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Showing posts with the label snapshots

Low budget fanless ZFS NAS

Dunno how this will end up as I did again mistake of digging up one of those Wyse Z90D7 terminals from junk pile. This time my idea is to use it for NAS after upgrading RAM from 2GB to 6GB and adding two 1TB 2.5" USB3 disks. Wyse being fanless and with host powered disks this should be decent combo. Then add FreeNAS 9.2 and ZFS with snapshots. Snapshots are mandatory feature as I'm sending this to friend of mine for christmas present. He's one of those who insist on installing every virus and cryptolocker he can find. With data backed up to NAS and protected by daily snapshots recovery is much easier than ever before. With assumption that he'll save important data to network drive which will then probably corrupt it all due me using inappropriate hardware...

Moving VMs between datastores with free ESXi (and very fast GhettoVCB restores)

Trying to move virtual machine between datastores (local or remote) can be painful without vCenter and SVmotion. Easy and fast way is to use traditional VI Client to move contents of virtual machine directory via datastore browser (Move To feature). Processing stays within ESXi and goes quickly. VMware converter could also be used, but it's SLOOOOOW and everything goes via management PC which is dumb design. GhettoVCB restores aren't fastest either. This is quite obvious workaround, but I have to admit didn't realize this until today. Since backups are NFS mounted I can simply import VMX file from backup directory using datastore browser. Yes, this will result in changes to backup which is not that great, but at least it's quick - even biggest VM can be restored in couple minutes. And that issue with changes to backup could be easily solved with ZFS snapshots.