Here at Anchor we really love our virtualization. Our virtualization platform of choice, KVM, lets us provide a variety of different VPS products to meet our customers’ requirements. Our KVM hosting platform has evolved considerably over the six years it’s been in operation, and we’re always looking at ways we can improve it. One important […]
A new version of the Debian operating system, version 8 (codename “Jessie”) was released over the weekend. Just as we did two years ago with Wheezy, we are now immediately offering Debian Jessie as an option for new customers. This includes our new OpenStack infrastructure, where Jessie is our recommended option for Managed Operations and […]
I’ve been working in this industry for a while now and naturally spend a lot of time using Linux on a daily basis. This gives lots of exposure to various Linux commands and tools. That said, I am sometimes surprised when I see, often very experienced system administrators, using somewhat convoluted commands to do something […]
So you’re trying to use the arrow keys in a remote server console with the iDRAC KVM. The keys not working and it’s driving you mad? Or perhaps that mission critical server is experiencing pain and you need to make use of the magic sysrq key to debug it? Unfortunately, for a long long time, […]
So you’ve just provisioned your shiny new OS instance with your host of choice, loaded in your confidential data and away you go without a worry in the world right? If your data consists only of captioned photos of cute furry animals, then all is well. Perhaps however, your data is worth just a wee bit […]
I kid you not, we just received this in a piece of marketing guff from our favourite enterprise vendor. “Industry analysts predict that Linux and Windows will soon dominate the operating system space. How you respond to this is critical.” Meanwhile, industry analysts predict that more than 98% of the population will be consuming oxygen […]
Reducing the memory usage in your VPS/VM can be a great way to free up some resources to handle more requests, users or some other metric of win. By default at Anchor we provision our Red Hat & Cent OS VPS servers with a trim memory usage profile by disabling a lot of unneeded services […]
Knowing the state of your disk IO latency in VMware ESX can help you pre-empt performance & capacity issues before the occur. There are a few guidelines you should keep in mind. These notes are directed towards people using directly attached storage. Write latency should be 0, because you have that fancy battery backed controller […]
What is dstat? dstat is a versatile replacement for vmstat, iostat and ifstat. Dstat allows you to view all of your system resources instantly. Eg, You can compare disk usage in combination with interrupts from your HDD controller, or compare the network bandwidth numbers directly with the disk throughput (in the same interval). No blog […]