2011-02-28

Cloud Connect - Here is your Chance!!

Cloud Connect

I received this email on Friday and just received the OK to pass this offer on.

From: A.
Sent: Friday, February 25, 2011 21:09
To: maishsk@…

Subject: Thanks for completing that survey on clouds

You're one of the winners (according to the very scientific =randbetween function in Google Spreadsheet.)

If you can make it to Cloud Connect (www.cloudconnectevent.com) on March 7, let me know, and I'll mail you a Flexpass code which will let you attend the whole event for free. If you can't make it, please tell me so I can let the next winner know.

A.

I will not be able to make this conference - I would have really liked to.

And here is where someone gets to benefit. I am giving this pass away to a someone who will be able to use it. This is how it will work.

Post a comment below the post to explain why you would like to go, and what the benefit you expect to receive from participating in this event and how you will use this knowledge to pay something forward to the community.

The winner will be chosen from those who posts a comment below. I will look for a co-judge to determine who that is.

Entries will be accepted until 21.00 (GMT +2) Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011.

Winner will be announced by 23.00 (GMT +2) Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011.

The Winner will receive a full Flex Pass valued at $2,095 - Hotel and Travel arrangements you will have to take care of yourself.

The Speaker List - if very impressive and here is some more info about the conference.


ACCELERATE YOUR CLOUD STRATEGY


Join your colleagues at Cloud Connect, where enterprise IT and cloud providers meet to set the cloud roadmap and explore the latest technologies, platforms and opportunities in the cloud.

Thousands of cloud leaders and technology experts from top companies attend to get the latest on private clouds, industry standards, data storage and CloudSec. Gain insight to move your deployment forward and reap the benefits of the cloud.

Gain comprehensive insight from the experts who are living the disruptive transformation of the cloud every day. Learn high level strategies to craft your utility computing plans, details on how to optimize cost, performance, capacity and risk, and real word end user examples.

Cloud Economics

Hear leading proponents of Cloudonomics provide detailed analytical methods, case studies and benchmark data.
• Cloudonomics: Private, Public or Hybrid?
• Clearing Up Cloud Computing
• The Economics of the Cloud
• How Does ROI Drive Architecture?

CloudSec

Learn how to protect yourself through encryption, auditing, new technologies and proven best practices.
• Attacking and Defending Cloud Computing
• Building Trust and Compliance in the Cloud
• Securing the Cloud—A Cloud Provider’s Perspective
• Private vs. Hybrid vs. Public Cloud Security: Dismissing the Myths

Culture, Risks and Governance

Find out how to address the risks and challenges that arise on your way to cloud adoptation.
• Cloud Risk Factors and Assumptions: Any Different than the Economics of Traditional IT Risk?
• Cloud Regulation: Is Governance Needed or Even on the Horizon?
• Cloud Hedging Debate
• Clouds Beyond Borders: When are Clouds too Big to Fail?

The Future of Utility Computing

Learn how IT strategy will change in the coming years thanks to the new era of democratized IT.
• The Move to Turnkey Computing
• A Global View of Connected Computing
• Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things

Performance and Monitoring

Learn how to measure and manage on-premise and third-party hosted cloud-based workloads.
• Understanding Cloud Performance
• Cloud Performance from the Perspective of Vendors and Users
• Performance Measurement for the Cloud

Data and Storage

Look at the emerging field of “Big Data” and what cloud storage means for IT professionals.
• Running One of the Biggest Transactional Websites in the Cloud: How Reddit Manages their Data
• NoSQL and Big Data in the Cloud
• Everyone Can Now Afford a Disaster Recovery Center
• Creating a Storage Cloud with Ceph

DevOps and Automation

Look at the changing face of application engineering, from the first line of code to the automation of massively distributed systems.
• Moving from “Dev vs. Ops” to “DevOps”
• Automating the Gaps Between Development and Operations
• Ask the Experts: The DevOps Panel

Design Patterns

Learn how to tailor cloud architectures, keep applications fast and reliable, and handle off-the-shelf and home-grown applications as they move to on-demand platforms.
• Scalable Application Design Patterns: 30 Proven Patterns in 30 x 2 Minutes
• Building Highly Scalable Java Applications on Windows Azure
• How to Think Like a Cloud: Architectural Design Patterns in AWS
• Cloud Event Processing

Private Clouds

See hybrid and private cloud architectures, focusing on how cloud models alter infrastructure, network and storage decisions.
• Virtualization On Demand vs. Private Cloud
• Real Barriers and Solutions to Implementing Private Cloud
• Hybrid Cloud Computing: Final Answer or Transitory Architecture?
• Implementing Private Cloud: Open Source vs. Everyone Else

Cloud Connect is the only event to bring together cloud customers and providers in one place to drive cloud computing growth and innovation.

See the latest cloud technologies and learn from thought leaders in Cloud Connect’s comprehensive conference and expo.

Good Luck!!

2011-02-27

Lab Manager (retired) to vCloud - Update

I received the answer back from VMware on the conversion ratio that I was waiting for from my
previous post.

  • Customers who bought LM before 9/1/2010 (Sep. 1) can exchange 1 CPU of LM
    for 20VMs of vCD.
  • Customers who bought LM after 9/1/2010 (Sep. 1) can exchange 1 CPU of LM
    for 10VMs of vCD.

Lab Manager goes for $1,495 per CPU

image_thumb11_thumb

And vCloud Licenses for a 25 VM  bundle for $3,750

image_thumb

So I put the question out on Twitter

Quick question for those using VMware Lab Manager - how many VM's do you have per host (vm/CPU ratio)?Wed Feb 16 19:59:32 via TweetDeck

The answers I got - which were completely reasonable - were approximately 4 vCPU's per per core (and that was quite conservative)

A small bit of math. Most ESX hosts today are 2 Quad Core CPU's.

4 vCPU's x 8 cores = 32 VM's

Taking the answer that I received from VMware this can be divided in two scenarios.

  1. You have Lab Manager Licenses from before Sep. 1, 2010.
    I trade my Lab Manager Licenses for 40 VM licenses of vCloud Director
    I am covered and I am happy!
  2. You purchased Lab Manager after Sep. 1, 2010.
    I trade my Lab Manager Licenses in for 20 VM licenses of vCloud Director and I now have to add another $3,750 to cover my licenses.
    I am not happy!!!!!!!!

I asked Support the question which I found to be the most obvious.

Why was the cutoff point defined at Sep. 1, 2010?

The answered I originally received was that there was a public announcement made stating that this would be the case. As far as my memory serves me there was not such announcement made, and
September 1st 2010 was smack in the middle of VMworld  in San Francisco. I asked for a link to that public announcement. Support retracted their previous statement and indeed said there was no previous statement issued about the conversion option.

Personally, my environment is not largely affected by this "strange" decision, but I am sure there are others that this change will have a much larger impact, and if so then I would suggest you take it up with your local representative. I do think that VMware are making a mistake here but because there is no other product that is anything like this on the market, we as the consumers have little / no choice. It does not leave the customer with a "warm fuzzy feeling" about VMware and their transparency.

Now I am not going into functionality features that are not available (in the current version) of vCloud Director - like linked clones, and the fact that you are tied to an Oracle DB at the current version. I am pretty sure these will all be non-issues in the upcoming versions of vCloud Director, and that's enough said.

What do you all think?

2011-02-21

VCDX Defense - New Dates

For those of you who were waiting, the next round of VCDX Defenses will be:

May 16-20, 2011 - Frimley, UK

Applications due: March 21, 2011, 5:00 PM Pacific

Congratulations to the new VCDX's that defended and passed at Partner Exchange

I will not be submitting. Good luck to you all!

VMware vSphere Design Book - Update

Our book page has now been updated with the following info:

Table of Contents

Introduction.
Chapter 1 An Introduction to Designing VMware Environments.
Chapter 2 ESX vs. ESXi.
Chapter 3 Designing the Management Layer.
Chapter 4 Server Hardware.
Chapter 5 Designing your Network.
Chapter 6 Storage.
Chapter 7 Virtual Machines.
Chapter 8 Datacenter Design.
Chapter 9 Designing with Security in Mind.
Chapter 10 Monitoring and Capacity Planning.
Chapter 11 Bringing It All Together.
Index.

Chapter Excerpt (PDF)

Full Table of Contents (PDF)

Feel free to go over to the site to look around and of course the book can always be ordered on that page
or on Amazon. Expected Availability is mid-March 2011. And YES, there should be a electronic download version available

VMware vSphere Design

2011-02-16

Drobo - Discount Codes - Tech Field Day

Even if you might think I came down hard on Drobo earlier in the week, I really like their products.

And being a Tech Field Day delegate does have it benefits, even if they are not for me.

Using the Promotional code below  you can get the following considerable discounts on the products below:

imageimageimage

$50 off on Drobo 4-bay 
$100 off on Drobo 4-bay with drives
$100 off on Drobo S & Drobo FS
$150 off on Drobo S and Drobo FS with drives
$150 off on DroboPro & DroboPro FS
$200 off DroboPro & DroboPro FS with drives

Use this code for the discounts DRIKEESING

Hope this will be of benefit to you all.

vCenter Lab Manager to be Retired - Told You So?

Jason Boche - The Future of VMware Lab Manager, Ian Koenig - Lab Manager is dead.. Long Live Lab Manager and Mike Laverick - VMware Lab Manager vs. VMware Cloud Director: Another Case of "Spanners" and "Hammers?" - the writing was on the wall.

For those of you who saw this - my apologies, but if not, VMware has posted an update on Lab Manager - announcing that there will be no more major releases for Lab Manager

We want to provide you with an important update about the vCenter Lab Manager product.  As customers continue to expand the use of virtualization both inside the datacenter and outside the firewall, we are focusing on delivering infrastructure solutions that can support these expanded scalability and security requirements.  As a result of this focus, we have decided to discontinue additional major releases of vCenter Lab Manager.  Lab Manager 4 will continue to be supported in line with our General Support Policy through May 1st, 2013.

As VMware continues to invest in our customers' journey to cloud computing, we are focusing on delivering secure multi-tenant enterprise hybrid clouds with VMware vCloud Director.  vCloud Director is a new software solution that provides the scalability and security necessary to deliver catalog-based self-service provisioning across different workload types, across multiple enterprise tenants, and across both private and public deployment models.

As a customer of Lab Manager, we would like to offer you a special opportunity to leverage the scale and security of vCloud Director.  Customers who are active on SnS may exchange their existing licenses of Lab Manager to licenses of vCloud Director at no additional cost.  This exchange program is entirely optional and may be exercised anytime during Lab Manager’s General Support period.  This provides you the freedom and flexibility to decide whether and when to implement a secure enterprise hybrid cloud.

The part in bold is something that I am interested in hearing an answer from VMware about. At present Lab Manager is licensed per CPU

per-vm Licensing

And as you may know vCloud is per VM.

vCloud Pricing

From my experience the conversion rates are not always in the customers favor. What will the conversion rate be?

SR has been submitted, looking forward to a reply.

2011-02-15

Upgrade vCenter to 4.1 U1

I upgraded my lab to vSphere 4.1 U1 on Friday.

vCenter was simple.

A quick set of screen shots

Pre-Check 1Pre-Check 2Pre-Check 3Pre-Check 4Pre-Check 5Pre-Check 6Pre-Check All GoodPre-Check ReportPre-Check CompleteChoose DSNSQL CredentialsUpgrade DBvCenter Service CredentialsPortsJVM MemoryGoing..Going..

And I was done.

1 Small thing though. On the credentials screenshot above which is a different color, I was asked to enter credentials for the vCenter Server Service. In My lab I have the Domain Administrator account MAISHSK\Administrator and on the vCenter Server there is a local Administrator account as well.

The Service was configured to run under a the Domain Admin account as per the vSphere 4.1 Hardening Guide

vSphere Hardening Guide

After the installation - my vCenter services would not start

A quick look at the vpxd vCenter logs located at
C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\Logs
gave me this

Logs - Wrong Credential

I looked at the Services of the vCenter server and found that the credentials to start the service were changed to .\Administrator - instead of MAISHSK\Administrator

Services

So of course they would not start. A quick change of the credentials and all was fine

Logs - all OK

The problem arises I think - because you have no option of changing the username - only the password during the upgrade - some of the options are greyed out as you can see below.

Credentials

Quick question for VMware. If you present with a screen that allows to set the credentials - why are the options greyed out? And also we are way past 2008!

2008??

And after all that I was upgraded.

Upgraded

Onto the vSphere hosts.

2011-02-13

Drobo - My visit from Tech Field Day

During DroboDay 1 of TechFieldDay #5 we were presented with a new solution that Drobo will start to market in the not too distant future.

Now I kid you not. The technology behind the way Drobo does storage is really really smart. We received an overview on how this works and what the secret sauce is all made of. (too many people used the term Secret Sauce in these two days)

 

Drobo B1200i

This is the product that they are marketing as a small business solution.

The full specs can be found here, below are a  few selected items that I thought should be mentioned.

Drobo model B1200i Specifications

Connectivity

  • 3 x 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet ports
  • 1 x 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet port for out-of-band management
  • USB 2.0 port for management
Capacity
  • 12 drive bays
  • 3.5" SATA 1 / SATA II or SAS 3.0 Gbps drives
  • Expandable by hot-swapping drives with larger ones. Use our capacity calculator to estimate available storage in various configurations.
BeyondRAID Features
  • Thin Provisioning
  • Instant Expansion
  • Mixed Drive Size Utilization
  • Automatic Protection Levels
  • Dual Disk Redundancy
  • Virtual Hot Spare
  • Data Aware
  • Drive Re-ordering
Additional Features
  • Data-Aware Tiering
  • Smart Volumes (LUNs, up to 255)
  • Drive Spin Down
  • Drobo Copy
  • Field-replaceable controller, power supplies, and fan unit
Ethernet Features
  • Connection failover
  • Jumbo Frames (up to 9000 Kb MTU)
Network Protocols
  • iSCSI
    • CHAP Authentication
Operating System Support
  • Windows 7
  • Windows Vista (Service Pack 1)
  • Windows XP (Service Pack 3)
  • Windows 2008 Server
  • Windows 2003 Server
  • Mac OS X 10.5.6 or greater (Intel Only)
  • Mac OS X Server 10.5.6 or greater (Intel Only)
  • Linux (support is currently in Beta)
  • VMware vSphere 4.x
  • XenServer 5.6
File System Options
  • Windows: NTFS
  • Mac OS X: HFS+
  • Linux: EXT3
  • VMware: VMFS
Certified Applications
  • VMware vSphere 4.x
  • Citrix XenServer 5.6
  • Symantec Backup Exec 2010
Management
  • Drive bay indicator lights, capacity gauge, status lights
  • Drobo Dashboard version 2.1 or later
  • Drobo-initiated email notifications
  • SNMP

Power and Cooling

  • Dual, redundant, hot-swappable power supplies
  • Hot-swappable cooling fan unit

So from the looks of the specs above you could think that this is a suitable Storage device for a small medium business.

Now taking what was said at the presentation Drobo define a small-medium business up between 150-250 users.

I do think that Drobo still needs to do some additional improvements before they venture into the Business market. Al of these would assume that I am using the device as a Let me explain what I mean, All of my remarks are regarding the model mentioned above.

  1. Network Interfaces


    There are 4 NICs in the device. 
    1 is dedicated for Management and the other 3 for storage. There is no option to create any sort of NIC teaming with the other 3. which means that you will have to configure 3 separate entities for your storage, be it CIFS or iSCSI.
  2. Mixing SAS and SATA drives.


    Ask any storage vendor and they will tell you THIS IS NOT A GOOD IDEA, especially if you are going to create volumes across different drives, You will not achieve the performance that you might want, because the slowest drive in the volume will be the one that slows you down.

  3. Network Protocols

    The only option with this is iSCSI - which I find is a great mistake on the part of Drobo. I do gather that the underlying management is using some kind of Linux distribution, and NFS is native in almost all Linux distro's, So why limit yourself to only iSCSI? There are additional benefits to adding NFS for some of the other features as well. Will get to that in a minute.

    Why limit this as a shared storage device that cannot be accessed by NFS? Both VMware and Native Linux would be more than happy to make use of this storage in this way.

  4. Redundancy

    This model does have dual redundant, hot-swappable power supplies and a hot-swappable cooling fan unit, which is great! But there is only one management module - which means if that fails - whoops … there goes the storage.

  5. Data-Aware Tiering


    So what is this feature?

    Data-Aware Tiering SANs allow businesses to consolidate storage resources and share that storage across all connected servers and their applications. The reality is that different applications have different workloads. Transactional databases require different storage behavior than streaming media applications. Traditionally storage has treated all workloads as equal, not optimizing for any of them.

    The intelligence built into the Drobo model B1200i allows it to do Data-Aware Tiering, optimizing data layout and drive usage for "hot" requests. Providing faster access to frequently requested information will improve performance of Exchange, SQL Server, and other transactional applications that read and write lots of small data chunks.


    Which means what exactly. Drobo is able to recognize the data which is being accessed most frequently and move it to a faster disk which should (in theory) provide quicker access to those files.

    But here is where my problem is. They mentioned Exchange and SQL above.My understanding of how this would work, is in one of two ways.

    • Directly  attaching the Drobo to a USB port and assigning a drive.
    • Using an iSCSI volume.
    Running your Exchange or SQL server off of a USB drive? Show me an admin that does that (even if it is small-medium business) - and I will be the first one to scream at you ..
    ARE YOU NUTS?!?!??!?!?!??!?!?

    So let's go to iSCSI - ok this is done and with the proper planning can be done pretty well. when you provision a iSCSI LUN - that is it - you can no longer see what data is inside. And if you can no longer see what data is inside - how can you move it around according to usage?

    Same goes for VMFS volumes - it is a LUN and there is no way to see what data is "hot" and what needs to be moved to a higher tier.

    Going back to having NFS Support - now here you would be able to identify the frequently accessed data and move it if needed (that is another reason NFS is missing)
  6. Snapshots / Backup


    Their BeyondRAID technology is really really cool, I mean seriously. But running your business on a central storage device without having the option of backing it up (at least with snapshots) is a big
    NO-NO.

    Yes you can sync your data with Drobo Sync to another device - and you can schedule that replication according to you needs, but that is still not a backup policy.
  7. Reporting / Monitoring


    During the whole presentation - the focus of the product was on capacity. You can thin provision. Over allocate etc. etc. I feel they are missing an important point. Gone are the days that capacity is the be all and end all of storage. Personally I think that is no longer so much of an issue, specifically with virtualization. Thin provisioning rakes care of most of that. Performance has taken its place.And in the dashboards (which is a great improvement from their previous version) there is no performance monitoring. Nothing for network, nothing for storage and in IMHO this is a pity. If you are aiming to go for the business users, to ask them to base their business on your storage - you need to give the tools to manage and control this storage.

I do not mean to come over as bashing Drobo for their offering, this is not the point of this post, honestly not. But when you use words like this you should be ready to play in the big boys playground and not go half-hearted into your offering.

Built on proven BeyondRAID technology, Drobo redefines IT economics by delivering award-winning iSCSI SAN storage and advanced capabilities usually reserved for more expensive  enterprise solutions.

Drobo iSCSI SAN storage is designed to provide reliable and high performance storage to servers running business-critical applications like data protection, email, and server virtualization. It connects seamlessly to your existing TCP/IP network and utilizes the industry-standard iSCSI protocol to provide simple, consolidated storage for your servers.

So here is my personal view on this product.

The Drobo B1200i is a great entry level storage for a small business - it has great value for its price. It is simple to use and allows you to expand as you grow. Service is guaranteed NBD 24x7 (in certain cases).

It still seems to me that this is still a product that is not yet ready for the business (at least not to host your mission critical apps). the marketing look and feel of these devices is to appeal to the home user not to the Infrastructure Administrator.

If I were to bet my business on a storage device, this would not be it. At least not at this current version.

Disclosure:

Tech Field Day is a sponsored event by the companies that are presenting. That means my travel & lodging expenses were covered by these vendors. I did take personal vacation days to attend this event. And I am under no obligation to promote any of these companies.

Snapshots are not backups

Well, frankly, I don't care. If I told him once, I told him a thousand times, "Don't go, Julie!" I said, "It's the Ides of March; beware already. Don't go, Julie, don't go…..

Wayne and Schuster - rinse the blood off my Toga

Rinse the Blood off my Toga - Wayne and Schuster

I grew up on this stuff, and it is actually quite funny.

But bringing this back to a relevant subject.

If I told him once I told him a thousand times, "Snapshots are not backups!", I said "It's the Ides of March; beware already. they are not backups, Julie, they are not backups.….."

Well if you don't believe me, then believe VMware. There is official KB 1025279 -
Best practices for virtual machine snapshots in the VMware environment 
(modifications are my own, refer to the original for the full article)

If I told him once I told him a thousand times, "Snapshots are not backups!", I said "It's the Ides of March; beware already. they are not backups, Julie, they are not backups.….."

And thanks to Raphael Schitz for inspiring this post

PowerCLI 4.1.1 poster - Updated

Pablo Roesch posted on the VMware Communities the latest version of the PowerCLI poster.

PowerCLI Poster 4.1.1

Thanks to all that made this happen.

2011-02-11

TechFieldDay - Day 1

This will not be a long post or detailed report of what we experienced today, that will have to wait for a later date. Too much info - to go into detail into a specific subject.

We spent the morning at Symantec - presentations about Netbackup and Backup Exec.

From there we went to Drobo - where we learned about some of their upcoming offerings.

Next on the same location was Druva - a new company that provides a Remote backup of mobile computers.

From there we went to the Computer History Museum.

Xangati presented their solution, and also some of what is to come in their upcoming release

We also got to see the:

Babbage Difference Engine

Cray-1

Babbage Difference Engine

Cray-1 Supercomputer

Dinner and party followed

Long day, brain drained, a slight bit jet lagged but hey who's complaining ????

Who's Tired

Let's get ready for tomorrow

Disclosure:

Tech Field Day is a sponsored event by the companies that are presenting. That means my travel & lodging expenses were covered by these vendors. I did take personal vacation days to attend this event. And I am under no obligation to promote any of these companies.

vSphere 4.1 Update 1 released

Thanks to a tweet from vConsult I learned that a new vCenter and vSphere update was released.

As always test before deployment!!

ESXi Release Notes

What's New

The following information describes some of the enhancements available in this release of VMware ESXi:

  • Enablement of Trusted Execution Technology (TXT) ESXi 4.1 Update 1 can be configured to boot with Intel Trusted Execution Technology (TXT). This boot option can protect ESXi in some cases where system binaries are corrupted or have been tampered with. TXT is currently available on Intel Xeon processor 5600 series servers. For more information, see KB 1033811.
  • Improvement in scalability — ESXi 4.1 Update 1 supports up to 160 logical processors.
  • Support for additional guest operating systems ESXi 4.1 Update 1 provides support for RHEL 6, RHEL 5.6, SLES 11 SP1 for VMware, Ubuntu 10.10, and Solaris 10 Update 9 guest operating systems. For a complete list of guest operating systems supported in this release, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.
  • Inclusion of additional drivers ESXi 4.1 Update 1 includes the 3ware SCSI 2.26.08.036vm40 and Neterion vxge 2.0.28.21239-p3.0.1.2 drivers. For earlier releases, these drivers are only available as separate downloads.

Resolved Issues In addition, this release delivers a number of bug fixes that are documented in the Resolved Issues section.

 

vCenter Release Notes

What's New

This release of VMware vCenter Server 4.1 Update 1 offers the following improvements:

  • Additional Guest Operating System Customization Support: vCenter Server now supports customization of the following guest operating systems:
    • Windows 7 SP1 (x32 and x64)
    • Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (x32 and x64)
    • RHEL 6.0 (x32 and x64)
    • RHEL5.5 (x32 and x64)
  • Additional vCenter Server Database Support: vCenter Server now supports the following databases:
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2005 SP3
    • Oracle 11g Standard/Enterprise Release 2, 11.2.0.1.0 or later,  (x32 and x64)
    • IBM DB2 9.7.2 Express C (x32 and x64)
    • IBM DB2 9.7.2 Enterprise (x32 and x64)
      For more information about using IBM DB2 - 9.7.2 database with vCenter Server 4.1 Update 1, see KB 1033201.
  • Resolved Issues: In addition, this release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

2011-02-08

Tech Field Day #5 - Day (-1)

Less than 12 hours until wheels up.

I have a long trip ahead of me later tonight. I start with a 12 hour flight from TLV to JFK, 2 hour wait and then another 6 hours to San Jose. I have some reading material with me - hopefully there will be an option to charge the laptop on the plane.

I am extremely excited to be able to participate in this event. The days are packed completely from start to finish.

I must commend the whole staff, with excellent organization, for their great ideas, for setting up a great schedule and taking care of a decent number of requests (some of them pretty weird… )

This will be second time in the US (last time was over 13 years ago).

It is going to be fun..

2011-02-04

Cannot start a Virtual Machine

I was presented with an issue yesterday regarding a VM that I was not able to start

image

I went through KB Article 10051, step by step, until I got to:

image

I did not want to reboot the host, seriously… just because there was one VM that would not power on?

What I did not tell you was that a few hours before there was a power failure that took out the Fiber Channel switches (yeah… you always find out that someone plugged something into the wrong power strip after things like this) which in turn caused the all the ESX Hosts in the cluster to lose the LUNs and HA tried to failover the machines.

This I saw in the logs of the VM.

image

As you can see the machine tried to failover to another host, but was not successful because the other hosts also had not access to the LUN.

I could not clone the VM. I could not remove the VM from the inventory either.

Did you notice that the machine was no longer on esxdmz2 (where it originally was located before the power failure)?

I confirmed this within the Events of the VM. the machine had been moved and changes were made on the new host.

image

I figured I would try to power it back up on the original host esxdm2.

image

That worked! I then moved it back esxdmz3 and powered it on on and as you can see the machine powered on with out an issue.

Sometimes all it needs is a bit of putting things back the way they were - before it hit the fan - and things go back to working the way they were.

2011-02-03

Viewing a WebEx on the Road

Today I wanted to join in on Simon Seagrave's EMC Live Webcast:

Install & Run the EMC Celerra Virtual Storage Appliance 

But I was not able to view it from the comfort of my desk, I was on the way back home - on the bus.

I decided not give the webcast a miss so I decided to view on my laptop using my phone as my internet connection. I have a an HTC Wildfire with Android Gingerbread courtesy of Cyanogenmod. One of the benefits of Froyo is Wireless tethering - which allows you to set your phone up as a Wi-Fi hotspot.

I use this great application 3G Watchdog to monitor my Mobile Internet usage.

The statistics from today from my phone during the WebEx:

image 

A quick PowerShell line to give that in numbers that I can understand:

Write-Output "Data Received: $("{0:N2}" -f (81121147 /1MB)) MB" "Data Sent: $("{0:N2}" -f (5838872/1MB)) MB"

image

I was happily surprised to find for a webcast that took over hour - including audio, the amount of bandwidth used was negligible.

That means I do not need to give up live webcasts on the ride home.

Thanks Simon for the great webcast!