Re: PVSCSI vs LSI Logic Parallel/SAS - WAS: Re: [gentoo-user] Best filesystem for virtualized gentoo mail server - WAS: vmWare HowTo / best practices

[Pandu Poluan]

On Apr 25, 2013 5:54 PM, "Tanstaafl" <tanstaafl@×××××××××××.org> wrote:
>
> On 2013-04-24 10:23 PM, Pandu Poluan <pandu@××××××.info> wrote:
>>
>> My Gentoo VMs in the cloud (using VMware's vCloud) uses PV-SCSI. It's
>> stable... but kind of sensitive: Everytime the cloud provider do
>> something with their storage, my VMs become Read-Only.
>
>
> Ouch... so, how do you fix it?
>

For the Read-Only problem, a simple reboot suffices.

But I made sure to fire an angry email to the Customer Support, telling
them in no uncertain terms that the next time they want to do something re:
their storage, they contact me first.

So, when the time comes for then to do some storage management things, they
tell me exactly at what time. I scheduled the VMs to shut down at the
agreed time, and turn them back on as soon as they text me that their
maintenance had finished. Only one VM I left on, the "gatewall" VM. And
every single time the gatewall VM detected that something is being done on
the storage level, and changed to a Read-Only mode.

I consider myself lucky that when the 'problem' manifested itself, the VMs
are not yet in Production. And no corruption happened.

(PS: Strangely enough, the RO switch happens only on Gentoo VMs; the
FreeBSD VMs and Debian VMs are unaffected. Maybe because I've pared down
each and every Gentoo VM to their bare minimum, so they are much more
responsive)

Rgds,
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