Understanding and improving VMware snapshot integration in FreeNAS 8

Understanding and improving VMware snapshot integration in FreeNAS
Those who followed my previous posts know that I am using a storage server called FreeNAS in a VMware virtualization environment. There are several benefits of why one would use a storage server rather than just a trivial storage solution. Two of such major benefits are snapshots and replication. In this article I will discuss ...

Experiments with dead space reclamation and the wonders of storage over-provisioning 3

Experiments with dead space reclamation and the wonders of storage over-provisioning
I am in the process of setting up a home storage server that will rely heavily on over-provisioning. You can read more about my previous VMware – FreeNAS – ZFS experiences in other articles. In this article I will conduct several experiments showing how available disk space fluctuates at various layers in the system. This ...

DiskSpdAuto: Automating IO performance tests and result collection using DiskSpd and PowerShell 3

DiskSpdAuto: Automating IO performance tests and result collection using DiskSpd and PowerShell
If you have followed my previous article titled IO Performance Benchmarking 101, you know that I am a big fan of using CrystalDiskMark for measuring disk IO throughput. CrystalDiskMark is a wonderful tool, but being a GUI application it is unsuitable for using in an automated environment or when you need to test several disks ...

Quirks of ZFS interoperability 3

Quirks of ZFS interoperability
My main tech project in the last few month has been an all-in-one home lab. The lab is a high-end PC running a hypervisor, which hosts VMs and provides a flexible infrastructure for experiments. One of the main components of such a setup is a storage VM that provides storage to other VMs, while giving ...