December has been a slow month for blogging. Ever since I got back from Trinidad, I’ve had “bloggers block” if there is such a thing!

What I can tell you is that I have been trying to download the Celerra Simulator from EMC Powerlink all month but have been unsuccessful. Everytime I try to download it, it’ll get to 87mb – STOP! 198mb – STOP! One time it got to 836mb, only to STOP shortly thereafter.

Ultimately what I had hoped to do was have somekind of NAS/Shared Storage virtual appliance that could run inside VMware Workstation so I could simulate ESX features from my USB drive. Fortunately, I ran across FreeNAS “The free NAS Server” which has a VMware appliance ready for downloading. If I remember right, it was roughly 29mb.

Once downloaded, it extracts to a VM with 128mb RAM, a single 128mb virtual disk, and 1 virtual NIC. It plugged nicely into VMware Workstation and came right up. I assigned an IP address and then managed FreeNAS thru its web GUI.

I added a second virtual disk to the VM, and booted it up to configure an NFS share. Below are just a few screenshots:

Configuring the Mount Point:

Creating the NFS Share:

Add the NFS Share to ESX:

For what I’ve needed so far, FreeNAS has worked pretty well. If you need a free NAS server, I recommend you check it out.

P.S. I just tried downloading the Celerra Simulator, got all the way to 21mb this time…..Am I doing something stupid?? Please tell me! 🙂