My wife and I have tried several budgets, did the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace course (which was very helpful BTW) and have struggled finding something that worked for both of us.  Finally have found it!

Here’s what didn’t work:

·         Excel Spreadsheets – pain to keep up with but in the end only told us where the money went, didn’t change were it was going.

·         Envelope System – setting aside specific amounts of money for every budget category and putting that cash in an envelope or in a separate bank accounts – not for us – never gonna happen in this house.

·         Slush Fund – tried the easy way of paying for everything as normal and setting aside a “slush” fund for my wife and me so all “optional” expenditures could come out of that account.  Didn’t work – the line between optional and necessary at Target and Walmart and even the grocery store gets blurred and so most everything became “necessary” and blew the budget.

What Finally Did Work:  Modified Slush Fund System

We needed a system that was easy to manage – didn’t involve tracking every purchase, no crazy envelops, no spreadsheets, and all with strict rules.  Sound impossible?  Actually pretty easy!

In a nutshell the system involves creating a budget and separating fixed and variable expenses.  The fixed are paid out of our joint checking account whereas the variable are paid out of our individual slush funds.  We also have a vacation and savings account.

How to put it all together …

The 1^st step is adding up all fixed expenses.  Some things like gas and electricity vary over the year so best to sum up the 12 months and divide by 12 to get a monthly average.  Here’re some sample fixed expenses:

Fixed Expenses

·         Mortgage / Rent

·         HOA Dues / Property Tax / PMI / Insurance

·         Utilities (gas, electric, TV, Internet, Phone, etc.)

·         Subscriptions (online services, fitness, pest control, etc)

·         Healthcare (premium or monthly known quantities)

·         Donations

·         Insurance (car, life, property, etc)

·         Taxes (additional income, inheritance, etc)

·         Car Payments / Maintenance / Tag Tax

·         Child school / daycare

·         Pet grooming / vet

·         Eye care

·         Haircuts / Grooming

2^nd step is getting an approximate idea of your variable costs. (those listed below).

Variable Expenses

·         Groceries (important to be here)

·         Car Gas

·         Shopping / Clothes

·         Restaurants / Coffee

·         Gifts

·         Dry Cleaning

3^rd step is approximating what you want to save.  Look at your costs and your income then get an idea of how much you can set aside for savings, vacation, college, unexpected repairs, etc.

Savings includes a couple things:

Real savings – money we want to remain in the bank

House Repair / Maintenance

Car Maintenance

Vacation

College Fund

4^th step – put it all together.  Add up each group and make sure you are under your average monthly income.  Go back and tweak the allotments as needed.

5^th step – create the bank accounts.  Create at least the following bank accounts:

·         Joint checking for fixed expenses

·         Slush fund checking account for each spouse (debit cards are really handy here!).  This will be for your variable expenses.  One spouse may get more allotment if they do the primary grocery shopping for instance.

·         Savings account (can have a single account to keep it simple or multiple savings accounts for Vacation, Christmas gifts, Repairs, College Fund, etc)

6^th step – setup automatic transfers.  Make sure money is automatically transferred once, or better yet, twice a month to each account.  I say twice a month since that will help will cash flow if you’re paid twice a month.

As an optional step see if your bank supports daily balance emails.  That’s a great way to be reminded how much you have left in your slush fund.  Another option is to cash out part of your slush fund each month and use cash for all your retail purchases.

Frequency is key …

A big problem we had at first was the frequency of transfers into our slush funds.  We started monthly but after 3 weeks with no money left we started reverting to credit card spending.  That’s bad.  So we switched to semi-monthly and that has made a huge difference.  It is enough money to buy larger items (like a full grocery run) but also frequent enough to get by between transfers.  Weekly or bi-weekly might work too, depends on your cash flow and how often you’re paid.

Why it works for us …

It achieves our objectives of being pretty much complete automated – we do very little to no budgeting now.  It needs very little tweaking – our fixed expenses haven’t changed much so there’s really nothing to change.  I suppose we could change how much we donate or save, but that’s super easy to change – just adjust the automatic transfers between accounts.

The kicker is the power of the slush fund – great spending flexibility balanced with restraints.  We don’t argue what we spend money on – if it’s in our slush fund we can buy it, that simple.  We’ve already decided how much is going into savings, donations, vacation, etc, so the rest is gravy.

Since discretionary spending is generally what busts the budget it is the single most important area for us to control.  The slush fund does just that by telling us what we have left to spend – a lot or a little – the main thing is we know where we stand and are limited by what’s available!  It’s the only budget that has positively affected our purchasing decisions.

A word about credit cards …

We don’t use credit cards as much now – but no harm in using them for fixed expenses like healthcare.  We just pay them off using the joint checking account or a savings account for vacation items.  The trick is *not* using credit cards for variable expenses.  That’s where you get into trouble.

Send your comments and questions!

Problem of the month: VMware ESX5 no longer supports our Dell MD3000i storage platform.  So after many attempts at working around the problem finally came up with a good way of reusing this older storage.

Here are some iSCSI storage arrays now unsupported by VMware as of ESXi 5:

·         American Megatrends

·         BlueArc

·         Buffalo

·         D-Link (DSN-1100-10, DSN-2100-10, DSN-3200-10, DSN-3400-10)

·         DataCore

·         Dell (DELL/EMC Celerra, Dell/EMC CLARiiON, MD3000i)

·         Dot Hill (2330, 3920)

·         EMC (Celerra, CLARiiON CX3-20c, CLARiiON CX3-40c, Iomega ix2-200, Iomega ix4-200d, Iomega ix4-200r, Symmetrix DMX-3, Symmetrix DMX-4)

·         FalconStor (NSS-S12, NSS-S24)

·         Fujitsu (ETERNUS 4000 Model 300 & 500, ETERNUS 8000 Model 700, 900, 1100 & 2100, ETERNUS NR1000F200 & NR1000F900, FibreCAT)

·         HP (AiO, EVA, MSA2012i)

·         IBM (N3700)

·         NEC (CX5000/s, iStorage various models, Symmetrix DMX-4)

·         NetApp (E7900, FAS200 Series, FAS900 Series, CTS2600)

·         Netgear

·         Nexsan (iSeries, SASBeast, SASBoy, SATABeast2, SATABoy2)

·         Oracle (Sun Storage 7xxx)

·         QNAP

·         Scale Computing

·         StoneFly

How to make these unsupported SANs work again in a VMware environment:

·         Let’s look at possible alternate paths.  VMware supports 4 back-end storage types:

o   Local Disks

o   iSCSI

o   Fibre Channel

o   NFS

·         Since we are dealing with out-dated iSCSI devices the only choices are:

1.       Convert iSCSI device to a local (direct-attach) disk if that is even an option with your hardware.  Although you will lose shared storage capabilities so even if possible may not be desirable.

2.       Use an NFS server as a middle tier between ESX and your iSCSI device.

Option #1 above is outside the scope here (and wasn’t possible with my equipment) so following up on option #2 I’ll jump ahead and say this is totally possible and can even be a super convenient alternative to iSCSI in ESX.

Need some stuff!

·         Decent server to act as the NFS server middle tier.  I suppose faster is better but I used a 7-year-old server and it worked well.

·         Networking – generally want this NFS server to have separate NIC for each of the following.  If you only have 2 NICs then probably combine NFS and LAN since the LAN connection will be lightly used.

o   LAN

o   iSCSI (and possibly 2 NICs for this for redundancy)

o   NFS data

·         And of course the NFS Software (this was the adventurous part :)

Tried a couple Windows NFS products:

·         Services for Unix (SFU) – built into Windows 2003 and Server 2008.

o   Had a copy of Win2003 R2 ready to go on a server that could easily be used for this project – perfect!

o   After banging at it for quite a bit finally figured out how to make it work.  Made everything anonymous (security not an issue in this environment), gave Everyone modify access on the folder.  Tried to share a root drive but worked better when sharing a subfolder.  Didn’t use the “User Name Mapping” stuff, not needed when access is anonymous.

o   End of the day it was dog slow – like 1 or 2MB/s.  That’s a deal breaker.  Happily uninstalled it.

·         Allegro NFS (shareware)

o   Super easy to configure – wow – refreshing after using MS NFS server.

o   Much better performance around 13MB/s.  Had some trouble with a large file transfer – blew out all my mount points.  Can’t have that, done here.  Emailed with tech support (great support BTW) and he said they are currently working out some issues (Feb. 2012).

·         HaneWin NFS (shareware)

o   A little more difficult to configure than Allegro but easier than MS SFU.

o   Not good performance, around 4MB/s.  Dang!

No joy in Windows world – too bad, that’s where my expertise is at.  Off to Linux land …

·         FreeNAS

o   From what I could tell it doesn’t support being used as an iSCSI initiator.  Next.

·         OpenFiler

o   So far the best alternative, BUT I’ll echo what I read on another blog … not much info on web about this usage style of OpenFiler, unhelpful user forum, have to pay for the official documentation (which I didn’t cause I’m pretty sure it won’t cover the Open-iSCSI config).

o   *NOT* easy to configure the iSCSI initiator – has to be done on the command line.  Shoot me an email if you want my recipe.  Using iscsiadm tool isn’t awful but not easy either.

o   Have *not* setup multipathing (MPIO) with the Open-iSCSI / iscsiadm utility.  Still need to figure that out.  So for the time being I forced all my LUNs to run on controller 0 on the MD3000i and I only did a single iSCSI session between OpenFiler and controller 0.  Bad things happened when creating additional iSCSI sessions

o   By far the fastest of any option I tried.  Hit 30MB/s and could possibly go higher with faster hardware – this server is circa 2004.  But I doubt the CPU or Ethernet is getting maxed out, so maybe that’s max?

o   Appears to use all of the server’s RAM for a cache – cool!

Overall Performance Comparison between NFS Servers:

·         Microsoft SFU: 2MB/s

·         HaneWin NFS: 4MB/s

·         Allegro NFS: 13MB/s

·         OpenFiler: 30MB/s

This was all done on exactly the same hardware and same NFS client (ESX) so it’s a good apples-to-apples comparison.

Great news – it is working!  ESX5 connects to my storage via OpenFiler NFS!

Benefits (and these are significant):

·         Performance (30MB/s is fast enough for most environments – especially a disaster recovery location using older hardware)

·         Shared Storage – can continue to put VMs on this shared storage and use vMotion (tested it out and vMotion works great with this config).

·         Compatibility – OpenFiler uses NFSv3 which is what ESX supports.  This will probably be supported long into the future.

·         Reuse – put older hardware back in production or use for disaster recovery.

·         Economical – OpenFiler is *free* and all other equipment was already purchased.  I did spend $8.50 (plus shipping) on an Intel dual port 1000Mb/s Ethernet NIC on eBay so that I could have a dedicated interface for LAN, NFS and iSCSI.

Downside:

·         OpenFiler volume management takes a bit of getting used to, but I’ve mostly got the hang of it now.  Although the install is fantastic – couldn’t be easier.

·         The iSCSI initiator is very difficult to setup the first time.  Now that I have my secret recipe it’s a snap.

·         Multipathing is super difficult to setup – haven’t gotten it working yet.

·         All my LUNs have to run on a single controller since MPIO isn’t happening yet.

Here’s a peak at what it looks like to connect to an NFS volume in VMware ESX:

Here’s the ESX network configuration – each network segment (LAN and NFS) have 2 NICs assigned for redundancy:

OpenFiler Configuration

·         Not completely straightforward but some good articles out there on the web for using OpenFiler as an NFS server.  Here’s one I used.

·         Here’s my OpenFiler System config:

·         Volume Groups:
I basically created 1 LUN on the storage system per Disk Group, then I created 1 Volume Group per LUN.  Right or wrong my idea was to keep volumes separated in OpenFiler by storage speed (SAS vs SATA).  This allows all the disk subdivision to be done in ESX.

·         Shares:

·         Services:

·         Again, shoot me an email if you’d like my formula for the iSCSI initiator and even the OpenFiler setup steps.

Happy NFS Serving!