Systems & Networking

I'm trying to squeeze out a bit more life from some IBM x3650 and x3550 M2's. These systems are quite old, but still pack enough power to run meaningful workloads when the upgrades are maxed out. There is one last upgrade you can do that will allow you to unlock the ability to run VMware ESXi 6.7 on a IBM x3650/x3550 M2.

Your XigmaNAS, NAS4Free, FreeNAS, of in general your NFS server is repeatedly showing a mount access error denied in the logs. The NFS client that's trying to mount an NFS export that does not exist or once existed. The NFS client is a VMWare ESXi host.

The Problem

A VMWare ESXi host is trying to mount an NFS export that you deleted or moved.  You log is spammed with endless mount request denied entries.

This is a slight departure from FreeBSD land, but there is no reason why this can't be applied to FreeBSD as well with some slight modifications. Here we will use Saltstack to automatically partition, format, and mount a volume in Ubuntu Linux 20.04.

This is a quick guide on how to resize your ZFS pool after adding more storage. We won't get too much into the details on how to add more storage to a multi provider ZFS pool or RAID setup (that's a complex subject). This guide will be limited to a single provider (aka 'disk' or volume).

I use XgimaNAS, an open source FreeBSD bases NAS appliance with 6x Western Digital 3TB (WD30EFRX) HDD's with a Areca ARC-1320-4i4x SAS HBA. Four of the drives are connected to a SansDigital 4-bay external enclosure, the other two are attached internally. Two drives are setup as a ZFS mirror and the remaining 4 in a RAIDZ2 configuration. It's been several years, and in that time I've had HDDs fail and replaced. The enclosure's power supply also failed at one point in history for which I had to replace the whole enclosure. The ZFS pools manage to survive all this turmoil very well.