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  • FreeNAS 8.0.2 Release is now ready for use

    Back in May of last year I wrote a post about how I thought that FreeNAS 8.0.0 Release wasn’t actually ready or reliable, it had failed on me a couple of times and performance as far as NFS was concerned was dire. Testing of the NAS couldn’t continue because of the difficulties I was experiencing with FreeNAS, so much so that I didn’t finish testing.

    Move forward two releases (with a 3rd just around the corner) and I can say that FreeNAS is now at a point where it does what it’s says on the tin. Let me give you an example.

    I recently built up a new NAS device instead of purchasing the ever so slightly over priced Iomega PX6, the idea being that I thought (correctly in this instance) that I could build up a server offering the same kind of functionality that’s on offer from the impressive PX6. My final solution was actually based on FreeNAS 8.0.2 after testing various products and I had been running my home lab from it for a couple of weeks.

    Because I had been experiencing some issues with my servers (three Lenovo TS200’s) I decided to run some memory tests on those boxes for a couple of days (as it stands the ram in all the servers ran fine for 48 hours so it mush have been issues with the installation of Windows 2008 R2 that I had been testing due to work). Once I had finished with my Hyper-V environment I decided to upgrade to vSphere 5 and start studying for my VCP 5 exam. This is where my change of heart for FreeNAS really came through.

    Having stacked my storage devices into Ghetto Rack I decided to install the latest release of FreeNAS onto my HP Microserver, I plugged in my SanDisk Cruzer and proceeded to “upgrade” FreeNAS onto it, I say “upgrade” because I had thought that the drive I was using had been used for something else but at the time I didn’t really think about it. With the Microserver now having FreeNAS on it I decided to boot up my GhettoPX but was alarmed when I discovered that it didn’t actually boot into FreeNAS but instead into OpenDSS (which is what I had thought was on the drive in the Microserver), it was then that I realised that I had used the wrong USB key, the concern now was that the GhettoPX had all my VM’s on it (around 20 different machines used for different projects).

    Disconnecting the 6 internal SATA drives I proceeded to install FreeNAS and tried to configure it to see if I could restore the environment back to how it was (no, at this stage I didn’t have a copy of the latest config which is silly because I always did so when I was using OpenFiler).

    I managed to import the disk set, which to be honest was a start but when I did that I couldn’t see anything on the disks, so going through the same configuration steps used when I originally created the iSCSI extents and targets I re-created them.

    Lo and Behold, by ensuring I created the targets and extents with the same names and sizes I was able to recover my iSCSI volumes, now all I needed to do was discover them in my last ESXi 4 server so that I could migrate them from the datastore to allow me to upgrade my entire lab (servers as well as datastores) to the vSphere 5 infrastructure. Using the vCenter console I was able to mount the datastore and migrate the data across to my NFS datastore on my IX4.


    What could have been a total disaster for me as far as lab build goes actually went very well, FreeNAS didn’t baulk at my lack of config files, didn’t stop at me recovering my existing iSCSI volumes and actually worked on the browser I wanted to use (actually I have tested it on both Firefox and IE9 successfully, something that the original 8.0.0 release wouldn’t have done).

    FreeNAS team, I know I was hard on you back in May of last year but the progress you are making on FreeNAS 8 is definitely moving in the right direction, it’s also nice to see that unlike OpenFiler you are keeping the releases flowing at a decent rate. I would like to see an improvement in NFS performance but as the current usage for the NAS is for my new ESXi 5 environment I will be playing with VMFS for the moment so NFS isn’t such a great issue… for now.

  • Goals for 2012

    Reminding myself of the goals I had set for 2011 I discovered that I have accomplished the majority of my goals for 2011.

    To recap my goals for 2011 were.

    * Sit and pass my VCP vSphere 4 Exam Sat and passed my exam on the 23rd of December
    * Improve my VMware product knowledge (VMware View in particular) Having installed VMware View in my homelab and played with ThinApp my knowledge of both has greatly improved.
    * Produce more technical content for this site (as well as my-homelab.com) I had produced more content including a couple of videos but those were done for my-techvideos.com instead.
    * Move more into the VMware Virtualisation platform market and less of the Microsoft one. I took a position with a major online gambling company in their Windows Team Sad smile
    * Become a recognised VMware blogger (I want my vExpert). Obviously not in the same league as other bloggers but with 22k unique visitors to my blog in 2011 I am happy with that.
    * Continue to improve my home lab environment. Yes on this one, I have continued to play with various technologies including various SAN\NAS providers as well as other technologies


    As you can see the goals I set in 2011 were pretty wellWhat that’s meant for me is that my goals for 2011 were both realistic and in the main, achievable. It also means that I have to improve my goals for 2012 which could be difficult.

    My goals for 2012 are.

    * Sit and pass my VCP vSphere 5 Exam
    * Sit and pass my VCA-DT 4 Exam
    * Continue to produce technical content for both this site and my-techvideos.com
    * Continue to grow my VMware blogger status (I still want my vExpert), this includes attending more VMUG’s as well as VMworld 2012 this year.
    * Continue to build up my home lab environment and experiment with various technologies.

  • VMware ThinApp Bootcamp

    After the earlier success of the VMware View Bootcamp back in July this year, VMware are releasing a new Bootcamp based on VMware ThinApp, this Bootcamp will be covering the use, deployment, and optimisation of VMware ThinApp.

    Topics covered over the 6 days are :-

    Day 1 – ThinApp Design Best Practices

    • Speaker – Ray Dusseault, VMware
    • This session provides an overview real world best practices surrounding the new ThinApp Design Process along with a basic timeline for the ThinApp Plan & Design engagement.


    Day 2 – ThinApp Implementation Best Practices

    • Speaker – Ray Dusseault, VMware
    • This session provides an overview of the latest ThinApp Strategy, methodology and real world Implementation best practices.


    Day 3 – ThinApp Performance Enhancing Techniques

    • Speaker – Dean Flaming, VMware
    • Common tips, rules, basic troubleshooting procedures, and suggestions used to help enhance performance of ThinApp packages, including pre-capture settings, post-capture clean-up, deployment options pros and cons, and environment configurations.


    Day 4 – Scripting within ThinApp

    • Speaker – Dean Flaming, VMware
    • Understanding the basics of scripting within a ThinApp environment including use of the callback functions as timing mechanisms, additional options available by admins, and how to implement a scripted solution within a ThinApp packaged application.


    Day 5 – Isolation Modes Explained

    • Speaker – Travis Sales, VMware
    • Isolation modes are at the heart of the abstraction layer within ThinApp. We will explore their uses and and how to adjustment them for optimal application compatibility.


    Day 6 – AppLink Fundamentals

    • Speaker – Travis Sales, VMware
    • AppLink enables you to package, deploy, and update component pieces separately while keeping the benefits of application virtualization. This session will explore AppLinks use scenarios and uses cases.

  • VMware STOP: 0x0000005d Error

    In my work I deal with our System Center Configuration Manager 2007 (Config Mgr) environment and ensure that it’s configured and running correctly, part of that is working on the Operating System Deployment (OSD) functionality, for the last couple of weeks I have been creating Windows 2008 R2 images and doing lots of testing in my VMware vSphere environment. With the 2008 R2 builds all working correctly the next step was working on the 2003 R2 builds, so using vSphere I have been building up 4 different flavours of Windows 2003 (Standard and Enterprise x64 and x86 architecture). Using the New Virtual Machine wizard I have created the machines with the correct OS types and built and patched the servers up to the latest patch levels, I also installed the Config Mgr client and placed the contents of the deploy.cab file into the C:\Sysprep folder. When I was ready I inserted my OSDCapture ISO file and let the autorun program launch, this was created on the Config Mgr console and in my case uses the x64 WIN-PE boot media (the majority of my environment is 64bit).

    All was fine with capture process until the server rebooted, it reboots after Sysprep has run to actually capture the image (either locally to an additional disk or to a network location) but as soon as I rebooted I was presented with the following screen.

    stop5d

    A little search around and I found out that the reason for this is due to the WIN-PE image being used is different from the original Win 2003 OS, one is 32bit whilst the other is 64bit, shutting down the OS and changing the OS version Architecture type from 32 to 64bit and rebooting allowed the capture process to continue.

    If you encounter this error in the future make sure that you change your hardware profile to reflect the change in OS architecture type.

  • VMware Workstation 8 Released

    I have used VMware Workstation 7 for the last year or so and I have been really impressed with it (as a solution for virtualisation on my laptop rather than my in-house lab). So when VMware announced the release of VMware Workstation 8 today I immediately purchased the upgrade.

    The upgrade purchase process was very easy and the upgrade site automatically populated the previous versions serial number which allowed me to purchase the upgrade product at the reduced price of $99 or £67.55 instead of the usual price of $199 or £135.50.

    Installation took about 10 minutes on my Dell E6410 and unlike my Acronis upgrades didn’t require entering the previous product key to carry out the installation.

    image

    Some of the blurb on the improved VMware Workstation product.

  • Run over 600 different operating systems right on your PC. Prove your mastery of the PC and run from DOS to Windows 7
  • Run the most demanding applications in a virtual machine with 8 virtual processors or 8 virtual cores, 2 TB virtual disks and up to 64 GB of memory per virtual machine
  • Move to the internal cloud. Build and test your virtual machines locally and then drag and drop to move them directly to VMware vSphere
  • Remotely connect to virtual machines running on VMware vSphere anywhere on your network to leverage not only your local PC but the internal cloud
  • Run as a server to share virtual machines with your team, department, or anyone in your organization with enterprise calibre control over user access
  • and much more.

  • VMware VCP 5 (VCP 511) Training Requirements – Updated

    VMware recently updated the requirements for the VCP 5 upgrade, for a limited time VCP3’s can now upgrade to the VCP5 by attending the What’s New (5.0) course, like the earlier requirements this also has a best before date of Feb 29th 2012.

    VMW-VCP5-105c

    The VCP 511 Exam Blueprint can be found here

  • How To – Restore a deleted WordPress post

    A couple of days ago I made a mistake on my blog and accidently overwrote one of my posts, it was whilst using the excellent Windows Live Writer and was absolutely nothing to do with the software, it was entirely a PEBKAC issue.

    pebcak_20898

    The mistake was that I took an existing post (first part in a multipart series) and edited it to make the second part of the article (I am used to Word documents). In this case it was only after I posted up the draft to the website did I realise what I had done.

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  • Building an Iomega PX6 Replacement – Part Two

    In part one I discussed how I didn’t want to splash out for an Iomega PX6 due to the poor cost performance figures I had seen for it. I had spent a long time before the PX4 and PX6 units actually shipped trying to decide whether to purchase a unit and in the end I decided against it. Having decided to self build a replacement for the Iomega PX6 I needed to decide on hardware, in part 1 I had already decided on the only mini-itx motherboard out there with 6 Sata3 ports on it, the Zotac M880G.

    In part two we will look at case options for the PX6 Replacement unit.

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  • Building an Iomega PX6 Replacement – Part One

    Having owned a couple of the Iomega IX4-200D’s for nearly a year I have been impressed with the build quality of the units, what I haven’t been overly impressed with was the performance of it, don’t get me wrong the IX4 is a home based storage platform and for that it works wonders but as a SAN\NAS storage device to be used as a datastore for my VMware vSphere environment it can cause me issues if I try powering on multiple VM’s at once (obviously I use Virtual Machine Startup/Shutdown rules for the most part) I can have serious performance issues.

    When Iomega announced the release of the PX4 and PX6 I was initially pleased with the idea of a 6 drive NAS that was capable of using a mix of SSD and Platter based disks but the more I looked at the PX6 the more I balked at the price when compared to the performance figures I had seen for it. Paying out the £650 (the cheapest I had found the Diskless PX6 out there, including the 20% discounted price that’s available on Simon Seagraves site couldn’t beat that price) started to sound like a bad idea to me.

    I then decided to see if I could actually build a unit for myself (as some of you are aware I have tested a number of NAS\SAN software based solutions out there already) so I did some investigating and surprised myself with how little there is in the way of cheap performance hardware available BUT, saying that I have found out it is possible to build yourself a PX6 replacement NAS device a lot cheaper than it would cost to purchase the Iomega unit. ** I will caveat this here, I understand that the newer IX4 and PX4/6 units out there do offer more than just network storage but for my needs I need a device that can handle both iSCSI and NFS as well as SSD and Platter based disks. It also needed to be able to perform better than the IX4 and HP MicroServer I currently own.

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  • De-bricking the Iomega IX4-200d

    I recently had a couple of comments on some of my IX4-200d posts asking for some assistance with the IX4, this chap (Johan) had experienced a failure of some sort that left his IX4 dead as a dodo (you all know the signs, a red LED of death and a graphic on the front of the unit that brings a lump to your throat.

    In the case of Johan he had either tried upgrading all the drives on his unit at once (formatting them in the process) or had a catastrophic hardware failure that ensured the disks were wiped clean (Johan, please post a comment here for clarification purposes). Anyway, his request was to see if it would be possible to take a copy of my NAS OS partition and sending it over to him. Now I have to admit that I was a bit loath to take out the disks from either of my two 8TB units as I really didn’t want to risk losing the data but as luck would have it I still had the original 500gb drives from when I upgraded my IX4 earlier on in the year so I told Johan that I would see what I could do.

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