Archive for May, 2010

ZFS? Why you should care about ZFS?

zfs_logoThere’s a lot of buzz about the Zettabyte File System from Sun Oracle, which has been included for a while in both Solaris and OpenSolaris.  (Distributions based on Opensolaris like Nexenta have it.  Also some BSD distributions have it).

In general, file systems are not exactly glamorous.  HFS?  UFS? VxVM?  Who cares.  It’s a file system, right?

ZFS has some serious juicy goodness.  Personally, I think as time goes on, you’ll see more and more ZFS (or at least ZFS-like file systems) used on production servers, especially file servers.  Like NexentaStor.

Read more

More on Nexenta

Here’s my $0.02 on Nexenta. (Based on my use of the free NexentaStor Community Edition, 3.0.2.

To summarize: Good stuff!  If you are looking for storage appliance software, try Nexenta first. Maybe you’ll luck out and Nexenta will like your hardware. If not, run Openfiler.

The Nexenta Community Edition is free to use. They do make you register it. That’s a bit of a hassle, especially if you fat-finger the key (“Is that an I or a 1?”)

The Nexenta load is no harder than, and arguably easier, than loading Openfiler.

Nexenta goes faster that Openfiler.  Nexenta goes faster than my $25,000 Dell/Equallogic PS5000E.

I’m working on a step by step how-to for loading Nexenta.

nexenta1

Read more

MCITP:EA – Took the Microsoft 070-643 Windows Server 2008 Applications Infrastructure, Configuring exam today

I didn’t pass.  I’ve never had such issues with any other exams before.  These Microsoft tests are tough!  Studying the official Microsoft Press books, and taking practice tests from the official Microsoft recommended practice test vendors is apparently not enough.

I read the book for this exam multiple times.  I painstakingly did all the labs.  This book does not cover test topics to the same depth and detail as you see them in the test.

I took the practice tests over and over again until I had all the questions memorized and repeatedly got perfect scores on them.  The actual test is unfortunately not a whole lot like the practice exams.

Oh well, Microsoft has their Second Shot program going right now, so retakes are free.  The program expires at the end of June 2010, so I will have to do the retakes soon.