Fishworks Simulator Hint and other VSA stuff

The Fishworks Simulator has been driving me a bit nuts; I couldn't get ESXi to reliably use a Fishwork's iSCSI LUN as a data-store; it would consistently hang whilst installing an Virtual Machine. I coudn't see anything wrong but it would just die. I tried moving things round, running two copies of the simulator, one providing the NFS share with the install files on and one providing the target iSCSI LUN and it was still dieing.

Fortunately the guys from the Fishworks team had made contact and I can ask them questions. They suggested reducing the number of virtual disks, so I've dropped down to two disks now. One for the Fishworks binaries and one to store data. This has made all the difference, it now works and doesn't die.

So people, if you are actually trying to use the Fishworks simulator to do useful stuff, you might want to consider reducing the number of virtual disks; I might try increasing the number of virtual disks and putting them on discrete spindles but I don't have 15 disks to play with; so I might try 3+1.

As per usual, I get all my VSAs built then both Nexenta and EMC release new versions. And someone has found me another VSA to play with. Falconstor seem to be ignoring my attempts to register for their free version.

At moment, I'm ignoring the VSAs which provide features like backups, dedupe but VSAs seem to be really taking off. I do like the concept of providing discrete infrastructure capabilities as a bundled virtual appliance and at some point I shall branch out into looking at some of these as well.