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TrueNas - Replace a working disk with a larger one

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One of the best features of TrueNas, and really ZFS in general, is the ability to grow your vdevs, and ultimately, grow your pools.  In my media server, i currently have the following topology; one pool with one mirrored vdev.   Pool (Media) 8TB Disk1 8TB Disk2 I recently found a good deal on 16TB disks online and decided i want to replace the existing 8TB disks in my vdev and repurpose them elsewhere.  Doing this in ZFS would usually involve taking the disk offline, putting the new (larger) disk in the system, and replacing the offlined disk with the larger one.  ZFS will resilver the new disk with all of the data in the mirror and off you go. The process is pretty similar in TrueNas, but hey, now there's a GUI and it handles all of the messy ZFS commands for you. Replacing The Disk First things first, log into your TrueNas system.  Navigate to Storage > Manage Devices Next select the disk you intend to replace.  On the right, scroll all the way do...
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Getting Started with Azure

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I recently took a 4 day training course on Azure Administration with the curriculum covering many aspects in the AZ-103 certification.  The specifics of the class can be found here  https://www.globalknowledge.com/us-en/course/178424/microsoft-azure-administrator-az-103/ .  Prior to taking this course I have had zero experience with either Azure, AWS, or cloud infrastructure in general.  I've heard of high-level concepts and done some reading on my own, but no tangible hands-on action with either provider. One thing from that course which is openly available are the lab materials.  I found them to be very helpful for me to get some practical experience working with Azure and understanding some of the main concepts of cloud infrastructure. Prerequisites  In order to run the labs in Azure you will need one of the following: An active subscription to Azure Sign up for the free Azure trial here:   https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/...
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Automating VM Deploys with Terraform & Ansible - Part 1

Since this is my first official blog post, I thought I'd cover a situation that is very recent in my career, and that is automating server/vm deploys.  One of the challenges my team faces is the amount of time it takes to execute a server request into a tangible VM in a timely fashion.  By the time a request gets put in, and it gets escalated to the right team there's a turnaround of up to 5 business days, and that's assuming the request gets executed correctly the first time.  From an end user's perspective, that's an incredibly long time.  It's not flexible, not agile, and not timely.  So I decided to solve that problem.  The whole solution is a bit extensive, so I will break this post up into two parts.  So let's get started with part 1. Requirements Phase 1 of the solution I want to implement has to have a few key characteristics: It has to be repeatable with expected results It has to be easy enough for anyone to execute It has to speed ...
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Welcome!

I want to start my first post by saying thank you for visiting my blog!  I have been in IT for nearly 10 years now, and I'd like to think I've gotten better as each year has gone by.  I'd like to share some of my knowledge, experiences, and interests with those who are willing to listen.  I have been involved in various portions of Infrastructure during my career.  Most of my experience comes from Virtualization (VMware 3.5 - current), Storage (NetApp, EMC, HP, Tintri, Pure), and Compute (Dell, HP, Cisco UCS).  This year i was heavily involved in a major project to migrate our entire virtual environment to a brand new datacenter.  That project is just now wrapping up and i intend on blogging about that journey as soon as i can gather my thoughts! Within the past year or so I've also begun the journey to implement solutions geared towards infrastructure automation.  This includes provisioning and automating many of the tasks that come with those t...
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