Posted by Brian on May 20, 2011 in VMware | 0 comments
I was sent a note from one on the PR people over at pearson about the newly created VMware Press offering. I’ve attached the PR write up about the new line of publications. This is something that I expected to happen a while back but it has finally arrived. VMware has already started to partner with some great talent the from VMware community to get the first few books published. I look forward to see what other interesting media is created through is venue.
Pearson and VMware Announce the Creation of VMware Press
New Publishing Alliance to Provide Virtualization Learning and Certification Resources from VMware
Indianapolis, IN – May 19, 2011 – Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, and VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced VMware Press, a newly created technical imprint that will serve as VMware’s official publishing entity. The newly formed press will provide a suite of virtualization technology and certification products in multiple languages and formats.
News Facts
· The newly formed press will focus on three types of content:
o Technical books, ebooks and videos that concentrate on specific applications of virtualization.
o Decision Maker books, ebooks and videos that focus on the business aspects of virtualization.
o Official certification materials that support VMware’s complete certification program.
· The majority of the new products will target VMware technology, primarily VMware vSphere®, VMware View™, VMware vCenter™ and VMware vCloud®, which comprise the basic platform for all of VMware’s products and services.
· Expert authorities, IT professionals, and subject matter experts from VMware will author official VMware Press titles.
· Working in conjunction with VMware, Pearson plans to leverage the user group community programs and social channels to further engage the VMware community and offer exclusive promotions and access to the certification and technology products endorsed by VMware.
· Visit http://www.vmware.com/go/vmwarepress for a complete product listing of relevant materials for IT professionals.
Usable Quotes
“Pearson stands for accessible, engaging learning, and we look forward to working with VMware to create materials that help IT professionals master innovative technologies and prepare for career-building certifications,” said David Dusthimer, Associate Publisher for Cisco Press, Pearson IT Certification and the new VMware Press. “Through this partnership, we will work hard to make VMware Press synonymous with exceptional VMware learning.”
“Many qualified subject matter experts from our engineering and technical communities are already reputable authors,” said Andrea Eubanks de Jounge, Senior Director at VMware, “and the time is right for VMware, through our alliance with Pearson, to establish a publishing entity as an official source of books and certification preparatory materials.”
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Posted by Brian on May 16, 2011 in Storage, VMware | 0 comments
I was able to see one of the new Tintri VM aware storage appliances get installed into our demo lab today. The storage unit was very simple to rack and setup took just a few minutes. After racking a short console session was established to set the management IP address then the remaining config was done via web browser. The web page only asks for vCenter login credentials, smtp mail server details, NTP and lets you set a new password. Pretty darn simple.
Just minutes later we were sVmotioning VMs over to the new NFS datastore that we created by pointing VMware at the Tintri appliance. Just seconds later by looking at the Tintri console page we could see transfer rates, IOPs, capacity and other settings on the dashboard. The device is truly VM aware and the inventory listing page shows us all virtual machines that are on the datastore and lists each virtual disk that belong to each VM. You also get details like percent of Flash traffic and latency for each disk.
I have included a few screen shots below of the dashboards. I will be writing more about the Tintri in the future as it looks like an exciting piece of storage technology. I think it could really offer some outstanding performance at the price point, one area that I’m anxious to see more from is how it performs with VDI loads.
Find out more about Tintri on their website.
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Posted by Brian on May 5, 2011 in Cisco, Hardware, SAN Fabric | 1 comment
Security: a necessity for all the right reasons. But it can play hell with the installation of those much-needed applications. Recently, during the implementation for a customer, a number of Cisco Nexus series switches have been deployed into fresh new environments, ready to allow for connectivity into new virtualized environments. During the Fabric Manager install, we ran into a number of challenges during the install and I thought it would be helpful to capture the steps that we took. These steps should work in just about any environment.
The Windows 2008 x64 image being used for the basis of the install for the application servers (vCenter, Fabric Manager and Netapp utilities server, etc) is very security focused, and as such, can be a real pain for application installs. In this case, for Fabric Manager (version 5.0.4b), we did the following:
1) Unzip Fabric Manager, and double click your way into the software folder
2) Install Java from jre-1_5_0_11-windows-i586-p.exe by right clicking and choosing Run as Administrator. One thing of note: this was a fresh install and did not have an existing install of Java. As I’m sure we all know how fussy Java can be, I would recommend this being installed in a location that does not require any additional Java-oriented applications
3) Once installed, I had to put the java bin folder into the PATH for the server, else I could not get the Fabric Manager installer to run correctly. (this is the path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Java\jre1.5.0_11\bin)
4) Next, head into the postres folder (located in the software folder, same as the java installer), then the Windows folder and run postgresql-8.2.msi. This will install the Postgres database that will be used for Fabric Manager. During the install, we accepted the default components, then set the password for the service that it would run as (you can choose the name, the default is postgres). This will also create the account for you as part of this process:
5) Next you will be able to give the superuser account for Postgres a password, and remain the account should you want to. You should also set the locale (English, United States in our case):
6) The procedural languages selection is fairly straightforward, as only PL/pgsql is available as a choice.
7) For the enable contrib modules, I leave the default selected (Adminpack.)
8) The install should continue and complete. When it is done, we need to now create the database that will be used for Fabric Manager
9) Launch pgAdmin III from the start menu:
10) On initial launch, you will see it the admin gui is disconnected from the default postgres instance. Right click and choose Connect, then enter your password you created during install:
11) To create a database for Fabric Manager, right click on the default instance and select New Database:
12) You can name the database whatever you prefer, but make sure to set the Owner to the user postgres:
13) Now it’s time to launch the fabric manager installer (finally, right?). You can do so from the start.html . Don’t worry if you get an unsupported environment pop up, just hit okay and choose a Custom install
14) We went with the Standalone install, and when the Database Options appears, make sure to select Use Existing DB, set the DB superuser account (postgres by default) and the password that you set during the install for Postgressql, and set the DB URL to have the name of the database you created in place of “dcmdb”
15) Set the local fabric manager user (defaults to admin, we used fmadmin) and set the password:
16) For the Authentication Options, since these are standalone installs, the mode we are using is Local
17) And for Configuration Options, we check both the “Use FC Alias as fabric default” and “Require SNMPv3 and disable SNMPv2c for increased security”.
At this point, you should get the Fabric Manager and Device Manager icons on your desktop, and you should be all ready to go. Hopefully this will help should you try the Express install and run afoul of the many issues of security that can come up during application installs.
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Posted by Brian on Apr 18, 2011 in IBM Servers, VMware, vSphere | 8 comments
I’ve been working with a client lately on a datacenter move and they have selected IBM x3690 servers. The 3690′s will be the ESXi hosts for the new site and are running ESXi embedded. I have not had the opportunity to work with many different clients that choose the embedded route, so it was cool to see how IBM setup the servers.
The servers came with ESXi 4.0 installed on a USB stick from the factory and installed in one of the two internal USB ports that the server offers. Upon turning on the servers some of them booted right to VMware and some did not. After some further looking into the boot order in the BIOS I noticed that the Embedded Hypervisor option was not added to the boot order on a couple of the servers. A quick add and they were running just like the rest, guess someone at the factory missed that one.
The servers took a very long time to post and boot up, part of this was due to the 128 GB of RAM installed. We turned off some of the non-essentials and modified the boot order to go right to ESXi and cut the post time down some. You can see from the image below it’s just another x-series server.
I snapped the image below with the cover over showing off all the sticks of memory installed.
The last image below is a close up to the two USB ports that are internal to the server. The lower one as the USB stick from the factory with ESXi embedded on it.
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Posted by Brian on Apr 11, 2011 in CLI, vMA, VMware, vSphere | 0 comments
This is not something that I’ve had to do very often. But on a recent customer engagement I was working with the client on setting up some new hosts that were recently purchased. These hosts were purchased with Embedded ESXi on them and additional PCI NICs were added to the config. The additional NICs did not have drivers available in the base ESXi build. Shortly after bringing the first host online we noticed that only the onboard NICs showed up in the list.
A quick search on Google for the Intel part number for the NIC lead me to the family name for the adapter. Then a search over at VMware lead me to the download page for VMware that provided the .ISO file to load the drivers into ESXi for the family of adapters. The process took only a few minutes and since this is something that does not come up that often I thought a short write up might help someone.
There are a few ways that this could be done, since we happened to be running ESXi the options were to use the vMA or vCLI. Since this was a new install and a vMA was not setup yet I just quickly tossed vCLI on a server. Then a quick download of the driver .ISO from VMware and unzip the package into a folder on the server with vCLI installed on it. If you wanted to use the vMA you could mount the .ISO to the virtual CD-ROM of the VM and issue the command against it.
Since I was using vCLI all I needed to do was point the command to a local folder. Here is a sample of the command used to perform the patch.
vihostupdate –server HOSTNAME –install –bundle c:\folder\name_of_file.zip
To run this command your host must be in Maintenance mode and it will then take just a couple of minutes to execute. After the update completes a reboot of the host is needed and then the cards should be available for use.
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Posted by Brian on Mar 21, 2011 in Cisco, Hardware | 3 comments
I was recently introduced to Cisco UCS and have been really enjoying working with the product. After working with HP, Dell and IBM products for almost 20 years it has been a refreshing change. Sure I was keeping an eye on what Cisco was doing with UCS and reading what others have been writing. But after working with the UCS and sitting for the UCS class I am a firm believer in what they have created now.
So I figured that it would be good just to write down a few of the little things that have impressed me so far. I will be writing a lot more about UCS in the coming weeks. But these are just some UCS features that I thought were cool.
This is no surprise but does the back of your server rack look this clean? Unless you have a UCS blade chassis I doubt it does. Sure other vendors have been creating Blade Chassis for years and they have done many things to cut down on cable clutter. But nothing comes close to making things this simple and clean.
The next one is maybe not so much a technology innovation but it’s just something so simple that I can’t believe no one has done this before. On each UCS blade server that is a little paper card that flips out. This can be used to write server names, put asset tags or other labeling details. No more are the days were you are forced to paste labels on the front of servers reducing the air flow by partially covering up some of the vents. This seems so dang easy but I’ve not seen any other vendor do this yet.
This will probably have people split on if its good or bad. Every UCS blade and C series rack mount server has the console port on the front and you can use the dongle in the picture below to access. The UCS dongle provides you with a video port, 2 USB ports and a 9 pin serial connection. This gives you the ability to connect monitor, keyboard and mouse to any blade or server. You could also use it for a console connection to a nearby switch if your laptop like many does not have a serial port. Sure others will probably say why would you want this when I just cable up my chassis to a KVM and forget about it. But after years of working with remote data centers and having a wide variety of skilled and non-skilled works there to be your hands in a crisis. This makes things dead simple just connect this dongle to server 1 and what do you see on the screen. No more try to remotely talk someone through how to use a KVM and never really being sure if they are looking at the right screen.
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