 So we're going to take a look today at ZenServer. Now, ZenServer is a Type 1 hypervisor, which means it runs directly on a hardware. It's very similar to both Proxbox and ESXi server, the VMware implementation. And I like the interface for it and we're going to get into some of the details. Now, for demonstration purposes, I'm showing you an installed on a virtual box, which is going to give me an error part way through that's just going to say, hey, I think you're installing it in something that doesn't support virtualization, which is correct because you can't install this inside a virtual box because it only installs inside of other Type 1 hypervisors, but it's ideally installed right directly on the hardware. Once I go through this part of the video showing you how to install it, we'll be, the rest of it's going to be operating on actual hardware I have sitting in my server rack and I'll show you how all the functionality works. So you're presented at the beginning with the usual installer like for Linux here, standard keyboard, sure, capture. Yep, it can be, it lets you know, welcome to the server setup. This tool can be used to install or upgrade Zen server systems. Make sure you have a backup. There is options for doing implementations of if you have an old version it'll let you upgrade to a new version. This is a clean install. Except the end user license, it's going to give me the, this is the hardware error I mentioned where it says, hey, this is not set to virtualization, no problem. Now, we have one hard drive set up in here and I'm also going to turn on thin provisioning. Thin provisioning, I'll look it up and give you a real quick overview of it. What thin provisioning does is allow you to say I have, I'm going to create a virtual 80 gig hard drive but I'm only, when I load it, it requires 10 gigs. So that means thin provisioning says, oh, it's only going to take 10 gigs of space on the hard drive. If it's thick provisioned, it allocates all of the hard drive space at once. And so you have to have all that storage ready. Thin provisioning can get you in trouble but it also can make things kind of easy because you could, let's say, have a bunch of hard drives and you've all thin provisioned them which means they are only taking up the space they're actually using at that time but they could start having overruns. You can go ahead and turn this on here in the beginning but for some devices like in this demo, I'm going to show you how to hook it up to an iSCSI system. It's not supported on there. So local media, this is being installed off a CD but if it's a USB bootable, works the same way. Search for repositories, I'm going to skip verification, you know, live life a little risky here but if this is a production system, take the time to verify the install to make sure there's no errors or no problems with it. Set your password. All right, simple enough, set a decent password. This will be the root password for the system. Set it to automatic for the network configuration but you can at this time set specifically a IP address for this. You can manually or automatically specify host name, give it a name here. Then server two, let everything else be on automatic. America, I like the fact that it has Detroit in here. Use NTP, worry about that. And then you run through the install. Install is pretty straightforward. It's going to run through the install, reboot and be up and running. So nothing real complicated about this part. So I'm going to go ahead and fast forward and get you to the more interesting part other than the next and yeses and the final question it will ask is do you have anything else to install and the answer to that is nope, I'm just installing the Zen server. Apparently they have an option so if you're installing other packages with it, you could put those in at the end. Right now I don't think I see anything else that's on their download to install with this version of Zen, which is 7.2. All right, now once the server is installed, this is what the management interface looks like. Pretty straightforward. There's not a ton here. There is the ability to go into the local command line and there's a lot of command line things you can do with Zen if you need to change configurations. We're mostly going to talk about doing it through the interface, but if there's some advanced things you can get there, you can get there from the local command shell here or you can simply SSH in, which I find more convenient. It does give you status display, let you know what IP address the management network interface has. You can change the management network interface. Now, what this actually is, is which interface is allowed to be connected for management so you can have multiple interfaces on this. Maybe they connect to different networks for your different virtual machines, but you only select one to be your management interface. But there's generally like hardware bios, the time zone it's in and things you can do here. You can also change the password. It lets you know if you're logged in right now. I'm not logged in so let's log in and log in real quick. Log in successful. You can change the password, change the auto logout time. It just, this is all the general things here. I rarely, because most of my servers, I mean, I only go to the, go to them when there's actually like a problem. So for the most part, you don't really need to use this. There's not much, there's not a whole lot here. Mostly we're going to be doing it from the main graphical interface that actually runs in Windows that manages Zen server. But I just want to show you what it looked like here. Oh, and local command shell and away you go. One real quick note, if you want to make sure you're connected on it, we'll show you the fingerprints for it when you're logging in. So you'll make sure you're logging into the right server. So you want to do those levels of verification for security purposes to make sure it's not spoofed. I do like the way it does really simply just by pressing enter on the status to give you that information. So we've loaded the Citrix Zen server into Windows 10 virtual machine that I have because I run Linux. And unfortunately, there's not the best support for this specifically on Linux. That is the one thing I don't care for what was in server, but I like this interface quite a bit and it works really well. And maybe in time, someone will pour this over into Linux. So the first thing I'm going to do is add our Zen server. And I've already got the IP address in my head, root and then the password, hit add, and then you're in. So now we can see some of the general settings. Now I actually already logged into this and configured the networks. I just wanted to run that show there. So here's the two different nicks and they actually are on separate networks, just so you know. And the reason that's important is I call this one is the dot three network. This is on a dot two network. They're physically separate networks in my office. One's going to be related to storage and one is related to the management interface. And those are really easy to click to configure. And it's kind of confusing because it seems like you should be able to click these to click to configure which one. But when you click configure, it brings them both up here. Now it only lets you delete other ones you've added but you can add extra IP addresses to the networks in here. So if I wanted to remove that one, it's already got the two network cards configured. You can easily change name of them. I called this one, which by default name is actually storage one when you add more network interfaces on there. And then here's the other one. If I wanted to switch which Nick this assignment was on. So pretty straightforward. It's actually nice because it also has help links down at the bottom. So it'll tell you more about configuring it and jumps right into the help screens. Really straightforward stuff. I did both of them static depending on your network configuration decide what works for you. Now you don't need to have multiple network interfaces. You can run everything through one interface. But one of the problems you run into is if you're uploading things through the management interface and the management network card is the one attaching to an external storage device via the network. You now can be uploading and downloading and pulling from the storage all at the same time. And you're just going to create your own bottleneck putting the storage Nick on a separate network card and dedicating it for storage. When I show you how to set the storage up here you'll see why that makes a little bit of sense especially cause I'm putting in not in this particular server but another server that we're building has 10 gigabit SFP plus on it network interfaces into our free NAS. Therefore it has to be a separate network cause it's not tied into we're using direct there with no land in between. I'm gonna do a separate video on the 10 gigabit side but so when you're doing that it'll recognize all the different network cards and you'll be able to put them in and that's the faster way to connect. All right, so there's really nothing on this end server right now. It's really pretty basic so it tells you what's the total available for the VMs and when I start loading up some VMs we'll give you some more insight in that. There's no licensing necessarily in this. You can do purchase support licensing and it would have that information in here. There are currently some updates that are required and it's actually with these notifications down here at the bottom R is let me know that we have some updates and an error from reconfiguring the server. It lost connection when I was reconfiguring so I changed the management interface IP address. We're actually gonna go, this is the list of notices as they go through you can expand each one out and you can also dismiss all the notices that are in here. Now the updates, a lot of the updates do require you to restart the server so make sure when you're running the updates that you have the virtual machine shut down and run them. As you can see, this was released in May so we get two updates for June, two for August and one for September. We're gonna go ahead and load all these. Now I haven't had a problem doing this. Normally you're gonna be loading them as they come but in this case because this is a fresh load I have to do all of them at once. You can do them automatically or you can do them somewhat manually. And I say so manually if you do them automatically they will go through, shut down all the virtual machines and go through a whole restart process. You can also say don't restart just apply all the updates and then do one restart to save time. I haven't had any problems and I've done that when I've loaded this. The only thing I wish it had was an easy way just to say select all and load all of them at once but well I'll show you the process here for doing the updates. So I'm gonna go to download and install. I also like to have go to webpage so you can find out what the update does. Nice if you care about the details. So download and install, next. Now because I haven't configured anything more than the local storage it actually has to download it to somewhere so it's gonna download it to the default local storage and now we're just gonna run its check to go ahead and load this. Now this is all just the pre-check part to make sure it's all ready. It seems very thorough here. I haven't had any problems running the updates. This is where you have to allow or I will carry out post update tasks and post update tasks is actually restarting the server. So we're gonna go ahead and install the update. Update installed successfully and now we're gonna go on to the next one and I'm gonna run through these real quick. All right so all the updates now have now been loaded so our notifications are clear and we're gonna go ahead and restart the server. Now if you notice in the objects down here we have it says object, infrastructure, organization of view, save searches. I mostly like the infrastructure view but you can view things in a different manner like I'm expanding out all the templates. If you have a list of servers, all the virtual disks, tools and things that it sees in here this view makes more sense to me because I'm on this server and if you connect to multiple servers I don't have another one set up right now to connect it to but you can connect it to multiple servers at once and then they would all be on here. This one's name is Zen Server 2. So this kind of gives you an idea of how the view system here works. So we're gonna make sure we're on this server selected which is the only one and server and we're gonna go ahead and reboot it. I also like if there's some other issues you can do just a restart of the tool stack if there's some type of control problem. I've never had to use it and all my playing was on server kind of novel that it has that. We're just gonna go ahead and server and reboot. Are you sure you wanna reboot it? Say yes and it's gonna take a minute and reboot. So it's all set, it's reconnected. I do have some error. Oh yeah, lost connection because I restarted it. I'm not sure why it likes to tell me that. I'm known as said to restart. It says it should try to reconnect 120 seconds. I guess it will reconnect eventually. I'm not sure how many times it retries. You can probably set that but not let your, you don't spend too much time rebooting your server. So I don't think it's really that big of a deal. Oh, and also just a side note, right here is shut down or reboot up here as well. All right, so the first thing we're gonna wanna connect is some storage for this. Now you have the local storage there's no disk in here right now. There's no virtual disk attached to this. But it's kind of limited because I've only got a smaller SSD in this that doesn't give us a whole lot of storage. Now you could, like I said at the beginning, you could set up multiple drives in here. And one thing about setting up the drives is if you do add hard drives to this after you've loaded it, you do have to go to the command line and there's some tools that they have some command scripts that you can do and add the storage devices locally to it. I highly recommend, especially maybe more enterprise setting. A lot of people have them set up in a separate storage server. And in my case, FreeNAS and in my case also we're gonna do this with iSCSI. Now the reason for doing this with iSCSI in FreeNAS and I'm gonna walk you through the setup of that is because with iSCSI, the read write is substantially faster with Zen. It was unfortunately, and I believe it's an asynchronous write problem. I was spent some time in a forum. When you connect this over NFS it goes fairly slow and it's kind of aggravating. And it turns out there's like some trickery you can do and change settings in PF Sense to make it work. It works with some NFS servers but I just chose to go iSCSI because it works great. There's no problems with it. And it's not bad. Now the downside of iSCSI is it is a block level protocol and the Zen server on a FreeNAS box is not gonna support thin provisioning over iSCSI but that's gonna take care of on the ZFS side because ZFS compression works so well so you still have kind of extra storage and I'll kind of show that. It's kind of weird how that works but it does work really well because if you don't have a thin provisioned and you allocate something over a block it wants to take up the whole size of the drive but FreeNAS fixes that and goes, yeah we understand that there's a lot of unused space where we're gonna compress this file because iSCSI to FreeNAS is just a file sitting on ZFS is the logical way that's controlled. So we're in FreeNAS and we go to services, we go to iSCSI and now we're gonna set up the portals. Now I already have a portal set up for the other server that I've got running and so we're gonna add another one but the first we gotta do is tie it to an IP address. This one's only listing on this port and we wanted to listen on more than one port so we have this one, we're gonna add an extra portal because we're actually gonna use the same iSCSI instance here so I don't have to recreate everything and tie this one to it. Now iSCSI because what it does is it creates a file on ZFS that acts as a logically attached physical hard drive as far as Zen server or anything else that attaches to iSCSI is concerned. It's because it's a block level device. That way FreeNAS it's sitting on the redundant array that we have, it's still fast and everything else so it's not a bad way to set this up. So .10 is the 10 gigabit network and this one is the storage network that we're gonna have the Zen server attached to which is the 2.7 network. So we're gonna do this, all right so now this is attached to two different IP addresses. This is the thing about iSCSI you know you have to specifically say what it's being attached to it's not like some of the Windows Samba or other shares that automatically just attached to all the available IPs by default. Then we have the iSCSI initiator and I just leave that as all. You do have to, there's only one group ID, one initiator, we'll edit real quick show you what's in here, nothing. You have to add this as an entry but this is where you can set up restrictions. I have it set to all networks but I can go specifically lock it down so only certain things do. And I might go back and do that later for security reasons. That way nothing can get in the way of iSCSI. I also have the iSCSI set to authenticate because I don't want anyone else that would perhaps get on my network and somehow plug in there, also be able to just jump on there and I'll get to where the authentication is. So you have to have at least one group ID. I can add more in here but we're just going to use the same one over again. Then we have the authorized users and add authorized assets. Now I'm just going to use the same user for both. I use my username Tom and you just come up with these. Now the length of these passwords is I think it's seven to 10. It's really specific. You can't go too big and you can't go too small or give an error. I had a longer password in there and I realized it didn't work. I forget the exact number for iSCSI but there's a limit to what it has to be and it's within a range. Targets, Zen server. So this is the target part and this is the portal it gets tied to. The authentication is CHAP which is going to be based off that authorized access we set in the other one. And this is for target Zen server one. It's just generally for the Zen server. I just call the Zen server one in case I added other servers or more servers to it. Extents, here's where you actually add the file. So this is the file itself for the other one, the Zen EXT just for the Zen extent. I named it this. This is the location of that. I actually have A in my storage and let me jump real quick to that for you. So on this ZFS array, I have a separate dataset called Zen storage. The only thing I have within this folder is the iSCSI files that are attaching to my Zen servers for storage. So pretty straightforward. It's a subset of this. It doesn't need anything too special to get it going because it's all being handled by free NAS as iSCSI interface for all the permissions or anything else. So you just got to create it and you'll notice right away because I have a file under already that it's compressing more than double of it. That's because I created this large three terabyte file. It's simply not using it. Matter of fact, it's only seeing 1.1 gigs used out of it. The volume itself has quite a bit of storage, but because of the compression that ZFS applies to it, without thin provisioning, like I had said earlier, it wouldn't do this. It would automatically just get, I'm using up all this much space even though you're technically not really using it up in the virtual machines. This is where ZFS kicks in and goes, I'm going to take care of that for you. So let's go back over to services, iSCSI targets. There's the target here, the extents, there's the one we're doing. We're going to add another extent. Yes, my clever naming of ZenSCSI. Cleverly, I'll call it Zen2 file. Browse to the extent, mount, Jupiter, Zen storage, ZenSCSI2, Extent size one, TB should be enough for this. Now you can set some of these other features here. If you have some special need, like for example, to set up as a lot different logical block size or anything like that, I've left this at default. This is actually kind of interesting. Because they have support for Zen, it actually has ZenInitior compatibility mode and it does it more friendly. Now this is also kind of novel and I'm not an expert at how this works in iSCSI, but you can set the RPM of the drive and it defaults actually to SSD and it's a behavior of this. Because this is spread across a very fast rate array, there's actually more speed than a standard, maybe closer to an SSD because it's across several drives and eventually I'm going to be moving this over to an SSD array for more speed again. So I just leave it at that and it takes care of the details. We're going to hit OK. All right, so now we have each of these associated targets. Now this is the target for this one. And I'll show you how the target looks, the LUN ID, the extent, and it's attached to server one. We're going to add another one. Since server one, one zero, leave that at that. But this is for our Zen two. So this will go to the other file we created. Whoops. And it's got to be, I'm sorry I did that wrong. It does have to be on LUN one because we were using LUN zero. I believe it says for logical unit number. I believe is what LUN stands for in SCSI. It's been a while, not a SCSI expert. But back in the early days, I used to do a lot of SCSI stuff like in the 90s. Don't see those drives quite as much anymore. All right, so now we have the two different drive options in here and it's all set up and configured for iSCSI here in FreeNAS so we can now attach our Zen server to it. Now, one more thing you do have to do and it's fine to do this over even a Windows standard SMB share is if you want a bunch of ISOs in there for loading things, you have to create a share and copy the ISOs into that share and then the Zen server has access to all the ISOs you copy into that. And I've got that set up in here as well. Let's just standard setting up a share and copying into it. I'll show it inside the Zen server. So we're in the Zen server. We're going to go ahead and add that storage repository and do it over iSCSI. iSCSI virtual disk storage, that's fine. Target host name, 2.7, use chat. Tom, our specifically length password, put that in there. Scan target host. Oh, I made a mistake here. And actually I'm going to leave this in the video because this was something I learned about the way FreeNAS handles iSCSI. It's kind of interesting. We set all the settings. The other services when you set the settings auto restart, you do have to stop, start. Please note doing that while virtual machines running may cause problems. So now I should be able to scan target host and now all those settings work. I don't know why after you change the settings it doesn't tell you you have to restart them but this caused me some headaches. So I wanted to leave it in the video to make sure you guys see this is what happens. You set all the settings to FreeNAS, if you don't tell it to do this, you're going to have a problem. So I'm going to go ahead and choose this one right here. So that's what we see for the target. I'm just going to scan that. Then how we chose the LUN zero or LUN one. So we're going to go ahead and choose this one here, LUN one because I'm using that one for something else and hit finish. Do you want to format the desk? Absolutely. Go ahead and say yes. Now if you were rebuilding this as a Zen server because it crashed or whatever and you rebuilt it, you can attach it and it'll detect if there's drives already in there and says, hey, let's just reattach to these drives. All right. So in our storage, here it is. LVM over iSCSI shared. Really nothing used, tells you the size of it. It gives you the size and gigabytes. So now we have that set up. Now right here is the DVD drives on Zen server. This is if you have physical drives attached to it, not any virtual ones. Then here's our local storage and shows what's used on there and then the removal storage, which we're not going to play with. I don't really have a purpose for that right now. Next thing we want to add is a ISO collection. So you can do this over Windows file sharing or you can do this over NFS. I guess I'll do this one over NFS because I actually realized I've already got it set up on NFS. So NFS ISO library, I'll call it FreeNAS share path. Put it actually, it's on this network. All right, so now we've added our DVDs to this and it found them. So now that those are in this part here, DVD drives, re-scan, nothing in there. Storage, here's the one we added called FreeNAS ISO library, re-scan. See what I have in there. No ISOs in there. So I need to copy a couple of ISOs in here real quick. That's why I didn't see any. All right, and I need G-parted in there because I have some machines I'm importing to this and it's a trick I cover a little and shortly. You need to boot it off a CD to fix sometimes if it's the virtual machine was designed differently because the drive lettering may be different depending on what virtual machine you're importing it from. So we're gonna go ahead and do that and now that we've copied over there, we do re-scan and it shows up. So pretty straightforward as far as that goes. I like the way it's generally simple, kind of weird, you have to add them as a repository but once you've added them, you can do properties and rename them if you wanna call it something else. That's nice way about all this works properties. I SCSI virtual storage, we can call this free NAS, I SCSI storage. Put a space there. Hit okay, it's changed. And even if you have things on there, it's not going to really cause any problems. It's just naming for your own. It has its own way of doing everything. Matter of fact, everything works behind the scenes with UUIDs. So when you're doing things, a lot of times you actually have to specify things by the UUID that it assigns. You can use all the user friendly naming at the front here for your own purposes but the UUIDs are used on the backend. Now if we move back over here to our object view, you can see the local storage or remote storage and by default it actually, after I added the ASCAS, it automatically switches to be the default storage. Now also default storage means if you create something on the fly, the default answer is going to be use through, we use whatever the default storage is like the name implies. It doesn't mean you can't use this one, it just, it's just the way it does that. It changes this to be the default but if I wanted to switch local to be default, I could just hit right click and set back as default. So not really a big deal there. Now here's all the templates and things like that. So we're not going to jump, I'll jump a little bit into those in just a second here but for the most part the server is all set up, rebooting it, it'll automatically reattach to which remote storage devices give errors if there's not. It does have troubleshooting if there's some connection problem for those where you can run through and do that. So if any of these do have an error, you'll get an error in the notifications here. I knew that. Now one thing you notice that this has been just sitting here with a little one over it is because it's one lost connection. You do have to go over here and you can just miss select it or we're just going to go to Smith's Laws I don't care about all these errors and notices of what was done but we'll also get into that when you're building the virtual machines because those are the notifications also contain the progress which was a little bit confusing. Do you think there'd be a progress on the screen when you choose an action such as moving a VM but there's not? It just drops all the progress into the notifications. Good and bad is it's all in there, it's nice and contained but it's sometimes a little bit confusing because I'm used to a progress bar across the screen while it's doing stuff but it allows you to queue multiple commands up and they'll all show their progress status inside of there. So let's get to the fun part here now that we've got this done. Now you can pull servers together like I said I only have one right here for demo maybe I'll do another one layer to show how you pull two servers together for shared resources but for the most part single server was probably a lot of people are gonna be running and so we'll leave it at this basic step. Now if you wanna create a new virtual machine pretty straightforward here you can use all the different templates they have and they've got ones for different versions of Linux and Windows and Windows Server 2016 and a lot of different options here that's set there. You can also just do other install media and go from there. Now we'll cancel this real quick and let's copy one more ISO over there. All right and I just copied over the ISO for the Debian, Debian. Rescan real quick, there we go. And now let's go ahead and create a new virtual machine. Now it only goes up to Debian 8 here but it doesn't really matter which one you choose. We're gonna go ahead and choose this. We're actually gonna name it what we want though, Debian 9 because that's actually what I'm using. Installation media is this one here and this is where they all show up. So you by default have the Zen server guest I out tools, the CDs I loaded here out of the FreeNAS library and then these ones here. I like how they have the option right here just to click and say let's start a new ISO library if you want. So we're gonna go ahead and choose the Debian one here. Where do you wanna place this? Now you have to assign it a home server if you want it to be started automatically but you can actually if you have a list of servers in here you can, there's options where you can spread it across multiple servers for some of the redundancy where you can say but which one does it start on? So pretty straightforward but we only have one server so it's really the only one to choose here. Then you have the number of CPUs. Now this is kind of interesting because it allows me to choose more than I have in this system. This is not a 32 system. Does not have 32 CPUs in it. We'll go ahead and assign it just four cores. You can also say four cores, one core per socket or one socket with four cores or two sockets, two cores. If the operating system cares, that is an option. And let's give it, you can assign their memory here. Now this actually supports GPU pass through with a, they have a list on their side of which GPUs are supported. So you can actually pass through all the graphics. Don't do not have a graphics hardness at all other than what's onboard. So nothing we're gonna do there. Use these virtual disks. We can change on the storage here if we edit. This is where you can say I want it on that or I want it on the local Zen server storage. You just hit edit and pretty straightforward. And I'll show you, you can actually move these afterwards. So after you design and install something you can move it back over the other way. And actually because this local storage is gonna be a little faster because it has a SSD drive in there. We're gonna go ahead and put it over on here. And let's up the size to 18 gigs. So let's go all the way 32, lost my mouse for a second. So you're really just typing in what size you want whether it's gigs or megabytes. Next, networking, auto-generated. I actually don't want it on my .2 network. So we're gonna head and delete that one and just leave it on here. And it's gonna auto-generate a Mac. And then we're gonna hit start the new VM immediately. Sure. All right, it's created. Now it shows up as another object over here. Now that it's created, so we've got Zen server and here's the Debbie and Jessie nine that we have running. There's our council. And now this is the council. This is the performance graphs, snapshots which we'll get into shortly. The general of it, you can see it's green. We can actually force shut down real quick. We're gonna shut it down and then you'll see it goes yellow because it's going through the shutdown process and red when it shut down. And the council shows you a snapshot of what was last there. So now we're gonna go ahead and start the VM back up. Turn yellow and then it's for that it's starting. All right, now we're back. Now you can also go full screen if we want, send control, I'll delete or undock. And I like the undock because then it becomes just easy to move around and goes behind it. Now the weird thing is, there we go. I kind of like it's got an option when you're here, find it or reattach. So when you're going to each virtual machine, you can find the council and it just brings it to the forefront. So if you have a lot of them open, you don't have to try and figure out what's what or you can just say reattach and put it back in here. It's got scaling options, but that kind of makes it ugly especially when you're doing some of these. The nice thing is there's not really, it automatically understands grabbing or not grabbing the mouse and changing focus. So we're gonna go ahead and run through the install. Set it up real basic to show you how it works inside here. And you can see it's nice and fast. I'm not gonna run through an entire dubbing install, but you get the concept here for how this works and how quick it is to set up a virtual machine. Your ISO could have just as easily been Windows 10. It could have been that. Now, someone may ask the question and then there may be some way to do it but I didn't really look into this. You can, not that I see in an easy way. Everything wants to install from ISO, not from like a bootable USB. So you can't just pop a USB and I didn't see any automatic passenger option to put in, for example, like a bootable USB to get it going. It's generally expecting an ISO that you crop into your ISO directory. Anyway, we go. Now, this is automatically configuring the network and running through everything. As you can tell, it just works and runs through the install and away we go. Now, like I had said before about the size of the hard drive. So, this is copying some files there but obviously not that much, right? Changes to disk. But when we actually pull up the size of the hard drive, here is the Zenska Z2 and Zenska Z3 terabytes. And you're like, wow, you're using a whole lot of space but I've only assigned a 32 gig drive to it so what's an entire terabyte doing on here and how is it being used? So, this is what the drive reports that we're showing that we've got four terabytes used but let's actually go to FreeNAS and look at the storage. 1.6 gigs used. So, the file system's reporting three terabytes used and I'm just where it confused me a little bit in FreeNAS and maybe I'll look up an answer on this at some point but it only says 1.7 X but it's clearly compressing way more than that. And then when you look at the overall, it says I'm using 1.2 terabytes. This is where most of it is. This is where some of it backs up some of my time backup which is my videos and things like that which is 107 gigs. But when you look specifically at the volume for the ZEN storage, only 1.6 gig of actual usage in here which completely makes sense because the other virtual machine, I set it all up but there's no virtual machines. Well, there is one, it's like one 16 gig file and the other one but loaded wise it's a few hundred megs so it's doing an excellent job of compressing it so even though those files do report three terabyte and one terabyte, they're clearly not using all of it. All right, now I'm gonna go ahead and, well, I canceled on that. So I'm gonna shut down this VM though because it's actually somewhat started low because it didn't partition it and it normally does this shutdown so I send it like an ACPI but then you can force and force a shutdown. Now, when we go over to the storage, here's the storage, local ZEN server, I can see what it's attached to, we can do the properties on it, size and location, size 32 gig, read write, device position, these are all your standard features when you're inside the VM so you can move where it is but you can also move it and current location is here, which is local ZEN and if I want to move this file over here, I just say move while it's shut down and it will move it right over to the ice because he storage. What about importing virtual machines? I actually have some I'm gonna import here so we're gonna run and import and show you how that works. So this right here is XOA Unified, which is actually ZEN Orcasha and I'll show you real quickly how this works. It's neat, I like it, this solves my Linux problem of how we're gonna use a web interface for it but it's really, really basic unless you pay and their pricing, I guess it's reasonable if it's an enterprise, but it's $70 a month, continuous, which I'm like, okay, just for a web interface seems a little bit pricey, they get a little bit better pricing if you do it yearly but it kind of novel that it works. I'll show you how this works as well because it's another way you can control ZEN server. So we're gonna go ahead and load it because it also gives us a way to do the importing of a virtual machine so we'll do this. Next, great, we'll go ahead and put this on local storage as well that way it's nice and fast. And we want it on the same .3 network, no problem. Next, and start VMF to import, sure. Now this is where I said, where's that progress bar? And there is one way down here but we're actually gonna go to the notifications, events and this walk, this is actually gonna tell you that this is being imported and preparing to import. Now it has time counting up, it does not have time counting down so it doesn't tell me exactly how long this import's going to take. You have the option here if you wanna cancel any of these things that are running, but at least you get an idea of how it works and where the notifications are going other than this little bar down here and that little bar down there doesn't tell me when there's concurrent projects going at the same time. Now this also counts for if we were to move something to a, move something around, you kinda got the same thing. If I'm moving a piece of storage, it's going to be in that same notification over there but no timer when it's gonna be done. Other general things let's cover real quick while that's importing is this is where you can edit the RAM, set a fixed amount of memory. Once you load the Zen server up and put in, for example, you load up multiple, you load the whole Zen tools part, that will give you ability to over allocate memory so if the machine's not using it because it loads a tool that can communicate directly with the virtual machine that's running and then that allows you to see the memory and say, okay, this computer's not using all the memory and shut it down, I haven't loaded any of that so that's why it says memory range cannot be set and this is where you can set actually a range of memory which is kinda neat that it lets you do that. And now this virtual machine is imported, the networking's all set up and it's probably booted, it's thinking. While it's thinking you can see what it's thinking about so it's got two CPUs assigned to it, the send receive for the NIC and disk read and write. This is actually really clever, I like the graphs on here. I can edit this graph and add just all kinds of different things to this specific virtual machine or let's go all the way up here to the Zen server itself and go to performance and this is where you set up everything on the Zen server. So what memory's being used and the little events are all noticed here so it automatically added all the CPUs so this has got 24 cores and right here is where I turned on the virtual machine, you can see all the activity that started and when a CPU being pinned right here, you can also add more graphs. So if we wanna look at the IOPS on our local storage or let's actually look at the, I think we can look at local storage latency, we'll get the total IOPS on there. We'll go ahead and just add that real quick, save. So then we can see the IOPS that are going for that. Also, if you wanna expand out, this expands or contracts the thing at the bottom here so I can choose the range I wanna look for. So kind of neat, you can also just say it here, one year, one month, this is 10 minutes and you can see the history of the server and the performance of it. So I really like the way the system does this because it makes it pretty straightforward for figuring a lot of this out, for going, okay, these are the performance issues and things like that. So it is booted and ready to log in here. Now this has the support for the memory and you can even adjust on the fly because the Zen server tools came preloaded when I imported that virtual machine. So it gives me those options for minimum, maximum, static memory settings. Now it also let me do this. It understands if the Zen tools are loaded, the console will give you the IP address. It will not give you the IP address in virtual machines you create, but don't load the Zen tools. So these apply for Linux and Windows, by the way. So here's the IP address that it's set to, 3.77. And I'll show you real quick how Zen Orgisher works. So here's the 192.1683.177 sign in and we'll go admin, whoop, the default is admin at admin.net. Then it's admin. And I highly recommend the first thing you do, it's gonna wanna know if you want to buy Pro support right away, free upgrade, nah, nothing's really free. They have charges for things. So you can go in here and it has its own user manager so you can go in here, settings, users. If I wanted to add myself another user, I'm not setting this up right now so I'll just show you real quick how to add a server. Label Zen Server 2. Whoops. Now this is where I'm gonna get an error, but I'll show you, you have to click this, then do it. Because it does a self-signed certificate, you have to do this. If you haven't already signed a certificate, it won't do that so just let you know. It also kinda nice to let you just do a read-only for example, if you wanna set this up read-only. Zen Orcish is a really nice tool if you have the paid version, there's all kinds of cool stuff you can do in here and create multiple users, home, the dashboard where all the graphs are, not available in here unless you have the paid one, but the VMs, right, there's Zen Orcish a VM and I'm gonna say here's this one and you can hit start, I can start, stop, move things around, I can edit the VM, I even get the console which is kinda cool. So it works rather well and there we go, boot success. It kinda gives you what's in the VM and what it's doing and because I canceled a partially done install, it just kinda locked up right here. Oh by the way, it does support PXE booting so if you do have something PXE on the network and you wanted to boot it, pressing F12 will let you do that. It does have those options inside of here and here's the advanced one, kinda weird to me because the buttons, I didn't zoom this in, the buttons are this big and it's just kinda strange the way they work. But it's a nice tool, it gives you a nice web interface to see what's going on, it gives you these graphs, it just doesn't give you all the history. I mean leave it on my server and use it because it's convenient so I can just open up a web interface and say hey, I can manage my Zen server from this and the tasks show up here if there's any pending tasks but like I said, you don't get any of the cool graphing features, those are all a premium support feature. There's some automation backup tools in here and those are all premium as well. So just give you an idea how that looks. It's pretty neat if it's something you wanna load. It's free to use the basic version with the basic controls free forever and you've seen how quick it was, you just upload it and say yes and it's done. Now speaking of backing up virtual machines, so let's go ahead here and shut this one down real quick. VM shut down. If you want to copy the VM and for example within pool or cross pool then you can just copy it to another Zen server, that's one way to do it. You can move it to another Zen server, you can convert it to a template, you can also assign a snapshot schedule, kinda neat, you can export it. Now this is something that I was told by people wasn't possible but it's actually really simple on these. So this PC data, I think I got a VBox backup, that's where I wanna put it, sorry for the profanity. So I want it to be a standard OVF OVA package or I can make it an XVA so it depends on what you want for the export so it supports more than one format. You just hit next, what's it gonna be? Do you wanna add a license to it which I think is kinda neat so if you wanted to build a virtual machine add a license to it. Next, you can create the manifest and sign it and create a certificate for it so people can make sure it's on there. You can create it, it will be a package file and compress it which is nice, that's how VirtualBox does it by default which is put everything in one file and put it in there. So we do this and we're gonna go ahead and not verify because I don't got time for that and finish and now once again goes to our little task down here when this is there it's going transferring it over once again, time are counting up I don't know exactly how long it's going to take to do this however long it takes to copy I think it said it was a 15 gig file however long it takes to copy those 15 gigs back over to my computer and I can see on my off screen on my third screen there's a my network is pinned right now and it's transferring quite a bit of data so it's copying it from that server through this Zen Center interface and down to my local computer so just to give you an idea of how that works but you know that's pretty straightforward you can export a virtual machine and you can import virtual machines really easy I can even import virtual machines and actually I'm gonna cancel this cause I don't care about the backing this up and this is click cancel and it'll give me an error that it failed, we know yep, import source now let's go ahead and look at these these are different ones and let's do PF sense because it's rather small so here's my PF sense just a standard OVIP charm I'm looking which one switch here and I think this is the one I wanted so we'll just do PF sense, next import to there yep, next go ahead and put it on local storage again so I know it's fast it had a couple networks attached to it so I want one network card on each of these operating system fix up is an option where you can there was a tool call operating system fix up to fix things in it the nice thing about PF sense is because it doesn't care about which hard drives there are it'll automatically do the hard drives without any you don't really gotta do anything to change it to boot it so go ahead and hit finish and it's going to import that one now now this was exported specifically from virtual box now one of the things that's interesting that it has to do is break it down into the VMDK file so it exports the VMDK file locally on your computer and that's why I had to stare at it a second because you can import just raw VMDKs as well now this is gonna be an idea what it's doing now this is being done by the Zen tool so it can do the import it broke out the OVA OVF file into a VMDK and did an extraction on my computer then it does the import on there it doesn't do that if it's a native Zen but it's something about the way I think it's because it has to change to hard drive types so if the hard drive type's not exactly compatible it's going to do a swap around and pull these in slightly different and it's going to say okay I have to export this to a VMDK then I'll import it into our file formats inside of there I just confirm looking at them they have VHD and VMDK support as well in there so you can import from different appliances and it's the same thing with the export you can import raw disk images in here as well and of course it exports back as OVF OVA files like I just shown and I have tested when you export these virtual box for example, which is my other go-to does have the ability to bring them right back in it didn't seem to have a problem from things I imported, exported and things like that but there is at least one issue that we're gonna show and talk about real quick here now this is the one thing that I ran into when I imported some of the servers is on the system it'll column slash dev STA or it'll say XV STA for part of the way it does the virtual machines so you have to line up on import if it's using grub and grub is not using UUID it's pointing directly at a drive I find that I had to adjust it well not necessarily grub but the mounts inside the machine if they're pointing not at UUID but it's specifically like STA then you would have to go in and boot some of those up so I did have that trouble when I was importing some of the machines but really wasn't that big of a deal and didn't cause me too much grief that was pretty easy to fix you just boot off this G-parted live CD go in there and edit the mount the FSTAB file and away you go so I'm gonna close this back down but that's how you do it this is also my half allocated machines so I can go ahead and delete now destroying a virtual machine just as easy we can go ahead and delete the VM are you sure? and you can do multiple deletes as well it lets you know that yes you can't recover this we're gonna go ahead and delete and it frees up the space and that's done now you see also I have this turned on to view hidden objects which is right here which is why you see the transfer but just so you know the default view doesn't let you see the transfers themselves I was doing this when I was doing some testing and I kinda like it cause it shows you like transferring landing on cause I started to transfer of Windows 10 and once again go to notifications here is that import but nice thing is while it's doing all that magic and importing this virtual machine of Windows 10 that I'm pulling in I can keep using the machine while I wait for it all to happen all right so I have a couple different virtual machines in here the DB9 when I went ahead and finished installing that PF Sense I'll leave Dormant for now I'll leave the Zen Orcasha running and I also imported a Windows 10 so I can show you what it looks like running Windows inside of Zen server cause that's good use case for it if you wanna virtualize your Windows installs whether they be server or workstation installs that's completely doable and manageable inside of Zen so the first thing I wanna do is load the Zen tools because without the Zen tools loaded it doesn't have any extra information or interaction from Zen directly to these and you don't have to load them but they do open up a few more features I wanna show you how they load so you go here and go to the console and choose the DVD drive and for this Windows 10 virtual machine same thing I chose the guest tools now sometimes when you first import it it'll say click here to create the DVD unlike some of the other virtual machines I've worked with specifically a virtual box if there's nothing here there's no DVD drive you click a button that says create the DVD drive and I think yeah click here to create a DVD drive like you see here once you create it it's in there it doesn't show up as any other piece of the storage so we'll go ahead and fire up our Windows 10 so it's booting up in the background because it's not an amazing performance gigabit to ICE because it is not bad, it's usable but it's not gonna be your super hang you really need either high speed local storage or a high speed like bonded SFP connections like I'm using with the other system so you get really high performance so go ahead and start the Windows 10 all right I'll let that do its magic I already have the WN1 started up here the WN started up and now the first thing to do is I'm gonna go to mount real quick I'm just gonna make a zen tool CD and we're just gonna run mount and I'm already running as root that's why I'm not running sudo dev just call whoops cd rom slash mount zen tool see I just chose to call it that you can call it whatever you want you gotta spell mount right right protect read only cd mount zen tools ls we have a linux directory so we're gonna go ahead and go in there and there's an install so we'll just dot slash install sh yep setting up the guest utilities you should reboot the virtual machine sure go ahead and reboot it real quick and I'll move this out of the way you'll actually see it rebooting in a console here all right now that virtual machines boot it back up and virtualization state optimize 7.1 installed virtual hard to assist it now it understands exactly what it is operating system DBN 9.2 stretch because now the two are talking to each other so pretty straightforward now this option comes up as well to do the memory allocation where I can see maximum minimum memory or set a fixed amount of memory these are options now they're all turned on for that optimization now let's go and look at windows 10 so it's booted up and right now it has no idea it says operating system unknown because there's no interaction we just imported a raw hard drive out of my virtual box I had to hit export on virtual box locally dropped it to a file imported it right here it boots right up and this is ready I could have been doing this with a local or whatever account it just exported exactly as it was on my machine with my signed in windows account now because we have the DVD drive is the guest tools right here is the Zen tools just double click it and I'll go ahead and just run this 64 windows 64 Zen and it'll run through a standard windows installer and load the Zen tools here on windows 10 and same thing we'll go ahead and restart the virtual server maybe the settings yeah it still hasn't picked anything up once I restart the virtual server here oh yeah once it needs to restart it let me know there's a slight delay well the performance is not amazing this is not a super high-end server this is running on it's an older opt-around board and of course this is attached to the iSCSI and over a gigabit network which has its performance issues on its own it's not really a reflection of Zen server it's a reflection of the hardware configuration that we have in use Zen server has no problem I have this on a faster machine it works really fast really happy with it and after we log back in windows management and agent installed successfully on reboot and the graphics seem to be maybe a little bit faster when it does this I think the screen yeah the screen redraw definitely looks a little better a little bit less laggy but it's pretty straightforward to install the tools on there and once you've done that it understands this is windows 10 pro it has all the different information in here and like back to the memory we can change some of the memory information and I don't believe you need to reboot the virtual machine to do this it'll let you choose these things and yeah it doesn't have to be rebooted to do that so I can change memory allocation and things like that because it's communicating directly with the underlying virtual machine it's allowed to do some of these things now another neat thing is you can turn on remote desktop and instead of launching this console when you go here you can tell it to launch as remote desktop and it also similar you can tell it instead of pulling over the console you can say open SSH console and it'll SSH in because now it knows didn't pick this one up in here maybe I gotta reboot it again it will in windows 10 it knows what IP address is assigned to this windows 10 unit because it's now communicating there there's probably something I need to change you get it communicating here with a Debian box like it does here with the Zen one but either way because it has that communication it knows what it is all it's doing is opening up an RDP session that you could do yourself but kinda novel that it leaves that option on there especially when you start managing a lot of virtual machines if you don't wanna think about the right IP addresses you could actually launch it on there so let's talk about snapshots so we'll go ahead and I'm gonna make a new folder real quick and there's our folder that's on this machine here so let's go over here to snapshots and I'm gonna go ahead and live and clean snapshot with the XXX folder alright we have it's creating alright now we have that snapshot now this is where it gets kinda fun so let's go back over to the console and we're gonna make oops, another new folder let's call it all twos now we have the snapshot before that was there we're gonna delete this one matter of fact let's just delete things off the desktop here and go ahead and shut the system down now I did the snapshot on purpose as a live running state so Windows will realize there was a hard drive error and have to do whatever appropriate fixes that it may need to do if we restore that snapshot but we'll also do another one that's a clean snapshot again and kinda show you how the flow of snapshots so now it's shut down, snapshots take another snapshot and we'll call this the 2222 folder now this is where you can just say revert to this one so we will we're gonna go revert back to this one here and also take a snapshot of the current VM before I revert, sure let's play another split before we rolled back you don't have to do this but there we go now you can view these as a list right here or put it back as a tree view now this is where it's kinda neat the tree view is going to now we've created, I like to almost look at this alternate timelines so now this is where it's at so when I have the VM it's booting back up right now cause it automatically goes and kicks off the VM after you've reverted back to a previous state and here we are back to the VM that only had this folder and these icons on the desktop now if I wanted to go back and use one of these ones I can say new VM from this snapshot so I can actually now create an entirely new VM if I want called before we roll back next and it'll give it that name cause it's gonna give it the name of the snapshot now I can fork it and have two different copies of it on there and even move it to another server and go through move it to another storage unit if I want and split that so you can do these you can even save these as a template export that VM to a file and I like that feature a lot because maybe I want the features I added on here so I want to export it and so it'll actually let you back up that specific one or any specific one really to a file versus that and if you just don't want these cause you want to get rid of the space you can just delete these snapshots and they go away and like that before we roll back is gone and you can then continue this and you can fork them as many times you want I don't know what the limit is other than the mess you'd create from it I you can create quite a bit of a different snapshot of different states now this is really handy for machines when you're loading software where you're maybe have an update that's giving you trouble you have a snapshot you load the update great you want to keep it you can delete the other snapshots it didn't go well I go ahead and shut the server down and roll it back to the other one really kind of a nice way to if you have a virtual machine I love this a lot in Linux when I have some software that I may want to install this quickly I go and I think I want to try this you know tool take a snapshot of one of my dev machines and then create a clone of it even right away that way I have a clean base that I know works I want to know if it works with this other software and if I like it I just merge it back in so it's kind of a really nice workflow for doing all the virtual machines and everything else so I'll show you real quick though how do we move the storage now that I've got all this other stuff so here is the storage for the Debian and how I said we can do the move when I move it over to here we can just hit move now it is moving it live which is kind of neat and it should complete live now I realize it only does this as long as you have the tools are installed it has the ability to talk to the virtual machine it says all right you can be moved and it'll do a live move of that virtual machine and it should be able to keep running while it's doing this and go back we can watch it now I just once again notifications are here moving virtual machine looks like it's about done back to here go back to Debian and it's none the wiser that it's getting moved doesn't even have any load on the machine because all the load is being done by the Zen server itself but this virtual machine is just being handed off and the files moved so if there's users running on it I imagine there's probably some performance here but now we go back over here to the storage and it's now on the free NAS eyes because he's storage it took all of the that wasn't sped up at all so it took only a few minutes to move that over it take a little bit longer to move them depending on the amount of storage you have so this is a 62 gig file versus that was a 16 gig file but you can get the idea that you can take and move these without shutting them down to different storage devices really nice for high availability if you're like I said before about upgrading your storage arrays you attach a storage array as long as it's got the tools loaded in there it should work now a couple of things I don't know if I can load the tools on I haven't tried it whether or not the tools work in PF sense but I get worried about loading any of those type of tools in PF sense as they may if you're using this as a your primary firewall loading all those end tools in there if there's any conflicts I don't know maybe I'll have to have reach out to the PF sense people see if there's any issues with loading the Zen tools on there I generally don't like to load anything extra into PF sense because it's such a critical piece of infrastructure I don't like any potential interference but this gives you a good idea how Zen server works it's not too complicated I wish it all would web interface without having to run something extra like this but you can do a lot from the council I'll go ahead and show you a couple of quick things that you can do in the council for it so this is me logged into the Zen server so we'll run Zen top for example is one of the tools and it lets you see the virtual machines running lets you air up and down through them this is similar to the way I believe it's ESSI does this so you have a command interface so you can see this there is in here XE tab a couple times a lot of different tools you can do all the backups exports imports and script everything from the storage and everything else all through the command line here so it's got options to run traces it has a ZenOps CLI each one gives you a whole set of tools the documentation is actually really thorough on their website which is nice so if you have some really interesting or challenging problems with your Zen system this is a good way you can get into the back end and very much watch what's going on so it does work really well one last little thing I will cover that I thought was cool is backing up the Zen server itself let's say you want to protect yourself from something cash traffic you can actually in the Zen server itself well you can import and export the Zen server list that's part of the Zen center software but then the server itself actually has backup options on it and right here's uh you click on the server that you want you go to server and you're going to say backup or restore from backup and when you do the backup it backs up all the settings for Zen so the eyes guzzy all the little steps we did to recover the repositories this is really nice because what happens is and I've tested this is really slick if you have a cash traffic hard drive failure and your Zen server itself you just reload Zen get it into the base configuration probably load some updates and then do a restore and you're done you now have your Zen server reattached to everything that it knew all the work and effort you put in there and this is what's nice having a separate files server as in FreeNAS automatically go okay these are the connections for the eyes guzzy and FreeNAS is holding on to all those files it reattaches and everything's back to normal so it's nice that you don't have to do anything from the server side and it creates just a standard backup file and the restore is right in here so you don't really need to do anything for that the last thing I guess I cover is there is a maintenance mode on the server like I said I haven't really had to do it but you had to change some functions of it you can under maintenance mode and shut down all of the servers themselves and that's pretty much it for Zen server kind of cool though look at the performance of what happened when I did these will give you the whole hour here to the day you can see all the starts and stops of the VMs and how much processor power it's using and it created like a whole scribbly graph of stuff for importing these VMs but pretty neat I mean like I said overall really happy with Zen server I might be doing some more specific videos here and there on it it's powerful it's nice it is open source but this management interface is not so I like the fact that it's open source I like this easy management interface as I've said before I mean I'm very good at the command line but I like a system that is easy for my staff to use and they can actually attach to this interface and I can create even separate users for them and give them access to the virtual machine that they need to have access to generally my staff works they have access to all of them but this allows them to from their desktops login and manage the system without having to know too much but they can get the servers up and down started if they need to or if they have to create something in here once again thanks for watching if you like the content here like and subscribe if you want some more Zen server videos let me know at some point I might do some real specific ones if I ever set up a HA cluster for high availability so that is a feature to support it in here as well all right thanks for watching