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This is a simple guide to creating a VMware ESXi virtual machine for NexentaStor. Actual OS installation is very easy and will be covered in another piece. Just over a year ago I created The Big WHS on a platform of Windows Server 2008 R2 with Windows Home Server installed in Hyper-V. Simply put, this may have been the easiest installation ever since Hyper-V and Windows Home Server work well together. With the lack of a new Drive Extender technology in Windows VAIL server, many users are looking to other storage platforms to fill the void. Continue Reading

Oftentimes people talk about passing a RAID controller/ HBA/ USB drive through to a guest OS in VMware ESXi (this guide is based on 4.1 and works for ESX too) using VMDirectPath I/O or disk through disk in Microsoft Hyper-V. This is especially useful when one either needs direct RAID controller/ HBA access for an operating system which is recommended for OpenSolaris/ FreeBSD solutions or USB access for an OS installation. It is a fairly simple process, so I figured I would provide a quick guide. Before embarking on this process, please note that the server will need to be restarted mid-process so this is not something that should be done on an ESX host with critical virtual machines running on the host. Continue Reading

Installing EON ZFS Storage, an OpenSolaris derivative for testing purposes in an Oracle VirtualBox VM is an easy task. This installation how to assumes that one has already installed VirtualBox, setup an OpenSolaris virtual machine, and booted from the EON ZFS Storage live CD.

The two relevant guides if you have not done so are:

1. How to Install Oracle VirtualBox (for a test ZFS Storage virtualization platform) on Windows 7 x64
2. How to Install EON ZFS Storage in Oracle VirtualBox on Windows 7 64 bit

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As was mentioned in my previous article, I am a big fan of using VirtualBox virtualization on my Windows 7 x64 desktop to sandbox different storage configurations, especially with ZFS capable operating systems like FreeNAS and OpenSolaris. While Microsoft’s Virtual PC works well to virtualize Windows XP instances on the desktop, it lacks the feature set of a more robust virtualization tool like Oracle’s VirtualBox.

In this article, I am going to show how one can install EON ZFS Storage, an OpenSolaris based operating system in VirtualBox to allow one to test ZFS storage solutions out before implementation. For the uninitiated user (to ZFS), I would strongly urge them to experiment with both FreeBSD and OpenSolaris based ZFS implementations before committing to build a full storage solution based on either. Also, I am using my previous article regarding installing VirtualBox on Windows 7 x64 as a basis for this article.

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Although I use Hyper-V virtualization for all of my current Windows Home Server, Windows Server 2008 R2, and other test environments, Hyper-V still does a poor job at virtualizing other environments like FreeBSD, OpenSolaris, and Linux (to some degree). Testing new Windows instances is very simple with Hyper-V, however for those wanting to test out ZFS prior to building a dedicated network attached storage (NAS) server, VirtualBox is a very strong virtualization platform. Coincidentally, VirtualBox is an Oracle/Sun product, as is OpenSolaris so the compatibility is akin to running Windows based Hyper-V guest operating systems. Perhaps the best feature of VirtualBox is the ability to run multiple operating systems within a 64-bit Windows 7 environment. Core i7′s with 8GB+ of memory can usually handle a few VirtualBox virtual machines making it a great desktop application obviating the need to use a KVM when setting up the test environment. This guide will show how easy it is to get started with virtualization using Oracle’s VirtualBox.

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