ZFS root using Debian GNU/kFreeBSD

       645 words, 4 minutes

For a while now FreeBSD had ZFS included. Since 8.x, revision 28 is available. The thing is, I don’t really like the FreeBSD package management ; but I love Debian’s one. Here’s the way to provide a stable Kernel with a decent system management on a powerful filesystem. The installation is done on a virtual machine. The multiple disk configuration has no really use here either than looking at how to do it.

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Monitor Synology disk temperature from SNMP

       595 words, 3 minutes

I’m always looking at how to get informations from my I.T. systems ; although it often ends they do nothing… Here’s a trick to monitor the disks temperature of a Synology NAS (DS409slim in my case).

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The FreeBSD hypervisor using VirtualBox

       976 words, 5 minutes

VirtualBox is a virtualization software that allows running several OSes on a single host machine. It was first a free VMware Workstation-like tools but has grown quite a bit now. You can now run virtual machines headless, like you do with Xen or KVM. Here’s a little tour on setting up an hypervisor using VirtualBox on FreeBSD 9. BTW: Why FreeBSD? Because it features ZFS filesystem version 5 and ZFS pool version 28.

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Share UFS and ZFS on FreeBSD 9

       299 words, 2 minutes

On my way for a new experiment, I want to share a UFS and a ZFS partitions on a single disk using FreeBSD 9. Although it is a quite arguable configuration, it is quite simple achieve.

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Restore thin provisioning on ESXi

       281 words, 2 minutes

When I wrote about moving VM on ESXi without VMotion or Storage VMotion , I forgot about one neat VMware feature: thin provisioning. Quoting VMware: “(…) Thin Provisioning, a key component of vStorage, allows over-allocation of storage capacity for increased storage utilization, enhanced application uptime and simplified storage capacity management. (…)”. This means that a virtual machine configured with a 20GB virtual disk and only using 7GB of real data will see a 20GB disk but the file will only consume 7GB on the ESX storage. If the VM uses more storage, the file will grow until it reaches 20GB. Since then, you can save the storage for other VM.

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