[I have a lot of stuff in my head to tell you all about, but I also have a thousand square feet of inventory and storage to move an average of two miles this weekend… so keep an eye out for more lengthy posts coming later in the month. ]

I’m helping a friend’s startup get some infrastructure built, and one of the things I’m looking at is shoring up their VMware environment. They’re not ready for any of the common sub-six-letter names that usually come up for a vSphere storage platform yet… even a Celerra is overkill for five developers, I’d have to say.

So I was looking into VAAI support on the TrueNAS appliances from iXsystems (and of course FreeNAS itself). The first three search results I found were actually this blog, some cached twitter roll comments where I said I didn’t know if TrueNAS/FreeNAS supported VAAI.

Well, I got it on good authority this afternoon that VAAI support is in the plans for FreeNAS over at iXsystems. There’s no current date for when it will be released, but they’ve jumped through a number of flaming hoops already to get ready, and will be keeping me (and you all by extension) up to date on progress.

For those of you using FreeNAS in your home lab, this probably won’t stop you from using it as shared storage for your VMware lab environment, or anything else for that matter. But if you’re considering TrueNAS for VMware storage, or need the full-on VAAI feature set, this will make things smoother in the foreseeable future.

And an unsolicited and uncompensated plug here (although if they want help testing a FreeNAS Mini Plus, they know where to find me)…

iXsystems are a hardware vendor who are a good friend to open source. They’re probably best known for their support of FreeBSD and FreeNAS (and Jordan Hubbard is joining them as new CTO this month), but they also sponsor Slackware, and make some cool storage appliances as well as a line of servers that come with open software history and support behind them. They’ve long been a friend of BayLISA, the Silicon Valley sysadmin group I’m involved with, as well as the Bay Area FreeBSD User Group and other organizations. Check them out if you’re looking for servers, workstations, or software.

Now back to moving… why did I need a Centillion 100 again? Anybody?

[PS: Welcome to all of you who followed iXsystems over here to my blog. For full disclosure, I am currently president of BayLISA, the Silicon Valley system administration user group, but this stuff is mostly written as Robert Novak, blogger, rather than Robert Novak, BayLISA cheerleader-in-chief.]