Finding out the Windows Cluster Size of a Volume

From an administrative command prompt type: fsutil fsinfo ntfsinfo d: The output will include: Bytes Per Cluster : 4096 In this case Bytes Per Cluster is 4096.
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Disable Disk Signature Writing in Windows

Windows default behaviour is to write to the disk signature of basic disks when they are attached/detected by windows. This can cause merry hell with iscsi volumes, especially those with existing setups. Start diskpart interactively and put in the following: automount disable Then: automount scrub The first setting disables automounting and the second resets any past configs for disks that have been previously attached.
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Windows 2008 Storage Server Default Password.

I’m not really sure how you are supposed to find this out (apart from google) but after installing, you are presented with a login window without specifying a password. Interesting. Well the password is: wSS2008! I am lost for words.
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Creating a ZFS iSCSI Target

Using a Nexenta VM it is possible to create a 500 TB thin provisioned iSCSI target in three lines: zpool create zfspool01 raidz c2t0d0 c2t1d0 c2t2d0 zfs create -s -V 500TB zfspool01/share01 zfs set shareiscsi=on zfspool01/share01 In this case the disks c2t0d0, c2t1d0 and c2t2d0 are all dynamic 10 GB virtual disks. This can easily be mounted with the Microsoft iSCSI Initiator for testing; it will be interesting to see how well this plays with ESX…
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