Open VM Tools 10.2.0-3 vSphere Guest Customization Issues
Hey all – I recently went to deploy a solution involving a few Ubuntu 16.04 LTS VMs in my lab to eventually put on AWS. There are some issues I’ve been having with deploying (updated) Ubuntu 16.04 LTS templates to my vSphere 6.7 cluster (though this seems to not work in 6.5 as well). I have a number of templates in my labs (and in production, having the same issue). One thing I try to do is keep templates up to date so I...
More microcode madness – VMware recommends NOT patching
VMware recommends NOT applying microcode patch that they pushed… and my R620 experiences some weird issues after having applied the patch!
Intel Microcode for Spectre/CVE-2017-5715 – Real performance loss in ZFS
Update as of Jan 14, 2018: VMware Recommends not applying patch Unless you’ve been living under a rock lately (which would have been convenient) you probably know about the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that have caused a huge stir in the IT industry. There are three CVE’s associated with these vulnerabilities: CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre) CVE-2017-5753 (Spectre) CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown) The purpose of this blog entry...
832 TB – ZFS on Linux – Setting Up Ubuntu: Part 2
As you’ve probably guessed, this post is going to cover installing the OS in the case of my ZFS on Linux build(s). This is heavily subjective. There are right and wrong ways of doing things, but there is also a ton of “yeah, that’ll work” in the middle. There are Linux admins out there who, first things first, will change the terminal colors, unify UIDs and GIDs across multiple systems, create aliases for...
Native Encryption for ZFS on Linux is here!
You heard right! Click here to read about the github commit Tom Caputi has signed off on the patch for encryption in ZFS on Linux! The part that really caught my eye reads: The last addition is the ability to do raw, encrypted sends and receives. The idea here is to send raw encrypted and compressed data and receive it exactly as is on a backup system. This means that the dataset on the receiving system is protected using the same...
832 TB – ZFS on Linux – Project “Cheap and Deep”: Part 1
Sometimes you just need a ton of storage capacity – in this post I share a ZFS build I’ve been working on!
About Me
I am a Sr. Systems Engineer by profession and am interested in all aspects of technology. I am most interested in virtualization, storage, and enterprise hardware. I am also interested in leveraging public and private cloud technologies such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and vRealize Automation/vCloud Director. When not working with technology I enjoy building high performance cars and dabbling with photography. Thanks for checking out my blog! 
