3.5 Inch 73GB SAS drive is not the same size as a 2.5 Inch 73GB SAS drive. So I could not write my system image to the blades raid 1 array of 2 x 15K 73GB SAS drives.

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