An interesting web site with much data and many charts, with one particular example: Gold to Oil Ratio Historical Chart
Monday, December 22. 2014
Macro Economics
NWO: New World Order
When reading about the Precious Metals, one can end up in the strangest places. One learns that the world is very interconnected. Underlying cause is not known for very visible effects.
A link to Comex Institutes Trading Collars For Precious Metals started my hop skip jump around. In simple terms, the CME expects higher volatility in the precious metals markets, particularly for gold and silver. For reasons yet unknown. The collars go in on Monday.
Derivatives and mass financial destruction talks about a worry that one or more G-SIBS (globally significant important banks) may fail. G-SIBS are counter-parties to a large fraction of $691 trillion gross nominal value in derivatives (about 9 times the global GDP). If there is instability in a major commodity market, say energy, and this instability vibrates through to other sectors via currency, credit or equity markets, insolvency may threaten G-SIBS via their lending and derivatives exposures. Various 'circuit breakers' are being enacted, with liability ultimately being transferred to government institutions. Continue reading "NWO: New World Order" »
Sunday, December 21. 2014
Accumulate Bitcoins For Free
QoinPro is offering free sign up and free deposits for Bitcoin wallets. They will deposit free coinage into your account on a daily basis. These can be used for online transactions.
There are offering referrals as well. Please follow this link -> QoinPro to sign up and automatically acknowledge me as a referrer. By signing up, you, too, can become a referrer and receive additional deposits.
With QoinPro you can collect and manage wallets for multiple digital currencies.
Mobile Sysadmin
A couple of items useful in Datacenter situations:
- AirConsole: portable, battery powered, RS232 Serial over WIFI and Bluetooth Adaptor. Designed to be seamlessly used with Mobile Apps on iOS, Android and also on PC, MAC OSX and Linux, Airconsole provides flexible and convenient access to physical Serial and Ethernet ports from devices (such as iPads and iPhones) that have only WIFI network interfaces.
- Lantronix Spider: provides secure KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) server management over an IP network. Spiders can be easily daisy-chained together. Serial administration console port (RS-232) supports Telnet and SSH tunneling to a server COM port. Does not require an external power supply.
Wednesday, December 3. 2014
VMware Virtual CPU States
- vCPU: one or more CPUs assigned to a virtual machine
- pCPU: one or more physical CPUs in a host, with a physical slot containing one or more physical cores
- Run: actually performing work. Compare load of one vCPU with others to ensure load is balanced. If all are heavily used, then may additional vCPU resources.
- Wait: two sub-states: idle-wait - nothing to do, io-wait - waiting for to read/write storage. A high io-wait may indicate performance issues on the underlying storage
- Ready: the vCPU is ready to work, but a pCPU has not yet been allocated. <10% may be good. >20% may be bad as allocation process is not being efficient or process resources are scarce. Check for CPU affinity if things seem unbalanced across pCPUs.
Mix of VMware and Linux Monitoring And Management Tools
Flings: Apps and tools built by VMware engineers that are intended to be played with and explored. One fling, called I/O Analyzer, is a virtual appliance designed to run workloads to help baseline performance capabilities of a system. Another one, called OS Optimization Tool can enable or disable services in a Windows system image template. Some services may not be necessary, if and not running, will reduce the load on the host.
Brendan Gregg (Netflix) designed a chart called Linux Performance Observability Tools. There is a slide show on that page describing tools for the various modules of a Linux system. Look for the Linux Performance Tools slide show. There are others interesting slide shows as well.
Something I need to review at some point in the future: Monitorix: An Open Source, Lightweight System Monitoring Tool For Linux
RVTools is a windows .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts.
VMware esxtop: similar to Linux top, but more expressive as it shows many performance indicators for a VMware host.
Update 2017/05/12: Brendan Gregg provided an example of using perf to see if a cpu really is busy with the command:
perf stat -a -- sleep 10
and look for the "insns per cycle" line.
Update 2017/11/18: An article on how to obtain and calculate some stats: Linux’s SRE Golden Signals