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I’ve been using FreeNAS for many, many years. I believe I started back in the .6 beta days, which if memory serves would have been somewhere around 2009ish? Over that time, I have had a handful of machines doing the work - three if I’m not missing anything. Power-related issues killed the first two (PSU / board death on one, and blown capacitors on another). I then scraped together some ‘old’ hardware at the time and built what is now my ‘current’ FreeNAS box. It is comprised of a whopping Pentium Dual-Core E6500 CPU and 4 GB of RAM. The real kicker is that it is running on a single 1.5 TB SATA drive. ...

Note: This post was written earlier this week, so some of the ’time contexts’ might be off. As I am writing this post, I am on my way to Tech Field Day 12 in San Jose. I am very excited about it, but deciding to come was actually a very stressful decision? As a bit of background, all of my costs are covered, I don’t need to do any prep work, and I don’t need to do anything after the fact. Of course, I have already done a lot of prep work (see my previous ‘Primer’ posts), and I do plan on doing ‘follow-up’ work after the fact. ...

A bit of a personal reflection post today, but this is also a topic I see that comes and goes in ‘waves’ amongst my peers and a lot of in the ‘vCommunity’. Imposter Syndrome is something that affects a lot of us, and it isn’t always easy to work through it. Timing on this is also impeccable, given that I just wrapped up my first Tech Field Day event. I’m not ready to start re-capping the event yet, but in the spirit of the vDM 30 in 30, I wanted to get something posted today. ...

I could have sworn that I have written about this before, but a search of my blog didn’t return anything. Oh well, if I did write about this, please point it out if you find it so I can see if my viewpoint has changed / wavered at all. A common ’trait’ (for lack of a better word) that I have come across in IT folks in the past is a hesitation to engage vendor support. I know I was guilty of this early on in my career, but now I definitely try to avoid this. So, what do I mean by this? ...

In a previous post, I covered off some of the podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis. I tend to consume a lot of audio content, so that list was far from done. I still have a fairly long list of podcasts, but I am going to cut the remainder down to ones that I think are worth recommending to most folks. So, once again, in no particular order, here are some more podcasts you should check out if you have already. ...

This will be last of the primers for the upcoming Tech Field Day 12 event. Some of you may notice that I have not covered off Intel - unfortunately they have had to cancel their appearance due to a scheduling conflict on their end. Too bad as their sessions in the past have been quite informative. So, let’s talk about Dell EMC. Unless you have been living under a rock, you likely heard about the Dell and EMC merger that was finalized earlier this year. From the time it was announced (October 12, 2015) to the time the merger closed (September 7, 2016) there was a lot of speculation as to how things would look after the completion of the $67 billion deal. Things are still very much in a ‘settling’ phase, but the new behemoth is still moving forward. ...

DriveScale will be presenting at Tech Field Day 12, and it looks like they will have a lot to share. It took me quite a few reads to finally wrap my head around what they do, but I think I have a clear picture now. Based out of Sunnyvale CA, and founded in 2013 by some extremely smart folks, DriveScale only came out of stealth in May of this year. At the same time, they announced $15 million in Series A funding. One of the investors includes Foxconn (via one its subsidiaries - Ingrasys Technology), who are the largest contract electronics manufacturer in the world. I imagine that can be a pretty lucrative deal if things pan out. ...

In my last post I covered off Docker, and I touched on how containers have exploded in use over the last couple of years. One thing that I didn’t go into detail about is the underlying storage for these containers. In a lot of cases, these containers will get spun up and not have any persistent storage. Docker does allow for the use of persistent storage with its containers, but it can be a little limiting. ...

I’m definitely excited to see Docker present at the upcoming Tech Field Day 12. I had meant to sit in on their exclusive vExpert demos at VMWorld 2016, but I, unfortunately, had a conflict at the time and skipped it (boo). I was bummed as I don’t know a ton about Docker, but I definitely want to learn more. For background, Docker Inc. was founded in 2010 after it was split off from dotCloud, which originally developed the container technology that became Docker. As it stands, Docker Inc. has had $180 million in funding across 6 rounds, and it has helped change the landscape of traditional application deployments. ...

There are several tasks that I find myself doing often enough (not necessarily daily), to warrant automation. But even more so, it is those tasks that I don’t necessarily do often where I really appreciate the automation. Part of it is because of the time savings, but even more so, if it is automated, there are a lot fewer steps that I need to remember. A good example of this is employee terminations. A simple, but typical workflow that I see is along the lines of: ...