Solaris
I installed NexentaStor Community 3.1.2 on my VMware ESXi 5.0 and wanted to get the VMware tools running ; mostly because I know there are tools for Solaris and it may improve the Administrator Experience.
The virtual machine is configured as “Oracle Solaris 11 (64-bit)” Guest OS. It has 2 vCPU and 4GB of RAM. There are also two Mapped Raw LUN attached to it. The VMware Tools installation is nearly straight forward.Continue reading...
ZFS may be Yet Another File System. To me, ZFS is Zee File System brought by Sun Solaris. It is remarkable because it comes with numerous interesting features. To name a few: redundancy, checksum, compression, deduplication, snapshots.
This article is a kind of cheat sheet on what is ZFS, how it is organized and how to build a consistent storage area using this particular file system. It is mostly an attempt to clarify and write down what I read about ZFS and how it has to be used to achieve various storage goals.Continue reading...
I recently discover a storage feature named “Data deduplication” also called “Deduplication”.
Quoting Wikipedia:
In computing, data deduplication is a specialized data compression technique for eliminating coarse-grained redundant data, typically to improve storage utilization. In the deduplication process, duplicate data is deleted, leaving only one copy of the data to be stored, along with references to the unique copy of data. Deduplication is able to reduce the required storage capacity since only the unique data is stored.
I was first thinking “well, a video/document/… is a file ; and a file is a sets of 0 and/or 1. Like a ZIP archive doesn’t care if it stores pictures or text files, I may be able to use deduplication to store my 32GB of personnal pictures into a smaller storage size… sounds great!”. That’s what I want to figure out.Continue reading...