Free iSCSI SAN for your home lab using FreeNAS 8.2

29 July 2012 by

Scenario

You have a home lab set up so you can experiment with the latest and greatest software and technology. You could be using VMware ESXi, Hyper-V or another hypervisor for your lab, but they don’t come with shared storage built-in. You need shared storage to set up features like Failover Clustering.

Luckily, you don’t have to spend a fortune to get an iSCSI SAN for your home lab. As the name suggests, FreeNAS is FREE!

Read on to learn how to install FreeNAS 8.2. I’ll be using VMware Workstation, but the process is similar for most hypervisors.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Storage, VMware Tagged With: , , ,

Performance Monitor counters for IOPS

6 June 2012 by

I usually refer to this excellent TechNet post when using PerfMon: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2008.08.pulse.aspx

However, for measuring IOPS, these counters are better:

  • Current Disk Queue Length
  • Disk Reads/sec
  • Disk Transfers/sec
  • Disk Writes/sec

These counters were recommended from this video on VDI and IOPS: http://www.brianmadden.com/blogs/videos/archive/2012/03/19/windows-iops-deep-dive-what-iops-means-to-you-and-why-you-can-t-do-vdi-without-knowing-about-them_2C00_-a-video-from-BriForum-2011.aspx

Filed Under: Microsoft, Storage Tagged With: ,
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