I was recently in a situation where a number of customer VM suddenly became unusable. When investigating the VMs in vCenter we could see that the disk latency was in the seconds. The back end storage was a NetApp AFF connected to the hosts using Fiber Channel. So looking at the AFF event logs I…
Category: Tutorial
Using SSHShellStream
One of my pet projects I am working on is a fully auto VCSA certificate checking script. I want to check the machine, root and STS certificates. I still have some problems to over come but I think I have solved my most pressing problem. That problem was how do I SSH to the VCSA…
Powershell Splatting
This post will explain how to splat in Powershell. Splatting is basically using an array or a hash table as the attributes of a command.As with most things in Powershell, its best demonstrated by an example or two. Example 1 In my day job I have an ESXi build script, part of that is to…
VCSA restore from backup
In this post I will detail the steps required to restore a VCSA from a file level backup. Hopefully this will be a post no one will ever need. But if you do find your self in a situation that requires a restore from backup, then I hope this post helps. This is a list…
FreeNAS, Disks and zPools
In this post we will add disks to the FreeNAS server and configure them in to a zPool. For this post we will use a ZFS equivalent of a RAID 10 but I will demonstrate all the other RAID options. Go to Storage and Disks to see a list of disks. This is not very…
FreeNAS, iSCSI setup
To get a zvol shared out on a network and visible to clients we need to set up the iSCSI service. This is not as bad as it used to be in the older interfaces. The iSCSI config can be reached from Sharing / Block Shares (iSCSI) or Services / iSCSI.Just remember to check that…
FreeNas build and setup
This series of posts will detail the build and configuration of a FreeNAS (TrueNas core) server version 11.3u1 in a homelab environment. For this series I am building a virtual FreeNAS server in ESXi. I have a physical FreeNAS server built out of an old mini tower with desktop hardware. This is certainly not an…
FreeNAS, IP setup
We have installed the FreeNAS OS on to disk. The next step is to configure the management NIC so we can access the server across the network. At this point on our physical screen or VM console we should be looking at the boot config console setup menu. Press 1 (and enter) to configure the…
FreeNAS, Data NIC
Before we can start presenting data over to iSCSI clients we need a dedicated NIC on the same network segment as those clients. In this post we will configure the second NIC using the web interface. Go to Network and then InterfacesHere we have our two NICs, em0 has been configured as management and we…
FreeNAS, Install from CD
Power up and connect the install media for the Freenas server. If physical I just cut a CD and connect a USB DVD drive. If virtual then mount the ISO. When booting from install media you will see the FreeNAS boot screen. Press enter or wait for 5 seconds. The first option in the build…