So the latest version of the Windows 10 tech preview is out and it is pretty snazzy! Being the daredevil rouge that I am I decided to try it out on my work laptop (being the only Windows PC I have) and have had great success. While I wanted to try it out I didn’t want to chance destroying all my data and I also wanted an easy back out if I didn’t like it. Neither a format/reinstall nor an upgrade suit these requirements so it was time to try something even cooler, booting from VHDX!

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Sorry all for the lack of posts, I’ve been lazybusy. But as you can see the site has had a new lick of paint but that is a whole different series posts. Instead I want to talk about my new NAS. Being the data conscious person that I am there is only one acceptable filesystem to use, ZFS. Thankfully there is also a nice appliance-like OS called FreeNAS that is based on FreeBSD and has ZFS as the foundation. Once I’d selected the OS it was time to get some hardware. By keeping an eye out I was able to pick up some awesome deals on Dell hardware (which I’ve listed below). With the hardware all installed and FreeNAS loaded onto a USB key I was finally able set up my system and have a look around.

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• Damien Flynn has a good article on Petri about using System Centre Update Publisher (SCUP) to deploy the SCCM client with WSUS.

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• Chris M Evans over at ArchitectingIT has a good post on why he doesn’t want to see a ten year old flash array. I honestly don’t think to many organisations really keep ancient arrays around as their primary storage array, the support costs alone would be astronomical.

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• With all the brouhaha about VSAN (and I admit I’m looking very hard at it and how much it would cost to get a nice home lab setup) the requirement for one SSD per disk group should show the importance of SSD reliability. If you plan on using consumer grade SSDs or SSDs not from your hardware OEM (and even then) you are going to want to test them, hard. With that I would really recommend reading the “Analysis of SSD Reliability during power-outages” report. I hope more tests like these are performed.

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• Jeff Wouters has a handy script to find empty Active Directory groups.

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• One to look out for those of you with IIS based websites, Update decreases the page load time of web sites that are hosted on Windows 7-based and Windows Server 2008 R2-based web servers.

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• For all you SOE creators out there, you might find this post from Henk Hoogendoorn useful as he provides links to driver packages from Dell, HP and Lenovo. Should come in quite handy if you are using MDT/SCCM.

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• Good news everyone! F5 have dropped the price of their LTM VE lab editions to approx. USD$95. Here in Australia the going rate was about AUD$2000 so this represents a significant saving. With this price it is worth adding these VMs to your lab and I look forward to trying out NSX with these new VEs when I’m able to get ahold of NSX. I’ve bought two to test failover but I’m still waiting on my license keys. Unfortunately not all resellers have updated and the prices I have available in Australia are the old ones, however, Packet Pushers have a blog post on where to order it. The licenses are delivered digitally.

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• I’m very happy to see that vCAC 6.0 is out and it looks much nicer to install now, being a vApp and all. I’d recommend have a read of the release notes on the VMware website. When I get a chance I hope to put it through its paces in my lab.

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