Defrag to improve Synology BTRFS performance

My Synology NAS gets a lot of use at home. Not only is the Synology NAS a central point for my VMware home lab, but all my PCs are connected to it for document, photo, and ISO storage.

In order to keep things as optimized as possible I try to defrag the drives every once in a while. Depending on how fragmented the drives are, this could help improve performance in sequential read and random IOPS.

In this post I’ll show how it easy it is to kick off the task. Just keep in mind you will want to do this during low usage as the defrag task will certainly impact performance while it’s running.

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How to install Centmin Mod with Let’s Encrypt and CloudFlare

I run several web servers for the many sites I own, like MikeTabor.com or for the sites I help run, such as LexVMUG.com. In the past these servers have always ran a traditional LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP) either installed manually or through WHM/cPanel.

For my last couple projects I’ve been using Centmin Mod instead. Centmin Mod has several benefits, the first being it installs a LEMP stack (Linux, NGINX, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP), then optimizes the installs, and secures the server. Even on the smallest of servers the LEMP stack has been amazing and FAST!

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Using PowerShell to Unblock multiple files

powershell blocked file

If you’ve ever downloaded a PowerShell script from the internet and tried running it you’ve probably seen the warning message “Run only scripts that you trust. While scripts from the internet can be useful, this script can potentially harm your computer.”

In my case I noticed the following tweet from Alan Renouf about the vCheck dev branch.

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Fixing, This host currently has no management network redundancy

host no management network redundancy

I recently redid my VMware home lab environment and after enabling HA the warning message “This host currently has no management network redundancy” started displaying on each of my ESXi hosts.

This warning happens because in a HA cluster there is a requirement for the management network to have redundant NICs, but in my case I’m using Intel NUCs which only have a single NIC and since this is only a lab I don’t care to see the warning so lets disable it.

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Be social! How to start a blog

This year marked my first year of going to VMworld and before I left I asked several people and the Twitter’s on advice and overwhelmingly the advice was wear comfortable shoes and to be social and talk with as many people as you can. I can’t tell you just how much those two pieces of advice are really worth.

While I was at VMworld several people told me being social has helped them immensely. From getting help when problems arise to landing their new dream job and everything in between. I even talked to a few people that was there but wasn’t really involved in the community and wanted to know how to get started.

For me blogging has been one of the better things I’ve done as it’s not only helped me learn new things, but also help teach others. It’s something I enjoy, thought don’t do as often as I like, and figured I’d start there – how to start a blog.

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How to migrate a VMware virtual machine to AWS

  • AWS

Migrate VMware VM's to AWS

At work we’ve been toying with the idea of moving some of our VMware workload off to AWS and I’ve been tasked with migrating a couple VMware virtual machines to AWS as a proof of concept for the time being.

In this post I’ll show how I setup the AWS Connector and did the migration from VMware to AWS using the AWS Server Migration Service.

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