block device Archive
30 Jun 2014
Creating bootable Windows USB from Linux
Intro Many of you probably have Linux for your desktop OS and therefore don’t have access to Microsoft’s DVD/USB tool that creates bootable USB from iso. I’ve had few issues in the past when I tried to make bootable USB from my windows.iso file. Pretty lame, but still… There used to be programs like winusb
17 May 2014
EnhanceIO block cache – howto and benchmark

What is EnhanceIO? EnhanceIO is fork of Facebook’s flashcache. It uses SSDs as cache devices for traditional rotating hard disk drives. I had one spare SSD @ my office so why not give it a try. I chose EnhanceIO over other block caching drivers becouse it’s one of rare drivers that doesn’t need any modification
04 Apr 2014
Tips for optimizing disk performance on Linux

Forespeech Lately I’ve been dealing mostly with storage and disk performance. We have several MySQL / MongoDB databases, which can be very I/O consuming. Usually people benchmark storage when they setup server, but running a real service on it, will actually show how really optimized the server is. Tips for optimizing your disk storage I’ll
12 Nov 2013
Hot backup for KVM / libvirt / Xen

Overview We use Xen server on our development server and I decided, it’s time I start making full snapshots of my VM’s. So far we’ve done data backup only, mainly because of storage limitations. Since we got the new server, I have much more disk space now, so I would like to backup whole VM’s.
04 Sep 2013
Tracing I/O usage in Linux

Introduction We know quite few programs that help us identify I/O usage in Linux. In order to identify exactly what is writing and which process, we need to use quite few commands, to make sure we know exactly what is going on. I will show you few useful commands that will help you find your