I found this recipe on www.paleo-project.com and the link on that site is now dead unfortunately but that is where the credit goes.  I made this for the first time tonight and it turned out awesome.  The chicken was extremely moist and very flavorful.  I made just a few changes which really just came down to increasing the amount of spices in the rub as it felt a little light in the original recipe.

Ingredients:

• 1 Whole Chicken (around 4 lbs)
• 2 tbsp honey
• 2 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground nutmeg
• 1 tsp ground cloves
• 1 tsp allspice
• 1 tsp ground cinnamon
• 5 garlic cloves (crushed)
• 1 tsp whole cloves
• 1 tsp coconut or olive oil

Recipe:

• Mix together the salt, nutmeg, ground cloves, allspice and cinnamon in a small bowl
• Cover a baking pan with aluminum foil (I used a cookie sheet with a lip high enough to hold the juices)
• Grease the spot the chicken will rest with the oil
• Preheat oven to 500 F
• Rinse chicken in cool water and pat dry (don’t forget to remove the extra bits often in a plastic bag inside the cavity!)
• Put the crushed garlic and whole cloves
• Spread the honey all over the outside of the chicken
• shake or rub the spice mixture all over the outside of the chicken
• Space the chicken on the pan breast side up
• Cook for 15 minutes at 500 F
• Lower the temperature to 450 F and cook for another 15 minutes
• Lower the temperature to 425 F, baste the chicken with liquid from the pan and cook for another 30 minutes or until the chicken is around 180 F in the breast
• Remove the chicken from the oven and allow to rest for 20 minutes before serving

While I haven’t made this in a little while I wanted this to be the first recipe I shared simply because of the picture.  The recipe itself I found originally on www.grouprecipes.com and my picture is on that page as well which I posted the first time I made it.  This is not a Paleo (how I’m eating now) recipe (cream cheese) but would probably qualify as Primal (how I will be eating in a few more weeks).  I’ll post more on the subject of Paleo and Primal eating soon but here is the recipe:

Ingredients

• 2 large salmon filets with skin removed
• 2 cloves garlic
• 4 tbsp softened cream cheese
• 4 stacks of fresh cilantro chopped
• 1 tsp kosher salt

Instructions

• Peal and mince the garlic
• Mix the garlic, cilantro and cream cheese together in a bowl
• Butterfly the salmon filets (if the filets are not thick enough to butterfly easily you can also just cut a line down the middle of the filet not quite all the way through and then fold the filet in half to be just like butterflied)
• Spread the cream cheese mixture inside of each filet and fold closed (cream cheese should be on the inside)
• Place on a hot oiled grill and cook for about 6 minutes on each side
• Sprinkle with kosher salt on both sides while grilling

Results

I’ve been investigating a performance problem in a VM on one of our ESXi 5 clusters that led to an interesting discovery about power savings settings on the ESXi host.  Basically under certain scenarios (and perhaps specific CPUs) they physical CPUs will be down clocked even though a VM is trying to use 100% of its CPU.

The physical host servers are HP DL385 G7 with 2 AMD Opteron 6174 12 core processors @ 2.2GHz and 128 GB of RAM.  They boot from an integrated SD Flash card and all other storage is provided by our Compellent SAN.

In the bios there are 3 key settings under the Power Management Options:

HP Power Profile – This defaults to “Balanced Power and Performance” but I’ve changed it to “Maximum Performance”

HP Power Regulator – This defaults to “HP Dynamic Power Savings Mode” but changes automatically to “HP Static High Performance Mode” after changing the power profile setting

Advanced Power Management -> Minimum Processor Idle Power State – This defaults to “No C-states” and that is what we want it set to

The VM I’m testing with has 4 vCPU and 8GB RAM assigned to it.  This VM is the host for a Lotus Domino server with some custom applications.  When the application is used it can cause the CPU to go to 100% utilization within the VM.

From testing the same processes over and over we observed that each process would take 50-150% longer to run with the bios set to Balanced vs having it set to Max.

What I believe is happening is that while the VM is running at 100% cpu it only using 4 of the 12 cores of a single physical socket (and 4 of 24 total in the host) and the other VMs on this host are all light CPU load so the physical host perceives itself to be lightly loaded and so is down clocking the CPU.  So our VM running at 100% CPU is not getting 2.2GHz of clock speed but some lesser amount depending on how much down clocking the host has done.  Since that down clocking is dynamic that would also account for the performance variance we are seeing.

In googling around I’ve found other people using the AMD Opteron 61xx series processors with VMWare having a similar issue.  It’s possible this is just an issue with that line as I don’t believe a CPU should slow the clock speed dynamically if a single core is being used completely (rather than relying on an average load accross all cores to determine if it should save power by down clocking).

We have another cluster that uses AMD Opteron 6282 SE processors I plan to do some additional testing on to see if the problem exists there as well.  I’ll update this post once I’ve had a chance to do that.

For now all of our hosts using the 6174 processors have been set to force max performance (more power and heat unfortunately).

I’ve finally taken the time to rebuild and relaunch my website.  I’m going for more of a mixture this time and hopefully this version will have some staying power.  In addition to technology and other geek related posts I plan to bring in another aspect I enjoy which is cooking through recipes, pictures and other food commentary.