What’s up world?  Things aren’t so great, eh?  Well, we feel the pain where I work as well, but it’s not so bad because we’ve always been stretched pretty thin.  Instead, people are leaving for greener pastures.  As for me, I’m sticking around for the moment.

Mainly I just wanted to post an update and stay in the habit of writing. I’ve got some documentation on LVM that I’m working on, but I took a tangent by deciding to refresh my 3D graphics hobby and am creating visuals for the write-up. It will primarily be a primer on the concept of LVM, followed by a how-to and hopefully some performance metrics.

As far as work is concerned, we’ve been working on several projects, such as migrating one of our VMware clusters off of SAN storage and on to Filer with plain old NFS.  The environment was way over-engineered, and we’ve found that we’ve got a huge, expensive piece of storage sitting there almost idle.  So off to the cheaper stuff with free (built-in, that is) de-duplication!  The other major project we’ve been working on is migrating one of our Oracle RAC clusters from one data center to another (both on-site) and in the process going from cheap, low performance SAN to more expensive, high performance SAN.  We’ve done the first portion and the systems are now running over ISL, tomorrow we’ll take a few nodes down and move them,  bring them up in the new data center, then bring the other nodes down and move them.  In order to do this we had to fiber two switches together across rooms to provide the private cluster interconnects. Fun stuff.

I’ve also taken a look at the RHCE book, I’m about a fifth of the way through it, but haven’t done a whole lot as far as prep. Still looking forward to it, though.