TreeSize

While I was at GCC a couple weeks ago, Kyle showed me a nifty little utility for gauging where file usage is happening at on your hard drives.

It’s called TreeSize.  It’s made by JAM Software, and it’s available in three different flavors; Free, Personal, and Pro.  Each step up offers more powerful searching and reporting capabilities, with the Pro version topping out at $50.

Below is a screen cap of TreeSize Free.  Even the free version is pretty useful for finding out where a majority of your hard drive space is getting used at.  The purple bar represents the total file size for each folder.

In the next screenshot, I set TreeSize’s filter to only check for audio files (.WMA .MP3 .AAC .AIF .M4A .M4P).  While these files affect our storage capacity on our file server, we filter out these same file types with our backup software, so they don’t take up space on our backup drives.

I like the free version, but I’m gonna download the pro version and and give it a spin as well.

Natural beauty

I was out early this morning and happened to catch this sunrise while I was outside…

Definitely worth a picture.  I want to be awake to see more of these before it’s too cold to be outside.

Here’s another pic a few minutes later…

I'm in.

 

Yeah I’m pumped.

working the night

It’s about 2AM right now in Northeast Ohio, and earlier this evening I started the task of taking all of our virtual servers down so that I could defrag the host machines that they live on.

For taking care of large virtual disk files, I use Contig, which is part of the Windows Sysinternals software lineup.  Basically Contig is a tool for defragmenting large files.  It can take wildcards and even recurse subdirectories if you want it to.  This makes it pretty simple to go to the directory where your virtual machines are kept and defrag all of your .vmdk (virtual disk) files in one sweep.

I was nervous for a good while this evening, because the Contig utility was taking an EXTRA long time to defragment a piece of the virtual hard drive that is part of our Exchange server, and perfmon was showing little-to-no disk activity at the same time.  About halfway through the second paragraph, however, the virtual disk finally finished up and Contig continued on to the next file.  WHEW!

Looking at our file server’s disk usage, I am amazed at how our storage needs have skyrocketed.  When I started in 2005, our dinky little file server had a 30something-GB SCSI drive on it, and it was enough to hold everyone’s information.  Since then we’ve moved to a 425GB RAID array, and we’ve managed to fill over 80% of that space.  Safe to say we’ll be looking for another storage solution sooner than later.

None too soon

This past Saturday night I was able to get a script working on our servers that would take them all down gracefully in the event of a power outage.  This was in response to an previous blunder on my part that had allowed every last server in our building to go down hard (although nothing was damaged in the event).

Fast forward to this Tuesday (earlier this week).  Our area got rocked by a couple of huge storms going through the area.  About 3/4 of the way through the first storm, the lights in the office flickered, dimmed, and finally went out.  I didn’t think the UPS script would get tested this quickly.

When I flipped open the KVM on our server rack, I was pleased to see that a countdown was already running on each machine.  The UPS software had run its script, and now each server was about 60 seconds away from shutting down automatically.  When it was all said and done, every last server shut down on its own, with plenty of battery life to spare.

The only tweak I ended up making to this process so far involved our physical domain controller (we have two, and the other one is a VM).  It resides in one of the IDFs and it shut down too quickly in response to the power outage.  As a result, after the VM-based DC went down, the remaining servers had no DC to talk to, and thus took a longer time to shut down cleanly.  All-in-all though, the real-life test proved successful, and as a result.  I have one more reason to sleep better at night.