Dell iDRAC 7 manual fan control

The Integrated Dell Remote Access Controller (iDRAC) is designed for secure local and remote server management. The iDARC monitors system health, checks and logs what is installed in the system and controls the servers cooling systems. As you may have discovered, when you cross flash a Dell H310 raid controller to IT mode and as …

TrueNAS Block Storage & ESXi (Part 1)

TrueNAS Core In part 1 I cover some basic ZFS theory and the layout of a high performance ZFS pool for ESXi VM block storage. I will be using TrueNAS Core, which in my opinion is hands down the best free storage platform on the market and it is open source. TrueNAS Core will give …

Fibre Channel SAN Concepts

Introduction to Fibre Channel (FC) If you are new to Fibre Channel SAN technology you should take the time to familiarise yourself with the basic terminology. Fibre Channel (FC) was developed in the late 1980s and became an American National Standards Institute (ANSI) standard in 1994 with it’s physical topology as well as logical topology …

Adding a NVIDIA Quadro P620 to my Plex VM

I’ve been running Plex in a CentOS 7 VM for over 5 years and it’s been extremely stable, I’ve had no issues, not even one. Currently Plex is hosted on VMware ESXi 7.0.2 host with two 4 vCPUs and 6GB of vRAM and it works well with H264. I’ve decided to re-rip all of my …

Set up Cisco MDS DS-C9148-16p-K9 with 2 VSAN’s

The Scope I’m going to setup Fibre Channel storage network to connect ESXi 7 hosts to a TrueNAS Core storage server using a Cisco MDS series switch. I’ve chosen to use Fibre Channel for my VM datastores because of it’s great performance and reliability and the fact that it works so well with VMware ESXi. Fibre …

XCP-ng NFS VM storage

I’ve been running the VMs in my home lab on a ZFS pool on FreeNAS and now TruneNAS CORE made up of 600GB 10K SAS drives in a 6 x 2 way mirror configuration for some time and it works fine, but I’ve always wanted to have an all SSD high performance array. The price …

TrueNAS + EMC KTN-STL3

Eventually you will come to the point where you’ll need more storage. I’m running TrueNAS and there are 3 main ways of increasing storage capacity. You could replace every disc in the pool to a larger size, one disc at a time resilvering each disc as you go and once all discs are replaced the …

Pick A Server

The first thing you need when going down the rabbit hole of setting a smart home with all the bells and whistles is a server to safely hold all of your data and a way to share that data. A server can be any computer that can serve up one or more applications, it could …