https://blog.technodrone.cloud/posts/ Recent content in Posts on Technodrone Hugo -- gohugo.io Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2025/12/llms-and-bon-bons.html Mon, 22 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2025/12/llms-and-bon-bons.html GenAI is like a box of chocolates - you never know what you’re going to get. And just like that box of chocolates, sometimes you get the perfect piece, and sometimes you bite into that bon bon that makes you question your life choices. I wish I could claim this analogy as my own brilliant insight, but a quick search revealed it was already used in a 2023 research paper. Great minds think alike, I suppose. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2025/11/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2025.html Mon, 24 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2025/11/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2025.html It is that time of the year again, we are just two weeks away from re:Invent. Every year I write a post) this was last year’s) and every year people tell me that it is a very useful resource for many Jewish attendees at the conference. There will be kosher food, for those who have requested requested in advance. They had kosher food at several of the venues last year, but it would be best to confirm where exactly it will be available this year. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2024/11/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2024.html Mon, 18 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2024/11/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2024.html It is that time of the year again, we are just two weeks away from re:Invent. Every year I write a post) this was last year’s) and every year people tell me that it is a very useful resource for many Jewish attendees at the conference. There will be kosher food, for those who have requested requested in advance. They had kosher food at several of the venues last year, but it would be best to confirm where exactly it will be available this year. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2023/11/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2023.html Sun, 19 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2023/11/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2023.html It is that time of the year again, we are one week away from re:Invent. Every year I write a post, this was last year’s and every year people tell me that it is a very useful resource for many Jewish attendees at the conference. First and foremost, there will be kosher food, for those who have requested requested in advance. They had kosher food at several of the venues last year, but it would be best to confirm where exactly it will be avaialble this year. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2023/09/phyllis-saidel-memory.html Tue, 12 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2023/09/phyllis-saidel-memory.html Last week, my mother passed away. She was 87 when she returned her soul to the creator. Losing a parent is hard, all the more so when it comes suddenly. In my mother’s case, it was something that we knew was coming, but even more so, I lost my mother over 9 years ago, when she developed full onset Alzheimers. Here is my eulogy in her honor from the funeral. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2023/07/4-years-at-aws.html Wed, 19 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2023/07/4-years-at-aws.html Four years have passed. How time flies, it is unbelievable! Three years ago, I wrote about my first year, and now that I just passed my fourth year mark (and also my second year in my role as a Developer Advocate), I will try and combine these two milestones together and sum up my experience and thoughts. Of course I will do this in the typical Amazonian fashion, according to the LP’s. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2023/05/setting-timeout-ecs-task.html Wed, 17 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2023/05/setting-timeout-ecs-task.html Sometimes you just want your application to run, but only for a certain amount of time, there are a number of reasons you might want to do this. It could be that that you do not want to spend too much time or money completing a n operation (letting things run until eternity, firstly would take a hell of a long time, but it could also rack up a good amount spend in your cloud account). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2022/11/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2022.html Mon, 14 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2022/11/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2022.html It is that time of the year again, we are two weeks away from re:Invent, and last year I did this it was a very useful resource for many Jewish attendees at the conference. Last year we had a Channukah party, which was a great opportunity to meet our Jewish customers, colleagues, and light candles together. I am so flabbergasted that this actually happened. More about this later in the week https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/10/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2021.html Mon, 25 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/10/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2021.html It is that time of the year again, and the last time I did this was three years ago. I did not attend re:Invent in 2019, and last year was 100% virtual, so anyone that wanted to keep kosher, it was pretty simple because everyone was at home. #Hanukkah and keynote #reinvent3word pic.twitter.com/RzuwK5m5Um — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) December 15, 2020 I am really happy that we will be able to get back an in-person event again this year. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/07/demo-sensitive-info-terminal.html Tue, 06 Jul 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/07/demo-sensitive-info-terminal.html I would like to share something really useful that I learned today from a colleague (huge shout out to Boaz Ziniman - a fellow AWS Developer Advocate) Have you ever demoed something on your your terminal and while running through the demo - you have on the screen some information that you do not want to actually show the rest of the world? For example you are demoing your AWS setup and you want to show the setup of your ~/. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/06/new-role-entreloper.html Mon, 07 Jun 2021 09:31:58 +0300 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/06/new-role-entreloper.html Today I start a new journey within AWS. I am happy to announce that today is Day-1 (and it is always Day-1 in Amazon - BTW) in a new role as a Senior Enterprise Developer Advocate in the container services team - focusing on ECS. In true Amazonian fashion - this is my first attempt at writing a mini-PRFAQ and there is no better way to start than to write one for my new position. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/06/50-35-15.html Tue, 01 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/06/50-35-15.html How do you balance the priorities during your work day? How do you know that you are focusing on the right thing? How do you even actually know what is the right thing? This is something that my team has been focusing on for a while. We all have a finite amount of time - 24 hours in a day, 1440 minutes, 86,400 seconds. And until someone solves that small problem of time travel - I don’t think that this going to be any different. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/03/ecs-exec-alias.html Wed, 17 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/03/ecs-exec-alias.html A few days ago AWS released a very much requested feature “ECS exec” - which enables you to “ssh” into one of your containers running in ECS, regardless of if they are running in AWS Fargate or in Amazon EC2. I do want to point out that I agree completely with Massimo - opening a remote shell is quite the anti-pattern of using containers in the first place and is not something that you should be doing in production. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/02/aws-cli-aliases.html Sun, 07 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2021/02/aws-cli-aliases.html Today I would like to share with you an AWS CLI feature that is not actually well known and not really well documented. I use the AWS cli on a daily basis - pretty much every time I spend time in my terminal. There are commands I use on a regular basis and some of them are repetitive - and also quite long to type out - and I wish that there was a way to alias a command in the AWS cli - it would make my life a lot easier. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/07/dont-erase-the-past/ Wed, 29 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/07/dont-erase-the-past/ This post has nothing to do with technology, so if you follow my blog for that purpose only - feel free click away. This post is based on the original article in hebrew by Rabbi Chaim Navon. Tonight is the commemoration of Tisha B’av, a horrible day in Jewish history, mostly remembered because it was the day that the first and second Temple were destroyed. It is part of my history. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/07/a-year-at-aws.html Wed, 15 Jul 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/07/a-year-at-aws.html Today is my one year anniversary at AWS as a Senior Solutions Architect. I started exactly 1 year ago. How time flies… this is re-post of a twitter thread (and in true Amazon fashion based on the Leadership principles) 1/ Today is my one year anniversary at @awscloud as a Senior Solutions Architect. I started exactly 1 year ago. How time flies... a thread (and in true Amazon fashion based on the Leadership principles) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/05/aws-visio-v2.0/ Thu, 07 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/05/aws-visio-v2.0/ Good evening to you all. I would like to introduce you to a new release of the AWS Community Visio stencils. What has changed? A lot actually. Jerry Hargrove has continued to release awesome diagrams, and I decided that it makes a lot more sense to follow his suite and produce a Visio stencil based on each of his works of art. So that now means that I will be releasing a stencil, per each diagram. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/05/blog-publishing-process/ Sun, 03 May 2020 08:00:00 +0300 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/05/blog-publishing-process/ There are a number of ways to publish content for a blog, and many people who have moved to static HTML platforms like hugo use a similar flow. In my Blog Migration Series, I went through how the migration process. This post will be about how I actually publish my content, and the flow that I have found that works for me. My tools The tools that I use are: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-5.html Mon, 06 Apr 2020 13:28:16 +0300 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-5.html This is part of a series of posts about how I completed the migration of my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted solution based on AWS S3. Part 1 - Decide on where to host the new blog and which platform I would use Part 2 - Export all the content out of Blogger and new blog design Part 3 - Import all the content into the new blog Part 4 - Fix up all the content issues Part 5 - Redirect all old content to the new site (This post) Post URLs When generating the blog post URL’s for my relocated blog they did not necessarily match the URL’s that existed in the past https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-4.html Mon, 06 Apr 2020 13:28:15 +0300 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-4.html This is part of a series of posts about how I completed the migration of my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted solution based on AWS S3. Part 1 - Decide on where to host the new blog and which platform I would use Part 2 - Export all the content out of Blogger and new blog design Part 3 - Import all the content into the new blog Part 4 - Fix up all the content issues (This post) Part 5 - Redirect all old content to the new site Welcome to the most tedious part of my migration. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-3.html Mon, 06 Apr 2020 13:28:14 +0300 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-3.html This is part of a series of posts about how I completed the migration of my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted solution based on AWS S3. Part 1 - Decide on where to host the new blog and which platform I would use Part 2 - Export all the content out of Blogger and new blog design Part 3 - Import all the content into the new blog (This post) Part 4 - Fix up all the content issues Part 5 - Redirect all old content to the new site So if you remember from Part #2, the result of the export - was an XML file - with all my content in it. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-2.html Mon, 06 Apr 2020 13:28:13 +0300 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-2.html This is part of a series of posts about how I completed the migration of my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted solution based on AWS S3. Part 1 - Decide on where to host the new blog and which platform I would use Part 2 - Export all the content out of Blogger and new blog design (This post) Part 3 - Import all the content into the new blog Part 4 - Fix up all the content issues Part 5 - Redirect all old content to the new site Export content The folks at Hugo have a set of tools that allow you to migrate your content out of your old platform which made my job a lot easier https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-1.html Mon, 06 Apr 2020 13:28:12 +0300 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-1.html This is part of a series of posts about how I completed the migration of my blog from Blogger to a self-hosted solution based on AWS S3. Part 1 - Decide on where to host the new blog and which platform I would use (This post) Part 2 - Export all the content out of Blogger and new blog design Part 3 - Import all the content into the new blog Part 4 - Fix up all the content issues Part 5 - Redirect all old content to the new site Let me first explain why I wanted to move off of Blogger. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-0.html Mon, 06 Apr 2020 13:28:11 +0300 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/04/migrating-the-blog-part-0.html It has been a journey, one that took a long time. A journey that took much longer than I had hoped, but now it is time to document how I migrated everything from my previous blog over to its new home. This is going to be a series of smaller posts - I have found that breaking these steps into smaller steps is easier to consume, and understand and easier for me to explain. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/03/thoughts-on-ethics-and-open-source/ Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/03/thoughts-on-ethics-and-open-source/ I wanted to write this post a long time ago - but refrained from doing so for a number of reasons. Since this topic came across my path a few days ago, and the discussion is continuing, it finally gave me the incentive to push the publish button - because I think this is a really touchy, emotional and controversial topic - and I think that my thoughts can add to the discussion. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/02/admitting-you-made-a-mistake/ Wed, 12 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/02/admitting-you-made-a-mistake/ Sometimes there comes a time where you have to admit that a decision you made in the past, was not optimal, was not ideal. Realizing that you made the mistake, is the path to a better way, the path to fixing the problem. Today, I confess. I made a mistake, and it has something to do with my post AMI has #3Syllables. A.M.I. Before all the ah-mee huggers break out the champagne… https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/02/the-unicorn-project-book-review-the-cabal/ Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/02/the-unicorn-project-book-review-the-cabal/ I finished The Unicorn Project a few weeks ago, and I had some thoughts that I wanted to share with you. In the words of the author Gene Kim “My goal in writing The Unicorn Project was to explore and reveal the necessary but invisible structures required to make developers (and all engineers) productive, and reveal the devastating effects of technical debt and complexity. I hope this book can create common ground for technology and business leaders to leave the past behind, and co-create a better future together. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/01/where-do-i-find-time-to-read-books/ Mon, 27 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/01/where-do-i-find-time-to-read-books/ This was the spark for this post.. I have one in my bag - and I plan on finishing it today, I don't really have this problem. But on the other hand - I only read 3-4 books a year — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) January 19, 2020 Some of you may ask - how is it that you find time to actually read a book? Time is one of the most precious things that we all guard, the thing that we always say that we never have enough of, and we wish that we had more of, so how is that I can spend it reading and even reading long enough to finish a book? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/01/welcome-to-blog-2.0/ Thu, 02 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2020/01/welcome-to-blog-2.0/ It is time for a change. When I first started to publish on my blog almost 12 years ago - I never thought in my wildest dreams that I would be where I am in my career, become who I have become am as a person, the knowledge I have accumulated and what I have managed to accomplish. It is time for a change, and that includes: A new domain name A new way of publishing content A new start I have decided to retire my old blog, which means I will no longer be publishing new content there, and I will be moving my activities here. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/06/starting-new-journey-aws.html Wed, 12 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/06/starting-new-journey-aws.html Simon Sinek has a great talk - about how great leaders inspire great action. I learned something really important from this talk even through it is almost 10 years old. By explaining things in the wrong way - we miss the opportunity to make a great impact, to change the world. We usually start with the What. Then the How.. And only at the end - we get into the Why… It should be the other be the reverse. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/06/book-review-mastering-aws-cost.html Mon, 10 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/06/book-review-mastering-aws-cost.html I dabble in AWS every now and again :) and a new book just came out - so obviously I wanted to go through it and give it a read. Mastering AWS Cost Optimization: Real-world technical and operational cost-saving best practices (Eli Mansoor and Yair Green) So first some disclosure - I have met with Eli a few times throughout my career - we had some business discussions during his Rackspace days. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/05/not-real-scientific-proof-that-ami-has.html Mon, 27 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/05/not-real-scientific-proof-that-ami-has.html AWS has 26, (yes) I counted them, different products with exactly 3 letters in them (or derivatives of) - lets go through them one at a time. A-C-M AWS Certificate Manager - Is not pronounced ac-em (also not hack-em)  D-M-S Database Migration Service - Is not pronounced dems nor dee-miss (and also not dimms) E-B-S Elastic Block Store - Is not pronounced ebbs (and we are not being washed back out to sea), nor ee-bzz (people might be allergic to bees)  E-C-2 (Well it should actually be E-C-C - but EC2 sounds so much sexier) Elastic Compute Cloud - Is not pronounced ek-2 (or even eck - otherwise people might get confused with “what the heck2”) E-C-R - Elastic Container Registry - Is not pronounced Ecker-R (sounds too much like pecker)  E-C-S - Elastic Container Service - Is not pronounced eh-ckes neither ee-cees nor Ex (People would be wary to use a product named Amazon X - they might think that AWS is taking after Google with their Alphabet)  E-F-S - Elastic File System - Is not pronounced ef-s neither ee-fees nor eefs E-K-S - Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes - pronouncing this x-kay (ECS-K) would sound too much like Xray (another AWS product). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/03/the-aws-ec2-windows-secret-sauce.html Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/03/the-aws-ec2-windows-secret-sauce.html Now that I have got your attention with a catchy title - let me share with some of my thoughts regarding how AWS shines and how much your experience as a customer matters. Deploying instances in the cloud is something that is relatively fast - at least when it comes to the deployment of a Linux instance. Windows Operating Systems - is a whole different story. Have you ever thought why it takes such a long amount of time to deploy a Windows instance in the cloud? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/03/the-anatomy-of-aws-key-leak-to-public.html Mon, 11 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/03/the-anatomy-of-aws-key-leak-to-public.html Many of us working with any cloud provider know that you should never ever commit access keys to a public github repo. Some really bad things can happen if you do. AWS (and I assume all the cloud providers have their equivalent) publish their own best practices about how you should manage access keys. One of the items mentioned there - is never to commit your credentials into your source code! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/03/my-awesome-podcasts-list.html Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/03/my-awesome-podcasts-list.html I have a decent commute every day back and forth to work and I have come to enjoy listening to a number of podcasts throughout the week. I will try and keep the list up to date - here As of today - this is my current list of podcasts Grumpy Old Geeks Two old farts (like me) that bitch about tech, and how ridiculous we have all become - Link https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/03/ami-has-3-syllables-ami-aws.html Mon, 04 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/03/ami-has-3-syllables-ami-aws.html Just to make this clear (before someone get’s the wrong idea…) This 100% fun. Humor. Not religion. Not a mission. Just having some fun at the expense of AWS.. If you follow me on Twitter (and if you don’t - your loss..) then you will know that I am one of many that are on a crusade. A crusade to right a wrong. A wrong that some who work in a company called Amazon Web Services (a. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/02/goodbye-docker-and-thanks-for-all-fish.html Mon, 25 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/02/goodbye-docker-and-thanks-for-all-fish.html Back in July 2018, I started to write a blog post about the upcoming death of Docker as a company (and also perhaps as a technology) but I never got round to completing and publishing the post. It is time to actually get that post out. OK .. Time to share my thoughts on the soon to be death of #docker — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) July 17, 2018 So here you go…. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/02/separate-vpcs-can-do-more-harm-than-good.html Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/02/separate-vpcs-can-do-more-harm-than-good.html I have come across this a number of times of the past couple of months. Environments that were born in the datacenter, have grown in the datacenter - in short people who are used to certain (shall we say - ‘legacy’) deployments, and they they are in the midst of an attempt to mirror the same architecture when moving to the cloud. I remember in my old days that our server farm had a separate network segment (sometimes even more than one) when I was using physical servers, (while I write this - I actually think it has been about 4 years since I actually touched a physical server, or plugged a cable/disk/device into a physical server) for our Domain controllers, Applications servers, and users had their own network segments that were dedicated only to laptops and desktops. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/01/empires-are-not-built-in-a-day.html Wed, 30 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/01/empires-are-not-built-in-a-day.html I am currently on vacation in Rome (my first time) and during this trip I came to a number of realizations that I would like to share with you. I went to the Colosseum today - and I have to say I was in awe. The structure is magnificent (even if the remains are only part of of the original structure in all its glory). As I progressed throughout the day - I came to the following realizations. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/01/the-year-2018-in-review.html Fri, 11 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/01/the-year-2018-in-review.html I don’t always do these kind of posts but 2018 was a substantial year for me that warrants a short summary. I released the AWS Powershell Container - gauging by the number of pulls - I guess that is was not that useful.. :) I completed my 5th AWS Certification. The post was also translated into Hebrew as well. I presented a session at the DevOps Israel conference I left Cisco (NDS) after 13 years and started a new position at CyberArk. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/01/i-was-not-expecting-this-at-reinvent.html Fri, 04 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2019/01/i-was-not-expecting-this-at-reinvent.html There was a lot to absorb during the jam packed week in Las Vegas but there were a number of things that I was truly surprised about during the conference.. It was clear that AWS is going after the Enterprise market and are accommodating the on-prem / legacy / old-school way of thinking. This is the first re:Invent that you could really feel the change. Here are a few of them: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/12/aws-client-vpn.html Wed, 19 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/12/aws-client-vpn.html So after leaking (or not really leaking) from some of the sessions from re:Invent it seems that AWS have finally released the Client VPN AWS Client VPN is a managed client-based VPN service that enables you to securely access your AWS resources and resources in your on-premises network. With Client VPN, you can access your resources from any location using an OpenVPN-based VPN client. So instead of you having to provision a EC2 instance on your own and configure your own OpenVPN server - you can use this service https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/12/aws-outposts-told-you-so.html Mon, 10 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/12/aws-outposts-told-you-so.html I called it - to me it was obvious that this was going to happen. The signs were all there. This was the direction that the market has been pushing for, and AWS has a reputation of giving the customers what they ask for. The last announcement that was Andy Jassey made on the keynote on Wednesday - was AWS Outposts. Here was the announcement. Usually Jeff Barr (or as of late - someone else on the Technical Evangelist team) have a detailed blog post - on a new product that was just announced. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/12/my-overall-impression-of-reinvent-2018_5.html Wed, 05 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/12/my-overall-impression-of-reinvent-2018_5.html I am now on a plane on my way back home, on a really long flight from SFO to TLV (13.5 hours) so now is a good time to re-cap and reflect on what happened last week at re:Invent. I think that this will be a set of posts - because there are a number of topics that I would like to address - and some of them deserve their own dedicated insight. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/11/how-i-get-most-out-of-aws-reinvent-2018.html Mon, 12 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/11/how-i-get-most-out-of-aws-reinvent-2018.html I am not an expert, and I only went to re:Invent for the first time last year, but I have been to a quite a number of conferences over the years. So here come my thoughts about making the most of the crazy week in Vegas. The (regular) sessions Contrary to what you might think, going to sessions where you have a speaker (or speakers) up on stage going through a slide deck, or a panel of speakers talking about a subject - is where you should be, is not a good use of your time. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/11/events-as-service-eaas.html Thu, 08 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/11/events-as-service-eaas.html Most vendors that perceive themselves as a market leader will have a major annual event (some will even have multiple events in different geographical locations). Here are few of these major events that come to mind: AWS (re:invent)  VMware (VMworld) Cisco (Cisco Live!) Microsoft (Ignite) Google (Cloud Next)  And every year we come around to the registration and scheduling of sessions to these events, and they almost always suck… (I am going to use re:invent as the victim here - but I am sure that the experience is probably the same with most conferences)  The Mobile App sucks. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/11/the-aws-visio-stencils.html Mon, 05 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/11/the-aws-visio-stencils.html It seems like only yesterday, but it was actually almost 10 years ago when I gave something awesome to the VMware community - the first version of the VMware stencils. The reason I did this was because at the time - there was no decent set of VMware stencils out there - so I took the initiative and created a set. And I subsequently set out to update them over the years. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/10/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2018.html Mon, 22 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/10/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2018.html So we are a little more than a month away from the yearly ascent to all things AWS - re:Invent 2018. Last year one of my most useful posts was the Kosher perspective on the event Keeping Kosher at re:Invent 2017. So this year - nothing much has changed - there is still no kosher food.. #boo (This is not last years graphic but taken from the current site) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/10/how-long-until-you-get-new-shiny-toys.html Mon, 15 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/10/how-long-until-you-get-new-shiny-toys.html re:Invent is coming - and the frenzy of releases that will build up to the event is just around the corner. I have always had in the back of my mind that all the products announced at re:Invent are great for the press releases and the small digs at other vendors, but sometimes it takes a while until we actually get what was announced on stage in front of ~20,000 people and the rest of the world. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/10/aws-privatelink-vs-nat-gateway-from.html Mon, 08 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/10/aws-privatelink-vs-nat-gateway-from.html A customer came to me with a request. They do not want to use a NAT gateway from their VPC to access the AWS API’s. They had a number of security concerns regarding the use of a NAT gateway (no control, logs, auditing - but that is a for a different post) and they asked for a solution. The AWS API’s that they needed access to were: S3 KMS SSM Cloudwatch Cloudformation Last year at re:Invent AWS announced the option to create VPC Interface endpoints using PrivateLink and have steadily been adding more endpoints over the past year. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/10/bastardizing-devops.html Tue, 02 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/10/bastardizing-devops.html I have come across two separate discussions this past week where it became clear that some people have no idea what DevOps is. The first one was an Israeli company here in Israel - https://devopsexperts.co.il/. Here is the proposed syllabus: They are offering this course - for a fee (of course), selling the hope that if someone would graduate the course - then they would be able to get a position as an DevOps engineer. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/replacing-aws-elb-automation.html Thu, 27 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/replacing-aws-elb-automation.html This is Part 5 in the Replacing the AWS ELB series. Replacing the AWS ELB - The Problem Replacing the AWS ELB - The Challenges Replacing the AWS ELB - The Design Replacing the AWS ELB - The Network Deep Dive Replacing the AWS ELB - Automation (this post) Replacing the AWS ELB - Final Thoughts It goes without saying that anything that I have described in the previous posts can be accomplished - it is just a really tedious work to go through all the stages when you are doing this manually. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/09/replacing-aws-elb-final-thoughts.html Thu, 27 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/09/replacing-aws-elb-final-thoughts.html This is the last part in the Replacing the AWS ELB series. Replacing the AWS ELB - The Problem Replacing the AWS ELB - The Challenges Replacing the AWS ELB - The Design Replacing the AWS ELB - The Network Deep Dive Replacing the AWS ELB - Automation Replacing the AWS ELB - Final Thoughts (this post) If you haven’t already read the previous posts in the series - please take the time to go through them. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/09/replacing-aws-elb-design.html Sun, 02 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/09/replacing-aws-elb-design.html This is Part 3 in the Replacing the AWS ELB series. Replacing the AWS ELB - The Problem Replacing the AWS ELB - The Challenges Replacing the AWS ELB - The Design (this post) Replacing the AWS ELB - The Network Deep Dive Replacing the AWS ELB - Automation Replacing the AWS ELB - Final Thoughts So how do you go about using an IP address in a VPC and allow it to jump between availability zones? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/replacing-aws-elb-challenges.html Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/replacing-aws-elb-challenges.html This is Part 2 in the Replacing the AWS ELB series. Replacing the AWS ELB - The Problem Replacing the AWS ELB - The Challenges(this post) Replacing the AWS ELB - The Design Replacing the AWS ELB - The Network Deep Dive Replacing the AWS ELB - Automation Replacing the AWS ELB - Final Thoughts Now that you know the history from the previous post - I would like to dive into the challenges that I faced during the design process and how they were solved. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/replacing-aws-elb-network-deep-dive.html Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/replacing-aws-elb-network-deep-dive.html This is Part 4 in the Replacing the AWS ELB series. Replacing the AWS ELB - The Problem Replacing the AWS ELB - The Challenges Replacing the AWS ELB - The Design Replacing the AWS ELB - The Network Deep Dive (this post) Replacing the AWS ELB - Automation Replacing the AWS ELB - Final Thoughts Why does this whole thing with the network actually work? Networking in AWS is not that complicated - (sometimes it can be - but it is usually pretty simple) so why do you need to add in an additional IP address into the loop - and one that is not even really part of he VPC? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/replacing-aws-elb-problem.html Wed, 29 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/replacing-aws-elb-problem.html This topic has been long overdue. This will be a series of posts on how you can replace the AWS ELB’s inside your VPC’s with a self managed load balancing solution. This will be too long for a single blog post so I decided it was best to split it up into parts. Replacing the AWS ELB - The Problem (this post) Replacing the AWS ELB - The Challenges Replacing the AWS ELB - The Design Replacing the AWS ELB - The Network Deep Dive Replacing the AWS ELB - Automation Replacing the AWS ELB - Final Thoughts Let me start at the beginning. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/scratching-itch-with-aws-vault-url.html Tue, 21 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/scratching-itch-with-aws-vault-url.html I think that aws-vault is a really nice tool. It prevents you from saving your AWS credentials in plain text on your machines (which is always a good thing) Since I started using it – I found a number of difficulties along the way. aws-vault does not support aarch64 #261 To solve this - I created my own binary - aws-vault on a Chromebook aws-vault only supports storing credentials when using a fully blown GUI. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/a-triangle-is-not-circle.html Sun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/a-triangle-is-not-circle.html We all started off as babies, and I am sure that not many of you remember that one of the first toys you played with (and if you do not remember - then I am sure those of you with kids have probably done the same with your children) was a plastic container with different shapes on the lid and blocks that were made of different shapes. A triangle would only go into the triangle, a circle in the circle, a block in the block and so on. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/saving-few-shekels-on-your-aws-bill.html Wed, 15 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/08/saving-few-shekels-on-your-aws-bill.html I have a jumpbox that I use to access resources in the cloud – and I use it at work, only during work hours and only on workdays. There are usually 720 work hours in the month or 744 in months that have 31 days. Assuming that I want to run the instance for 12 hours a day and for 5 days a week. In order to calculate how many hours exactly – we will need an example. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/07/aws-vault-on-chromebook.html Mon, 23 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/07/aws-vault-on-chromebook.html I have moved almost exclusively to a Chromebook for my day-to-day work (a whole other set of blog posts - on the journey and outcome are planned), and I was missing one of the tools in belt and that was aws-vault. If you look at the releases you will see that there is no binary available for arm. I opened up an issue on the repository - and the answer that I got was - that it is not likely to have any binary released for ARM in the near future, I should go and compile it for myself. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/07/the-aws-world-shook-and-nobody-noticed.html Thu, 19 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/07/the-aws-world-shook-and-nobody-noticed.html A few days ago at the AWS Summit in New York there was an announcement which in my honest opinion went very noticeably under the radar and i don’t think many people understand exactly what it means. The announcement i’m talking about is this one EC2 Compute Instances for Snowball Edge . Let’s dig into the announcement. There are new instance types released the sbe1 family which can been on AWS Snowball Edge device which essentially a computer with a lot of disks inside. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/07/getting-hit-by-boat-defensive-design.html Thu, 05 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/07/getting-hit-by-boat-defensive-design.html In a group discussion last week – I heard a story (I could not find the origin – if you know where it comes from – please let me know) – which I would like to share with you. John was floating out in the ocean, on his back, with his shades, just enjoying the sun, the quiet, the time to himself, not a care in the world. When all of a sudden he got bumped on the head (not hard enough to cause any serious damage) with a small rowing boat. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/07/encounters-in-cloud-interview.html Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/07/encounters-in-cloud-interview.html This is a translation of an interview I gave to IsraelClouds (a meet the architect session). Hello, my name is Maish Saidel-Keesing. I am a Cloud and DevOps architect at CyberArk in Petach Tikva. I have over 19 years experience in the compute industry. In the past I was a system administrator, managing Active Directory, Exchange and Windows servers. I have a lot of past experience with VMware systems - I wrote the first version of VMware vSphere Design and I have extensive knowledge of OpenStack (where I also participated in the OpenStack Architecture Design Guide). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/06/comparing-cloudformation-terraform-and.html Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/06/comparing-cloudformation-terraform-and.html Whenever someone asks me what tools do you use to provision your infrastructure within AWS - the answer is it can be done with a variety of tools - but people usually use one of the following three CloudFormation Terraform Ansible The next question that comes up of course - is which one is easier/better to use? The answer of course (as always..) is - “It Depends”. There are really good reasons to use each and everyone of the tools. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/07/comparing-cloudformation-terraform-and.html Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/07/comparing-cloudformation-terraform-and.html The feedback I received from the first comparison was great – thank you all. Obviously the example I used was not really something that you would use in the real world – because no-one actually creates a only a VPC – and does not create anything inside it, that is pretty futile. So let’s go to the next example. The scenario is to create a VPC, with a public presences and a private presence. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/06/microsoft-to-acquire-github.html Mon, 04 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/06/microsoft-to-acquire-github.html Microsft is currently in negotiations to acquire. Github. Github.com. Github, it’s the place where we all store our code, all our open source code. I was actually quite shocked. There is this article. The first thing that I was surprised by was that Microsoft has bean negotiations with Github for quite some time. If they do buy Github then it could possibly change the world of open source. Almost everybody I know stores their code on Github. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/05/my-commentary-on-gartners-cloud-mq-2018.html Tue, 29 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/05/my-commentary-on-gartners-cloud-mq-2018.html As a true technologist – I am not a favor of analyst reports and in some circles Gartner is a dirty word – but since most of the industry swears by Gartner – I went over the report. Here are my highlights…(emphasis is mine – not from the source Most customers have a multicloud strategy. Most customers choose a primary strategic cloud IaaS provider, and some will choose a secondary strategic provider as well. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/04/to-be-10x-engineer-or-not-to-be.html Mon, 30 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/04/to-be-10x-engineer-or-not-to-be.html I am sure you are all familiar with those select few in your company who supposedly have super powers or hidden technological gifts. Yes, I mean those co-workers who know exactly how to fix the most esoteric issues that no one has come across, ever. Perhaps you share a cubicle with the guy who’s able to conceive of breakthroughs time after time after time. Or maybe you were hired the same month as the woman who can code like no one has coded before, and it’s like reading poetry — smooth, with meaning, and plays on your most inner emotions. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/04/time-for-new-chapter-hello-cyberark.html Mon, 09 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/04/time-for-new-chapter-hello-cyberark.html The cat is out of the bag. The beginning of a new journey — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) March 20, 2018 A bit of history After 13 years at Cisco - I have decided to challenge myself and embark on a new adventure. I first would like to express my gratitude to those who have helped me grow over the years. Starting out 13 years I was part of the helpdesk at a company called NDS (who was acquired by Cisco about 5 years ago), Supporting users over the phone, servicing desktops and laptops. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/01/5-aws-certifications-in-237-days.html Tue, 30 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/01/5-aws-certifications-in-237-days.html Today I completed my 5th AWS Certification. Something which I had hoped to complete before the end of 2017, but life got in the way. I started working dabbling with AWS a while ago - signed up for a free account at way back in the end of 2014 and started to play with it, but not too much. It was not until the beginning of 2017 that I really went in full force. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/01/kubernetes-is-not-silver-bullet.html Sat, 27 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/01/kubernetes-is-not-silver-bullet.html Does the following sound familiar to you? The industry latches on to a new technology and everyone falls under its spell, a spell that makes them think this latest technology will solve any and all of the problems we have suffered from in the past. The Evolution of Illusion I experienced this phenomenon when our IT department first discovered blades. It would solve all our problems, everyone said, cabling, cooling, power, and real estate. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/01/the-aws-powershell-docker-container.html Thu, 25 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2018/01/the-aws-powershell-docker-container.html I cannot believe it is over 3 years since I created the openstack-git-env container. At the time I was really frustrated at how hard it was to get started with setting up an environment to start contributing to OpenStack. Well I have now moved on - focused primarily on AWS - and I have a good amount of PowerShell experience under my belt - but since I moved off a Windows laptop 3 years ago - I hardly use PowerShell anymore. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/11/the-cloud-walkabout-aws/ Thu, 23 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/11/the-cloud-walkabout-aws/ Some people say that once you write a book - you never stop at only one. I think I tend to agree. There is something about creating something from nothing, and even more so for me - I enjoy sharing the knowledge I have accumulated with the rest of the world. I think I have always been this way. This blog would not exist if that was not the case. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/11/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2017.html Wed, 22 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/11/keeping-kosher-at-reinvent-2017.html I hardly mix my professional and personal life here on this blog. I will every now and again throw in some thoughts and feelings from my personal beliefs into my blog posts, when appropriate. The last time I did a Jewish perspective on a technical conference was VMworld 2014 in San Francisco - VMworld - from a Religious Jewish Orthodox Perspective. It was really interesting to see the comments in the blog post and also the feedback I received on Twitter - which lead me to realization that people are completely unaware of the challenges others face because of the their religious beliefs and faith, and explaining these in a public forum - goes a really long way to help them understand https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/11/self-publishing-my-new-book.html Mon, 20 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/11/self-publishing-my-new-book.html If you have been following the hints that I have been dropping on Twitter - you may have noticed that I am about to go public with a new book. A sneak peak… #AWS #real #soon pic.twitter.com/2lwuf47q7A — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) November 16, 2017 Before I actually go live with the announcement - I would like to prepare you all for how this is going to work - because it could be slightly different from the conventional book launch you might be used to. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/10/ive-got-plan-for-reinvent-2017-do-you.html Fri, 27 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/10/ive-got-plan-for-reinvent-2017-do-you.html I am no IT conference novice. I’ve attended several VMworld events over the years (last year, together with over 25,000 other IT professionals). But even though I’ve been in this business for quite a while — since the days when cloud was known as “virtualization” — I haven’t been to re:Invent before. This year, I knew it was time. Over the years, as virtualization evolved into cloud, my skills and knowledge evolved, from hardware to VMware to cloud (with VMware) and then open-source cloud (with OpenStack), then containers, Docker, and now, most recently, the major public cloud providers. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/08/pay-parity-gender-diversity-and-all.html Tue, 22 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/08/pay-parity-gender-diversity-and-all.html The past few weeks have been a bumpy ride for the folks at Google - and before hand Uber was the center of a pretty big scandal. The gender-diversity thing is really getting out of hand. People are different. Men&women are different. Not better or worse. Live with it. — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) August 8, 2017 TLDR; What was portrayed in the Google letter was completely wrong - but also completely right as well! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/08/public-speaking-like-yknow.html Tue, 01 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/08/public-speaking-like-yknow.html <RANT /ON> I was rubbed the wrong way today - listening to a podcast. This is a podcast that I hold in high regard, the hosts are people I have had multiple conversations with over the years and they are well renowned and public speakers. This is a problem with society as a whole so I will not name the podcast as to not single them out - but I will use them as an example. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/07/buying-car-or-understanding-aas-concept.html Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/07/buying-car-or-understanding-aas-concept.html This past week - I have been working a lot with an account team to provide an RFP for a potential customer, and it is quite clear that sometimes the sales teams do not understand what an As-A-Service solution means, and even more so - from the potential customers list of requirements that was part of the RFP - they have absolutely no idea either. A colleague of mine came up a great way of explaining what aaS is and how to explain to your potential customers. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/07/cloud-agnostic-friend-or-foe.html Tue, 25 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/07/cloud-agnostic-friend-or-foe.html I have been working on a project for a while that includes the deployment of a large number of moving parts that are in a significant state of flux. Drops every two weeks, new features added all the time, and, of course, with a system this size there is a great amount of complexity involved. Complexity in the Continuous Integration stage, complexity with the end-to-end testing, and, definitely, complexity with the Continuous Deployment. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/07/what-is-hyperconverged-infrastructure.html Mon, 17 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/07/what-is-hyperconverged-infrastructure.html Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appears to have been confusing people ever since 2012, when the term was first coined by Steve Chambers and Forrester Research. While computing experts agree on the basics of HCI as a system of IT that’s intended to bring a more powerful virtualized infrastructure to big enterprise, there is still a lot of disagreement as to what defines and delineates HCI. By the standard definition, in HCI the elements of computing, SAN, and networking are virtualized and all the networking and storage tasks are implemented virtually using software rather than physically in hardware. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/06/giving-just-for-sake-of-giving.html Tue, 20 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/06/giving-just-for-sake-of-giving.html There comes a time in one’s life where you ask yourself, “Is this it? Is this all I am doing? Is this all I want to do?” There are people who love their job, I do. I get to deal with technology all day, every day and at all hours of the day. I learn new things - all the time. I solve problems and sometimes I even amaze myself (and others) at what we accomplish and how we actually manage to do what others said could not be done. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/04/3-things-i-learned-week-17.html Fri, 28 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/04/3-things-i-learned-week-17.html As you might have noticed, weeks 15 and 16 are missing – life just got in the way – my apologies. Life does go on and so do I (and no – I am not going to post 9 things this week – to make up for it), so here are three thing that I learned this week. There is a great analogy of the On Pioneers, Settlers and Towns Planners Or Understanding My Personal Brand – from Matt Brender (now Broberg). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/04/3-things-i-learned-week-14.html Fri, 07 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/04/3-things-i-learned-week-14.html I spent most of the half the week in Texas, and the other getting ready for Pesach. Here are 3 things that I learned this week. JFK was assassinated in 1963, and to this day – there are so many unanswered questions. It was interesting to see that two Jewish Orthodox Scholars (Weiss and Ashkenazi) played such an important part in uncovering the fact that there was a 4th shot from the grassy knoll. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/04/3-things-i-learned-week-13.html Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/04/3-things-i-learned-week-13.html I have spent most of the week here in Texas at an internal DevOps conference. As things go with these kind of events – the most interesting parts are always those where you speak to others – outside of the informal sessions. Here are 3 things I learned this week. Our youth is amazing. My daughter was one of sixty 11th and 12th graders that presented the summary of here thesis that she has been doing in researching remodeling of neurons, neuro-transmitters, and the mushroom-body. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/03/3-things-i-learned-week-12.html Fri, 24 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/03/3-things-i-learned-week-12.html I am a bit late with this post – life has really gotten mad as I get ready for a trip to the US next week. Here are 3 things I learned this week. Here is a great read on how taking control of AWS costs – can save you a huge amount of money -The million dollar engineering problem Here is a nice AWS solution based on Lambda to monitor if you are coming close to a resource limit on your AWS account (something that happened many times this week) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/03/3-things-i-learned-week-11.html Fri, 17 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/03/3-things-i-learned-week-11.html Crazy week – but one of the best I have had. I work with an amazing team of people – who have accomplished the almost impossible. Beside working weird and wild hours, here are 3 things that I learned this week. From dotCloud to Docker is a relaly good read about how docker started out a few years ago. It is hard to believe that is has evolved into what it has today. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/03/3-things-i-learned-week-9_10.html Fri, 10 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/03/3-things-i-learned-week-9_10.html Well – another week has gone by – and winter is practically over here in Israel. Learning never stops and here are 3 things that caught my eye this week. This is a great set of posts about how Evernote moved their whole infrastructure to Google Cloud. Part 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5. docker-aws is a nifty little container – with all the tools you will need to interact with AWS. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/03/3-things-i-learned-week-9.html Fri, 03 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/03/3-things-i-learned-week-9.html Honestly this week has not been my best – far too much going on at work – after work and yet there are always new things that I learn. I tried to upgrade my Raspberry Pi to an updated version – it did not go well. But all is not lost, after installing Minibian which is perfect for my needs – I was well on my way again with less RAM and resources in use. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/02/3-things-i-learned-week-8.html Fri, 24 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/02/3-things-i-learned-week-8.html All in all this has been a good week – some ups, some downs – but knowledge is a never ending journey. Here are some of the things I learned about over the last few days. Randy Bias wrote a very interesting point about how risky it can be to ‘check’ your into a CI/CD pipeline. Continuous Delusion at the Infrastructure Layer is a good read at understanding thta not everything belongs in the pipeline – you should consider how big your blast radius is. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/02/3-things-i-learned-week-7.html Fri, 17 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/02/3-things-i-learned-week-7.html A week where our Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu went to visit President Trump in the U.S. will always be an interesting one – no matter how you look at it. Here are some things that enriched my knowledge this week. One of the things that someone told me regarding AWS and IAM roles attached to a instance – was that you only have a single chance of assigning a role, and once you do it, that’s it – no going back. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/02/3-things-i-learned-week-6.html Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/02/3-things-i-learned-week-6.html Where has the time gone by? This past week – I was up to my neck in architectural discussions and meetings for a big upcoming project on AWS. Nevertheless - here are three things I learned this week. Many a time I want to look at a file and what better way to do that than with less . But then comes that moment where you want to actually edit the because you see a mistake. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/02/i-am-running-for-openstack-user.html Thu, 09 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/02/i-am-running-for-openstack-user.html Two days ago I decided to submit my candidacy for one of the two spots up for election (for the first time!) on the OpenStack User committee. I am pasting my proposal verbatim (original email link here)… Good evening to you all. As others have so kindly stepped up - I would also like to self-nominate myself for as candidate for the User committee. I have been involved in the OpenStack community since the Icehouse release. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/02/3-things-i-learned-week-5.html Fri, 03 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/02/3-things-i-learned-week-5.html January has come and gone – and of course this week is no different than the last – always something new. Exposing everything to the outside world is never a good idea, but there are times where you have to leave something open in order to manage everything else in the remote location. That is where a bastion host comes in. How to Record SSH Sessions Established Through a Bastion Host – is a really interesting way of monitoring what is happening on this node – and how to create an audit trail. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/01/3-things-i-learned-week-4.html Fri, 27 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/01/3-things-i-learned-week-4.html Another week has gone by. Children have a totally different outlook on life. At a family meal this week we were talking about life insurance – why it is needed – and how that money can help the family that is left behind in a financial way. My 11 year daughter asked – what would we do with all of her money – if something would actually happen to her (heaven forbid). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/01/3-things-i-learned-week-3.html Fri, 20 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/01/3-things-i-learned-week-3.html This week has been a busy one. So here goes… Netflix is big.. Really big. Their monthly bill is 100’s of MB in size, it contains over 800 million lines of information. Netflix has a dedicated Hadoop cluster – whose only purpose is to load their bill (I find that hilarious!) Seriously though – this presentation from AWS re:Invent 2016 is a treasure trove of information – and well worth spending less than an hour on. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/01/my-goals-for-2017-q1.html Mon, 16 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/01/my-goals-for-2017-q1.html I was thinking of putting up a post about what I want to achieve in 2017 – but I think that I would really be kidding myself – trying to set expectations for the next 12 months. Making plans for the next 12 months are always great – it is good to have a vision of what you want to do in the long run, but as we all know, in our field things are so dynamic – and especially when working Agile – which is per sprint (between 2-3 week periods), making plans for the 12 months – is something that is not that realistic and will change over time. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/01/3-things-i-learned-week-2.html Fri, 13 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2017/01/3-things-i-learned-week-2.html We are constantly learning, evolving and improving (well at least I hope we are). Personally I learn new things each and every day, not all of them are technology related, but still – I am pleased to say that knowledge is really infinite and we should actually never stop. I am going to try and post a short note with three (it will sometimes be hard) things that I learned about this week. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/10/pre-openstack-summit-post.html Tue, 25 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/10/pre-openstack-summit-post.html I am on my way to the summit – cutting it fine, as I will only be arriving after the keynotes have started on Day 1. That is part of my life being a religious orthodox Jew. Just a few hours ago, I finished the festival of Sukkot, a festival where we ‘leave’ our homes for 8 days and move to a temporary house. Well not really leave the house – but we eat all our meals in the Sukkah for the whole festival. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/10/vmware-on-aws-my-thoughts.html Sun, 16 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/10/vmware-on-aws-my-thoughts.html The world shook a few days ago, with the announcement of a partnership between VMware and AWS. There are a number of posts that have been released, by a number of bloggers and analysts, about what this actually means but I would like to highlight 3 of them, and also insights from the Joint announcement and my thoughts on the matter as whole. VMware and Amazon Web Services Announce Strategic Partnership (Charu Chaubal) VMware Cloud on AWS – A Closer Look (Frank Denneman) In the Works – VMware Cloud on AWS (Jeff Barr) So first some history, VMware has always perceived AWS as a competitor. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/10/saying-thank-you.html Fri, 14 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/10/saying-thank-you.html So if I am already on a roll with saying thank you, I wanted to share wiith you all a post I wrote on LinkedIn a month ago (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/saying-thank-you-maish-saidel-keesing) Reposting it here in it’s entirety. Two small words, but they make so much of a difference. We take things for granted - every single day. Life Breathing Our kids Our family Electricity Email All of these are things that we interact with every day, and only when they do not work, things go wrong, or are no longer there - do we wonder. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/10/a-small-note-to-thank-two-new-sponsors.html Thu, 13 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/10/a-small-note-to-thank-two-new-sponsors.html Writing a blog is mostly fun, but it comes with a cost not only of time and effort but also some cold hard cash (or actually everything is paid today with a credit and it all just numbers on a spreadsheet..) be it for Webhosting, Domain registration – well you all know the drill. So it is time to thank two new Sponsors of this blog. solarwinds – who have many products for the IT / Network / DB / VMware Admin and some of them are even free. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/10/i-dont-want-to-talk-to-my-cloud-provider.html Sun, 09 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/10/i-dont-want-to-talk-to-my-cloud-provider.html A short while back I participated in an internal event. A number of priority customers of our internal cloud service were invited for a feedback session, to voice their thoughts, listen to roadmap sessions and just to get to know each other. There was one comment made there by one of the participants that has been on my mind since then, and it was something along the lines of: “I have been using AWS longer than I have been using our internal cloud service – that is more than 5 years. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/09/losing-will-to-share.html Tue, 20 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/09/losing-will-to-share.html I assume that it has been apparent that I have not been active on my blog. Not for a while at least. The last time I actually wrote something here was just under 6 months ago. I do enjoy information, I love consuming information – but about 6 months ago I lost my will to write here on my own blog. It is a shame – because I thoroughly enjoy this as my own place in the world, my place where I could vent, where I could provide insight, a place I could call my own. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/05/sandboxed-malware-testing-with-veertu.html Fri, 20 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/05/sandboxed-malware-testing-with-veertu.html A while back I blogged about native virtualization on a Mac, and today I am pleased to host Clarence Chio with a guest post about a very interesting use case for using Veertu. Clarence is a Security Research Engineer at Shape Security, working on the system that tackles malicious bot intrusion from the angle of big data analysis. Clarence has presented independent research on Machine Learning and Security at Information Security conferences in several countries, and is also the organizer of the “Data Mining for Cyber Security” meetup group in the SF Bay Area. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/03/we-are-all-openstack-are-we-really.html Thu, 24 Mar 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/03/we-are-all-openstack-are-we-really.html Background OpenStack has a vast community, globally distributed, spanning multiple time zones and all sorts and kinds. The community has a culture - a charter, a way of doing things. It is something that you have to learn how to get used to - because the lay of the land is not always as straight forward as you would expect, not what you are accustomed to, and sometimes it might see downright weird. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/02/there-is-no-root-cause-only.html Mon, 01 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/02/there-is-no-root-cause-only.html I participated a week or two ago in the DevOpsJRS meetup in Cisco Jerusalem. Our guest speaker was Avishai Ish-Shalom. I always enjoy Avishai’s talks, he is a great speaker, a down to earth guy, and I have had the opportunity and pleasure to work with him several times in the past. One of the slides that he posted included the following: There is no such a thing as root cause, only contributing factors /via @nukemberg #DevOpsJRS https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/01/native-mac-osx-virtualization-with.html Tue, 05 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2016/01/native-mac-osx-virtualization-with.html I was contacted today by Izik Eidus, an old acquaintance from Ravello which I was really impressed with their technology and introduced them in this post. I assume that not many of you know that Apple released native hypervisor functionality with their OSX Yosemite release, their Hypervisor.framework. What this does is it allows you to run a VM natively on OSX, without the need for client hypervisor (such as VMware Fusion or VirtualBox). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/11/is-openstack-leopard-changing-its-spots.html Mon, 16 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/11/is-openstack-leopard-changing-its-spots.html A short while back I tweeted the following: Has hell frozen over? There is actual talk about prioritizing stability over landing new features. Times are a changin' #OpenStack — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) November 5, 2015 This was a result of me reading the minutes of the OpenStack Technical committee from November 3rd, 2015 (full log is here) What pleasantly surprises me is that this might finally becoming a viable option. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/08/pillar-2-operations-engineers.html Sun, 27 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/08/pillar-2-operations-engineers.html This is second post in the The Three Pillars of DevOps series Part 1 – The Three Pillars of DevOps Part 2 – Pillar #1 - Developers Part 3 – Pillar #2 - Operations Engineers Part 4 – Pillar #3 - Management In this post we will dive in to the second pillar – Operations Engineers. Being part of the Pillar Allow everyone to consume your infrastructure Infrastructure is there to be used. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/08/pillar-3-management.html Sun, 27 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/08/pillar-3-management.html This is third post in the The Three Pillars of DevOps series Part 1 – The Three Pillars of DevOps Part 2 – Pillar #1 - Developers Part 3 – Pillar #2 - Operations Engineers Part 4 – Pillar #3 - Management In this post we will dive in to the third pillar – Management. Being part of the Pillar DevOps is a cultural change Most people do not like change. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/09/nsx-62-is-available-for-download.html Tue, 08 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/09/nsx-62-is-available-for-download.html Since this has been totally unavailable up until now (except for a select few), it is great to see that it now available for public download As has been said a number of times before (here and here), it was not possible to get hold of NSX unless you had specifically been given access. There were a number of reasons for this – some I agree with, some I do not. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/08/pillar-1-developers.html Thu, 27 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/08/pillar-1-developers.html This is second post in the The Three Pillars of DevOps series Part 1 – The Three Pillars of DevOps Part 2 – Pillar #1 - Developers Part 3 – Pillar #2 - Operations Engineers Part 4 – Pillar #3 - Management In this post we will dive in to the first pillar – Developers. I apologize in advance – but I will be using a number of stereotypes in this series – on purpose. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/08/the-three-pillars-of-devops.html Thu, 27 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/08/the-three-pillars-of-devops.html I apologize for plagiarizing the holy concept of The Three Pillars, but I do think that a foundation needs to be laid down for a healthy DevOps culture to thrive and even survive. And I would like to share with you some of my thought on this. To be true to the agile methodology it would only be appropriate that instead of talking about pillars I prefer to talk about personas. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/08/powershell-profile-tricks-for-better.html Wed, 26 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/08/powershell-profile-tricks-for-better.html My new post on some PowerShell Profile tricks for VMware has been published on the Petri IT knowledgebase. As an IT pro, we rely on scripts to manage our VMware environment, which helps us be more efficient throughout our work day. In this article, I’d like to share some PowerShell profile tricks that are specific to VMware. These are tricks that I use on a daily basis, which I think you’ll find helpful . https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/07/openstack-summit-voting-by-numbers.html Wed, 29 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/07/openstack-summit-voting-by-numbers.html I love diving into numbers – especially when it has something to do with technology conferences. But before I do that I would to bring to your attention my two sessions that I have submitted for the upcoming summit (Shameless Plug.. ) Me Tarzan, you Jane (or Operators are not Developers) Welcoming Operators to the OpenStack Jungle. A year ago I set out on a journey on trying to help the OpenStack developer community understand the other (and sometimes not well understood) side of the OpenStack community, its users. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/07/hybrid-vs-public-google-joins-openstack.html Mon, 20 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/07/hybrid-vs-public-google-joins-openstack.html This was a big piece of news last week. There are some that even are suggesting (but not really) that the Google stock jumped drastically as a result of this announcement, I personally find that just a good joke (and some wishful thinking). A snippet from the Google post: As we look to the future of computing in the enterprise, we see two important trends emerging. The first is a move towards the hybrid cloud. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/07/registration-is-open-for-openstack.html Mon, 13 Jul 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/07/registration-is-open-for-openstack.html Even though we still do not know what the next release of OpenStack will yet be called (due to some community naming issues) – this is still an event I am very much looking forward to. Registration is open for the event. Early bird tickets are $600 (until August 31st, 2015) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/06/downloading-all-sessions-from-openstack.html Sun, 28 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/06/downloading-all-sessions-from-openstack.html A question was just posted to the OpenStack mailing list – and this is not the first time I have seen this request. Can openstack conference video files be downloaded? A while back I wrote a post about how you can download all the vBrownBag sessions from the past OpenStack summit. Same thing applies here, with a slight syntax change. You can use the same tool – youtube-dl (just the version has changed since that post – and therefore some of the syntax is different as well). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/06/the-openstack-summit-kilo-summit-recap.html Mon, 01 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/06/the-openstack-summit-kilo-summit-recap.html I have been home for just over a week from my trip to Vancouver for the OpenStack Kilo Summit (or Liberty Design Summit – take your pick). It was a whirlwind of week, jam packed with sessions, conversations, meetings, presentations and community events. There were a number of insights that I took with me and I would like to share with you in this post, and also in some upcoming posts in the future. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/05/integrating-openstack-into-your-jenkins.html Sun, 17 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/05/integrating-openstack-into-your-jenkins.html This is a re-post of my interview with Jason Baker of opensource.com Continuous integration and continuous delivery are changing the way software developers create and deploy software. For many developers, Jenkins is the go-to tool for making CI/CD happen. But how easy is it to integrate Jenkins with your OpenStack cloud platform? Meet Maish Saidel-Keesing. Maish is a platform architect for Cisco in Israel focused on making OpenStack serve as a platform upon which video services can be deployed. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/05/some-vendors-i-will-visit-at-openstack.html Wed, 13 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/05/some-vendors-i-will-visit-at-openstack.html At all technology conference I always like to go on to Floor / Marketplace / Solutions Exchange – where vendors try to get your attention and market their product. Going over the list of vendors from Summit site, the list below are some of the less know companies (at least to me) that caught my eye and I would like to go over during the summit and see what they have to say. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/05/get-ready-for-openstack-summit.html Mon, 11 May 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/05/get-ready-for-openstack-summit.html The OpenStack community is converging on Vancouver next week for the bi-annual summit for all things OpenStack. I am glad to be joining the event and I would like to share with you a short outline of what public events and activities I will participating in. Monday May 18th, 13:30 – OSpod with Niki Akosta and Jeff Dickey Monday May 18th, 15:00 - vBrownbag Presentation, “The Oh..!! moment in OpenStack” Tuesday May 19th, 17:30 - The Jenkins Plugin for OpenStack: Simple and Painless CI/CD Wednesday May 20th, 09:00 – OpenStack and Beyond Podcast The rest of my time will be spread out over the Cross-Project workshops, the Ops sessions, other sessions and activities. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/04/why-i-decided-to-run-for-openstack.html Mon, 27 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/04/why-i-decided-to-run-for-openstack.html As of late I have been thinking long and hard about if I can in some way contribute in a more efficient way into the OpenStack community. Almost all of my focus today is on OpenStack, on its architecture and how to deploy certain solutions on top such an infrastructure. What is the Technical Committee? It is a group of 13 elected people by the OpenStack ATC’s (Active Technical contributors – a. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/04/openstack-israel-cfp-voting-is-open.html Mon, 20 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/04/openstack-israel-cfp-voting-is-open.html I would like to bring to your attention that the voting for the sessions for the upcoming OpenStack Israel Summit on June 15th, 2015 is now open. Make your voice heard and participate in setting the agenda for the event! You can find more information and the presentation that I gave last year in this post Recap - Openstack Israel 2014 #OpenStackIL and for your convenience I have embedded the recording below. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/04/the-chefs-special-and-trusted-solutions.html Mon, 06 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/04/the-chefs-special-and-trusted-solutions.html It is funny where one gets the idea for a blog post from. I was sitting in a restaurant last month in San Jose, one of the only two kosher ones in the area, and I ordered the chef’s special. So it was grilled salmon, mashed potatoes and grilled vegetables. It was tasty, the flavors blended very well. Which got me thinking. What made the chef choose that combination? Why those three? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/installing-openstack-cli-clients-on-mac.html Thu, 26 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/installing-openstack-cli-clients-on-mac.html I usually have a Linux VM that I use to perform some of my remote management tasks, such a OpenStack CLI commands. But since I now have a Mac (and yes I am in enjoying it!!) I thought why not do it natively on my Mac. The official documentation on installing clients is on the OpenStack site. This is how I got it done. Firstly install pip easy_install pip Now to install the clients (keystone, glance, heat, nova, neutron, cinder, swift and the new OpenStack client) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/deploying-vcsa-60-appliance-directly.html Thu, 19 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/deploying-vcsa-60-appliance-directly.html Hey… Is that even possible? It seems that it is not – at least that is what I heard this week over Twitter. The documentation also says the same thing. When trying to put in a vCenter as the target for deployment it will throw an error. I actually find this really silly and a really weird move on behalf of VMware. Why limit this to connecting directly to an ESXi host? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/vsphere-60-release-notes-part-2.html Sat, 14 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/vsphere-60-release-notes-part-2.html This is the second half of my thoughts on the vSphere 6.0 release notes. Part 1 can be found here Disclaimer: These are my own thought and ramblings. I think they should be questions you should be asking VMware, your TAM and the support people. These are not the only items in the Release Notes - just those that got my attention. Your mileage may differ and there may be other things that are of importance in the original document. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/vsphere-60-is-here-read-release-notes.html Fri, 13 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/vsphere-60-is-here-read-release-notes.html I make the time whenever a product is released to go over the release notes – because there are always tidbits of information there that you should know about and usually it will save you time in the long run – understanding what you are getting into and staying out of trouble. I have traditionally done this for vSphere 5.1, 5.1.0a and 5.5. So as always, the first things I do when a new version is released is: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/vcenter-is-still-single-point-of.html Tue, 10 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/vcenter-is-still-single-point-of.html My previous post vCenter is Still a Single Point of Failure caused a decent amount of discussion on Twitter and comments on the blog. I am actually glad about that because it raised a point that I think has been neglected for quite some time – and is finally being addressed. Today I learned that the Availability Guide was recently updated – and there were a number of changes (the original version is no longer available – but are we all lucky that I have screenshots). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/is-smp-fault-tolerance-even-useful.html Mon, 02 Mar 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/03/is-smp-fault-tolerance-even-useful.html Last week I got into a very interesting Twitter conversation regarding whether FT is a solution worth using and why. The short version of this post – in my honest opinion the answer is a definite NO! but I cannot leave you with that kind of a statement without explaining in detail why. So here goes. A quick quote from VMware’s site as to what Fault Tolerance is useful for https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/02/vmware-integrated-openstack-cost.html Tue, 10 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/02/vmware-integrated-openstack-cost.html VMware announced last week the launch of VIO and there are a number of things that I think people are missing and should be pointed out. The information I have taken is from the Datasheet and publicly available information. Networking A great part of the the functionality and flexibility that people use is the option for flexible networking, i.e. creating private networks, routers for example. That is great – all the functionality is there – with NSX. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/01/the-openstack-elections-another-look.html Wed, 21 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/01/the-openstack-elections-another-look.html The Board of directors and the bylaws were approved. Summary posts can be found here (2015 Individual Director Election results) and here (Bylaws amendments approved). Individual Directors Tim Bell Russell Bryant Alex Freedland Rob Hirschfeld Vishvananda Ishaya Kavit Munshi Egle Sigler Monty Taylor The voting numbers can be found here. Congratulations to all the new and re-elected board members. Well deserved! I have a few things I would like to add about the data that was presented – and my thoughts. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/01/the-openstack-foundation-2015.html Thu, 15 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/01/the-openstack-foundation-2015.html Well I am happy to say that the election is underway and I have already voted. Kenneth Hui had an interesting post about how OpenStack Is A Social Contract and how people in the OpenStack community should be rushing to vote. I had a few thoughts about the change of quorum that is proposed. Current bylaws: A majority of the Individual Members voting (but only if at least 25% of the Individual Members vote at an annual or special meeting). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/01/recording-of-devopsdays-tlv-2014.html Mon, 12 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2015/01/recording-of-devopsdays-tlv-2014.html I would like to share with you the recording of the presentation I gave at DevOpsDays Israel – more information about the presentation can be found here. It was interesting to hear the feedback from people – especially the developers, on how they do not know the other side of things. I think it was educational – and useful for all those who attended. Presentation at DevOpsDays Tel Aviv 2014 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/12/how-did-2014-turn-out-for-you.html Wed, 31 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/12/how-did-2014-turn-out-for-you.html 60 Blog posts in a 2014 – sometimes I don’t understand how that happens. Is that a lot? A little? I have always said that I do not blog for the sake of blogging, but to share information and my thoughts. It is good to see that people find this useful – and do take an interest in what I have to say. The 5 posts that received the highest number of visitors in the past year were: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/12/vcenter-is-still-single-point-of-failure.html Thu, 11 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/12/vcenter-is-still-single-point-of-failure.html A few days ago VMware (Mike Brown, Anil Kapur and Justin King are the authors) announced the updated document for the vCenter Server 5.5 Availability guide. I would like to make clear a few things from the start. This is not a VMware bashing post. (Even it might be perceived as such) I hold all three of the authors in very high regard. Here goes. When reading this document I was hoping to hear something new, something refreshing, something that VMware customers have been asking and verbally complaining about for a very long time. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/12/keeping-up-to-date-with-openstack.html Mon, 08 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/12/keeping-up-to-date-with-openstack.html OpenStack is a living product – and because it is community driven - changes are being proposed almost constantly. So how do you keep up with all of these proposed changes? And even more so why would you? The answer to the second question is because if you are interested in the projects then you should be following what is going on. In addition there could be cases where you see that the proposed blueprint could break something that you currently use or is in directly contradiction to what you are trying to do – and you should leave your feedback. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/12/landing-your-first-openstack.html Tue, 02 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/12/landing-your-first-openstack.html In my previous post I showed you how to get your OpenStack git environment up and running by using a container. In this post we will go through the steps needed to actually contribute code. This will not be a detailed tutorial on how to use git and gerrit, and its functionality, but rather a simple step by step tutorial on how to get your code submitted for review in OpenStack. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/12/introducing-virl-personal-edition.html Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/12/introducing-virl-personal-edition.html This is an internal Cisco tool which is so useful – that I am really pleased that it is finally available for public consumption. VIRL Stands for Virtual Internet Routing Lab What Is VIRL? **_VIRL is comprehensive network design and simulation platform. VIRL includes a powerful graphical user interface for network design and simulation control, a configuration engine that can build complete Cisco configuration at the push of a button, Cisco virtual machines running same network operating systems as used in Cisco’s physical routers and switches, all running on top of OpenStack. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/start-contributing-to-openstack-easy.html Thu, 27 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/start-contributing-to-openstack-easy.html One of the most daunting and complicated things people find when trying to provide feedback and suggestions to the OpenStack community, projects and code – is the nuts and bolts of actually getting this done. There are a number of tutorials around. The official kind - HowTo for FirstTimers, Documentation HowTo, Gerrit Workflow. Scott Lowe also posted a good tutorial on Setting up the Tools for Contributing to OpenStack Documentation. But the process itself is still clunky, complicated and for someone who has never used git or gerrit before – highly intimidating. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/automating-blog-retweets.html Mon, 24 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/automating-blog-retweets.html I love IFTTT – it is a simple way to automate things. If This Then That. If something happens – then do something else. I am already using a number of IFTTT recipes to help me in automating my daily life. I do not use Wordpress – Blogger suits my needs very well, It has its upsides and downsides. When I publish a blog post – I like to update my social networks with the announcement. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/presenting-ignite-way.html Sun, 23 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/presenting-ignite-way.html Today I gave a presentation – actually two – but they were very different. How many of you have heard about Ignite? Ignite is the name for a particular type of event that is held throughout the world—organized by volunteers—at which participants speak about their ideas and personal or professional passions according to a specific format. The event holds the motto, “Enlighten us, but make it quick!” Anyone can throw an Ignite event. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/devs-are-from-mars-ops-are-from-venus.html Thu, 20 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/devs-are-from-mars-ops-are-from-venus.html I will be delivering a talk at the upcoming DevOpsDays Tel Aviv which will be on this coming Sunday and Monday. DevOps is one of my personal interests, especially educating of the other side of the table, the developers, as I do not see myself as one but rather an Operations kind of guy. I will also be delivering an Ignite session about Using Social Media As a Tool in Your Daily Work. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/how-operators-can-get-involved-in-kilo.html Wed, 05 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/how-operators-can-get-involved-in-kilo.html I participated on Monday in the Ops Summit: How to get involved in Kilo, and as these sessions are not recorded I wanted to convey the messages that were conveyed at the session. But first, the Ops Summit is a mini 2-day set of sessions that were introduced at the previous summit to get the feedback of the people actually using OpenStack and their problems and issues that they are encountering. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/on-my-way-to-openstack-summit.html Sun, 02 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/11/on-my-way-to-openstack-summit.html I am currently writing this post from the plane on the way to the summit in Paris. For those of you who are living under a rock, or were completely unaware, this is the biannual “pilgrimage” of all thing OpenStack. This coincides with the Juno release that was went GA less than 3 weeks ago. This is only my second summit, I have but I am really looking forward to bumping into some familiar faces, and making new acquaintances. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/10/nova-docker-on-juno.html Tue, 28 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/10/nova-docker-on-juno.html Containers are hot. It is the latest buzzword. Unfortunately buzzwords are not always the right way to go, but I have been wanting to use containers as a first class citizen on OpenStack for a while. In Icehouse, Heat has support for containers but only in the sense that you can launch an instance and then launch a container within that instance (Scott Lowe – has a good walkthrough for this – it is a great read). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/10/it-is-all-about-resource-abstraction.html Mon, 13 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/10/it-is-all-about-resource-abstraction.html I am here sitting here at the blogger table on Day-0 (Partner Day) of VMworld in Barcelona, and it is time to close some technical debt (well not really technical but it would be better to call it blogging debt). If there is one thing that VMware have been doing a great job over the years is abstracting resources, and by that I mean making it easier and easier for end users to use the underlying resources in your infrastructure. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/09/vmworld-from-religious-jewish-orthodox.html Tue, 30 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/09/vmworld-from-religious-jewish-orthodox.html I am sure you have all been reading the numerous amount of posts recapping VMworld and their experiences. My RSS feed has been overflowing and it has taken a while to get through it all. This will not be my only VMworld post, but one with which I would like give you all my personal perspective of how I went through VMworld, but not from a technical perspective, but from a personal one just before we start with VMworld 2014 Europe. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/09/aws-summit-tel-aviv-2014.html Tue, 23 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/09/aws-summit-tel-aviv-2014.html Last week I attended the AWS Tech Summit in Tel Aviv. The Conference is growing. 500 attendees 2 years ago, 1000 last year, 1500 attendees this year. There was an impressive Solutions Expo, with a quite a number of companies. I enjoyed the Keynote given by Dr. Werner Vogels (VP & CTO). He is great and passionate speaker. There was one thing that I found quite enlightening and one of the key takeaways for me from the conference. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/09/my-toolbox-is-becoming-heavy.html Mon, 22 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/09/my-toolbox-is-becoming-heavy.html I would like to add one or two more points points to my previous post - An Open Letter to the OpenStack Foundation. I used Ceilometer as an example, and only as an example. I am more than sure that there are perfectly valid reasons to have chosen MongoDB instead of MySQL. I have no doubt. But doing so this still introduces more complexity. Paul Richards left a comment – and because of his example – I think this just made thoughts even clearer. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/09/an-open-letter-to-openstack-foundation.html Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/09/an-open-letter-to-openstack-foundation.html I have recently started to regularly follow the mailing lists and the conversations are quite interesting. It is quite evident that that OpenStack is starting to go through growing pains. It was quite evident as well from OpenStack Silicon Valley 2014 that was held yesterday. OpenStack has grown from a minimal amount – where most of the developers knew each other personally, knew each others phone numbers, a good personal community – the way it should be. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/09/vmunderground-opening-acts.html Fri, 05 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/09/vmunderground-opening-acts.html The event was organized by the VMUnderground crew. The idea here was to have an activity – community driven – to give people who were interested in something to do on the day before VMworld – Sunday. Yes you could mess around and go sightseeing – all of that is fun – but most of us are techies at heart – and we need our tech fix, so unless you were part of Partner Day or TAM day, there was not much you could do today. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/the-often-overlooked-side-of-vmworld.html Tue, 12 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/the-often-overlooked-side-of-vmworld.html VMworld is almost upon us. I am personally looking forward mostly to the social networking part and of course also delivering my first VMworld presentation (NET3160-SPO). I wrote a summary post last year VMworld 2013 has Come and Gone where I described my experience from last year. Today I would like to touch on a slightly sensitive topic – because it is a two edged sword (so bear with me please). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/to-innovate-or-to-stabilize-that-is.html Mon, 11 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/to-innovate-or-to-stabilize-that-is.html There has been a lively thread on the openstack-dev mailing list these past few days, largely to do with GBP. I don’t want to go into the intricacies of what exactly sparked the discussion but rather to discuss one of the by products that came out of it. OpenStack is now 4, and on its ninth cycle of development. There has been a huge amount of innovation that has gone into the product and I think that the community is now coming to a stage where these growing pains are starting to show. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/the-openstack-architecture-design-book.html Fri, 08 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/the-openstack-architecture-design-book.html In the OpenStack Design Summit I asked the authors the same 5 questions in order to get their thoughts and feelings on OpenStack, the community and the future. How many years have you been working with OpenStack? What is your favorite thing about OpenStack? What is that you dislike about OpenStack? If there was only one thing you could change/improve in OpenStack - what would it be? Where do you think Openstack will be 3 years time? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/openstack-paris-summit-session-voting.html Wed, 06 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/openstack-paris-summit-session-voting.html We are down to the wire – last two days to vote for the sessions you would like see at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Paris. There are a large number of categories that you can choose from as you can see below: You will need an account to cast your vote. It is quite interesting to see that some of the sessions are targeted at how you can migrate your workloads away from VMware and onto OpenStack, something that I think people will be looking into a lot more in the near future. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/the-openstack-architecture-design-guide.html Mon, 04 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/the-openstack-architecture-design-guide.html Over 6 weeks ago I posted that I was going to embark on a journey, another book journey, and this time it was an OpenStack one. Go ahead and read the post OpenStack Design Guide Book Sprint. I have been wanting to write this for a while – but so much has been happening – that I just have not yet got around it until now. I first would like you all to visit these two posts: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/vmworld-is-3-weeks-away.html Mon, 04 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/08/vmworld-is-3-weeks-away.html Yep, that is 21 days. I do not think there is any need to introduce VMworld to the readers of my blog. I would like to share with you some (and by no means a comprehensive list) of the activities I will be partaking in during VMworld. Opening Acts 2014 — Panel Agenda - Sunday August 24th I will be a panelist in the Architecture & Infrastructure Panel. Opening Acts will be a series of group/panel discussions over the course of a few hours on Sunday afternoon. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/vmci-revisited-aka-project-marvin.html Mon, 28 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/vmci-revisited-aka-project-marvin.html You all know what VMCI stands for – don’t you? Well if you ever looked at VMware solutions – then you would recognize it - VMCI Overview. The Virtual Machine Communication Interface (VMCI) is an infrastructure that provides fast and efficient communication between a virtual machine and the host operating system and between two or more virtual machines on the same host. The VMCI SDK facilitates development of applications that use the VMCI infrastructure. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/openstack-summit-its-all-about.html Tue, 22 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/openstack-summit-its-all-about.html This one has been sitting in the drafts for a while. What pushed me to publish and finish this post was an article posted by Brian Gracely, Will Paris be the last OpenStack Summit? The Openstack Summit is actually two separate tracks – one for users, and a second for developers. It is just by “chance” (not really) that they are held at the same location – at the same time – because they are catered for two very different audiences. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/recording-of-my-presentation-at.html Mon, 21 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/recording-of-my-presentation-at.html Embedded below you can find the recording of my session “OpenStack in the Enterprise - Are you Ready?” You are welcome to go over the blog post I wrote about the event. The full playlist of all the sessions can be viewed here I have already submitted a few sessions for the upcoming summit in Paris. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/the-return-of-container.html Thu, 17 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/the-return-of-container.html This is an excerpt of a post published elsewhere. A link to the original is at the bottom of this excerpt Containers are not a new concept – there are several implementations that have been around for quite a number of years, be it Solaris Containers, Linux-V-Server, OpenVZ, or LXC. So why has this become a hot topic, something that has many people turning their head and looking at it once more. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/happy-fourth-birthday-openstack.html Fri, 11 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/happy-fourth-birthday-openstack.html Have a look at this infographic Mazel Tov #OpenStack! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/m-snickers-and-security-in-cloud.html Mon, 07 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/07/m-snickers-and-security-in-cloud.html I cannot take credit for this one - I heard it last week at a very interesting talk by Adrian Cockroft at the Speed and Scale Meetup last week in Herzeliya. The analogy was a very simple one, but very much to the point, and I feel that it was a great way on how we should be looking at security in the cloud. M&M’s are the one thing that me kids always ask me to bring back for them when I go to the States, especially the ones without the peanuts. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/06/back-from-openstack-cloud-summit.html Wed, 18 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/06/back-from-openstack-cloud-summit.html This is a re-post of my article, originally published on The Ravello Blog. Last month I attended the OpenStack Cloud Summit in Atlanta. It was a very interesting experience. I learned a lot of things from the people there, from the organization, and how the OpenStack cloud community works. Without a doubt, the people who are writing the code are extremely talented. They are doing unbelievable work writing things that make something out of nothing – with just a few lines of code transform your whole system into a cloud that allows you do a huge number of things. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/06/openstack-design-guide-book-sprint.html Mon, 16 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/06/openstack-design-guide-book-sprint.html It is said that once you get a bug in you – it is hard to get rid of it. I have been asked (and I have accepted) to participate in a book sprint commissioned by the OpenStack Foundation. What is a book sprint you may ask? I am sure this will explain it better than I can – but in short… A Book Sprint brings together a group to produce a book in 3-5 days. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/06/cloud-apis-and-programmatic-interfaces.html Tue, 10 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/06/cloud-apis-and-programmatic-interfaces.html This is a re-post of my article, originally published on The Ravello Blog . In talking about functionality and how a product works, people don’t always address the question of allowing interfaces into their software. As a product evolves and grows, the more important the implementation of programmatic interfaces becomes. APIs need to take the place of users sitting at keyboards to better facilitate access to interfaces, especially for large products. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/06/recap-openstack-israel-2014-openstackil.html Mon, 09 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/06/recap-openstack-israel-2014-openstackil.html It was a great event. They were expecting 300+ people at the event, and almost 500 people were there - it was really full - but not crowded. Slide Decks from the whole day can be found here. The slides from my session are embedded below, and I would like to add a few words to expand on the content. OpenStack is an amazing community - very different from the VMware one I am so acquainted with - and yet very similar in many ways. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/openstack-israel-2014-openstackil.html Wed, 28 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/openstack-israel-2014-openstackil.html I would like to invite you all to join me at the OpenStack Israel Conference that will take place next week on Monday - June 2nd, 2014. There is a stellar (their words – not mine) lineup of speakers – with a number of guests from across the globe. I highly enjoyed my experience at the last conference where I presented a session on OpenStack for VMware Admins. I will also be presenting at this event as well. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/the-quickest-way-to-get-started-with.html Tue, 27 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/the-quickest-way-to-get-started-with.html Containers are not only those things are used for shipping stuff around – or storing the things you will never use or you don’t want to spoil – they are also used (and if you ask me – might even replace virtual machines in the not to distant future) as a platform to run applications / services / stacks. Docker is one that is getting a large amount of focus lately https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/vbrownbag-at-openstack-summit.html Sun, 25 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/vbrownbag-at-openstack-summit.html There is only one thing I can say about the vBrownbag crew and their work They are AMAZING!!!! The crew on site was Jeremiah Dooley, Josh Atwell, Alastair Cooke and Eric Wright, Damian Karlson. Here is their summary post - #vBrownBag was at OpenStack Summit Atlanta The setup was super professional, the stream quality was amazing – kudos to the event team that provided super bandwidth! The location was perfect and the sessions were great. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/openstack-summit-attendees-and-sessions.html Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/openstack-summit-attendees-and-sessions.html Well the OpenStack conference has come and passed, and I promised that i would share some of my thoughts, so lets start with the first two. I plan to make these as short as possible. (Let me first say that i have only ever been to an international VMworld conference, both in the US and in Europe, so my comparisons are based against those experience). Attendees This was a smaller conference, in numbers of course, i am not sure about the size of the venue, although i do assume it is smaller than the Moscone Center in San Francisco. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/openstack-summit-some-thoughts.html Fri, 16 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/openstack-summit-some-thoughts.html Friday, the Georgia World Congress Center – and there is still a buzz all around. The official OpenStack User summit is over – and the only ones who left are the developers and operators – and we will be here the whole day until 18.00. This week has been an amazing experience – and I have learned a lot about OpenStack, Open Source and how a community behaves. I will sharing over the next couple of days some of my thoughts about the conference. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/redhat-is-in-dog-box-but-should-they-be.html Thu, 15 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/redhat-is-in-dog-box-but-should-they-be.html One topic of discussion that surfaced during the summit today was an article published on the WSJ yesterday Red Hat Plays Hardball on OpenStack Software – and shortly thereafter Barb Darrow published this one - Is Red Hat the new Oracle? Here is a relevant piece from the WSJ article: In its quest to sell OpenStack, Red Hat has chosen not to provide support to its commercial Linux customers if they use rival versions of OpenStack, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/icehousejuno-openstack-summit-2014.html Sun, 11 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/05/icehousejuno-openstack-summit-2014.html I am finally on my way to the OpenStack Summit in Atlanta. (Full schedule online) There might be some confusion about if this is the Icehouse Summit or the Juno summit – well I think it is safe to say that it is a bit of both. Icehouse is the current version of OpenStack – and the Operational track at the summit will be covering this version. The design track will be covering the next version – and that Will be Juno. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/04/a-day-of-remembrance-holocaust-day.html Sun, 27 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/04/a-day-of-remembrance-holocaust-day.html I just finished watching the opening ceremony of the Yom HaZikaron laShoah ve-laG’vurah(Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day) were both our President and Prime Minister addressed the dwindling number of Holocaust survivors that are still alive today. I do not write about politics on this on this blog and I do not do religion either. But every now and again there is something that is close to my heart that I do feel I need to share. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/04/software-defined-networks-sdn-and-cloud.html Mon, 07 Apr 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/04/software-defined-networks-sdn-and-cloud.html This is a re-post of my article, originally published on The Ravello Blog. The advent of the cloud has brought with it major changes in the size and nature of networks. These changes pose new challenges for network management. Software-defined networks (SDN) have the potential for helping network managers cope with their ever increasing workloads. In the public cloud, the network could be very different from what it is in the datacenter. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/03/the-multi-cloud-future-challenges-and.html Wed, 19 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/03/the-multi-cloud-future-challenges-and.html This is a re-post of my article, originally published on The Ravello Blog. Over the last year, as enterprise awareness of the cloud has increased, more and more enterprises outsource their workload deployments to the cloud, in most cases to a single cloud provider or vendor. But the market is rapidly changing with more and more options becoming available from a variety of public IaaS providers, including Amazon, HP, IBM, RackSpace as well as private offerings such as Openstack and VMware. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/03/vsan-unspoken-truth.html Mon, 17 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/03/vsan-unspoken-truth.html Last week VMware released the long awaited VSAN including the even more popular licensing information. Today I would like to discuss what I see as one of the points that I have yet seen to be discussed regarding VSAN – and in my eyes the most problematic. unspoken truth An unspoken truth is something in life we all know to be true but to speak it is taboo. Before I go in what this unspoken truth is of which I am talking about, I would like to congratulate the VSAN team on a job well done! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/03/how-to-launch-product.html Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/03/how-to-launch-product.html I am not a marketing genius – I don’t pretend to be – and honestly don’t think that is my line of work. I am just a customer. When you announce a product – the message should (IMHO) contain the following: What the product/offering is. The features / benefits – including technical documentation. Availability date. Cost. VMware did this at VMworld – announcing the availability of NSX. And it included 2/4 above points. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/02/lets-do-it-differently-voting-time-again.html Tue, 25 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/02/lets-do-it-differently-voting-time-again.html Last year I asked you Please do not vote for Me! and I still stand by every single word I said in that post last year – nothing has changed. I would like to re-iterate who I think you should be be voting for and why: Try not to make this into a popularity contest. Judge the bloggers on their content. Judge the bloggers on their writing skills. Judge the bloggers on their passion. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/02/openstack-session-voting.html Fri, 21 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/02/openstack-session-voting.html I have submitted three different sessions for the upcoming Openstack Summit in Atlanta. This is the first time I have submitted content for an OpenStack Summit, and I am looking forward to attend the event. I think the content of these sessions will be highly beneficial to all those who attend, and if you would like to hear some more about these topics at the Summit in May, I would appreciate your vote for one (or more) of the sessions. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/02/the-first-step-toward-devops-bridging.html Mon, 17 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/02/the-first-step-toward-devops-bridging.html This is a re-post of my article, originally published on The Ravello Blog. Without a doubt, the traditional role of IT is changing. Traditionally IT were the ones to make the decisions about all kinds of things, they ruled. Today the end user is now king – and is placing all kinds of demands on IT. Users want mobility, they want their applications to work on all of their devices and not just in the office. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/02/devops-and-fours-sons.html Tue, 11 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/02/devops-and-fours-sons.html I usually do not mix religion and technology together but there are places where they do have something in common. The Torah refers to four sons: One wise, one wicked, one simple and one who does not know how to ask a question. What does the wise son say? “What are the testimonials, statutes and laws Hashem our G-d commanded you?” You should tell him about the laws of Pesach, that one may eat no dessert after eating the Pesach offering. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/02/ucs-manager-plugin-092-beta-for-vmware.html Mon, 03 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/02/ucs-manager-plugin-092-beta-for-vmware.html From the official blurb.. Cisco UCS vCenter Plug-in is an extension for the vSphere Web Client v5.1 or higher. It enables virtualization administrators to view, manage and monitor various aspects of Cisco UCS physical infrastructure. The result is a single pane of glass for Virtual Center users to get both physical and virtual infrastructure information for a given hypervisor. The packages can be downloaded from here. The Cisco UCS Plug-in can be divided into 2 major components, ucs-vcplugin service and ucs-vcplugin UI. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/sdn-adoption-is-not-as-easy-as-you.html Thu, 30 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/sdn-adoption-is-not-as-easy-as-you.html Kendrick Coleman wrote a post today titled SDN on the Horizon, get ready – where amongst other things he stated: If I were a betting man (and I am, considering I am avid horse racing fan), VMware’s NSX is going to get a pretty good stronghold on its existing customer base. It’s VMware for Pete’s sake. If it has the brand and the label, then a majority of customers are going to buy into it for their needs because having that single vendor relationship makes sense. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/vcenter-orchestrator-finally-gaining.html Sun, 26 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/vcenter-orchestrator-finally-gaining.html I have stated before (here), vCenter Orchestrator was the least utilized and least understood product in the VMware product suites, which is a shame – because the capabilities in Orchestrator are pretty much endless. I started to do some number crunching and the results are quite interesting (although obvious). Let us have a look at the number of threads in the PowerCLI community vs. the Orchestrator community over the past 4 years https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/vmware-and-public-cloud-frenemies.html Thu, 23 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/vmware-and-public-cloud-frenemies.html Historically, VMware – the pioneer in virtualization – has always been a software/solutions vendor. They were never in the business of selling hardware, they left that to the hardware vendors. With the advent of the cloud, VMware established partnerships with third-party service providers, who have developed cloud-based solutions on top of VMware’s vCloud product. In this way they have continued to be leaders and have advanced cloud technology, without providing a cloud service of their own. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/adopting-cloud-importing-vs-building.html Wed, 22 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/adopting-cloud-importing-vs-building.html This is a re-post of my article, originally published on The Ravello Blog. The cloud has brought a change in how we view and manage virtualization, especially for enterprises that need to deploy their sophisticated enterprise workloads around the world. Traditionally, the preferred method was to copy and deploy a virtual machine over a WAN. This can be a difficult and time-consuming process, especially for large VMs and complex IT environments. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/sdn-adoption-is-not-as-easy-as-you-think.html Thu, 16 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/sdn-adoption-is-not-as-easy-as-you-think.html Yesterday I read an article titled Martin Casado on VMware’s 2014 Roadmap, the Competition, and SDN and the part on which I would like elaborate is the following On the tactical level, meanwhile, Casado said that VMware’s biggest market hurdle isn’t any particular competitor or technology, but rather “the traditional way of doing things” in IT. “Inertia in IT is surprisingly strong,” he said. To overcome it, VMware and their ilk must convince enterprises that if they adopt network virtualization, it will not simply be just as secure as the traditional model, but even more secure; not just as easy to manage, but in fact easier. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/the-difference-between-dev-ops.html Wed, 15 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/the-difference-between-dev-ops.html This one has been simmering for a while, so lets see where this rolls. DevOps (a portmanteau of development and operations) is a software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology (IT) professionals. DevOps is a response to the interdependence of software development and IT operations. It aims to help an organization rapidly produce software products and services. Source Wikipedia Devops is hot topic today, I keep on hearing around me - “In order to grow we need to change to a DevOps mindset” or, “We have to start doing DevOps. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/private-cloud-getting-started-guide-for.html Mon, 06 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/private-cloud-getting-started-guide-for.html This is a re-post of my article, originally published on The Ravello Blog. Cloud adoption is on the fast track, companies of all size are seeking ways to adopt cloud while eliminating the traditional IT project risks. The largest enterprises in the world view the private cloud as one of the most appealing ways to start, while utilizing the already made investment of their on-premises resources. CIOs and IT leaders that are thinking about creating their own cloud need to make sure to consider the current viable options and prepare a plan for the future that will suit their specific enterprise grade IT requirements. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/some-thoughts-about-openstack-high.html Thu, 02 Jan 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2014/01/some-thoughts-about-openstack-high.html As of late I have been putting some thought into how the underlying infrastructure that is needed for running and OpenStack environment and the lack of built-in high availability solutions to provide a robust (and yes I might even go as far as saying - an “Enterprise-Ready”) solution. First let’s go over what are the components/services that run in Openstack - the easiest would be to quote the OpenStack documentation. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/12/installing-esxi-with-razor.html Thu, 26 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/12/installing-esxi-with-razor.html This is part #6 of the Razor series. In the last post we looked at what lies within the installer. In this post we will go more into detail of how exactly the installation process works. Fort his post we will run through the deployment of an ESXi host. Installing Razor - Yes the New Version.. Razor - DHCP and TFTP Installing the Razor client and creating a repository Installers, Policies and Tags Razor - What Lies Within the installer? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/12/0-day-deployment-my-presentation-at.html Mon, 16 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/12/0-day-deployment-my-presentation-at.html A few weeks ago - I gave a session about how to deploy a full environment starting from a bare rack to a fully functioning environment with deployed applications. Firstly about the VMUG event. I was fortunate enough to be invited by the VMUG organization to present at this years VMUG. I would like to extend my thanks to the VMUG organization for their hospitality and the effort they made to help feel at home (including kosher food) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/12/openstack-israel-2013-openstackil.html Thu, 12 Dec 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/12/openstack-israel-2013-openstackil.html This week at the OpenStack Israel conference there was a impressive turnout of approximately 400 people. It was a vibrant day, lots of interesting people from all over the world, and great sessions. I even got to have lunch with Scott Herold! Here are some of the moments from day Heard at #OpenStackIL: "AWS is a great demo environment before deploying production on OpenStack". This. — hastexo (@hastexo) December 9, 2013 @ohadlevy @OpenStackIL @redhat still not mature enough. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/razor-what-lies-within-installer.html Thu, 28 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/razor-what-lies-within-installer.html This is part #5 of the Razor series. In the last post we looked at Policies, Tags and touched slightly on Installers. In this post we will go more into detail into what exactly the installer does. Installing Razor - Yes the New Version.. Razor - DHCP and TFTP Installing the Razor client and creating a repository Installers, Policies and Tags Razor - What Lies Within the installer? Installing ESXi with Razor The installers are located in the /opt/razor-server/installers directory. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/razor-installers-policies-and-tags.html Tue, 26 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/razor-installers-policies-and-tags.html This is part 4 of a series of posts on the new version of razor-server Installing Razor - Yes the New Version.. Razor - DHCP and TFTP Installing the Razor client and creating a repository Installers, Policies and Tags Razor - What Lies Within the installer? Installing ESXi with Razor We are almost ready to deploy our first node but in order for that to happen - we will need the following. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/installing-razor-client-and-creating.html Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/installing-razor-client-and-creating.html This is part three in the Razor Series. In part #2 we saw how to configure DHCP ad TFTP and as I mentioned in a previous post, the client is now a separate component. Installing Razor - Yes the New Version.. Razor - DHCP and TFTP Installing the Razor client and creating a repository Installers, Policies and Tags Razor - What Lies Within the installer? Installing ESXi with Razor Here is how you would go about installing the razor-client which will allow you to interact with the server. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/razor-dhcp-and-tftp.html Mon, 18 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/razor-dhcp-and-tftp.html This is part 2 of a series of posts on the new version of razor-server Installing Razor - Yes the New Version.. Razor - DHCP and TFTP Installing the Razor client and creating a repository Installers, Policies and Tags Razor - What Lies Within the installer? Installing ESXi with Razor In the previous part we installed the razor-server component. But what use is razor without TFTP and DHCP servers that will allow you to boot your machines and install their OS? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/installing-razor-yes-new-version.html Wed, 13 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/installing-razor-yes-new-version.html This is part 1 of a series of posts on the new version of razor-server Installing Razor - Yes the New Version.. Razor - DHCP and TFTP Installing the Razor client and creating a repository Installers, Policies and Tags Razor - What Lies Within the installer? Installing ESXi with Razor I assume that some of you are familiar with Razor - the provisioning system that was open sourced by EMC and written partially by Nick Weaver - his post about razor is here. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/openstack-israel-sessions-cast-your-vote.html Wed, 06 Nov 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/11/openstack-israel-sessions-cast-your-vote.html I would like to ask your assistance in voting for one of the sessions I proposed for the upcoming OpenStack Israel conference next month. You can cast your vote here - https://www.openstack-israel.org/#!call4paper/cf4g The three sessions I submitted are: Rapid deployment of Openstack with Cisco Openstack Installer  In this session I will demonstrate the Cisco A Rapid Devops approach to the deployment of Openstack Using an Open source tools, such as Puppet, Cobbler to rapidly get your Openstack deployment up and running in no time https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/10/ucsm-login-problems-with-java-7-update.html Thu, 24 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/10/ucsm-login-problems-with-java-7-update.html This thread was brought to my attention - https://supportforums.cisco.com/thread/2246189 After updating Java to Update 45 - you can no longer login to UCSM (UCS Manager) You may see one of two errors: Login Error: java.io.IOException: Invalid Http response** Login Error: java.io.IOException: Server returned HTTP response code: 400 for URL:** [https://x.x.x.x:443/nuova](https://x.x.x.x:443/nuova) Cisco Bug ID: CSCuj84421 This is due to a change introduced in Java The solution posted is to rollback to Update 25. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/10/is-vmware-starting-turf-war-with-its.html Wed, 16 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/10/is-vmware-starting-turf-war-with-its.html Another light bulb moment. (I love it when that happens) #lightbulb moment. VMware is now positioning VDPA as a direct competitor to @veeam -> Turf war? Again? #vmworld — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) October 16, 2013 VMware announced GA of NSX yesterday. It is no secret that VMware is now in direct competition with Cisco with their NSX offering. (As a side note - this is the strangest GA of a product I have seen. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/10/interesting-tidbit-in-powercli-release.html Tue, 01 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/10/interesting-tidbit-in-powercli-release.html With last week’s release - there was also an updated version on PowerCLI that was released as well. VMware vSphere PowerCLI 5.5 Release 1 Release Notes I noticed something quite strange (personally I have not yet hit this bug - but I am sure it must have happened to someone) That sounds like fun … :) So I put a question up on the the PowerCLI community. What exactly does this mean? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/09/devopsdays-tlv-2013.html Mon, 30 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/09/devopsdays-tlv-2013.html I will not be live blogging the sessions - but will embed the Twitter conversation below - and will add some thoughts about the sessions later on. Tweets about “#devopsdays TLV” https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/09/cluster-performance-replication.html Sun, 29 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/09/cluster-performance-replication.html VMware has released two new Flings. vSphere Replication Capacity Planning Appliance The vSphere Replication Capacity Planning Appliance allows administrators to model the network impact of a virtual machine replication without producing actual replication traffic. The appliance provides command-line tools to configure replication for any VM in a vSphere Virtual Center. The replication is established in preview mode and thus requires no storage space. Networking traffic, required for the replication, is measured and displayed in an easy-to-understand graphical format that allows you to estimate the network bandwidth required. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/09/read-vsphere-55-release-notes.html Mon, 23 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/09/read-vsphere-55-release-notes.html My previous post on the 5.1 Release notes was quite popular as well as the 5.1.0a post as well… So as always, the first things I do when a new version is released is: Download the bits - of everything.. Download the documentation Go over the Release Notes So here are my takeaways and some questions regarding the 5.5 Release from yesterday. Disclaimer: These are my own thought and ramblings. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/09/vsphere-app-ha-closer-but-not-yet.html Fri, 13 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/09/vsphere-app-ha-closer-but-not-yet.html vSphere App HA has undergone a decent overhaul - with a substantial increase in the use cases. But we are not there yet. Not so long ago I wrote a post about the missing piece in the VMware HA puzzle. And I would like to continue the discussion about how this new release completes (or does not yet complete) the puzzle. So before we get into what it exactly does and what has changed - here are at least three articles that have already posted information about App HA. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/09/vmworld-2014.html Tue, 03 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/09/vmworld-2014.html VMworld has come and gone. A whirlwind of a week. I only was in the US for 4 days, and in transit for another two, and it was worth every single second and cent. First thank you’s. I would like to thank Corey Romero, and John Troyer for the blogger pass to VMworld. I would like to thank Amy Lewis for her assistance in getting me to VMworld as part of the Social Media effort for Cisco. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/08/the-ultimate-blogger-guide-to-vmworld.html Tue, 20 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/08/the-ultimate-blogger-guide-to-vmworld.html There are a number of posts out there on the WWW with great guides on how to make the most of your time at VMworld, two of them are mentioned here below: The Ultimate Guide to attending #VMworld 2013 – AND ON A BUDGET! Where to hang out, eat during VMworld 2013 – San Francisco These are great resources. I would like to share with you, some advice of how I would make good use of my time, AS A BLOGGER, while at VMworld. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/08/top-100-cloud-computing-experts-on.html Thu, 15 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/08/top-100-cloud-computing-experts-on.html I just found out that I was included on the Huffington Post’s Top 100 Cloud Computing Experts on Twitter. I was surprised (to say the least) to be included in a list with a number of familiar faces on Twitter: Randy Bias, @randybias Stephen Foskett, @SFoskett Reuven Cohen, @rUv Hoff, @beaker Ben Kepes, @benkepes Alessandro Perilli, @a_perilli Duncan Epping, @DuncanYB Dave McCrory, @mccrory Stuart Miniman, @stu John Mark Troyer, @jtroyer Brian Gracely, @bgracely Ed Saipetch, @edsai Vanessa Alvarez, @vanessaAlvarez1 Cody Bunch, @cody_bunch Chris Wolf, @cswolf Vaughn Stewart, @vStewed Chris M Evans, @chrismevans Aaron Delp, @aarondelp The full Twitter list can be found here. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/08/virtualizing-management-layer-with.html Mon, 12 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/08/virtualizing-management-layer-with.html About two weeks ago I spent a very interesting hour with Shimon Hason (Co-Founder & CEO), Phil Neray (VP of Marketing) and Tomer Levy (Co-founder). Intigua? Where have you perhaps heard that name before? Intigua won the Best of VMworld 2012 in the New Technology category. So what is Intigua? The blurb from their website says… Intigua was founded in 2010. Currently they have an R&D facility in Herzliya, Israel and their headquarters are located in Boston (and not in Palo Alto). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/08/access-dcui-from-remote-ssh-session.html Thu, 08 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/08/access-dcui-from-remote-ssh-session.html I posted a tweet tonight. Love it that you access the DCUI from a putty session pic.twitter.com/ODZuFaYMmL — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) August 8, 2013 I needed to restart the management agent on a ESXi host (it would not reconnect to vCenter) Restarting the Management agents on an ESXi or ESX host (1003490) is the correct KB for information on how to do it. If you are at the console - you go in through the DCUI. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/07/deploying-instance-with-novaclient-in.html Mon, 29 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/07/deploying-instance-with-novaclient-in.html There are a number of limitations with the current GUI when deploying a new instance in Rackspace (such as no option to attach a keypair to the deployed instance) - therefore I suggest you use the API. One of the easiest methods I have found is using the nova client Installing python-novaclient on Windows Installing python-novaclient on Linux and Mac OS Export the correct variables List the available flavors (sizes) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/07/is-devops-answer-to-everything.html Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/07/is-devops-answer-to-everything.html I was just watching a discussion on DevOps, Automation and Continuous integration and heard the following, “Chef is a tool for doing infrastructure automation - config management, application deployment - all of that stuff” (Adam Jacob - CPO, Opscode) Two things that I would like discuss regarding that quote. What is Infrastructure? In my current role at Cisco - we have been discussing to great length platform - and what that platform actually is. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/07/thanks-to-dawoo-for-vexpert-swag.html Mon, 22 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/07/thanks-to-dawoo-for-vexpert-swag.html I would like to thank Darren Woollard for taking the time to create and send over my new vEXPERT and iVirtualise sticker (even if it is spelled wrong :) ) Thanks!! If you are a vEXPERT - go on over and add your quote to his blog here - https://vexpert.me/sticker https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/07/snowflakes-in-july.html Thu, 18 Jul 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/07/snowflakes-in-july.html Unless you live in a very specific part of the world - the chance that you will see snow (I mean the real fluffy stuff - not the artificial muck that people make) is really, really slim. But many of deal with snowflakes each and every single day - and we do not even know it. So where are all these snowflakes? (in July??) They don’t see each other. They only see what they want to see. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/vsphere-big-data-extensions-v10-beta.html Wed, 26 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/vsphere-big-data-extensions-v10-beta.html VMware vSphere Big Data Extensions 1.0 Beta - Release Notes VMware is proud to announce the VMware vSphere Big Data Extensions v1.0 beta. This product is designed to work with vSphere and leverages the VMware contributions to the Serengeti Project. Big Data Extensions gives customers an easy to use management tool to provision, manage, and monitor enterprise Hadoop clusters on vSphere through the vCenter user interface. What’s New in vSphere Big Data Extensions vSphere Big Data Extensions is a virtualization platform that enables provisioning and lifecycle management of Hadoop on VMware vSphere. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/all-i-did-was-add-vmkernel-interface.html Wed, 19 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/all-i-did-was-add-vmkernel-interface.html That was the call I got today. “All I did was add a VMkernel interface and my host lost connection to vCenter”. On went my troubleshooting hat. First the environment (simplified) The physical interfaces on which the VMkernel interfaces reside were trunked with multiple VLANs. In this case VLAN(4) and VLAN(49). vmk0 was used for ESXi management - with a default gateway of x.x.4.254 When the user added vmk1 - the host would become disconnected, he removed vmk1 - the host reconnected to the vCenter. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/security-in-vmware-virtual-appliances.html Mon, 17 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/security-in-vmware-virtual-appliances.html Today I got a reminder of a post I have been meaning to write about security best practices and VMware Virtual Appliances. A question was raised on the VMTN community VCSA - what is the default “upgrade” user for? That is a very legitimate question!! Giving a user all rights with no password can become an issue. But in this case since it is used (most probably) for the purpose of the upgrade of the VCSA from version to version - then it might OK (or not… ). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/yo-ho-ho-vmware-needs-cto.html Thu, 13 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/yo-ho-ho-vmware-needs-cto.html Forgive the catchy title… Well this morning I thought that I had missed something (which I usually don’t) - and that Paul Strong was appointed as the new CTO succeeding Stephen Herrod. What made me come to that conclusion you might ask - it was this article. Performing a reality check on Twitter is easy Forgive the ignorance but when did Paul Strong become the new CTO? — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) June 13, 2013 And it seemed I was not the only one. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/announcements-from-red-hat-summit.html Wed, 12 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/announcements-from-red-hat-summit.html Here is a short summary with links on today’s announcements from the Red Hat summit in Boston. Red Hat Launches Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.2 Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.2 brings a vast array of new features, including: Fully supported Storage Live Migration, allowing virtual machine images to be moved from[ one storage domain to another without disrupting service Support for the latest industry-standard processors from Intel and AMD, including Intel Haswell series and AMD Opteron G5 processors https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/vcenter-log-insight-now-available.html Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/vcenter-log-insight-now-available.html Hello World…. vCenter Log Insight (Release Notes) - The first public release of the new Log Management and Analytics product. VMware vCenter Log Insight is the new solution of VMware for log management and analytics for dynamic hybrid cloud environments. It delivers superior technology for automated log management through log analytics, aggregation, and search to extend the leadership of VMware in analytics to log data. Log Insight can analyze vast amounts of unstructured machine generated data and enable interactive, real-time search and analytics through an easy to use interface providing superb time to value. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/vexpert-2013.html Tue, 04 Jun 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/06/vexpert-2013.html Last week, the 581 people that were awarded the vExpert title for the year 2013. It is large list of people who are active in the community, that share knowledge, that lead VMUG’s and all other kinds of evangelizing for VMware and the community in general. As we all know there are a number of “perks” that come with being a vExpert, but mostly it is an honor. An honor to be part of an amazing group of people https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/vmtn-communities-now-supports-mobile.html Fri, 24 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/vmtn-communities-now-supports-mobile.html This was not widely announced, so I guess that many of you do not know that since the upgrade that was performed on the VMware Community Forums (VMTN) there is now support for mobile devices (such as Android and iPhone/iPad). This is what it looks like through a regular tablet browser (Android with Chrome in my case). With a tablet this is pretty much ok, but from a phone the forums are pretty much unusable. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/vmware-workstation-fusion-technology.html Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/vmware-workstation-fusion-technology.html VMware have just released a new public beta for VMware Workstation The VMware Workstation team is providing public access to the VMware Workstation Technology Preview to gather feedback from users on a wide range of hardware and software configurations. The VMware Workstation Technology Preview includes changes to the core virtualization engine and new capabilities we are exploring. What’s New - Read the full release notes VMware Hardware Version 10 - This Technology Preview introduces hardware Version 10. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/change-outlook-meetings-en-masse.html Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/change-outlook-meetings-en-masse.html I had my mailbox migrated to a new domain today. One of the side effects of this was that for silly reason, a large number of my meetings now had a prefix of Copy: added to the subject of the meeting. Which annoyed the hell out of me. Now I could go ahead and remove all the extra information one by one - but that is tedious annoying and against my automation principles. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/choosing-webhost-for-your-blog.html Mon, 20 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/choosing-webhost-for-your-blog.html Many bloggers have their sites hosted somewhere. Personally I find it very convenient having my blog hosted under Google’s Blogger service. Since I am having issue with my provider and mentioned it on Twitter, several people asked if I found a good new host, if I would not mind sharing the details with them. I assume that none of you know that I used to run a private webhosting service as a side gig for a decent number of years, and I think that some of the knowledge I have accumulated over the year could be of great use in choosing the right Webhost for your blog. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/why-single-feature-doesn-matter.html Fri, 17 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/why-single-feature-doesn-matter.html Once upon a time… Nah… This is not a fairy tale so lets do it differently. What is the maximum size of a virtual disk that vSphere 5.1 supports? If you have no idea, then probably you have not passed your VCP (because they ask those silly kind of questions) but you can use Eric Siebert’s page VMware configuration maximums from 1.0 to 5.1 if you need a reminder.. 2TB https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/my-take-on-vcenter-certificate.html Thu, 09 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/my-take-on-vcenter-certificate.html This is just a note to point you to an article that was recently published about my thoughts on the newly released vCenter Certificate Automation Tool 1.0. The full post can be found on TechTarget below I for one am looking forward to see vCert Manager released. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/upgrading-to-vmware-latest-release-of.html Tue, 07 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/05/upgrading-to-vmware-latest-release-of.html Jason Boche posted a great article vSphere 5.1 Update 1 Update Sequence and there he pointed to an excellent KB article released by VMware - Update sequence for vSphere 5.1 Update 1 and its compatible VMware products (2037630) I would like to add some of my thoughts about the mass release of products that happened last week. First look at the screenshot below. The first thing that I noticed - the number of products that are intertwined - is becoming larger and larger. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/04/by-numbers-vmworld-2013-session-voting.html Wed, 24 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/04/by-numbers-vmworld-2013-session-voting.html So the onslaught of “vote for my sessions” has begun. I like numbers and the interesting information that can be interpreted from those numbers. VMworld Call for Papers Voting is no exception. So let’s start. But before that, I would like to stress something. These numbers are what I have extracted from what is publicly available - it could be that the numbers presented below do not make up a full picture (they probably don’t) - because there are sessions that could already have been accepted and we know nothing about it. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/04/what-is-your-most-popular-post.html Fri, 12 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/04/what-is-your-most-popular-post.html I mentioned last week on The Unofficial VMware Visio Stencils post that it is by far the most popular post on my blog. We all have a most popular post - one that usually stand out amongst the rest. I started thinking - why not compile a list of each of our most popular blog posts. It does not necessarily have to be Virtualization related, I think it should - but you can decide. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/04/vmware-visio.html Mon, 08 Apr 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/04/vmware-visio.html The VMware Visio Stencils I have created are by far the most popular post on my blog. Over the past few years I have posted a three versions over the years since they were released. I decided last week that it was time to create a dedicated page that would hold the most up to date version and not to have them spread out all across my blog. Therefore from now all the old versions will now redirect to this page. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/why-can-we-just-talk-to-each-other.html Mon, 25 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/why-can-we-just-talk-to-each-other.html Times they are A-changin’, Bob Dylan’s song from 1963 was written at the time to make a change. On Friday I caught wind of a story which I think should actually be an eye opener for us all. The story I am talking about is the one about Adria Richards and her tweet at Pycon. Amanda Blum posted a long but good post Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost with her take on the whole thing. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/vcenter-multi-hypervisor-manager-11-beta.html Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/vcenter-multi-hypervisor-manager-11-beta.html The VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.1 Public Beta is now open. Actually it was already open on March 11th, but it seems it has not yet been publicly announced. Download Link | Release Notes What is VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.1 VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager is a component that enables support for heterogeneous hypervisors in VMware vCenter Server. It provides the following benefits to your virtual environment: An integrated platform for managing VMware and third-party hypervisors from a single interface. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/vcloud-hybrid-vs-aws-battle-begins.html Thu, 14 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/vcloud-hybrid-vs-aws-battle-begins.html Yesterday was a busy day, lots of announcements I would like to put down my thoughts on the fact the VMware will now get into the Public Cloud market in direct competition with Amazon. We saw this coming - it started with the vCloud Service that VMware announced about 6 months ago - an open Beta - that actually was not free. In my blog post vCloud Service - I Asked Myself - Why? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/ravello-systems-and-bit-of-deja-vu.html Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/ravello-systems-and-bit-of-deja-vu.html A while back Duncan Epping wrote a wonderful post VMotion, the story and confessions about how people remembered the when they witnessed vMotion for the first time and asked people to add their experiences. I of course remember mine vividly - and also remember that when I first saw vMotion I knew that this would change the way we used computers in the future. A few weeks ago - I got that feeling again - but this time not with vMotion but rather with a product that I saw for the first time from Ravello Systems. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/vmware-vcenter-converter-standalone-51.html Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/vmware-vcenter-converter-standalone-51.html First and foremost I would like to express my public gratitude and thanks to legendary Ulli Hankeln, the Master of Converter and VMDK/VMFS disk dissection/recovery for sticking with this and bugging VMware to make the proper changes to this product. After being in a private Beta for a while - it is now open to the public From the Release Notes What’s New The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 5.1 Beta includes the following new functionality: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/and-winner-is-you.html Mon, 11 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/and-winner-is-you.html So you are all the winners, for participating, for voicing your opinions and making your vote count! Today Eric Siebert posted the results for the top 2013 VMware and Virtualization Blogs. I asked you Not to vote for me but it seems that did not work. The full results and podcast can be found here. In short. I was ranked at No. 41 in the total count 7th in the Scripting blog category 8th in the Independent blogger category. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/vmware-cloud-cred-program.html Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/vmware-cloud-cred-program.html At VMworld 2012, at the vExpert briefing - we were introduced to an upcoming social idea that VMware were working on - Cloud Cred. Today I received an email from the VMUG organization (screenshot below) Currently the site is not yet available (according to the mail above - it will be on March 11th) - as you can see from the screenshot below. So what is Cloud Cred - I will leave this to VMware to explain. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/vmworld-cfp-voting-needs-to-be-more.html Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/03/vmworld-cfp-voting-needs-to-be-more.html It is around that time of the year again, when VMware puts out the announcement that the Call for Papers for VMworld 2013 and will be open, and then people will start to submit their sessions to get their hour of glory at the biggest virtualization show of the year. VMworld will be in San Francisco between August 26-29, 2013 in the Moscone Center. Last year there were 1222 separate sessions up for voting - yes I counted them. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/how-to-deal-with-complex-project.html Thu, 28 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/how-to-deal-with-complex-project.html You have been tasked with a task, it could be a long term project, a one-off thing. These usually involve identification of number of tasks and stages that need to be executed in order to complete the whole task. One such an example that I would like to discuss today is the completion of a complex scripting task. One script I have been nurturing is a deployment script for Oracle RAC on VMware. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/i-just-bought-some-kitchen.html Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/i-just-bought-some-kitchen.html A few weeks ago I discovered leak in one of my kitchen faucets. At the time I managed to fix it - but it was evident, it would not hold for long, so I needed to get new ones. The previous ones had served me well for a good 10 years. I do not know about you - but things like kitchen faucets in Israel are not cheap - they can go from anything from $100 - $600 (Yes I know this outrageously overpriced - but that is what they cost). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/vcenter-automated-install.html Thu, 21 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/vcenter-automated-install.html So how long does it take you to install vCenter, not using the VCSA, but the Windows package? How many manual steps does it require you to perform? Have you actually ever counted? It is quite a lot. When automating - Manual intervention is the mother of all evil. — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) February 21, 2013 I was presented with the following requirements for a project: We need to install vCenter as part of a deliverable for a customer The Installation should standard and repeatable. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/migration-path-for-vcsa-from-vpostgres.html Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/migration-path-for-vcsa-from-vpostgres.html Wait… there is no way to do that – is there? Today I would like to address a point that is perhaps pretty obvious but not really well known, and that is the lack of a migration path out of the vCenter Server Appliance installed with an embedded database. To understand the issue – let us first understand the process if you were to use a vCenter Server installed on a Windows Server machine. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/please-do-not-vote-for-me.html Wed, 20 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/please-do-not-vote-for-me.html Really – I mean it!! The Twitterverse exploded this morning with @ericsiebert’s announcement: Voting now open for the 2013 top VMware & virtualization blogs (Read his post – with detailed instructions) Shortly thereafter started the flood of posts announcing the vote. Over 20 in the last past 12 hours. “Vote for me …. “ “This is what I did ….” “This is who I voted for… and why… “ https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/host-profiles-should-become-standard.html Thu, 14 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/host-profiles-should-become-standard.html Can you name the features that are only available in vSphere Enterprise Plus edition? If you need a reminder you can get the information here Storage I/O Control Network I/O Control Distributed vSwitch Host Profiles Auto Deploy Storage DRS Profile Driven Storage Single Root I/O Virtualization A while back I asked for your feedback in this poll I have to say that I totally agree with the results, and I was not at all surprised by them either https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/welcome-to-our-new-sponsor-zerto.html Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/welcome-to-our-new-sponsor-zerto.html I would like to thank Zerto and extend them a warm welcome for sponsoring my blog. Below is a (very) short video explaining what they do Zerto Hypervisor-Based Replication from Zerto on Vimeo. I first heard about Zerto from their presentation at Tech Field Day 6. Zerto is an Israeli Company based out of Herzliya. I first met one of the co-founders Oded Kedem while sitting down for lunch at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/the-99c-computer-vs-byos.html Sun, 03 Feb 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/02/the-99c-computer-vs-byos.html Amazon announced a few days ago the availability of EC2 for In-Memory Computing - The High Memory Cluster Eight Extra Large Instance, here are the specs: Two Intel E5-2670 processors running at 2.6 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost and NUMA support. 244 GiB of RAM. Two 120 GB SSD for instance storage. 10 Gigabit networking with support for Cluster Placement Groups. HVM virtualization only. Support for EBS-backed AMIs only. Pricing starts at $3. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/devopscon-2013.html Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/devopscon-2013.html Today I attended the DevOpsCon 2013 in Hertzliya, Israel. As you can see from the agenda there was an abundance of great sessions and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. This was not like most of the one-day seminars I usually go to – it was focused 100% on DevOps – and virtualization was just a (very small) by-product – seeing that it was only the underlying infrastructure. The speakers were very good (almost all of them), the content was very interesting and very though provoking. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/error-removing-nexus-1000v-vem.html Mon, 28 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/error-removing-nexus-1000v-vem.html I encountered this last week and was not find any reference to my specific problem – so I am documenting it here. I was trying to remove the Cisco Nexus 1000V VEM from the ESXi hosts in my lab. This was the error I was getting. This is what I had from the esxupdate.log file 2013-01-24T08:35:32Z esxupdate: LiveImageInstaller: DEBUG: Starting to live remove VIBs: Cisco_bootbank_cisco-vem-v147-esx_4.2.1.1.5.2b.0-3.1.1 2013-01-24T08:35:32Z esxupdate: LiveImageInstaller: INFO: Live removing cisco-vem-v147-esx-4. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/set-sshkeys.html Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/set-sshkeys.html SSH Equivalence is one of the pre-requisites needed for an Oracle RAC installation. There are a number of posts on how to do this like here or here, and Oracle even have been so kind as to provide a script that will do this for you (even though it is not 100% automated. The process is relatively simple (when you break it down piece by piece) Create the . https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/the-ssh-key-problem-with-cloned-linux.html Wed, 23 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/the-ssh-key-problem-with-cloned-linux.html First let me start off this by saying – the way this is effects you will differ entirely on your organizational procedures and security requirements. We all love templates – don’t we? I mean they are the best! You configure your VM to your liking, OS patches, company policy settings etc.. etc.. and every new VM that you deploy – will have the exact same baseline. Standardization… conformity… in the enterprise – all great. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/a-major-milestone-my-first-million.html Tue, 22 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/a-major-milestone-my-first-million.html No… Not Dollars, Shekels and not even IRR (of which 1 miliion is worth ~US$40). Today I passed 1,000,000 Pageviews on my blog. I never for the life of me expected this would happen. It started on November 27, 2007 – just over 5 years ago, with this post Welcome to the blog A year later – and 16 posts down the line I had whopper of 6 subscribers. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/copy-datastoreitem-understanding.html Mon, 21 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/copy-datastoreitem-understanding.html I brought this up on Twitter a while ago. What network path will the transfer take when using Copy-DatastoreItem - does anyone know? — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) January 8, 2013 I studied the traffic flow – and would like to share it with you here, but first here is the architecture of the testbed – which will help explain in more detail Well the environment is pretty simple. One vCenter server, four ESXi Servers – each with a local datastore and a shared datastore among the 4 hosts. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/another-powershell-vexpertme-url.html Thu, 17 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/another-powershell-vexpertme-url.html Building on Jonathan Medd’s excellent idea of Using PowerShell to access the vExpert.me URL Shortener, I decided to improve it a bit more. Here is the completed script. <# .SYNOPSISWill create a new vExpert.me URL .DESCRIPTIONUsing the Invoke-Rest Cmdlet to invoke a creation of a new vExpert.me URL .PARAMETERURL URL that should be shortened. .PARAMETERCustom The custom URL that should be used. .EXAMPLEPS C:\> New-vExpertURL -URL 'https://www.google.com' This example shows how to call the New-vExpertURL function with with the URL parameter and generate a random URL. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/red-hat-64-clustering-changes.html Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/red-hat-64-clustering-changes.html I am pretty sure that this one escaped under the radar – because it was not well advertised. Red Hat released on December 4th, 2012 their latest Beta of RHEL 6.4 – release notes can be found here. So what has changed? VMware PV Drivers The VMware para-virtualized drivers have been updated to provide a seamless out-of-the-box experience when running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 in VMware ESX. The Anaconda installer has also been updated to list the drivers during the installation process. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/powercli-does-not-officially-support.html Thu, 03 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/powercli-does-not-officially-support.html Just a heads up. According to the Release Notes PowerCLI is not supported Does this mean that it will not work – No of course not! From what I have tested it works almost flawlessly – but there are some quirks… For example - Set-NetworkAdapter returning ‘Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object’ and Error with Move-VM: Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/invoke-vmscript-failed-and-how-i-was.html Wed, 02 Jan 2013 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2013/01/invoke-vmscript-failed-and-how-i-was.html Luc Dekens wrote a great post a while back Will Invoke-VMScript work? about the prerequisites needed in order to get Invoke-VMscript to work. Stop for a minute and go and read his post. Glad to have back. As part of an Oracle RAC provisioning script that I am working on – one of the first things I wanted to do was to configure the network settings for my two nodes – with parameters taken from a config file. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/12/creating-eagerzeroedthick-disk-with.html Thu, 27 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/12/creating-eagerzeroedthick-disk-with.html Hey… - that is not possible – I hear you say – well in principle you are right. Up until today… By mistake of course – I found that there was a change made to the 5.1 release of PowerCLI – but this change has not been documented anywhere – which I think is a shame. This post is the only public reference I know of. Up until the 5.1 release you could not create an EagerZeroedThick hard disk with PowerCLI. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/12/do-you-have-what-it-takes-to-be-cloud.html Sun, 16 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/12/do-you-have-what-it-takes-to-be-cloud.html This question is something that I have come across in a number of ways and variations over the past few months and on some occasions I have actually been asked the following: Are you a cloud architect? Can you build me an cloud environment like Amazon? Can you explain to me over lunch how to build a cloud? Granted, the last one made me laugh, but the rest of them are pretty valid. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/11/vcloud-suite-licenses-and-novram.html Tue, 27 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/11/vcloud-suite-licenses-and-novram.html Yes I said the “v”- word again. That “dirty” term that was abolished at VMworld 2012 this year. (forgive the cynicism) To my surprise – it is still haunting me – and I suppose soon us all. A week ago I received my first vCloud Enterprise Suite license. Happy as can be, I added it into my vCenter Server and then I realized something which was strange.. I checked the API as well. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/11/vcap5-dcd-mission-accomplished.html Wed, 21 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/11/vcap5-dcd-mission-accomplished.html As you can deduct from the title of this post – yes I passed. I scored a 345 today (passing mark was 300). I wanted to share with you my feelings and thoughts about the exam that I sat today. Not all Pearson VUE exam centers are equal. Some are more strict than others – luckily today the one I went to today was not on the extreme side as opposed to the one where I sat the VCAP-DCA). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/11/guest-customization-on-ubuntu-1204-fails.html Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/11/guest-customization-on-ubuntu-1204-fails.html I came across an issue today – trying to deploy a Ubuntu Precise VM from a template and applying a customization setting to the VM – with default DHCP configuration. These are the errors I was getting So first up the second error message is wrong – because the log file should not be but rather /var/log/vmware-inc/toolsDeployPkg.log Going into the log file on the VM I saw the following. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/11/what-is-vmware-kb-number-1.html Thu, 01 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/11/what-is-vmware-kb-number-1.html Have you ever wondered what VMware Knowledge base article Number one is? Where it all started? Genesis is the beginning of the bible… KB number 1 was the beginning of a plethora of knowledge that has changed how we consume technology today. As of the time of writing this blog post the lastest KB is 2035036. So far back does it go? I decided to check. Powershell of course helped me out here. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/going-over-vsphere-510a-release-notes.html Mon, 29 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/going-over-vsphere-510a-release-notes.html Less than a month – that is all it took for VMware to release an update to vSphere 5.1.0. A good thing? A bad thing – that I will leave for another post – in this one I will go over the release notes once more as I did last month in my post Read the vSphere 5.1 Release Notes!! Here are my takeaways from the 5.1.0a Release Notes https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/vcloud-suite-upgrade-there-is-no-free.html Wed, 24 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/vcloud-suite-upgrade-there-is-no-free.html As you should have heard by now vCloud Suite will be available as a free – well almost free. According to the VMware vCloud Suite Upgrade Promotion you have until December 15, 2012 at 11:59pm Pacific Time (PT) if you have purchased vSphere Enterprise or vSphere Enterprise Plus as of August 27th, 2012 and you have an active Support and Subscription agreement to upgrade to vCloud Standard Edition So for the Enterprise Plus customers this is a no-brainer … or is it? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/installing-rvc-on-ubuntu-1204.html Mon, 22 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/installing-rvc-on-ubuntu-1204.html I was trying to install the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) today on my Ubuntu machine running Precise Pangolin. I used William Lam’s post as a baseline for the installation – but since there are several differences with Ubuntu – I will post the steps here. Do not install Ruby from apt-get it will not work If you have already installed it the remove it sudo apt-get --purge remove ruby-rvm sudo curl -L get. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/tempplanetv12n-my-daily-virtualization.html Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/tempplanetv12n-my-daily-virtualization.html For those of you who follow the PlanetV12N aggregation feed of anything and everything that is virtualization – you might have noticed that the feed has been stale for over 10 days. The reason being.. – well I do not really know – it usually is a problem with one of the feeds in the list – which causes the whole process to commit harakiri. It is extremely annoying. I know. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/using-powershell-to-install-powercli.html Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/using-powershell-to-install-powercli.html I am currently preparing a deployment package architecture for a full vSphere environment and one of the requests was to include PowerCLI in the installation script. I was surprised that I could not find anything already mentioned on how to do this on Google. So here is the syntax: # Install PowerCLI Set-executionPolicy RemoteSigned -Confirm:$false -force Write-Host "Installing PowerCLI" $myargs = $myargs = '/q /s /w /L1033 /v" /qn ' $exe = "C:\installs\VMware-PowerCLI-5. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/you-cant-use-onyx-with-web-client.html Sun, 07 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/10/you-cant-use-onyx-with-web-client.html The Web Client will be VMware’s direction going forward. It was stressed more than once. There was even a slide from one the sessions to state that 5.1 will be the last windows based client – as I blogged about before here. If you stop for a moment to think about this it makes sense. VMware is looking to remove any kid of dependency on the Microsoft operating system. We have seen it with move to a direct of a center appliance and now with the new client. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/vsphere-web-client-vs-vsphere-client.html Wed, 19 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/vsphere-web-client-vs-vsphere-client.html There are a great number of differences between the two, and it is obvious that the vSphere Web client is where the future lies – VMware made it clear at VMworld that 5.1 will be the last release of the vSphere Client Picture (c) by Marco Broeken. But unfortunately there are things that have / will fall between the cracks – and functionality we are used to – is no longer available. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/vEsxi-with-10gb-ethernet-using-VMXNET3.html Wed, 12 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/vEsxi-with-10gb-ethernet-using-VMXNET3.html I have asked for this…. Begged for …… Ok not begged, but I did ask nicely.. a number of times, a great number of times!!!! One of the slight drawbacks of working in vESXi is that you could not configure a virtual 10Gb Ethernet card. Why would you? Because you can of course but also because if you wanted to see what would happen in a lab before implementing 10Gb Ethernet in your Production environment– the only way to do it was with a physical server and a physical NIC. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/read-vsphere-51-release-notes.html Tue, 11 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/read-vsphere-51-release-notes.html The first thing I always do when a new version is released is go over the Release notes. There are always interesting things that come out of a document like this. vSphere 5.1 is no different. Here are my takeaways (and some questions as well) as a result of going over the Release Notes Takeaways: For vSphere 5.1 you have no change. But before the next version you should be prepared to retire these old Operating Systems. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/a-powershell-script-to-notify-you-on.html Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/a-powershell-script-to-notify-you-on.html vSphere 5.1 will most probably be released by the end of September 10th (that is 2 minutes from now in my timezone). Of course nothing is 100% certain but I will explain on what this assumption is based. From this Press release  From the VMware Unveils Industry’s Most Comprehensive Cloud Infrastructure and Management Solution press release September 11, 9-11. This is a sensitive date for especially for Americans. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/solutions-exchange-did-you-miss-last-day.html Mon, 10 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/solutions-exchange-did-you-miss-last-day.html A funny thing happened on the way to the Forum Solutions Exchange floor (forgive me for the corny humor…) In previous years the Solutions Exchange floor usually opened with a the Hall Crawl which was at the end of the first day (i.e. Monday). This year it opened on Sunday afternoon and was open until the end of Wednesday. I have not been able to find out what the rationale was behind this, and it depends on who you ask this was either a good / a bad thing. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/release-cycles-and-why-we-are-chasing.html Tue, 04 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/release-cycles-and-why-we-are-chasing.html One of the things I continuously heard from a decent number of people during VMworld is that they are constantly running after the technology. I actually put out a question on Twitter with the following poll: How many of you are still running ESXi 4.X in your environment? The results were actually a confirmation of what I heard at the show. Over 70% of those who replied said they were running the previous version. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/vmworld-us-2012-recap.html Sun, 02 Sep 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/09/vmworld-us-2012-recap.html I am currently on my flight back from San Francisco to New York and then on the way back to Tel Aviv, so now is a great time to start writing about my experiences and what happened during the show. I promised myself that I would not do a blow-by-blow account of what I went through during the show, but more of a insight on some of the things that I think are worth mentioning and I experienced during the past week. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/live-blogging-general-session.html Mon, 27 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/live-blogging-general-session.html I will try and get a live blog update for the First General session Started with a Disclaimer – which was strange for a keynote. Stomp kicked off the keynote beating on VMworld 2012 with drumpads in each of the letters Rick Jackson (Chief Marketing Officer) took the stage to welcome over 20,000 participants of VMworld with another 10,000 online. He promised that a number of announcements that will come out of the conference this week. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-2-to-VMworld.html Sat, 25 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-2-to-VMworld.html One of those lightbulb moments (Ding!!) With everything going on during this week – could you actually cram something else in? Well evidently yes. The vExpert Roundtables idea was born. This post explains it some more. Totally voluntary, totally not planned the idea was born 2 weeks before VMworld. So I do not know if it will be successful – or if it will work, but I do think it does have potential. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-3-to-VMworld.html Fri, 24 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-3-to-VMworld.html The people. I might have mentioned this in a previous post, there are a lot of people at VMworld. Most of them are tech people – like you and I. Some more technical than others – but hey we cannot all be the same. Coming from a country that only has a population of about 7 million I am never used to the sheer size of things in conferences like this. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-4-to-VMworld.html Thu, 23 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-4-to-VMworld.html There were over 1000 submissions for sessions for VMworld 2012 – but of course not all were accepted. So the idea of the Lightning Tech Talks in the community lounge. There is a packed BrownBag schedule every single day starting with a vExpert hour every single morning between 10.00 and 11.00. I will be presenting a session on vCenter Orchestrator and the reason for actually trying to get a lab into the Session catalog. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-5-to-VMworld.html Wed, 22 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-5-to-VMworld.html The Solutions floor. 256 different vendors, some well known and some less known – but everyone has something to show – that is in some way connected to virtualizations. There are giveaways, iPads, SWAG Booth babes, and technology all around. Some of the booths I would like to see what they are all about and the solutions they provide - and they are – but not only: https://www.maginatics.com/ https://www.asigra.com/ https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-6-to-VMworld.html Tue, 21 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-6-to-VMworld.html Personally this is not really a big one for me – but I guess that for the rest of the world probably it is – that why they always go out of their way to find a star – this it is Bon Jovi – to perform during the party. Food is usually there a plenty – I don’t eat it – and the drinks are a flowing. It is fun, its different, and people have a great time. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-7-to-VMworld.html Mon, 20 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-7-to-VMworld.html Being a blogger has its perks, being a vExpert has it perks as well. We have exposure – but I promise you that is not why we do it. Most of us do not blog for a living – we all have our regular 9-5 jobs (and then some) and we write these articles on our own spare time. VMware recognize the value of the blogosphere and one of the biggest social community programs around. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-8-to-VMworld.html Sun, 19 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-8-to-VMworld.html 36 different Labs to choose from. My post from last years labs. The amount of VM’s created and destroyed over the week, will be more than you will probably ever create in a lifetime. And all of it sitting in the Cloud. VMware really eat their own dog food a,d have created a great experience. There are some innovations this year including BYOD labs, and some lightning labs that will be short and sweet. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-9-to-VMworld.html Sat, 18 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-9-to-VMworld.html Have you seen the Schedule Builder? The amount of sessions is astounding!!Unfortunately there were approximately another 700-800 sessions that did not make the cut this year with the Call for Papers – but that is another story.. Almost everything and anything you can think of regarding VMware and virtualization will be covered. 437 Sessions on: Applications End-User Computing Infrastructure Operations Partner Track Technology Exchange for Alliance Partner IT Transformation Cloud Security Networking Applications Storage https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-10-to-VMworld.html Fri, 17 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/T-10-to-VMworld.html It is almost here, 10 days until VMware’s biggest event of the year, the biggest virtualization event of the year. The number of reasons to be at this event are countless, so I decided to create a daily post counting down (in no particular order) to the event, each day with a great reason to be at VMworld - and here is number one. Reason #1 – Social Networking Imagine, 20,000 people – geeks just like us, interested in the same silly things, that have their hearts miss a beat when they see a script creating 100 VM’s with a single command. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/deleting-vm-in-vmware-workstation.html Thu, 16 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/deleting-vm-in-vmware-workstation.html Just a small and silly thing I came across today. I almost ran out space on my hard drive today. You could say – then go and get a bigger one – well that is true but I needed the space fast and found that I had a number of old VM’s on my laptop that I thought I had deleted – but it turned out I did not. When you right-click on a VM that is not in focus you will be presented with the following menu: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/vcloud-service-i-asked-myself-why.html Wed, 15 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/08/vcloud-service-i-asked-myself-why.html VMware announced today that it is now offering a new service called vCloud Service. A few people asked me today – why? What does this mean? vCloud is already offered by a large number of partners all over the world – so what is the (if any) added value that me – the customer gets from this and also where is the benefit here for VMware? vCloud Service is after all being run by one of VMware’s partners after all. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/the-easier-way-to-use-vmworld-schedule.html Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/the-easier-way-to-use-vmworld-schedule.html I wanted to share this tip – since it is not so obvious and after doing it myself the hard way – I found a much easier way to find the right sessions for VMworld which will most probably save you a lot of time and headaches If you go into the Schedule Builder – after you have already logged (as I said in my earlier post) you will be presented with this screen. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/vmworld-schedule-builder-is-live.html Thu, 19 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/vmworld-schedule-builder-is-live.html No official announcement yet – but you can get in. Got to the VMworld site and login with you account. Once logged – open the link to the Schedule builder which should allow you to then choose your sessions. You cannot book a time slot twice (and this is not my real schedule..) I would have so wished that VMware would have made the option to filter by day – it would make life so much easier. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/aligning-business-goals-with-your-own.html Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/aligning-business-goals-with-your-own.html I had an interesting conversation with a colleague of mine last week. We were talking about goals and targets. Let me first start with a question. Do you know what your company’s goals are for the year 2012? Can you name them? I am not talking about general goals like keep doing what we are doing, continue our sales. Honestly ask yourself - are you fully aware of the company’s goals? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/what-is-this-vsel-thing-anyway.html Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/what-is-this-vsel-thing-anyway.html As of late I have seen multiple mentions of vSEL – and always by VMware employees. So what is this vSEL that they are talking about? Google led me to some answers. Hany Michael (now a VMware employee) – has a comment from Mike Dipetrillo on his post VMware also has an internal environment called vSEL that runs nearly all of the products in a nested environment. vSEL (the virtual SE Lab) let’s our tech resources in the field deploy and learn our applications as well as do demos and training with customers and partners. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/ibm-esxi-customized-offline-bundle.html Wed, 04 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/ibm-esxi-customized-offline-bundle.html Oh….. how I have searched for this… For hours… really. And to just come across this by chance today. Duh! Search for a customized bundle for HP hardware and it is very easy to find. Try the same search for IBM – no……. My frustration has been expressed on Twitter a number of times – because this is not the way it should be. Is there a way to create a an offline VIB from a vendor customized ISO #bah #IBM https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/things-i-dont-like-about-vcenter.html Tue, 03 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/things-i-dont-like-about-vcenter.html VMware are looking to move everything to a virtual appliance model. That is pretty obvious. And of course the most central component is your vCenter, I wrote a post a while back about Should You Patch the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance? but since then I am finding more and more issues with the VCVA (vCenter Virtual Appliance) and differences in functionality between the Windows and Linux Versions of Virtual Center. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/completing-missing-piece-in-vmware-ha.html Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/07/completing-missing-piece-in-vmware-ha.html I cannot remember the number of times I have been saved by VMware High Availability. To protect an application in my datacenter from hardware failure has never been easier. Just put your VM in a VMware HA cluster and Bam! you are done. It is that easy. And for your more critical VM’s here you have Fault Tolerance. Granted today that will only help you for your low hanging fruit VM’s that have 1 vCPU – but that will most probably change in an upcoming version. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/06/esxi-shell-history.html Mon, 25 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/06/esxi-shell-history.html Someone asked me this question this week – how do I see the history of my commands in the the ESXi shell? There is no history command on an ESXi host.. So how do you go about getting the history of the shell commands? William Lam posted an answer today on the VMware Communities. The command history is located in /var/log/shell.log Of course also there is a KB stating this information as well - KB2004201 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/06/openindiana-installation-walkthrough.html Tue, 19 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/06/openindiana-installation-walkthrough.html This is Part 4 of a series of posts explaining how to configure OpenIndiana as NAS storage device. The series is made up of the following parts: Background information about OpenIndiana and OS installation Network configuration and Setting up storage Presenting storage to your Hosts with iSCSI and/or NFS Performance testing Today we will go into the performance I was able to get out of the OpenIndiana appliance that I have installed. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/06/something-awesome-from-veeam.html Mon, 04 Jun 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/06/something-awesome-from-veeam.html So if you have not heard by now Veeam have released the 6.1 version of Veeam Backup & Replication. Here are some of the new features VeeamZIP Version 6.1 includes a new capability for performing ad-hoc backups. In many ways, it functions like a zip utility for VMs. For this reason, it’s called VeeamZIPTM. Use VeeamZIP whenever you need to: Backup a VM on-the-fly (for example, before making changes to it). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/which-sessions-i-voted-for-vmworld-2012.html Wed, 30 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/which-sessions-i-voted-for-vmworld-2012.html 1222 sessions – That is a lot. How do you wade through that amount? That is what the filter is there for. So you can filter out the sessions on several criteria – but to do everyone justice – I decided to do this meticulously – and go track by track and note which sessions I chose and why. The criteria for my choices were: Does the topic interest me? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/vmworld-call-for-papers-voting-is-live.html Tue, 29 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/vmworld-call-for-papers-voting-is-live.html The voting for VMworld Call for Papers is now Open. Cody Bunch and myself have submitted a session – based on the customer stories behind the vExpert HoL that we are designing for the upcoming VMworld. If you would like to see the story behind the lab – we would appreciate your Thumbs Up for the session. 1996 Managing Your Day-to-Day Administrative Tasks with vCenter Orchestrator There are 1222 different sessions that you can vote for – so wading through them all – can be tiresome. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/vexpert-hands-on-lab.html Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/vexpert-hands-on-lab.html Yes we vExperts are a crazy bunch, really we are. Not only do we blog about virtualization, read virtualization, breathe virtualization and immerse ourselves in technology but most of all we enjoy what we do. Approximately three weeks ago, a post was made on the vExpert community forum with a offer - but I would call it a challenge. As you all know Call for Papers for VMworld 2012 is slowly coming to an end (deadline is May 18th). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/openindiana-installation-walkthrough_15.html Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/openindiana-installation-walkthrough_15.html This is Part 3 of a series of posts explaining how to configure OpenIndiana as NAS storage device. The series is made up of the following parts: Background information about OpenIndiana and OS installation Network configuration and Setting up storage Presenting storage to your Hosts with iSCSI and/or NFS Performance testing At the end of Part 2 we had the network set up, VMware Tools installed, additional disk space added to the VM, and a zpool created. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/openindiana-installation-walkthrough.html Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/openindiana-installation-walkthrough.html This is Part 1 of a series of posts explaining how to configure OpenIndiana as NAS storage device. The series is made up of the following parts: Background information about OpenIndiana and OS installation Network configuration and Setting up storage Presenting storage to your Hosts with iSCSI and/or NFS Performance testing I have enjoyed using Nexenta Community Edition for a while – really I have. It is a great product, but there have always been a few annoying things that I could not get around. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/openindiana-installation-walkthrough_14.html Mon, 14 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/openindiana-installation-walkthrough_14.html This is Part 2 of a series of posts explaining how to configure OpenIndiana as NAS storage device. The series is made up of the following parts: Background information about OpenIndiana and OS installation Network configuration and Setting up storage Presenting storage to your Hosts with iSCSI and/or NFS Performance testing We ended Part 1 with a newly installed OS and a login screen. Now it is time to configure and start to use the OS. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/creating-and-storing-powershell.html Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/creating-and-storing-powershell.html I actually do not understand why I have not put this in a blog post before, but it is about time - because I used it again today. Sometime you need to store a credential for a number of purposes, be it a scheduled script - or just not having to enter credentials each and every time you would like to connect to a Host or your vCenter. PowerCLI has it’s own credential store with the New-VICredentialStoreItem and Get-VICredentialStoreItem cmdlets. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/vmworld-2012-usregistration-is-now-open.html Fri, 11 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/05/vmworld-2012-usregistration-is-now-open.html Just got this from Twitter. Registration for VMworld US is Now Open https://t.co/NSofq9kFFri May 11 06:57:19 via TwitterrificBas Vinken Registration is now Open Convince your Boss Hotels and Travel Go! Go!! Go!!! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/04/automating-vsphere-with-vmware-vcenter.html Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/04/automating-vsphere-with-vmware-vcenter.html I had some time this past week to read Automating vSphere: With VMware vCenter Orchestrator by Cody Bunch. I stand by my views that vCenter Orchestrator is one of those uncovered gems that unfortunately not enough VMware professionals know how to use and do not make enough use of the product and the vast number of options and functionality available with the product (I must confess, I am just guilty as everyone else here). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/04/should-you-patch-vcenter-server-virtual.html Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/04/should-you-patch-vcenter-server-virtual.html With vCenter 5 came the release of the the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance. This move was applauded by many due to the fact that VMware made the first step in the direction of removing their dependency on Microsoft’s Windows OS and finally making the move to a Linux based platform. If you would ask me (and this is my personal opinion – not based on concrete info) the days of a Windows based vCenter server are numbered, if not in the next version – then the one after that – there will only be a Linux Virtual appliance. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/04/vexpert-2012thank-you.html Sun, 15 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/04/vexpert-2012thank-you.html I am proud to announce that I have been awarded the VMware vExpert award for the year 2012. The current list has been posted here. It is nice to receive such an honor but I would rather like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to a few people in appreciation of this honor. Alex Maier – for being the driving force behind the vExpert Program, for managing the VMware communities and for putting up with our nagging when we have no-one else to complain to. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/04/what-happens-when-no-swap-volume-is.html Thu, 12 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/04/what-happens-when-no-swap-volume-is.html Have you ever asked yourself that question? A customer of mine a small number of VM’s on one host that were continuously crashing. He would power them up and within less than 5 minutes – they would get powered off. In this case – the host had a swap partition configured not with the default setting but rather as a separate shared datastore. So what happened? The swap_12 datastore was not accessible (the reason – is not relevant at the moment), and then they powered on a number of machines. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/winds-of-change.html Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/winds-of-change.html Of course the title of this post was blatantly borrowed from the Scorpions (I do love the song) For the past 5 years I have designed, implemented and supported our corporate IT infrastructure. We have grown (sometimes too fast) and have established a solid and sound foundation for the ever-evolving market and business needs. The time has come for a new adventure and change of focus. Starting Mid-April I will be moving to a new position of Platform architect in NDS. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/quick-and-dirty-powercli-to-repair-disk.html Thu, 22 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/quick-and-dirty-powercli-to-repair-disk.html I ran into a case of a datastore that ran out disk space (why that happened is a whole different story – don’t go there… really…) but because of a whole strange chain of event this caused a number of VM’s to become corrupted. So how did they become corrupt? There were a number of VM’s that were in the middle of committing a snapshot and there was no space on the volume. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/open-sdkopening-vsphere-management-sdk.html Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/open-sdkopening-vsphere-management-sdk.html When writing scripts (I am a fan of PowerCLI of course) there is many a time when I need to get something out of the vSphere SDK so I can dig in and get the details that I am looking for. Of course you could always go out to the internet and look for what you would like. But sometimes I do my coding when in transit (don’t worry I am not driving) - and have no internet connection - so I like to have the SDK with me on my laptop. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/cause-linux-kernel-panic-or-windows.html Mon, 19 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/cause-linux-kernel-panic-or-windows.html In some testing I was doing with VM HA monitoring – and I would highly recommend Duncan’s post for some more information on the subject - I needed to crash a VM to test the functionality. So in essence what does it do? When enabling this feature – VMware HA monitors the guest itself for Operating system failure and if recognized – it reboots the VM (according to the defined threshold) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/netapp-virtual-storage-console-40.html Fri, 16 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/netapp-virtual-storage-console-40.html Thanks to Christopher Wells for the heads up #NetApp Virtual Storage Console (VSC) 4.0 for #VMware vCenter... Now available for download! http://t.co/JUW75aqv (NOW account required) — Christopher Wells (@vsamurai_com) March 16, 2012 So What’s New? Virtual Storage Console 4.0 for VMware vSphere includes enhancements to all four capabilities. The Monitoring and Host Configuration capability adds support for the following: Data ONTAP® for Cluster-Mode Management of consolidated storage controller credentials https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/dont-let-your-datacenter-turn-into.html Wed, 14 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/dont-let-your-datacenter-turn-into.html Last night I tweeted a poll asking this question. The choices that people left are more or less what I was expecting but I still think that this warrants a post explaining my thoughts – and also to get yours. Virtualization is a godsend!! We are finally able to decouple the operating system from specific hardware. For as long as I can remember this was emphasized (by myself – I admit as well) as one of the many benefits for using virtual machines. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/removing-m-characters-from-files-in.html Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/removing-m-characters-from-files-in.html As part of a build process for an ESXi server – on of the stages are to upload a valid SSL certificate to the ESXi server. When copying the certificate over to the host with pcsp for some reason they file is always malformed when going over. If you do a cat rui.crt you will see no issue, but if you do a vi rui.crt then you will see that each and every line has a ^M at the end of it – this is because the file is a dos format file. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/set-updatetoolspolicyfor-your-vms.html Mon, 05 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/03/set-updatetoolspolicyfor-your-vms.html In continuation to William Lam’s post on how you can Automating VMware Tools Upgrade Policy and thanks to a comment left on the post – I wanted to perform the same functionality in PowerCLI. I present to you the Set-UpdateToolsPolicy Function Function Set-UpdateToolsPolicy { <# .SYNOPSISA function to change the update policy one or more VM's .DESCRIPTIONThis script will change the VMware Tools Update policy on one or many virtual machines . https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/02/50-free-licenses-vmware-horizon-app.html Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/02/50-free-licenses-vmware-horizon-app.html VMware is offering 50 Free Licenses of VMware Horizon Application Manager 1.5 on certain purchases of VMware SKU’s. FAQ Q. What is the current offer? A. During this promotion, eligible orders will receive 50 user licenses of VMware Horizon Application Manager 1.5 and one (1) year of Basic Support and Subscription (SnS) no additional charge. Eligible orders must include a qualifying VMware vSphere 5 product SKU. Q. What is the timeframe for this promotion? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/02/top-blogs-results-thank-you-all-for.html Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/02/top-blogs-results-thank-you-all-for.html Eric Siebert has posted the results from the Top Blog 2012 survey. I would like to thank you one and all for casting your vote. I am very please with the results that were published and wish to congratulate each and every one of the 187 bloggers on the list for doing an amazing job and especially those who made it into the top 25 spots. I was ranked #45 in the overall listing. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/02/how-to-set-cdp-on-vswitchthe-powercli.html Thu, 23 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/02/how-to-set-cdp-on-vswitchthe-powercli.html We all know that you get CDP information in a number of ways (also PowerCLI), KB 1007069 provides a number of ways to do it. But how would you go about setting CDP on the vSwitch? That can be done on the host itself in a number of ways: esxcfg-vswitch –B both vSwitch0 but also with esxcli esxcli network switch standard set –c both –v vSwitch0 That got me thinking…. esxcli… where had I used that before – of course Netstat for ESXi. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/02/windows-8-developer-preview-on-esxi5.html Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/02/windows-8-developer-preview-on-esxi5.html Thank you William Lam @lamw!!!!!!! Due to William’s How to Run Windows 8 on vSphere 5 (for reals) post I can now try out Windows 8 Developer Preview on my ESX boxes. This was resolved in patch ESXi500-201112001 - it just seems that no-one told us until now.. It would be very interesting to hear what actually changed in this patch. Running on Workstation was not a good option for me. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/02/my-wish-for-dvfabric-dvswitch-for.html Wed, 08 Feb 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/02/my-wish-for-dvfabric-dvswitch-for.html This one has been sitting with me for a while. It would be nice to hear your comments on this. The dvSwitch (Distributed Virtual Switch) – oh how it has changed our lives… Do you all remember the days when you had to manually add the all the portgroups and network settings to a new host? We use scripts, we use mega-kickstart deployment scripts, gui applications. Let us not forget that it is still the case for all those who do not have and Enterprise Plus vSphere license. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/01/tis-season-to-be-voting.html Tue, 24 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/01/tis-season-to-be-voting.html It seems like only yesterday when the last survey was conducted, and I was actually not going to write this post – because I hate “me too” posts. So let us try and do this slightly differently. On my No. 32 - Thank you all so much! post I stated some observations – which I hope you will consider this year, when you choose which blogs you wish to rank in the top 10. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/01/inventorysnapshot-fling-updated.html Mon, 23 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/01/inventorysnapshot-fling-updated.html Personally I think this is one of the most useful Fling’s I have come across. For those of you who do not know what a fling is… A fling is a short-term thing, not a serious relationship but a fun one. Likewise, the tools that are offered here are intended to be played with and explored. Four days ago the InventorySnapshot Fling was updated to version 1.1 From the release notes: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/01/system-center-2012-resources-say-how.html Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/01/system-center-2012-resources-say-how.html Of course this is not a GA product (yet). Hyper-V 3.0 is not GA (yet). So this is all theoretical and in the future. Microsoft is about to starting to push their Private Cloud offering. The first thing I always look at is what are the components involved. From the Download Microsoft Private Cloud Evaluation Software page : System Center 2012 App Controller provides a common self-service experience across private and public clouds that can help you empower application owners to easily build, configure, deploy, and manage new services. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/01/vmjugglerthe-powercli-version.html Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2012/01/vmjugglerthe-powercli-version.html I was tasked with testing the throughput of the vMotion network between two hosts - to see how much of the throughput was / could be used. Now I remembered that there was an application that someone had wrote to simulate vMotions between hosts - so I put the question out to Twitter Where was that script that ran a continuous vmotion for tests with #PowerCLI ? — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) January 15, 2012 The answers I got from @joerglew and @boukeg pointed me to VMJuggler written by Richard Garsthagen https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/12/internet-access-is-needed-to-install.html Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/12/internet-access-is-needed-to-install.html I came a cross a case this week that I thought would be worthwhile sharing. A client needed to install the vCLI on a Linux machine, and this machine was behind a firewall that was blocking access to the internet. The process was supposed to be very simple. Download the Tarball, copy it to the machine, untar and then install. But during the install this message popped up: Do you accept? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/12/mercedes-benz-and-byod.html Wed, 21 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/12/mercedes-benz-and-byod.html I spent a week in meetings with our global IT group in the UK last month. It is always good to see the people face to face that you interact with on a regular basis and build those personal connections. It makes working together a lot easier and more productive. During our time there, we had an outdoor activity at Mercedes Benz World. But first I have a confessions to make. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/12/vkernel-vops-45-launched.html Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/12/vkernel-vops-45-launched.html vKernel announced the release of version 4.5 of their vOperations Suite today. What’s New: New Automation Features - vOPS’ automation capabilities are enhanced with auto-deletion of abandoned VM images, auto-merging of unused snapshots, an additional automated remediation for performance issues and auto-calculation of future resource requirements. Automation Controls - vOPS 4.5 also adds the ability to more finally control some automation processes. For example, VMs can be grouped, and then these groups set with minimum and maximum resource amounts that automated right-sizing will respect. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/12/vmware-appspeed-to-be-retired.html Fri, 09 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/12/vmware-appspeed-to-be-retired.html This is the excerpt of a message I received yesterday.(the highlights and graphics are my own) Dear Maish, We want to provide you with an important update about the VMware® vCenter AppSpeed™ product. As customers continue to expand the use of virtualization and cloud resources, we are focusing on delivering management solutions that can support the flexibility that enterprises require. As a result of this focus, we have decided not to produce additional releases of vCenter AppSpeed. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/12/restarting-vcenter-services-with.html Tue, 06 Dec 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/12/restarting-vcenter-services-with.html Has it ever happened that you need to restart a vCenter service? I guess that you have been there before. Once upon a time I wrote a post that mentioned that there are not enough tools available today for us to troubleshoot the vCenter service which usually ends in a restart of the vCenter service. When you want to stop the vCenter service you will notice that there are several services that depend on the vpxd service so they also need to be stopped. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/11/all-of-us-can-benefit-from-techfieldday.html Mon, 28 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/11/all-of-us-can-benefit-from-techfieldday.html Where would you go to hear more or find out about a new product or a new company? The Web? Blogs? the company’s website? Probably all of the above are true. But sometimes that information is just… not… enough… I would like to share with you a resource that I find is of great value to me, and not well known (if you ask me). I was looking to find out some more about Nutanix. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/11/set-virtualswitch-and-misunderstanding.html Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/11/set-virtualswitch-and-misunderstanding.html I was doing some installations yesterday – and I wanted to add a second NIC to a vSwitch on a set of newly installed servers. Of course there were 10 of them, and I did not want to do this manually. Easiest way to do it (besides installing them with a script correctly in the first place) was with PowerCLI. From the Set-VirtualSwitch help: -------------- Example 3 -------------- C:\PS>Get-VMHost *. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/11/that-was-utter-surprise-to-me.html Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/11/that-was-utter-surprise-to-me.html That was an utter surprise to me. Seriously. I don’t actually know really, what to think about this though. Quest and VKernel are direct competitors. Quest acquired Vizioncore back in January 2008. It took 2 years until they discontinued the brand completely. So these words are something that still will need to be proven: VKernel, a leading provider of capacity management products for virtualized data centers and cloud environments, will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary of Quest. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/11/i-would-like-to-give-shout-out-and-warm.html Tue, 15 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/11/i-would-like-to-give-shout-out-and-warm.html I would like to give a shout out and a warm welcome to Embotics for joining on as a new sponsor for the blog. What does Embotics do? Embotics provides easy-to-use, virtualization management and private cloud automation solutions with the fastest time-to-value in the industry Welcome aboard. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/11/many-ways-to-skin-cat-or-write-script.html Thu, 10 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/11/many-ways-to-skin-cat-or-write-script.html I wanted to share with you another small example of how there are many ways to do things in PowerCLI. I wrote a post a while back about How to Speed Up Your PowerCLI Queries and there I came to the conclusion that not always is using Get-View faster. I came across a case that a customer had a snapshot that was taken (never mind the reason) on all the VM’s and this snapshot is removed with a script thereafter. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/10/enabling-vlan-tagging-on-redhat-linux.html Mon, 10 Oct 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/10/enabling-vlan-tagging-on-redhat-linux.html I came across this one today, and am putting it here to document it ofr my own benefit. I needed a physical machine with one NIC to be able to have two different IP addresses on two different VLAN’s. On Windows I am not sure if that is possible by default. So how would you do it on Redhat Linux (taken from Howto: Configure Linux Virtual Local Area Network (VLAN)) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/09/connecting-usb-device-to-esxi-50-vm.html Sun, 18 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/09/connecting-usb-device-to-esxi-50-vm.html This is something we have been asking for years and it was only available up until now in VMware View. We can finally connect a USB device to a VM running on ESXi. No additional licensing required!!!!! From the What’s New in vSphere 5.0 Could it be that simple? Well actually yes it is. This is my host (in this case the free vSphere Hypervisor) Here you have a VM Virtual Hardware version 8 (I was not able to test with Version 7 so if you would like to try and add a comment here - that would be great! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/09/netstat-for-esxi.html Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/09/netstat-for-esxi.html The title of the post is actually misleading - on purpose - because there is no netstat for ESXi. The reason that I bring this up today is because of a Twitter conversation from today regarding SSH access and VMkernel interfaces. I was looking to see which ports were open and what interfaces were listening. But that is a different post. What is netstat? according to Wikipedia: netstat (network statistics) is a command-line tool that displays network connections (both incoming and outgoing), routing tables, and a number of network interface statistics. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/09/vcp-5-beta-exam-pass-but-it-aint-easy.html Thu, 08 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/09/vcp-5-beta-exam-pass-but-it-aint-easy.html I received an email today September 7, 2011 Dear VMware Beta Candidate Congratulations! You have passed the new VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 5 (VCP5) certification exam. Thank you for your participation in the beta exam. Your input and participation were invaluable to this process. We will be adding this certification to your transcript within the next three weeks. You will receive an email notification with additional instructions once your education transcript has been updated. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/09/vmworld-labs-addendum.html Wed, 07 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/09/vmworld-labs-addendum.html As always the VMworld labs are always a hit. Everyone wants to try out the new technology, see the new stuff, and get a hands on feeling with the latest and greatest. To add to my HoL post from VMworld, the Fast Pass was gone within a very short time, so my apologies about that one. Borrowing from Duncan Epping’s post VMworld Labs 2011. The labs were (as they always are) impressive, two monitors at each seat, with a thin client. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vmware-hol-hands-on-labs.html Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vmware-hol-hands-on-labs.html As always they are brilliant!! The lines are long - at some time during the days it calms down but it is well worth the wait I took one lab yesterday HOL24 with the Horizon App Manager. It looks like a really great product. Some info from yesterdays VMware mail.Take note of the last sentence. Hands-on Labs Even though the Solutions Exchange closes tonight at 5:30pm, you can stop by and take a Lab until 10:00pm – or- stop by tomorrow morning at 7:00am. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/esxi-quiz-show-vsp1956.html Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/esxi-quiz-show-vsp1956.html This is going to be fun!! Why you may ask? because it has never been done before it is a great idea more than 400 people have already registered for this session. This was Duncan Epping’s brainchild.Bring a group of vExpert’s together - and make an entertaining session out of it all. VMworld is all about knowledge, well ok also about technology a bit, and beer a bit as well, but what good is knowledge if you cannot share it with others? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vmworld-2011-day-0.html Sun, 28 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vmworld-2011-day-0.html So my day started off not so well. Irene - you must have heard about that gal somewhere, that small little storm that was blowing up on the East coast? Seriously though, I hope that it does not cause too much damage and everyone stays safe and healthy. My original itinerary was to fly at 00:05 on Saturday night from TLV to JFK, a stop-over of 2.5 hours and from there to Las Vegas. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vmworld-2011-mobile-apps.html Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vmworld-2011-mobile-apps.html This is a repost of the original blog posted on the VMworld site Take VMworld with You on the Go The Mobile Web App iOS Application for the App Store Make sure you have VMworld with you while at the conference with the official VMworld 2011 mobile application. It is a show program, breakout session schedule builder and Solutions Exchange guide for attendees of the VMworld conference. The application is synced to email stations throughout the event and is compatible with iPhone, BlackBerry, and all other smartphones. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vmworld-2011-us-program-guide.html Fri, 26 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vmworld-2011-us-program-guide.html The Program Guide is now available. Get it here (No breadcrumbs that I could find regarding what will be happening next year.. Sorry!) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/i-want-more-bandwidth-but-kiss-brc2k11.html Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/i-want-more-bandwidth-but-kiss-brc2k11.html This will be the 3rd and final post for the Bloggers Reality Contest that I am participating in before VMworld 2011. The topic we will be dealing with today is converged networking. Why is it necessary? A few years ago, when I was starting out with virtualization, I started out with rack mount servers. From the start I knew that I would be using Network attached storage - and that the minimum amount of network cards I would need for my for these ESX servers was 6 1Gb NICs, two for management and vMotion, two for network traffic for the virtual machines and two more for iSCSI / NFS. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/how-many-vmotions-powercli-way.html Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/how-many-vmotions-powercli-way.html As an addition to Luc Deken’s and Jonathan Medd’s great VIProperty Module, I wanted to add one property that I found useful. Ever wanted to know how many vMotions have been made in your clusters? Using the GUI is fine, but not for more than one cluster. You can see the option on the summary tab of your cluster And of course the PowerCLI way. New-VIProperty -Name NumberVmotions -ObjectType Cluster -Value { param($cluster) $cluster. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/orchestration-will-rule-them-all.html Sun, 14 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/orchestration-will-rule-them-all.html On Wednesday night I participated on session 2 of the Blogger Reality Contest. From the rankings that were published on Wednesday - I am actually not doing so well (so your continued and strengthened support would be appreciated) - but hey this is not about the competition - it is all about the participation. It is great to interact with a whole new set of people, and I am sure that the relationships built during these three weeks will last. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/list-of-sessions-for-vmworld-2011-us.html Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/list-of-sessions-for-vmworld-2011-us.html Last year I posted a list of all of the sessions available for VMworld Copenhagen (there is an improvement this year with the session builder - but it still leaves a lot of space for improvement), and here is one for VMworld 2011 US. Click on the image below to get an Excel spreadsheet of all the sessions (updated as of yesterday). Easy to filter on time, Speaker, Track, Session Type etc. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/hp-and-minority-report-also-converged.html Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/hp-and-minority-report-also-converged.html So here it comes, Blogger Reality Contest - Session #1. We all participated in a briefing of HP’s Converged Storage Solutions But before even starting about what we learned, I asked myself what is converged storage? Well it seems that it is actually an HP term - because on Google there is not very much else besides answers that pertain to HP (small mention there of a another company - Nimble). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vsphere-5-0-vram-entitlements-are-to-be.html Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vsphere-5-0-vram-entitlements-are-to-be.html The first rumor of this was mentioned here by Gabrie van Zanten The original levels were as follows: As I mentioned on a previous post of mine vSphere 5 Licensing is (some kind of) per-VM licensing - VMware took a huge amount of flack from this. People were very verbal - very blunt and on the competition’s side very, very pleased. The thread below has been extremely busy since the announcement, reminds me of the good old days. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vmware-vcenter-converter-to-be-retired.html Mon, 01 Aug 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/08/vmware-vcenter-converter-to-be-retired.html Who uses vCenter Converter? Well I do. So I have some bad news for you. It looks like the built-in converter plugin which was part of vCenter 4.x will be no more. This is screen shot from the Beta This I used for performing the import of VM’s into the my Virtual Infrastructure right from the vSphere client as in the screenshot below. But this is all going away. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/blogger-reality-show-starts-on-tuesday.html Sun, 31 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/blogger-reality-show-starts-on-tuesday.html Last week I blogged about how I was going to get to VMworld, and all of this is due to the fact that I am participating in a Blogger Reality Contest. Our first session will be this Tuesday Session 1: Converged Storage After this session I will post an article on my thoughts on the solution presented. And this is where I will need your help. 60% of the points allocated to each contestant will be counted by reactions from my Twitter and blog followers. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/special-happy-birthday-to-john-troyer.html Sun, 24 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/special-happy-birthday-to-john-troyer.html Today is a special day. Not for me, but for someone that not only I think has done such a great service to the VMware community - but so many other agree as well. And that is you John Troyer! Instead of a present we all decided to say thank you - in a way that we all do best, through our blogs. I wish you many happy returns, lots of good times in the future and may the upcoming years be as great a ride as these past few years have turned out to be. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/so-i-am-coming-to-vmworld-on-with-show.html Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/so-i-am-coming-to-vmworld-on-with-show.html First let me say - Yes!!!!!!!! After a back and forth - and some uncertainty - I can finally say that I am going to be at VMworld next month. Copenhagen was out of the question for me this year because it falls smack bang in the middle of the Jewish Holiday of Sukkot. So how did this all come about? It all started with small item I saw on Twitter https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/using-vmware-zimbra-fling-with-gmail.html Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/using-vmware-zimbra-fling-with-gmail.html A while ago VMware released their VMware Zimbra for Android (VZA). The developers Chitong Chung and Ben Kolin described the fling as follows: VMware Zimbra for Android (VZA) is a native Android collaboration application that allows you to access your email, calendar, contacts, tasks and files from any Android device, specifically smartphones and tablets. VZA supports any Microsoft ActiveSync compliant email server and also supports the VMware Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/vsphere-5-licensing-is-some-kind-of-per.html Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/vsphere-5-licensing-is-some-kind-of-per.html After a rocky two days on the blogosphere, the forums, Twitter, and practically everywhere else, I would like to add in my 2 cents. My apologies if this turns out to be a long post. Firstly let me say - the release announcements made on Tuesday - are amazing!! The amount of new features, improvements, the scalability - are amazing. Congratulations on the great work and all the new additional features. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/netapp-dfm-console-on-ubuntu.html Sun, 10 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/netapp-dfm-console-on-ubuntu.html I finally got to play around with the NetApp Operations Manager last week. The two options for the management I had, was to install on a package on a Windows/Linux machine that I use or to use the web console. But the Linux package was only an RPM package. But my I use Ubuntu Linux - and I am not going to change the Linux flavor just for the console. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/strange-vcenter-permissions-issue.html Sun, 10 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/strange-vcenter-permissions-issue.html Today I came across a strange issue with permissions and the lack of ability to change permissions on a VM. Someone had by mistake given the explicit Role VirtualMachineUser to the Built-in Group Users. Don’t ask how. What did this cause? Every single user in the domain now had access to the machine - which was not a good thing. No-one could change the permissions for this VM! Here is what a screenshot looked like when logging in as a Full Admin. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/vexpert-2011.html Sun, 03 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/07/vexpert-2011.html I was extremely happy to receive a nice email from John Troyer on Friday morning with the following text: Dear Maish Saidel-Keesing, We’re pleased to designate you as a vExpert 2011 as recognition of your contributions to the VMware, virtualization, and cloud computing communities. You’ve done work above and beyond, and we’re delighted to communicate more closely, to share resources, and to offer other opportunities for greater interaction throughout the year as we continue to grow knowledge and success in the community of IT professionals. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/reducing-amount-of-ram-for-vcenter.html Sun, 26 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/reducing-amount-of-ram-for-vcenter.html ***** Disclaimer ***** This is not recommended by VMware and I am also pretty sure it is not supported either, so if you make this change then do so at your own risk. The vCenter Orchestrator Installation and Configuration Guide states the following for Hardware requirements. A few pages later this statement is also made. I actually find this quite strange because Orchestrator is installed by default on each and every instance of vCenter Server. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/what-if-you-start-over-and-build-it.html Tue, 21 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/what-if-you-start-over-and-build-it.html There are several environments (at least in the beginning) that their initial infrastructure was not designed with virtualization in mind. When they started out - virtualization was something that you were asked to fit into the existing infrastructure - adapt your current processes and procedures, to this new emerging technology. So most things worked, some didn’t and we all learned during this time what the pitfalls were, how things have to change. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/where-does-it-all-come-from.html Wed, 15 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/where-does-it-all-come-from.html Today I received an email with something that I found very moving - and I was also able to project onto the subject of virtualization. Here is the original text (slightly altered). The Scope of Gratitude _Someone I know described a self-improvement group in which he participated. In order to improve their sense of gratitude, everyone in the group was to select one thing that they do frequently - and then think for 10 minutes about its ramifications. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/israel-vmug-meeting.html Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/israel-vmug-meeting.html For those of you in Israel (Yes I know you are all dying to be here…), next week the local Israel VMUG meeting will be held. When: Tuesday, June 14, 2011 - 08:30 - 13:30 Where: Habayit Hayarok (The Green Villa), Tel Aviv How to attend: Register here The Agenda: 08:30-09:0 - Welcome & Registration 09:00-09:10 - Opening by VMware Israel Country Manager 09:10-09:55 - VMware vCloud Director – Technical Overview 09:55-10:40 - Backup & DR for Virtual Environments 10:40-11:25 - vCenter Operations – Real Time Performance Management (Including Demo) 11:25-11:50 - Coffee break 11:50-12:50 - End User Computing: View 4. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/my-vmworld-session-not-accepted.html Wed, 08 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/my-vmworld-session-not-accepted.html Unfortunately the session submitted by Forbes Guthrie, Scott Lowe, Tom Howarth and myself was not accepted. Thank you for your interest in speaking at VMworld 2011. We received a record number of submissions this year and were only able to accept ~15%. Unfortunately, we are not able to accept your session proposal, but we greatly appreciate and value the time and effort you took to submit a session proposal, and we hope that you will participate in the VMworld 2012 Call for Papers. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/netapp-virtual-storage-console-21.html Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/06/netapp-virtual-storage-console-21.html NetApp has quietly released an updated version of their Virtual Storage Console Software (you will need a NetApp Now account to access). Here is the announcement: The Virtual Storage Console software is a single vCenter Server plug-in that provides end-to-end virtual machine lifecycle management for VMware environments running NetApp storage. The plug-in provides the following capabilities: Storage configuration and monitoring using the Monitoring and Host Configuration capability (previously called the Virtual Storage Console capability) Datastore provisioning and virtual machine cloning using the Provisioning and Cloning capability Backup and recovery of virtual machines and datastores using Backup and Recovery capability Note: Use of various capabilities in VSC requires the purchase of one or more NetApp software licenses. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/converting-linux-machine-fails-during.html Mon, 30 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/converting-linux-machine-fails-during.html I was having some difficulty with the conversion of a Linux machine. Every time I tried to import the machine it would fail at about 19%. So two things I wanted share with you today. If you are using the integrated vCenter Converter (which you should..) then you can monitor the results of the conversion from the vSphere client itself. If you right click on the task you will get a view summary option. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/storage-vmotion-deep-dive.html Mon, 23 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/storage-vmotion-deep-dive.html Of all the features available with vSphere - one of the greatest features I like is Storage vMotion, which is described by VMware as follows: In simple terms, vMotion allows you to move your VM from one host to another, Storage vMotion allows you to move your VM’s between different Storage arrays / LUNS that presented to you ESX Host. All without downtime (ok, one or two pings.. ). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/update-intel-nic-drivers-on-esx-41.html Thu, 19 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/update-intel-nic-drivers-on-esx-41.html I Installed an IBM x3650 M3 the other day. During the installation the additional Intel NIC was not recognized by default in the ESX Host. This I could see in two different ways, from the output on the console msaidelk@esx9:~$ sudo lspci | grep Ethernet0b:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (rev 20) 0b:00.1 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (rev 20) 10:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation Broadcom NetXtreme II BCM5709 1000Base-T (rev 20) 10:00. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/vmware-horizon-app-manager.html Tue, 17 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/vmware-horizon-app-manager.html VMware has launched Project Horizon !! Here is the VMware Horizon App Manager landing page Datasheet - FAQ - News Release Q. What Is VMware Horizon App Manager? A. VMware Horizon App Manager is a hosted service that enables organizations to centrally manage the provisioning, access and usage of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. With this turnkey solution, IT departments can extend on-premises Microsoft Active Directory identity to the public cloud, simplifying the security of application access. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/why-should-that-veeam-will-support-for.html Tue, 17 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/why-should-that-veeam-will-support-for.html I will not go over the details of this announcement that was released today. Both David Davis and Sean Clark wrote very good articles about the release. I do want to add a small point of my own, and that is why I think this is a big thing - or at least the start of a big thing. There is no doubt that: VMware is the current market leader. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/10-things-that-are-on-my-mind.html Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/10-things-that-are-on-my-mind.html I was recently asked what are the things that I currently working on and what is occupying my time. I thought I would share that list with you - as it holds a list of things that you should have on your list of things to do: How do I provide more automation for my environment? Mainly for the end user. Securing my environment – performing security audits, reviews – what tools can be utilized. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/vmworld-session-voting-is-now-open.html Mon, 09 May 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/05/vmworld-session-voting-is-now-open.html Sorry for the shameless plug – but the amount of amazing sessions that are available are enormous – 1164 of them to be precise – and all of these are open for public voting. Forbes Guthrie, Scott Lowe and yours truly have submitted a session as an opportunity to present your questions and voice your opinions on vSphere Design at VMworld. Tom Howarth has kindly agreed to moderate the session. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/04/welcome-to-my-latest-sponsor-solarwinds.html Thu, 14 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/04/welcome-to-my-latest-sponsor-solarwinds.html I would like to thank SolarWinds for joining as a sponsor for my blog. Welcome aboard!! If you would like to join as a sponsor please feel free to contact me https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/04/access-esx-host-when-root-login-is.html Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/04/access-esx-host-when-root-login-is.html VMware Security best practices are to not allow PermitRootLogin to an ESX host. Enabling root SSH login on an ESX host. I could not SSH into a newly provisioned host. The server would not allow root login (rightfully so), and my domain account could not log in either. This is how I solved the issue. Logged into the ESX host directly with the vSphere Client. Created a new user with SSH access to the host. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/04/ibm-x3650-m3-does-not-recognize-nics.html Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/04/ibm-x3650-m3-does-not-recognize-nics.html I was battling with a piece of IBM hardware last week during the install of a new ESX host. I had installed a new server, IBM x3650 M3 with 2 Intel Dual Port Server Adapters, and the damn thing would not recognize the cards in the system. I updated to the latest firmware. This was not the first time this model had been installed but up until now now problems had occurred. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/04/vmware-vexpert-2011-applications-now.html Tue, 12 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/04/vmware-vexpert-2011-applications-now.html John Troyer has just announced that the applications for the vExpert 2011 Program is now open. vExperts are the bloggers, the book authors, the VMUG leaders, the tool builders and town criers, the tinkerers and speakers and thinkers who are moving us all forward as an IT industry. A vExpert should demonstrate knowledge about VMware solutions and their benefits, and how they fit into the overall IT landscape. A vExpert designation is not a technical certification of any kind, although they are often very articulate and knowledgeable about virtualization and IT topics, both technical and non-technical. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/04/installing-uber-vnx-nfs-v1-1st-steps.html Sun, 10 Apr 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/04/installing-uber-vnx-nfs-v1-1st-steps.html Ever since EMC released the the VNX I have been itching to get my hands on a simulator to try it out. Now seeing that Chad and Nick are not ones to leave us hanging for long, I started to ask for it straight after the launch. I was told that it would be out, in the not too distance future. Yesterday, I saw that Nick Weaver had done it again. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/03/xangati-for-esx-and-it-free.html Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/03/xangati-for-esx-and-it-free.html The new version of Xangati for ESX was designed specifically to make the installation process as simple as possible and provides VI administrators with the following benefits and features: A new and simplified GUI-based appliance set up – for getting the appliance addressed, powered-up and on the network – launched directly from the vCenter console tab; Standardization on one virtual appliance covering dynamic and static IP addressed data center segments; Streamlining of the steps required to enable Xangati to gather and summarize traffic traversing a vSwitch; Fifty percent reduction in the screens required to get to a working Xangati UI. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/03/datacenter-in-few-years-from-now.html Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/03/datacenter-in-few-years-from-now.html I recently participated in writing a short piece on the question, “Is the Hypervisor a Commodity Nowadays?” on TechTarget. The consensus there was split 50/50. I would like to explain a little more. What is a commodity? A good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price. [Source: Webster Dictionary]. So let us give two examples. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/cloud-connect-here-is-your-chance.html Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/cloud-connect-here-is-your-chance.html 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. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/lab-manager-retired-to-vcloud-update.html Sun, 27 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/lab-manager-retired-to-vcloud-update.html 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 And vCloud Licenses for a 25 VM bundle for $3,750 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/vcdx-defense-new-dates.html Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/vcdx-defense-new-dates.html 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! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/vmware-vsphere-design-book-update.html Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/vmware-vsphere-design-book-update.html 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. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/drobo-discount-codes-tech-field-day.html Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/drobo-discount-codes-tech-field-day.html 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: $50 off on Drobo 4-bay $100 off on Drobo 4-bay with drives $100 off on Drobo S & Drobo FS https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/vcenter-lab-manager-to-be-retired-told.html Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/vcenter-lab-manager-to-be-retired-told.html 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 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/upgrade-vcenter-to-41-u1.html Tue, 15 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/upgrade-vcenter-to-41-u1.html I upgraded my lab to vSphere 4.1 U1 on Friday. vCenter was simple. A quick set of screen shots 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. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/drobo-my-visit-from-tech-field-day.html Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/drobo-my-visit-from-tech-field-day.html During Day 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) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/powercli-411-poster-updated.html Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/powercli-411-poster-updated.html Pablo Roesch posted on the VMware Communities the latest version of the PowerCLI poster. Thanks to all that made this happen. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/snapshots-are-not-backups.html Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/snapshots-are-not-backups.html 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 … 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! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/techfieldday-day-1.html Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/techfieldday-day-1.html 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. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/vsphere-41-update-1-released.html Fri, 11 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/vsphere-41-update-1-released.html Thanks to a tweet from vConsult I learned that a new vCenter and vSphere update was released. As always test before deployment!! 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. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/tech-field-day-5-day-1.html Tue, 08 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/tech-field-day-5-day-1.html 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. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/cannot-start-virtual-machine.html Fri, 04 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/cannot-start-virtual-machine.html I was presented with an issue yesterday regarding a VM that I was not able to start I went through KB Article 10051, step by step, until I got to: 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. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/viewing-webex-on-road.html Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/02/viewing-webex-on-road.html 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. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/vmware-vsphere-design-book.html Mon, 31 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/vmware-vsphere-design-book.html This is a joint post of three prominent writers in the virtualization community: Forbes Guthrie, Scott Lowe and Maish Saidel-Keesing. For the past 6 months we have been working on a joint project. It has actually been kept pretty quiet, and it is now time to make this public. Previous VMware vSphere books have focused on how to master the technology, deep-diving into certain elements and giving tips & tricks that help you manage your virtual infrastructure. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/do-you-really-need-vma.html Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/do-you-really-need-vma.html This post was triggered by a very informative conversation I had with William Lam this week. Thanks William! vMA - vSphere Management Assistant, is a virtual machine that includes prepackaged software such as a Linux distribution, the vSphere command‐line interface, and the vSphere SDK for Perl. Basically it is the missing service console for ESXi. But it’s more than that too. This allows administrators to run scripts or agents that interact with ESX/ESXi and vCenter Server systems without having to explicitly authenticate each time. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/windows-72008-deployment-kms-and-mak_17.html Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/windows-72008-deployment-kms-and-mak_17.html Continuing the problem from part 1. Over the past 8 months this template has been updated with Microsoft security patches (released once a month) and during that time the template OS was activated - while connected to the network. After the upgrade to 4.1, I noticed that I could no longer deploy a Windows 2008 R2 template with customization. (There were several issues here. In the beginning I could not deploy a template at all - but after a restart of the vCenter server and an SR submitted to VMware on the issue that was solved). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/windows-72008-deployment-kms-and-mak_4336.html Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/windows-72008-deployment-kms-and-mak_4336.html I would close up what we have learned from part 1 and part 2. During my work with the VMware Support on this case, one of the questions I asked, was is it possible to to inject a parameter into the customization process, but the only option was to import a full sysprep file. This would in essence break a good deal of the automation process, such as the rename of the OS to match the deployed VM name. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/milestone-1000-twitter-followers.html Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/milestone-1000-twitter-followers.html Wow! When I joined on: Thu 21 Aug 2008 07:23 I would have never thought that anyone would actually have much interest in what I have to say, evidently I was wrong. On to the next 1000!! W00t!!! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/windows-72008-deployment-kms-and-mak.html Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/windows-72008-deployment-kms-and-mak.html I have been dealing with an issue that has been bugging me for quite a while. It has to do with the deployment of Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 VM’s and License Activation. First let’s describe the environment and situation. The whole infrastructure is at 4.1, vCenter and all ESX hosts as well. It was upgraded recently from 4.0. 7 months ago I created my templates - with all my customizations. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/i-am-delegate-gestalt-it-tech-field-day.html Thu, 13 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/i-am-delegate-gestalt-it-tech-field-day.html I was honored to receive an email last night from Stephen Foskett offering me a spot on on the next Tech Field Day in February in San Jose. I am happy to be able to accept the offer, so I will hopefully be making my way to the US in the beginning of February. The list of delegates are as follows. Sean Clark SeanClark.us @vSeanClark Bill Hill Virtual Bill Gestalt IT @Virtual_Bill https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/what-do-you-use-for-your-vmware.html Wed, 12 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/what-do-you-use-for-your-vmware.html I would be interested in hearing your opinions on what you use for monitoring your VMware environment. I am conducting a study on what tools you find useful for monitoring and Capacity Management/Planning If you would be so kind as to answer the poll below and if you could leave a comment below on why you made your choice - it would be highly appreciated. What do you use for monitoring your VMware environment? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/virtualization-challenges-in-2011-under.html Mon, 10 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2011/01/virtualization-challenges-in-2011-under.html I wanted to give you a heads-up on a webcast that will be held on Wednesday January 12th, 2011 09.00 GMT You are all cordially invited to join, it should be an interesting talk! Gary Thornton, Simon Seagrave, Steve Chambers, Richard Garsthagen, and myself for an hour of discussion about Virtualization Challenges in 2011 or on the site directly. Looking forward to see you there! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/esxi-has-32mb-memory-footprint.html Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/esxi-has-32mb-memory-footprint.html I was listening to an very interesting presentation this evening from Olivier Cremel, Principal Engineer ESXi Internals: Better Understanding for Better Management and Troubleshooting The ESXi Architecture document actually states that the memory footprint of the hypervisor is 32mb Eric Gray, also put up a post regarding the hypervisor footprint - again 32mb The hypervisor is loaded into memory into a RAMDISK. But where exactly can you see the size of the RAMDISK in which the hypervisor runs, and is it actually 32mb? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/what-is-in-store-for-2011-and-how-to.html Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/what-is-in-store-for-2011-and-how-to.html 2010 has come and gone. It has been a great year, seriously, there are so many things I can point out that continue to amaze me, that makes me wonder sometimes what is it that I do that has brought these great times upon me. Two contributions of mine that were published lately were predictions on what is store for us in 2011. Predictions for 2011 by the virtualization community - Veeam 2011 server virtualization predictions from our advisory board - SearchServerVirtualization. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/unsupported-hardware-would-you.html Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/unsupported-hardware-would-you.html Today I came across two different products that could provide a large amount of benefit to any organization. But there is an issue with both of them. The first one is Nexenta NexentaStor™ is a fully featured NAS/SAN software platform with capabilities that meet and even exceed the capabilities of legacy storage systems. NexentaStor’s rapid development is due in great measure to the feedback and input of well over 10,000 NexentaStor™ users and the ongoing progress of the underlying OpenSolaris and Nexenta. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/veeam-holiday-present.html Thu, 09 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/veeam-holiday-present.html I would like to tell you a short story about the new present that Veeam has announced today. Just under 2 months ago I sent the message above to Doug Hazelman. The text speaks for itself. This is the answer I got back from him So the Hash tags were out #F4C - which was of course #NFR4VCP Isn’t it great to have companies like this that actually think of these things before you even have the idea? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/vmware-communities-downtime-this.html Thu, 09 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/vmware-communities-downtime-this.html For those of you who have not already noticed. VMware will be upgrading Communities systems between 10-12 December 2010. During this time, the system will be placed in read-only mode. While we work on the upgrade, you will not be able to log in, and only public content will be available. All data will be preserved and become available again once the upgrade is complete. This is a sneak preview of the demo site. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/welcome-to-new-sponsor.html Thu, 09 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/welcome-to-new-sponsor.html I would like to thank Veeam for becoming a sponsor of Technodrone Welcome aboard!! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/my-android-phone-as-usb-stick.html Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/12/my-android-phone-as-usb-stick.html A few days ago, I was presented with a situation that I had a failed ESX Server which needed to be re-installed. How and what happened is another tory for another time though. I wanted to get some information off of the ESX host, namely the configuration and the whole /var/log partition for the purposes of opening an SR with VMware to analyze the issue. In this particular case I could only get into single mode on the ESX host, so I did not have any network connectivity to the outside. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/welcome-to-vmware-alive-vm.html Mon, 29 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/welcome-to-vmware-alive-vm.html Heh? Alive VM? I have never hear of it? Well up until today neither had I. Looking at my previous post Upgrade to Enterprise Plus promotion I clicked on the link (which was originally pointing to the above mentioned promotion) and was presented with this page. A quick search on VMware’s site brought only these two hits A Google search brought me to this Aha! Integrien!! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/i-got-my-ugly-mug-on-vmware-site.html Mon, 22 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/i-got-my-ugly-mug-on-vmware-site.html Pablo Roesch approached me a while back to ask if he could add me to the Hero Spotlight on the VMware Developer Community. I was contacted today by a colleague in Israel who said he saw my face up on the VMware site The Heroes in the Spotlight are rotated, so F5 to go through them all. I am honored I am not worthy - there are so many others that should be up there. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/upgrade-to-enterprise-plus-promotion.html Thu, 18 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/upgrade-to-enterprise-plus-promotion.html Act Now to Get More Value from vSphere That is the title of the promotion valid for less than one month from today. For a limited time, you can get VMware vCenter CapacityIQ and/or VMware View for free, depending on which version of VMware vSphere you upgrade to or purchase, making the ROI better than ever. If buy vSphere Standard, Advanced, or Enterprise or Enterprise Plus, upgrade to any of these editions, or purchase any vSphere acceleration kit that contains these editions between August 9, 2010 and December 15, 2010 and get 15 VMs of VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, a robust virtualization capacity planning solution that helps you utilize your datacenter and desktop capacity in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/new-patch-released-vmsa-2010-0016.html Tue, 16 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/new-patch-released-vmsa-2010-0016.html This was just released. KB 1027027 (ESX) and KB 1027753 (ESXi) I wanted to point out that is should deal with several issues that include a patch to solve this Host crash because of ESX Active Directory Integration. Here is the info from the KB 1027021 When an user who is a member of more than 32 groups attempts to log into an ESXi host by using KVM, any one of the following issues might occur: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/incorrect-nfs-datastore-mount.html Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/incorrect-nfs-datastore-mount.html I was contacted the other day with an issue where someone was trying to create a cluster in a box, and they were running into an issue. When trying to power on the VM with the shared, eager-zeroed-thick disk that was created they were running into an error message, saying that they did not have permission to access the disk. I checked to see if the VM settings were correct and that the SCSI adapter was set to a different controller with the correct disk sharing options. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/get-vsphere-client.html Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/get-vsphere-client.html As was posted on the new KB article 1029925 the vSphere Client is no longer packaged with current builds of ESX and ESXi. However it is packaged with vCenter, so you can still get it from the web interface of your vCenter server. Since they have posted a direct URL to the download I decided to wrap this in a PowerShell script Get-vSphereClient. Function Get-vSphereClient { <# .SYNOPSISDownloads the vsphere 4. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/list-of-free-ebooks.html Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/11/list-of-free-ebooks.html I came across this list of free eBooks that Microsoft has released as of late. Windows 7 troubleshooting tips Deploying Windows 7, Essential Guidance Introducing Windows Server 2008 R2 First Look Microsoft Office 2010 Perhaps you can find something useful here. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/can-we-move-to-only-one-physical-cpu.html Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/can-we-move-to-only-one-physical-cpu.html I started reading Eric Siebert’s book this afternoon - Maximum vSphere: Tips, How-Tos, and Best Practices for Working with VMware vSphere 4 (which is a great book - highly recommended!!), and for some reason during the part that he was speaking about licensing and the features, a thought crossed my mind. I put out a feeler this evening on Twitter with this question: Quick twitter poll - what is your average CPU usage on your ESX hosts? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/journey-to-vcdx-not-complete-yet.html Sat, 23 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/journey-to-vcdx-not-complete-yet.html 10 days ago I completed my VCDX defense in front of a Panel of some the top professionals and technical people in VMware. This has been the completion of a journey, a path and quest to achieve the VCDX certification. But let us roll back a bit - approximately a year back. VMware announced that there would be a new certification path that would be a level above the current VCP certification. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-2010-or-was-it-disneyworld.html Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-2010-or-was-it-disneyworld.html A week has passed since the last day of VMworld in Copenhagen. And I owe myself (and you as well) a roundup and summary of the event Quite a few roundups have been published over the past week. I will not repeat what has been said in the other posts, but I would like to add my following comments. Which kid does not like going to Disneyworld? So I guess you can say the same thing, which virtualization enthusiast does not like like going to VMworld? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-2010-copenhagen-vexperts-panel.html Thu, 21 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-2010-copenhagen-vexperts-panel.html I wanted to share with you a short interview that John Troyer held with Alex Mittell, Erik Scholten and myself during the Show last week. I apologize I did not manage to trim the video properly, so please scroll to the 3.00 minute mark to get to the beginning. Hope you enjoy. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/getting-average-usage-from-your-hosts.html Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/getting-average-usage-from-your-hosts.html I was asked to provide a small report on what the average RAM usage was on each host over the past 30 days I forgot to mention the code was inspired by the session that Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf gave at VMworld. Of course you could do it with mouse clicks – but man I love PowerCLI. 10 lines of code. less than 3 minutes and BAM! $start = (Get-Date). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-day-2.html Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-day-2.html My day started at 08.00 with two labs that. The labs were nice and quiet. LAB17 Lab: VMware vCenter™ Orchestrator This I think is one of the most hidden secrets and most unused featured that is bundled with vCenter. In essence this could enable you to basically do almost anything you want in your Virtual Infrastructure. But the issue is that the documentation for the product was, IMHO, severely lacking until the current release and besides a few how-to’s on how to set it up - the knowledge is practically non-existent. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-day-3.html Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-day-3.html Day 3 started with me being a bunch of nerves and getting up at the crack of dawn. I would like to lodge an official complaint with the Danish Hotel Association (If that even exists) You should not have two hotels named the same in the same city First Hotel Vesterbro // COPENHAGEN and the First Hotel Skt. Petri // COPENHAGEN. Not being Danish - can you see how this can be confusing - and they are located within 1. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-day-4.html Thu, 14 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-day-4.html Today was the day of packing up. Early check-out from the hotel. I headed over to the Labs early to get a lab done. The labs were already busy at 08:10. The Wyse thin-client on each and every station was what connected you to the labs and from there further into the cloud to the remote datacenter The lab I completed was LAB18: VMware vCloud Director - Networking. This was the 3rd in the series of Cloud related related Labs. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vcdx-defense-is-complete-i-feel-15.html Wed, 13 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vcdx-defense-is-complete-i-feel-15.html Instead of answering 300 times on Twitter on how it went I will say that it is over. And it is a huge relief!! Feelings and more details to follow in a later post. I will not know how I did, until the results are released in about 2 weeks. Thank you all very, very much for all the good wishes, the support and advice you have given throughout the whole process. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-day-1.html Tue, 12 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-day-1.html So day one started with @esloof sneaking into the Bella Center at the crack of dawn and sneaking some pictures in from the solutions exchange. The first 20 Seconds you can can see how quiet (AND EARLY) it was. I arrived at the Bella Center at around 9.00 and completed registration without hardly having to wait line. There are at least 12 stations with two computers each, for registering. Very simple process. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-day-0.html Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-day-0.html Sunday, I started my trip to Copenhagen, not nearly as exciting as the vRoadtrip but I do guarantee you I flew faster than 210 KM/h I usually travel with my family, at least once a year, so flying to Europe is not new. But flying without kids is a whole different experience. Coming from Israel though does not put you in a central location. I was en route from door to door almost 11 hours - with stop overs and waiting for flights. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-directions-from-hotels-to-bella.html Mon, 11 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-directions-from-hotels-to-bella.html Corey Romero from VMware posted a very useful list of directions from all the hotels to the Bella Center. Each one on a PDF page that you can easily print out and put in your pocket. Click on the picture below for the directions https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-copenhagen-here-i-come.html Sun, 10 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmworld-copenhagen-here-i-come.html Finalizing my schedule.There are not enough hours in the day to accommodate all that I would like to do. It will actually be interesting to see how much of this changes or how much of the schedule I abided by. Will let you know after VMworld. And have I mentioned I would like to come back with an IPAD? (nudge nudge, wink wink, say no more??) I am wheels up tomorrow at 16. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmware-product-interoperability-matrix.html Wed, 06 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vmware-product-interoperability-matrix.html How do you know what vSphere Family product is compatible with another? Does ESX 3.5 work with vCenter 4.0? Does Capacity IQ 1.0.2 work with ESX 4.1? VMware have published the VMware Product Interoperability Matrix which allows you to check which product (and version) is compatible with another VMware Product and version? Here you can see the vCenter 2.5 U6 compatible only with ESX 3.5 U5. And here you can see the Capacity IQ 1. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/stuxnet-virtualization-targeted-dos.html Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/stuxnet-virtualization-targeted-dos.html Stuxnet for those of you have been unaware to the what has been happening with one of the most talked about worms since Conficker is an industrial rootkit targeted at Siemens software. Now conspiracy theories aside: Who was this targeted at? Who created it? I started to think how can or could this reflect on a Virtual Infrastructure? What would happen if you had a worm / virus targeted at virtual machines or even worse at the ESX host themselves? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vcdx3-track-50-discount-for-vcap-dca.html Mon, 04 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/10/vcdx3-track-50-discount-for-vcap-dca.html I have been waiting for confirmation from the VMware Certification Team regarding this and it came in today. For those of you who remember, when the track was released there were a number of people already in the process who wanted to upgrade to the new track. The assurance back then was that people already in the track would receive a discount on the new exams. After exchanging emails back and forth with Jon Hall and the Certification team, asking about this discount, I received this in my inbox today. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/host-crash-because-of-esx-active.html Wed, 29 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/host-crash-because-of-esx-active.html I was subscribed to this thread and received an update today that I must have missed previously, with an issue much more serious than the one that the thread was originally started with. Previously, I posted an article to explain how to Integrate ESXi into Active Directory. After the integration logging onto a host with your domain credentials can cause the host to crash. The issue occurs when the user logging into the ESX host with their Active Directory credentials is a member of more than 30 Security Groups. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/no-32-thank-you-all-so-much.html Tue, 28 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/no-32-thank-you-all-so-much.html The list of the top 25 blogs was released yesterday. I unfortunately did not make the top 25 this year - close but not enough. I am honored to be placed anywhere on this list, be it number 1, number 32 or even 115. The way I look at it is that people are enjoying the content I write on my blog and think it is useful, and the ranking I received - is for me a great vote of confidence and makes me extremely proud! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/murphy-law.html Tue, 21 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/murphy-law.html Let me introduce you to a good old soul by the name of Edward Murphy. Who was Edward Murphy? In short he was responsible for the famous saying, “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”. And so the story goes. After preparing with the rest of my team members about what should be done - how it should be done, and going over all the current open issues that needed to be taken care of while I would be away on vacation, I thought, “Great! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/vcloud-enterprise-as-well-not-only.html Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/vcloud-enterprise-as-well-not-only.html After having a Twitter conversation with Massimo Re Ferre’ - VMware vCloud Architect, (his article is a great read - you should definitely make the time to get to understand it - vCloud Director Networking for Dummies) he was surprised that the whole conversation was going on because as far as he knew the Ent. Plus was not a pre-requisite for vCloud Director (even though the information states so on the VMware website) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/vote-for-top-25-virtualization-blogs.html Tue, 14 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/vote-for-top-25-virtualization-blogs.html It is that time of the year again, and it time to perform your duties and help me stay in the top 25 bloggers list. Eric Siebert has opened the survey on his site. The list is a large, 100 blogs, but you can only pick your top 10. I hope you enjoy the content I provide and will put me in the top 3! (Seriously though - anywhere on this list will make me happy). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/user-can-cancel-task.html Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/user-can-cancel-task.html I was asked today to cancel a task of a machine import today - because it was created by mistake. So I naturally asked the Cluster Admin, “Why do you not do it yourself?”. And he naturally answered me, “Because I can’t! The option is greyed out.” Now there are certain tasks you cannot cancel in vCenter. The exact list - I am sure LucD will be able to pull this out of the SDK - but this was not the purpose of this post. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/converter-43-throttling.html Sun, 12 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/converter-43-throttling.html In my previous post about Converter 4.3 - My First Impressions - I mentioned a new feature called Throttling which was introduced in the new version. So what does it do? You can limit the amount of resources that will be used by the Conversion Task. I would like to clarify two things about throttling: This is only valid for Windows Machines this has no effect for Linux. The throttling is not done one the ESX host. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/converter-43-my-first-impressions.html Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/converter-43-my-first-impressions.html There are a few changes to note with the new Converter version. You can now import Hyper-V Machines Directly There is a new Throttling feature (More about that in an upcoming post) You can now define a cluster as a destination for your conversion - I guess DRS will sort out where to place the VM. As opposed to And Last But not Least. It is blazing fast. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/vmware-vcloud-director-for-enterprise.html Sun, 05 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/09/vmware-vcloud-director-for-enterprise.html Please see the update in the follow up to this post. OK VMworld is now over. I was actually not in San Francisco, but with all the updates from Twitter, the Keynotes, and #thecube I felt part of the conference. From all the feedback that I have heard from the show, it seems that it was a great event, and extremely beneficial. I will not go over all the product releases that were announced over the past week, there have been more than enough posted last week. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/vmware-vcenter-converter-new-releases.html Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/vmware-vcenter-converter-new-releases.html VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 4.3 | 30 Aug 2010 | Build 292238 Release Notes - VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 4.3 User’s Guide What’s New The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 4.3 includes the following new functionality: Support for VMware vSphere 4.1 as source and destination targets Support for importing powered-off Microsoft Hyper-V R1 and Hyper-V R2 virtual machines Public API and sample code for submitting and monitoring Converter jobs Support for importing Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 sources Ability to throttle the data transfer from source to destination based on network bandwidth or CPU IPv6 support Discontinued Support Support of the following operating systems is discontinued: Windows 2000 Windows NT Support for OVF format is discontinued Support for VCB image sources is discontinued Linux installation support is discontinued In addition there is a new SDK that was made available https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/vmware-vcloud-sdk-for-java.html Tue, 31 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/vmware-vcloud-sdk-for-java.html VMware vCloud SDK for Java allows you to get started quickly interfacing using vCloud API. It brings the REST based vCloud API in the world of Java developers by providing easy to use client side representation of vCloud resources and hiding the details of REST and HTTP. Features and Benefits: REST resources of vCloud API available in Java High fidelity to vCloud API resource models Simple and clean design to help understanding and predictability No new client side object model Associate resources with their operations meaningful to clients Hide REST verbs and URL semantics Download VMware vCloud SDK for Java version 1. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/mysterious-lab-013.html Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/mysterious-lab-013.html If you looked at the list of labs that were released here, here, there was a definitive missing LAB13 Well the answer to that was released with the program guide. Expect some news…. By the way did anyone think why the ALT labs started at 2002 and not at 2000? Same for ALT3000? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/useful-vmworld-2010-information.html Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/useful-vmworld-2010-information.html I did this last year – and I will post this information again for 2010. Meals Continental Breakfast is served in Moscone South-Hall A and Moscone West-Level One. Hot Lunches are served in Moscone South-Hall A and Moscone West-Level One. Boxed Sandwich & Salad Lunches are served in Moscone South-Hall C, Moscone West-Level Three. There is additional ground seating (no food service) outside in the Yerba Buena Gardens above Moscone North. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/vmworld-2011-partner-exchange-2011.html Mon, 30 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/vmworld-2011-partner-exchange-2011.html Even though we are only starting the 2010 Conference Today - it is always nice to see what will be happening next year, so here is some information. VMware Partner Exchange will be between February 8-11, 2011 in Orlando Florida VMworld 2011 will be held in Las Vegas between August 29-September 01, 2011 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/list-of-sessions-for-vmworld-copenhagen.html Thu, 26 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/list-of-sessions-for-vmworld-copenhagen.html I got fed up with trying to get what I wanted from the online Content Catalog. All I wanted was a spreadsheet that I could use and keep, but there was no option like that – so I created my own. I know this is not for San Francisco next week – I am not going, but I will be in Copenhagen so this will be useful for me (and I am sure some others as well). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/sql-upgrade-error-vcenter-41-upgrade.html Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/sql-upgrade-error-vcenter-41-upgrade.html As I said today on Twitter - this one took up some of my time today. This bit me in the butt today http://twitpic.com/2hr42l #vCenter Upgrade. Butt - I bite back!!!! — Maish Saidel-Keesing (@maishsk) August 24, 2010 During the upgrade of a vCenter 4.0 Server to 4.1 - which included installing a new 64 bit Windows 2008 R2 Machine and moving the Database from one server to another, I encountered an error during the process of the upgrade of the SQL database which stopped the installation. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/issue-with-vcenter-versions.html Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/issue-with-vcenter-versions.html I noticed something that I thought was an issue with my the vCenter installation and perhaps a change in location of the SQL database. But it turns out not to be the case. Many of us have, are in the process or will soon upgrade to vSphere 4.1. I personally like to test things before I do an upgrade so I currently have two environments running simultaneously When you install your new 4. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/troubleshooting-tools-for-vcenter.html Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/troubleshooting-tools-for-vcenter.html What troubleshooting tools are you familiar with for monitoring your ESX host? I am sure that one of the first things that pop into your mind is of course ESXTOP. ESXTOP will provide a great deal of information about the performance of your Host, be it network, your storage, VM’s you name it. The next thing that pops into my head is logs. There are numerous amount of logs on an ESX host be it the hostd, vmkernel, vmkwarning, aam and I am sure that I am leaving out a number of others as well. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/hp-g7-does-not-use-devccissc0d0.html Mon, 09 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/hp-g7-does-not-use-devccissc0d0.html I was entrusted with the deployment of a new HP DL380 G7 as a new ESX Host. I have my build process down very well. I use the UDA: create a new sub-template enter the information that I need in for the hostname and IP Boot the server. Choose the server name from the menu Come back 20 minutes later and add the ESX host to my vCenter. All fine and dandy. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/linux-vs-windows-live-conversion.html Thu, 05 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/08/linux-vs-windows-live-conversion.html I have been entrusted with converting a large number of Virtual machines that are currently hosted on Xen Server into the VMware Infrastructure. There are all sorts of ways of migrating these a virtual machine exporting to VMDK’s, Xen can export to a VMDK, convert to an OVF, other tools etc. I have found that the easiest way for the conversion is to treat the XEN VM as a live machine. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/social-media-users-list-at-vmworld-2010.html Wed, 28 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/social-media-users-list-at-vmworld-2010.html John Troyer published a document on the VMworld site VMworld 2010 is going to be a whirlwind of technological and social activity. Let’s keep in touch! If you are going to VMworld 2010 in San Francisco and use social media - like blogs or Twitter – please add yourself to the list below. We’re going to use this in a few ways at the event. We’ll pull blog and Twitter feeds from this list to aggregate and feature on VMworld. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/changes-in-powercli-41.html Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/changes-in-powercli-41.html July 14, 2010 Kirk Munro posted last week about the PowerCLI 4.1: A fork in the road regarding changes in namespaces that were introduced in the new version of PowerCLI 4.1. Scott Herold of Vizioncore also posted an article regarding these Changes - vEcoShell 1.2.6 and PowerCLI 4.1. First and foremost - I would like to commend the PowerCLI team for becoming active again and since my post PowerCLI - What Will the Future Hold? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/where-to-place-your-vm-swap.html Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/where-to-place-your-vm-swap.html This one has been bothering me lately. Where do you place your Virtual Machine Swap files? There are two options: In the Same Directory as the VM In the Datastore specified by the host. As you can see below. If you choose the second option then you can configure the swap location per host Here comes my question. Duncan Epping posted about the Impact of decisions… - for those that wanted to keep the vswp files on local VMFS datastores on their Hosts. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/quest-activeroles-management-shell-for.html Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/quest-activeroles-management-shell-for.html Quest just released a new version of there amazing Active Directory Module - Version 1.4 Here is Dmitry’s Post about the release: There are many new Cmdlets available here are some of the details from the release notes 1.1. New cmdlets Get-QADLocalCertificateStore New-QADLocalCertificateStore Remove-QADLocalCertificateStore Get-QADCertificate Where-QADCertificate Add-QADCertificate Import-QADCertificate Show-QADCertificate Edit-QADCertificate Export-QADCertificate Remove-QADCertificate Remove-QADPrivateKey Get-QADCertificateRevocationList Add-QADCertificateRevocationList Import-QADCertificateRevocationList Export-QADCertificateRevocationList Remove-QADCertificateRevocationList Get-QADPKIObject Publish-QADCertificate Unpublish-QADCertificate Publish-QADCertificateRevocationList Unpublish-QADCertificateRevocationList Add-QADProxyAddress Set-QADProxyAddress Remove-QADProxyAddress Clear-QADProxyAddress Enable-QADEmailAddressPolicy Disable-QADEmailAddressPolicy Set-QADProgressPolicy Get-QADProgressPolicy Set-QADInactiveAccountsPolicy Get-QADInactiveAccountsPolicy 1. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/esxi-41-active-directory-integration.html Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/esxi-41-active-directory-integration.html The previous post about what was new in vSphere 4.1 was a general overview with some slide shots. For all ye of little faith thinking that I was only going to post those screenshots with no details Nuh-Uh! I prefer to lay down the basics with screen shots - and then go into the details. I mean you do have to cater for all spectrums of the public from basic to advanced. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/updating-your-vmware-hypervisor-server.html Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/updating-your-vmware-hypervisor-server.html So first post about the free Hypervisor under its new name. I wrote an article regarding the process of upgrading from ESXi 3.5 to ESXi 4.0. Well I am happy to announce that this has changed - again! Have you tried to find the VMware vSphere Host Update Utility? It was never downloadable - it was part of the vSphere Client which was bundled with your ESXi Installation.(by the way that has also been removed from the installation and is not a separate download as well. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/vmware-tools-icon-has-changed.html Wed, 14 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/vmware-tools-icon-has-changed.html I posted in a previous post about the VMware Tools Icon in VMware Workstation. After updating the tools this evening on a VM running on a ESXi 4.1 Host - this is confirmed Personally - I like the new icons much better… https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/king-is-dead-long-live-king.html Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/king-is-dead-long-live-king.html Forgive the corny humor… The free ESXi Hypervisor is no more (well at least not by that name). VMware have re-branded it as VMware vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi) VMware vSphere Hypervisor FAQs What is the difference between VMware ESXi and VMware vSphere Hypervisor? VMware vSphere Hypervisor is the new name for what was formerly known as VMware ESXi Single Server or free ESXi (often abbreviated to simply “VMware ESXi”). VMware vSphere Hypervisor is the free edition of the vSphere production line. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/vmotion-or-vmotion.html Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/vmotion-or-vmotion.html Now that vSphere 4.1 is now released one of the new not so exciting features or developments that have emerged but are definitely worth mentioning. VMware has finally made the change. Up until this release - the live migration of virtual machines between hosts was known as VMotion (with a capital V) From here on it will now be know as vMotion (with a small v) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/what-new-in-vsphere-41.html Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/what-new-in-vsphere-41.html A small group of people were granted access to the Release Candidate Beta and over the past 3 weeks have been exposed to the new features and improvements that are involved with this new release. I was one of this group. There are going to be an abundance of posts flying fast over the next few days, with a huge amount of information.One of the purposes of the program, was to spread the word and expose the new features that are available with the new release. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/what-new-in-vsphere-41-esxi.html Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/what-new-in-vsphere-41-esxi.html Here are some of the New features and enhancements for ESXi 4.1 and the vCLI Get ready - THERE WILL BE NO MORE FULL ESX!! (or so VMware promises…) Boot From SAN will be fully supported in ESXi 4.1. It was as only experimentally supported in ESXi 4.0. Boot from SAN will be supported for FC, iSCSI, and FCoE – for the latter two, it will depend upon hardware qualification, so please check the HCL and Release Notes for vSphere 4. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/what-new-in-vsphere-41-network-io.html Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/what-new-in-vsphere-41-network-io.html Network Traffic Management. A great new feature allowing you to define shares on the Network traffic of your ESX servers. The diagram at left should be familiar to most. When using 1GigE NICs, ESX hosts are typically deployed with NICs dedicated to particular traffic types. For example you may dedicate 4x 1GigE NICs for VM traffic; one NIC to iSCSI, another NIC to vMotion, and another to the service console. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/what-new-in-vsphere-41-storage-io.html Tue, 13 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/what-new-in-vsphere-41-storage-io.html After all the videos and Posts published regarding the new Feature of SIOC, here are some of the new features and solutions that SIOC addresses. The problem Storage I/O control is addressing is the situation where some less important workloads are taking the majority of I/O bandwidth from more important applications. In the case of the three applications shown here, the data mining is hogging a majority of the storage I/O resource. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/surebackup-demo-veeam-backup.html Thu, 08 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/surebackup-demo-veeam-backup.html Veeam will be releasing a new Backup product including verification of the integrity of the backup job. I blogged about this a few months ago I would like to point you to a small Demo that was brought to my attention in an email from today You’ve heard about it—now see it in action! Thank you for your interest in SureBackup and the upcoming release of Veeam Backup & Replication™ 5. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/plug-ins-and-tomcat.html Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/plug-ins-and-tomcat.html I have another post coming up regarding 2rd party plug-ins - explaining a few things I have learned over the past two days - regarding SSL and getting that to work with your properly in the vSphere client, but first… I am extremely grateful to all those who are providing their plug-ins to make the administrators life easier to work with. Both EMC and NetApp have their plug-ins. I have installed both the Rapid Cloning Utility (RCU) and the Virtual Storage Console (VSC). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/powercli-what-will-future-hold.html Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/powercli-what-will-future-hold.html This is just a small rant on my part, so forgive me if it comes over the wrong way. Carter Shanklin left the PowerCLI team about at the end of April 2010. For those of you who do not know, Carter was (and still is) the PowerCLI guru. It was his project for a long time. It has evolved into a great automation tool that I use every single day. I really do not know hat I would do without it. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/updating-pictures-for-users-in-ad-pt-2.html Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/07/updating-pictures-for-users-in-ad-pt-2.html The last sentence in my previous post on Updating Pictures for Users in AD was: Now the only part hat needs to be taken care of - is getting a proper image from HR in the correct size. Maybe we will find a Powershell script to take care of this :) So here it is. This can be done with ImageMagick Once you have unpacked the Zip file (to c:\temp\ for example) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/be-careful-of-9th-host-in-cluster.html Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/be-careful-of-9th-host-in-cluster.html I was looking yesterday at post from Matt McSpirit regarding the Cluster Limits of Hyper-V. I started to look at how this would compare to vSphere. I do not want to go into who can cram more VM’s into a cluster VMware / Hyper-V? I did notice something that I realized - I think I should point out. Take the following Scenario. Now you want to add another Host to your cluster. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/get-alldomaincontrollers-function.html Tue, 22 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/get-alldomaincontrollers-function.html Sometimes you would like to run a query against all DC’s in your forest. For example today – I was looking a specific error on the System Event Logs. Here is a quick way to get all the DC’s in the forest adapted from Marcus Oh’s blog. # ============================================================================================== # NAME: Get-AllDomainControllers # # AUTHOR: Maish Saidel-Keesing # DATE : 22/06/2010 # # COMMENT: Will collect all Domain controllers, set the list as the $alldcs variable # and output as list # # ============================================================================================== function Get-AllDomainControllers{ $myDomain = [System. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/benchmarking-your-disk-io.html Sun, 20 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/benchmarking-your-disk-io.html How fast is your storage? How do you even check what kind of throughput you are getting? That is a question that comes up often enough, when performing benchmarks. I actually dealt with such a case last week. The customer was performing a storage Migration of all their VM’s from an HP MSA Array to a NetApp Filer. In order to ensure that no decrease in performance was experienced, I needed to benchmark the the disk I/O before and after the migration. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/virtualization-domain-controllers-2.html Sun, 20 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/virtualization-domain-controllers-2.html I received a number of comments on my previous post and offline as well I want to clear up some things regarding the previous post. I am not against virtualizing domain controllers - not at all. I am against trying to P2V a domain controller. It seems that was not clear enough from the last post. I do still advise that if your risk analysis - you should do that before virtualizing your domain controllers (or anything else for that matter) comes out that it is more cost effective to keep one Physical DC then do so. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/updating-pictures-for-users-in-ad.html Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/updating-pictures-for-users-in-ad.html I came across a nice article last week regarding pictures for User accounts in an Active Directory environment First let describe the issue at hand. Every now and again, my manager gets an email saying, “Why don’t I see the picture of xxx when I open up his mail?” And shortly thereafter I get an email asking the exact same question. Well the answer is always give is that up until Exchange 2003 - there was no option of adding a picture to GAL (Global Address List) - and even if you did you had to jump through hoops to get that picture to appear in Outlook on every computer. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/vmworld-sessions-close-but-no-cigar.html Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/vmworld-sessions-close-but-no-cigar.html After waiting most the day, and seeing a number of people on Twitter who announced that they had sessions that were accepted, I was waiting for an email - and yes, lo and behold - it arrived this evening - along with many emails to others, the rejection letter. Last night on the Communities Roundtable - the VMworld team was there, including Richard Garsthagen. He spoke about the 1000 Sessions submitted for the call for papers this year. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/virtualizing-domain-controllers.html Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/virtualizing-domain-controllers.html One of the frequent questions that come up on the forums is, “How do I convert (P2V) my Windows Domain Controller (or SBS Server)?” Let me first start with the following statement. DON’T!!!! Now that I have that off my chest - lets explain why and provide some references to back that up. A Domain Controller could possibly be - and probably is - one of the most important computers on your network. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/new-updates-of-vmware-products.html Fri, 11 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/new-updates-of-vmware-products.html As Always, Test Before you deploy!!! VMware Data Recovery 1.2 Available. Release Notes - Download Link - Admin Guide Here are some highlights of the new release: a file level restore client for Linux virtual machines ability to run up to 10 VDR appliances per vCenter Server instance ability to fast switch between the deployed appliances via the vSphere Client plug-in Miscellaneous vSphere Client Plug-In user interface enhancements including: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/vmware-tools-icon-changed-did-you.html Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/vmware-tools-icon-changed-did-you.html While installing VMware tools on a virtual machine this week on VMware Workstation 7.1 (build-261024) I noticed that the small icon that appears to show that VMware tools are installed looked different. Before After Will it be the same for the next update of ESX?? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/vmware-vexpert-awards-2010.html Sat, 05 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/06/vmware-vexpert-awards-2010.html Yesterday the vExperts for 2010 were announced. VMware awards the vExpert to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year. vExperts are book authors, bloggers, VMUG leaders, tool builders, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others. These vExperts have gone above and beyond their day jobs to share their technical expertise and communicate the value of VMware and virtualization to their colleagues and community. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/vcdx4-dcd-out-vcdx4-in.html Sun, 30 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/vcdx4-dcd-out-vcdx4-in.html Duncan pointed out to today on the VCDX forum that they have changed the name. What was once – the VCDX4-DCD: Is now – the VCDX4: Check out the VMware official page for more info. I for one am pleased with the change… :) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/vmworld-sessions-most-popular.html Thu, 27 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/vmworld-sessions-most-popular.html No I do not have a crystal ball. I am not a magician, and also not a fortune teller. A large number of sessions were submitted for VMWorld. Now I do not know how many were submitted - but I can tell you how many were up for voting in each track. How did I come by these numbers? I spent an evening counting each line (NOT!) But then I can’t give away all my trade secrets can I? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/2010-scripting-games.html Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/2010-scripting-games.html The 2010 Scripting Games are over and the results have been posted here. The scripting games is a fun little competition - well not so little. Similar to a decathlon there are 10 Events, published over the period of about 2 weeks. A huge amount of work goes into the logistics of the whole competition. Preparing the events,finding people (judges) to go over the huge amount of scripts that are submitted and grading them and so on . https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/vmware-player-31-new-release.html Wed, 26 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/vmware-player-31-new-release.html VMware Workstation 7.1 was released yesterday. With it - was the release of it’s baby brother/sister - VMware Player 3.1 What’s New? This release provides support for the following host and guest operating systems: Operating System Host and Guest Support** Ubuntu 8.04.4 - Host and guest Ubuntu 10.04 - Host and guest OpenSUSE 11.2 - Host and guest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 - Host and guest Fedora 12 -Guest Debian 5. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/esxi-deployment-solution-part-4.html Mon, 24 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/esxi-deployment-solution-part-4.html So today we will deal with how to get the scripts into the an ESXi installation. On Part 3 we dealt with what the scripts were and how to to use them So how do we get the script to run on startup? The two things that need to be done are: Add the script to /sbin/client.py # TCP client example import time import socket time. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/vcdx3-upgrade-path-to-vcdx4-dcd.html Mon, 24 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/vcdx3-upgrade-path-to-vcdx4-dcd.html For those who are already in the process of the VCDX 3 (me included), regarding the announcements today - the most important bit of information for me was what will happen in the interim to those who are already in the track Taken from the FAQ I’ve started on the path to VCDX3. How will the VCAP program affect my next steps? Your progress toward a VCDX3 certification can help you with VCDX4-DCD certification process because: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/vcenter-essentials-3-host-limit-not-6.html Fri, 21 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/vcenter-essentials-3-host-limit-not-6.html vSphere Essentials is a package that is for the SMB. At present there is a promotional offer (Until June 15, 2010) reducing the price from $995 to $495. In this package you receive vCenter and 3 ESX host licenses (up to 6 CPU Licenses) Of course this a basic package - with only the basic features - no HA, Vmotion etc. This is ideal for a small business starting out. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/set-time-limit-on-group-membership.html Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/set-time-limit-on-group-membership.html One of the most surprising things that Microsoft have not yet provided in Active Directory management - is allowing you to set a time limit on assigning membership of a user to a group. Let me explain the use case for this kind of feature. You have resource (be it a file, web site - what ever). You want to assign the permission to a user, but you only want to do it until the end of the day, of for the next hour. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/so-i-need-some-assistance-vmworld-2010.html Fri, 14 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/so-i-need-some-assistance-vmworld-2010.html Ok it is up. I see that all three of my submissions are up for Public Voting. (good to know that I am still up for consideration). If you would like to see the sessions below accepted for VMworld - pop on over to the VMworld 2010 Call for Papers Public Voting! and submit a click. There a great number of sessions there - and many familiar names - and again I am honored to have my names up with such a great list of people. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/mms-2010-labs-powered-by-hyper-v-whatif.html Thu, 06 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/mms-2010-labs-powered-by-hyper-v-whatif.html No - I have not gone over to the Dark Side. And forgive me for the Powershell pun, but I read an article by Ronald Beekelaar on the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog - demonstrating the wonders of Virtualization that were used in MMS 2010 Labs: Powered by Hyper-V, System Center & HP… The numbers are impressive - very impressive - I would suggest that you read the article. The numbers were as follows: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/need-lot-of-iops.html Wed, 05 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/05/need-lot-of-iops.html I was introduced to an product today that caught my eye. HP StorageWorks IO Accelerator for BladeSystem c-Class So what is this IO module. It is a mezzanine card that is currently available in HP Blades (it will be available in the near future also for the Proliant Series as well). It comes in different capacities: 80GB, 160GB and 320GB Now what caught my eye, is the Maximum IOPS 100,000 IO/sec https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/last-chance-for-vmware-vexpert.html Fri, 30 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/last-chance-for-vmware-vexpert.html Today April 30, 2010 is the closing day for Nominations. VMware vExpert Application Form Award Benefits Criteria & Guidelines If you have not already got your nomination in, the clock is ticking…… https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/are-we-allowed-to-publish-everything.html Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/are-we-allowed-to-publish-everything.html In continuation to my post regarding mistakes, it actually started a very interesting discussion.on Twitter on the subject. Don’t get me wrong - I am not for publicizing information that was under NDA. And if you ask me - if someone does publicize a piece of information that is covered by an NDA - then the publisher should have sanctions taken against them. But the whole idea of that post was not because someone broke an NDA, not at all. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/mistakes-mistakes-and-more-mistakes.html Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/mistakes-mistakes-and-more-mistakes.html Small Rant … Over the last two weeks there have been a numerous amount of occurrences where VMware employees have voiced new announcements in Public, and thereafter several bloggers have posted on their blogs information based on these announcements. Content here, here, here, here and here. Now what you will find in common with all of the above posts - is that they either have been pulled, or the content they were pointing to has been removed. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/monitor-ad-replication-status-with.html Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/monitor-ad-replication-status-with.html Do you know the feeling? You have 40 domain controllers located in 20 different locations - with a multitude of child domains and children of those child domains, on all sides of the globe (yeah I know a globe does not have sides….), with different people at different levels of expertise managing these DC’s? Sound familiar? And for some reason someone went on vacation and forgot to clean up a movie that they put on the DC’s C: drive - because they had nowhere else to put it? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/vmworld-2010-what-new.html Wed, 28 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/vmworld-2010-what-new.html VMworld 2010 registration is now open. A few facts and new introductions to this year’s conference Follow the Experts - New in 2010 This year, VMworld is connecting you directly with subject-matter authorities with our Knowledge Experts Program. These highly respected members of the VMware community - made up of industry-leading customers, bloggers and VMware employees - will be conducting and participating in Breakout sessions and Birds of a Feather discussion groups. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/esxi-deployment-solution-part-3.html Tue, 27 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/esxi-deployment-solution-part-3.html Today we will deal with the client and server scripts, and before we start I would like to get the definitions straight. Client Script: The script that is executed on the ESXi machine (Python) Server Script:The script running on a Windows host that will configure the ESXi machine after deployment (Powershell) So let’s start. Here is the client script - it was adapted from here # TCP client example import socket s = socket. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/vcdx-design-exam-check.html Mon, 26 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/vcdx-design-exam-check.html Now I am happy to say that I have completed the VCDX Design Exam today - and if you did not know that will probably be because you missed my announcement on Twitter this afternoon. OK so first what did I use to prepare for this exam? Duncan Epping’s Post has a great list. Jason Boche’s post on his experience. Joep Piscaer’s review as well. Jon posted a review of the process as well. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/esxi-deployment-solution-part-2.html Fri, 23 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/esxi-deployment-solution-part-2.html Today we will be dealing with some details of the parts involved. In my previous post - I explained the rationale behind the whole process. So let us get into the schematics. An ESX server can be installed with a kickstart script. There are multiple posts all over the web on how to configure this and customize the process. In a nutshell - most of the additional customization is performed in the %post section https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/ibm-imm-integration-into-ad.html Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/ibm-imm-integration-into-ad.html This one has nothing to do with Virtualization as such. All new IBM servers from the M2 series and up have a IMM IBM Integrated Management Module. For you HP’ers - it is the same as ILO. The same as ILO the IMM comes in two modes - the free integrated version which does not allow Remote Presence (remote console control) and the full version which requires a Virtual Media Key (a physical component on the Motherboard) at an additional cost https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/esxi-deployment-solution-beginning.html Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/esxi-deployment-solution-beginning.html I posted a small preview about a new ESXi Deployment Solution. First question I would like to answer is why? Why is a Deployment solution needed for ESXi? Why is it any different to Deploying the full ESX version? So the answers were: VMware has announced multiple times that ESXi will be the platform of choice for the next version of ESX. They are moving away from the Service Console for a multitude of reasons. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/sneak-preview-of-esxi-deployment.html Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/sneak-preview-of-esxi-deployment.html Well after cursing more than once at Python on Twitter over the past week or so - I finally got managed to overcome This is a sneak preview of my ESXi Deployment Solution How exactly it works - will come in the next few days with a detailed explanation. I can tell you it is made up of several components including: PowerCLI Python Deployment appliance Here is a video of the process below. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/those-annoying-thing-in-powershell.html Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/those-annoying-thing-in-powershell.html Powershell v2.0 has a cmdlet that allows you to send an email Send-MailMessage NAME  Send-MailMessage SYNOPSIS  Sends an e-mail message. SYNTAX  Send-MailMessage [-To] <string[]> [-Subject] <string> -From <string> [[-Body] <string>] [[-SmtpServer] <string>] [-Attachments <string[  ]>] [-Bcc <string[]>] [-BodyAsHtml] [-Cc <string[]>] [-Credential <PSCredential>] [-DeliveryNotificationOption {None | OnSuccess | OnFailure | Delay | Never}] [-Encoding <Encoding>] [-Priority {Normal | Low | High}] [-UseSsl] [<CommonParameters>] DESCRIPTION  The Send-MailMessage cmdlet sends an e-mail message from within Windows PowerShell. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/how-to-speed-up-your-powercli-queries.html Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/how-to-speed-up-your-powercli-queries.html It is a known fact that using PowerCLI there are more than one way to skin a cat - or more than one way to access the SDK and the properties that you would like to get. Take for example getting all the VM’s - their Name, their Memory and CPU count Measure-command {get-vm | ForEach-Object { Write-host $_.Name $_.MemoryMB $_.NumCpu } } | select TotalSeconds TotalSeconds ------------ 5.402703 You can also get the same thing with the Get-View cmdlet https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/small-quirk-with-get-view-vs-get-vm.html Sun, 11 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/small-quirk-with-get-view-vs-get-vm.html I was trying something last night to compare the speed of the two Cmdlets here. I noticed something though. While running the command I wanted to check against how many machines I was running the command against. Get-View -ViewType VirtualMachine | Measure-Object Count : 371 And compared to get-vm | Measure-Object Count : 356 And as you can see they are not the same! The reason for that being that Get-VM does not retrieve any templates only virtual machines. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/deploy-esxi-v10-my-esxi-script-0-mania.html Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/04/deploy-esxi-v10-my-esxi-script-0-mania.html As I posted a few weeks ago - I entered the ESXi Script-0-Mania Contest. Unfortunately, my entry was not chosen as one of the top entries, but hey - I don’t do this for the money - I enjoy what I do - I feel that the contribution back to the virtualization community is the least I can do - seeing the amount of info and help that I receive from you all. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/review-your-infrastructure-needs.html Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/review-your-infrastructure-needs.html Let me give you a real case scenario. (I am not saying that any of the implementations in this example are best practice) Default rack that was installed was a 42U rack. Each rack was populated with no more than 16 Servers. (This was the most that they were willing to lose in the case of losing a full rack and also due to cooling issues per rack they were leaving 1U empty between each server). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/install-emc-powerpathve-with-update.html Mon, 29 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/install-emc-powerpathve-with-update.html I was looking into this a short while ago – after updating the hosts to Update 4.01. This VMware KB – 1018740 will show you the way. Download the the Powerpath/VE 5.4 SP1 package from Powerlink (if you are looking for the document location manually - Home > Support > Software Downloads and Licensing > Downloads P-R > PowerPath for VMware). Once the package is downloaded extract the zip package to a folder which is accessible to a web browser. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/inject-vmware-drivers-into-source-os.html Sun, 28 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/inject-vmware-drivers-into-source-os.html P2V a machine - who does not want to get rid of all their physical machines to get the rid of the old hardware? If so raise you hand! So now that we have that out the way - P2V’ing a Windows 2000 Operating System is not always as straight forward as a the other operating systems. Take into account the following scenario. you have a Windows 2000 SP6 Server running a customized app. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/surebackup-by-veeam.html Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/surebackup-by-veeam.html I was one of a few blogger that were invited to participate yesterday in a Bloggers briefing - given by Doug Hazelman - presenting Veeam’s new product Surebackup. Well this is not actually a new product as such - but a family of the current technologies that Veeam use with the addition of one significant new feature that will be introduced in Q3 of 2010 in Backup and Replication v5. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/distribution-and-security-groups.html Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/distribution-and-security-groups.html I was asked to day at work, “What would be the quickest way to add all of the members of a Distribution Group to a Security Group?”, the reason of course being because you cannot assign permissions to a Distribution group. My answer was, “To script it.” And I never would have thought how easy it would be Get-QADGroupMember "My_DG_GROUP" | Add-QADMemberOf -Group "MY_SG_GROUP" Amount of time spent on Task: 30 seconds Financial investment in that task: Depends on how much you make per hour :) The reaction I got for doing something so complicated “so quickly”: PRICELESS! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/cd-connected-to-another-client.html Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/cd-connected-to-another-client.html While trying to VMotion a VM I hit an error because of a Mounted CD. Well you might say – that is simple. Just go into the GUI and then disconnect it. But this time it was connected and open in another users sessions so I got this The reason I think this was happenning was because of the other user still having a console session open to the VM with the CD mounted. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/running-vm-that-did-not-exist.html Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/running-vm-that-did-not-exist.html This was a weird one that hit me today. I had a performance issue on a server. esxtop is the first I thing I looked at and got this: ID GID NAME NWLD %USED %RUN %SYS %WAIT %RDY 69 69 VSE 5 83.98 85.74 0.00 380.16 22.14 So I looked to which machine it was: [root@dmz1 root]# vmware-cmd -l | grep VSE [root@dmz1 root]# And the result I got was nuddah! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/my-esxi-script-o-mania-entry-deploy.html Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/my-esxi-script-o-mania-entry-deploy.html I have submitted a script for the VMware Script-O-Mania contest that will end in a little under 9 hours from now. The idea behind the script was for automating the deployment of a stand-alone ESXi server. A small demo you can see below. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/network-ports-needed-for-vmware.html Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/network-ports-needed-for-vmware.html As usual looking for this list of which ports need to be punched through the firewall in order allow all kinds of services to work correctly. Well today – I tried to scan a host for (that is behind a firewall) and vCenter failed with this error message: Now since I knew that this was behind a firewall and only the needed ports are opened (the way it should be) I knew that it was a firewall problem, also because scanning other hosts (not behind this firewall) worked fine. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/generate-random-password-powershell.html Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/generate-random-password-powershell.html A task that I do quite often when building a new System is to create random password a local user on the machine – Don’t ask – it is a an OPSEC requirement from way before my time. So instead of Running my fingers of the keyboard in a random way and having my colleagues ask what I am doing each time I decided to simplify this Powershell. Dmitry Sotnikov’s post set me in the correct direction, the result below is a function that will prompt you for the length you want, create a password and put it in your clipboard https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/spring-on-vmware-promotion.html Mon, 08 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/spring-on-vmware-promotion.html VMware acquired Springsource not so long ago, and now they have started to offer their first promotion. Excerpt of the announcement below As IT organizations continue to virtualize increasing proportions of their datacenters, the virtualization of servers running custom Java applications is becoming increasingly common. Building and running custom Java Spring applications on an application server that is ideally suited for usage in a virtual environment is a critical step in extending the operational efficiencies of virtualization to a greater proportion of server workloads. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/customize-template-during-deployment.html Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/customize-template-during-deployment.html When deploying a Virtual Machine from a template you have the option of Using the Customization Specifications for Automating Deployment. I am sure this has been mentioned more than once but I could not find an easy reference on a blog only on the VMTN Forums Well the problem was like this below, when trying to deploy a VM the option was greyed out The user had the correct Privileges on the folder, cluster and on the storage, but could choose the customization specification. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/quick-powershell-tip.html Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/quick-powershell-tip.html Something that I do every now and again (almost every day - many times per day) is to connect to the Event Viewer / Computer Management / Services console of a Remote Windows machine for troubleshooting purposes. Now of course you could do it like this: Start -> Run -> compmgmt.msc Right-Click -> Connect to another computer -> <Computer_Name> -> OK or you could make it even shorter Start -> Run -> compmgmt. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/removing-esx-snapshots-en-mass.html Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/removing-esx-snapshots-en-mass.html Recently we had a planned maintenance window that required shutting down power to the entire building. As part of the procedure we created snapshots of each VM before the powerdown. With PowerCLI this is really easy get-vm | new-snapshot -name "before power down" -description "powerdown" -runasync -confirm:$false Of course there is a whole methodology of how to perform this shutdown - what comes before what and what should be powered down in which order, but that is not the issue at hand. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/vcenter-on-windows-2008-r2.html Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/03/vcenter-on-windows-2008-r2.html Ladies and Gentlemen!!! Because I have seen two such posts in almost as many days here and here - dealing with installation of vCenter Server on Windows 2008 R2 (which of course is 64-bit only) I feel it is important to point out that this is not a good idea and to bring your attention to the vSphere Compatibility Matrix - pg.18. vCenter is not supported (as of today) running on Windows 2008 R2! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/so-how-up-to-date-is-your-bcp-plan.html Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/so-how-up-to-date-is-your-bcp-plan.html Here is a tale of a small little airplane and what kind of damage it can do. No I am not going back to Sep. 11 and the WTC. more of the likes of Feb 17th, 2010 - 07:50 in Palo Alto California. A play-by-play of the events showed that because of a small plane that crashed (unfortunately killing 3 people) Palo Alto went dark - well not really dark, because it was early morning - but power went out, COMPLETELY! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/israel-vmug-february-2010-cloud-vision.html Sun, 21 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/israel-vmug-february-2010-cloud-vision.html Last Thursday I participated in the Israeli VMUG meeting. The following are my thought and observations from what was presented at this meeting. (The product release dates mentioned below are not mine, but were presented at the event). First up was someone from the Systems Engineering group from VMware who talked about: Cloud Vision It was mentioned that ESX 4.1 will be released in not to distant future. VMware are working on the options of raising the Maximum number of vCpu’s for a VM from 8 per VM. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/esx-40-active-directory-authentication.html Wed, 17 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/esx-40-active-directory-authentication.html There are numerous posts about how to use Active Directory to authenticate your ssh logins to your ESX servers. Jason Boche,Travis Laird, Geert Baeke The idea is pretty simple Configure the ESX server with esxcfg-auth as in the above posts Add the desired users locally on your ESX Server Login away But … Once this is enabled all authentication will be done against Active directory – INCLUDING THE root USER https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/is-100mb-enough-for-service-console.html Tue, 16 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/is-100mb-enough-for-service-console.html It is accepted practice amongst most of the virtualization world that you can use a 100mb/s link for your Service Console port, because there is not much traffic that is flowing over that link. Well in the majority of the cases that is true. For example. vmnic0 is running the Service Console. This link is connected at 1000mb/s As you can see in the screen shot there is nothing really running through the Service Console (vmnic0) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/install-vmware-tools-on-server-core.html Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/install-vmware-tools-on-server-core.html Just to remind you all - Server Core - NO GUI! I needed to install VMware tools today on a VM with Windows 2008 R2 Core. Start the VMware tools install. msiexec /i <path to>\VMware Tools64.msi /qn Machine will reboot automatically - unless you provide the correct parameters to the msi installer Thanks to Mike and Geert for the assistance https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/new-hyper-v-security-vulnerability.html Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/new-hyper-v-security-vulnerability.html Many eons ago there was talk about patch footprints - comparing ESXi to Hyper-V, footprints and security patches. So today I came across this one. Microsoft Security Bulletin MS10-010 - Important General Information Executive Summary This security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. The vulnerability could allow denial of service if a malformed sequence of machine instructions is run by an authenticated user in one of the guest virtual machines hosted by the Hyper-V server. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/veeam-fastscp-supports-win7-and.html Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/veeam-fastscp-supports-win7-and.html Last week I posted the link to the Beta release. Today Veeam announces the release of version 3.0.2 that now supports Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2. Release Notes New Features The following is a list of new features introduced in the Veeam FastSCP 3.0.2: Added support for Microsoft Windows 7 and Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 VMware vSphere 4 is now “officially” supported. The following is a list of new features introduced in the Veeam FastSCP 3. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/vmware-workstation-small-rant.html Mon, 08 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/vmware-workstation-small-rant.html Every now and again VMware releases an update for their products, among those are also VMware Workstation. I have a small issue with the whole thing. Firstly, I must say this is only regarding those who are running Workstation on Windows - from what I hear this does not happen on on a Linux Host OS. When you install an update for Workstation - you are required to reboot the machine. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/fastscp-302270-beta.html Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/fastscp-302270-beta.html For all of you who have been waiting for a version that works on Windows 7 and on Windows Server 2008 R2 it is out. For those that do not know the current tool does not work correctly on Windows 7 or on Windows 2008 R2 As was posted on the Veeam Forums you download a Beta release here There are issues with ESXi and 64-bit Windows OS’s so read the post on the forum to see what can be done and what cannot https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/optimize-nfs-settings-for-celerra.html Tue, 02 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/02/optimize-nfs-settings-for-celerra.html In continuation to both Jason Boche’s and Scott Lowe’s excellent posts about the recommended Advanced Settings for ESX while using a Celerra NFS mount, and after Jase McCarty’s post earlier regarding how to set the recommended settings for ESX and NetApp, I wanted to share with you my script for doing the same for those who are using EMC function optimize-CelerraNFS { Set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -Name NFS.SendBufferSize -Value 64 Set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -Name NFS.ReceiveBufferSize -Value 64 Set-VMHostAdvancedConfiguration -Name NFS. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/new-releases-from-vmware.html Sun, 31 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/new-releases-from-vmware.html Workstation 7.0.1 - Release Notes What’s New Workstation 7.0.1 is a maintenance release that resolves some known issues. This release of VMware Workstation adds the following new support: New Support for 32-Bit and 64-Bit Operating Systems This release provides support for the following host and guest operating systems: Operating System Host and Guest Support Windows 2008 R2 Host and guest Windows Vista SP2 Host and guest Ubuntu 9. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/disabling-services-in-esxi.html Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/disabling-services-in-esxi.html Duncan posted this one this evening. So to add to his post there is a way to “hide” the web service at least front page in ESXi the configuration file that is responsible for all this is /etc/vmware/hostd/proxy.xml <ConfigRoot>  <EndpointList>  <length>10</length>  <type>vim.ProxyService.EndpointSpec[]</type>  <e id="0">  <type>vim.ProxyService.LocalServiceSpec</type>  <accessMode>httpsWithRedirect</accessMode>  <port>8309</port>  <serverNamespace>/</serverNamespace>  </e>  <e id="1">  <type>vim.ProxyService.LocalServiceSpec</type>  <accessMode>httpsWithRedirect</accessMode>  <port>8307</port>  <serverNamespace>/sdk</serverNamespace>  </e>  <e id="2">  <type>vim. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/vmfs-or-nfs.html Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/vmfs-or-nfs.html We are outgrowing our current storage capabilities, and virtualization is one of main “customers” that is causing this. So we are now looking for a 2nd storage that will enable us to continue on our journey forward. I am a great fan of NFS for usage as a datastore for ESX. There are numerous reasons: Backups can be done on the storage level with little or no impact on the Host. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/adding-esxi-as-standard-operating.html Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/adding-esxi-as-standard-operating.html Lately I have been asked more and more to install an ESXi system on a whitebox. Why you may ask - because users (we are a R&D company) are asking to have a box with multiple operating systems with all kinds of configurations for testing purposes. Now of course the ideal would be to say, “Sure, no problem! Let me deploy a VM for you!” But seeing that the infrastructure that our ESX farm resides on (Servers, Network, Storage) is a hell of a lot more expensive than $700 PC. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/bug-in-snmp-traps-sent-from-vcenter.html Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/bug-in-snmp-traps-sent-from-vcenter.html I encountered this today. I was trying to configure the alarm for datastore usage. Relatively simple operation - there is even a built in alarm for this in vCenter So I configured the alarm to fire to test and to send me a notification email and an SNMP trap I received the email Target: ESX2_NFS Previous Status: Gray New Status: Red Alarm Definition: ([Yellow metric Is above 75%; Red metric Is above 85%]) Current values for metric/state: Metric Storage Space Actually Used = 86% Description: Alarm 'Datastore usage on disk' on ESX2_NFS changed from Gray to Red and the SNMP trap as well https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/vcenter-powercli-migration-script.html Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/vcenter-powercli-migration-script.html As I promised in a previous post I wanted to migrate from a vCenter to whole new machine Process was: Export folders Export VM locations in Folders Export Permissions Export Custom Attributes Create Folders on the new vCenter Disable DRS/HA Remove ESX hosts from Source vCenter and add to Destination vCenter Enable DRS/HA again Move all vm’s to correct folders Apply the permissions back Apply custom attributes and notes Here is the script https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/wow-i-am-honored.html Sun, 17 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/wow-i-am-honored.html Eric Siebert just released the results for the Top Virtualization Bloggers poll that was running over the last 2 weeks. I am flabbergasted to say that was included in the top 25 (24) !!!!!! I highly appreciate the vote of confidence from all of you that voted for me. I do have to express my thanks and support from my number one fan Njoesh! Without your support I really could not have done it. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/bit-of-housekeeping-powershell.html Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/bit-of-housekeeping-powershell.html I have been busy with using Powershell in these past few days. I would like to share with you two of the scripts that I used lately. They were both used because of a password change that was made on a service account. Now the thing about service accounts in Windows 2003 is, they are good, they need elevated privileges in some cases, and since the account is used for the specific purpose then you know that you have to change it once in a while and you know where. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/vcp4-swag.html Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/vcp4-swag.html Stuff We All Get (for those of you who were wondering) - I only found this out not so long ago - in Yiddish it is called tchachkes. I got a letter in the mail today with my VCP4 Certificate. I am very pleased to see that Paul Maritz (himself) signed it! Seriously though - it is a nice addition to my Current Certifications. I am actually quite impressed with the speed that it was issued and delivered. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/always-look-at-your-os-versions.html Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/always-look-at-your-os-versions.html This evening I started to create a Windows 2008 R2 Template for my environment. I created the VM with the assistance of this walkthrough adding my own tweaks along the way. I then tried to import the VM into my vCenter Server and was presented with an error: Unable to Determine the Guest Operating System. Going into the Converter log on the client I found this row: _P2VError UNABLE_TO_DETERMINE_GUEST_OS()_ When creating the VM it was on a ESX 4i U1 Host and I chose the option for Server 2008 R2 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/bad-vm-bad-vm.html Tue, 12 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/bad-vm-bad-vm.html I had an issue today with a slowly responding ESX 3.5 Host. When going into the Host – it was visible that pCPU0 was running constantly at 90-100%. In esxtop I saw that the console process was running at 50-70% of %USED CPU. Back into top on the host. I saw that vmkload_app was sitting at 30-50 %CPU on a permanent basis. Below is similar to what I was seeing https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/upgrade-vcenter-pt-2.html Fri, 08 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/upgrade-vcenter-pt-2.html As much as some of the Virtualization community would like - vCenter is a Windows application that means no Linux. VMware have released a CTP of an appliance that will run on Linux, but if you ask me - the project will never get off the ground - there just is not enough interest. So a new server, new OS. Supported Operating Systems are (Compatibility Matrix): Windows XP SP2 / SP3 Windows 2003 32/64 SP1 / SP2 / R2 Windows 2008 32/64 Std/Ent/Datacenter The de-facto OS that we deploy today for a server is Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit - and this was not on the list! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/upgrade-vcenter-pt-1.html Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/upgrade-vcenter-pt-1.html To continue my experiences and planning for the upgrade to vSphere, here is the next stage. To Upgrade / Re-install - that is the question (and it is a very good one if I may say so). Here are some of the pros and cons for both scenarios, and there are differences for reasons between the vCenter Server and the ESX hosts themselves. vCenter ESX Hosts I elected to go with a fresh install of all components of my vCenter infrastructure for a number of reasons: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/adding-esx-35-servers-to-vcenter-40.html Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/adding-esx-35-servers-to-vcenter-40.html I came across this today while performing and migration from vCenter 2.5 to vCenter 4.0 When adding an ESX 3.5 Server you will need to provide a license for the host. vCenter 2.5 uses a separate application (FLEXLM) and there is no way to point the ESX host to use a vCenter 4.0 License. From the vSphere Upgrade Guide So all of this is pointing to the same thing - you have to connect your vCenter server to the old licensing server. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/i-hate-self-promotion-but-sometimes.html Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/i-hate-self-promotion-but-sometimes.html I really do not like pushing myself my readers and self plugging is not my style but since I have been included in the list of the VMware top bloggers poll, I feel honored to be on the list of 63 other great bloggers out there, spending large amounts of their free time for a greater cause. If I remember correctly, none of us really blog for a living - this is a “sidekick” of our regular lives and daily jobs which we all enjoy doing. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/travelling-down-5th-ave-at-180-kmh.html Wed, 06 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/travelling-down-5th-ave-at-180-kmh.html Today I got an urgent call from an administrator saying that he had one machine that “had started to crawl. It was working fine yesterday!!!” So I pulled out my VI client. First thing you look for is what the resources are allocated to the VM. Lo and behold - A Windows 2003 64bit server with 8gb RAM and 4 vCPU’s The machine was not moving, not… at… all Onto the ESX host, fire up ESXTOP and I was seeing %WAIT times for this specific VM that was x14 more than any of the others. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/understanding-upgrade-process-mjtv2.html Mon, 04 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2010/01/understanding-upgrade-process-mjtv2.html To continue my experiences and planning for the upgrade to vSphere, here is the next stage. First and foremost you have to understand what the process is for upgrading your environment. So off I went to the vSphere Upgrade Guide. I highly advise you read this document from start to finish , but to lay it down in short the process is: Upgrade vCenter Server (including all additions) Upgrade the Hosts Upgrade the Datastores (not relevant in my case) Upgrade VM’s You need to understand - what will be affected (and what will not! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/2009-in-349-words.html Wed, 30 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/2009-in-349-words.html I started this blog - like most of us bloggers for none other than a personal reference for keeping track of things I find during my day. Officially my first blog post is dated somewhere in November 2007, but I can say that I started seriously from November 2008. Now I posted some new years resolutions a while back when the new Jewish year started. I can say that from that list of things I wanted to get done I have done the following: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/vmwarevcmsds-time-for-change.html Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/vmwarevcmsds-time-for-change.html As of vCenter 4.0 when installing a new instance of vCenter, in order to allow for Linked Mode, an instance of Microsoft ADAM is installed on Windows 2003 or AD LDS on Windows 2008. The reason for this is because in order to link your vCenter Server together there has to be some kind of hierarchy in order to allow for the communication between the servers, similar to Active Directory. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/case-of-my-ssl-cert-rtfm.html Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/case-of-my-ssl-cert-rtfm.html It took me a while to understand why this was not working - it could be because I hate - actually loath -having to dig through logs because of Java and Tomcat issues, but I only have my self to blame for this one. I am currently installing a new vCenter for my Production Environment (this is part of my MJTV series that I currently going through the process). The last time we installed - we were just starting out with VMware – and there have been a decent amount of problems that we have encountered because of lack of experience and knowledge. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/esx-disconnecting-from-vcenter.html Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/esx-disconnecting-from-vcenter.html I got a call today from a colleague that had an issue with an ESX Server that was behind a firewall that kept on disconnecting every 30 seconds, and he could not understand why. I remember that I had encountered this before, and the solution this was happening because not all ports in the firewall were open to allow the traffic through, and there the Host was losing connection. So as a reference for myself (and anyone else that can use it) here is what needs to be opened. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/assigning-permissions-powercli.html Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/assigning-permissions-powercli.html Have you ever been asked to assign permissions to a VM/Folder/Resource? Come on, own up! Of course you have. Ever done it with the GUI? I guess the answer is the same. So GUI is pretty easy: Find Resource (for example VM) Right-Click Add Permission Choose Role Check Propagate (if needed) Add User/Group OK OK In total 8 different actions that need to be performed for one action. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/updating-user-attribute-in-enterprise.html Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/updating-user-attribute-in-enterprise.html I was asked to update an attribute of the EmployeeNumber for each and every user in the Enterprise for a new Application that will be using the newly populated attribute for a Global Database application. I had several examples that I could use for the job utilizing VbScript – but I wanted to use Powershell for the task. It turned out to be a relatively easy task – using the Quest Active Directory Commandlets. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/benefits-and-justification-mjtv1.html Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/benefits-and-justification-mjtv1.html Firstly, you might ask what is MJTV1? I was thinking that I would like to tag all my posts for this series with something to be easy to recognize it by. So no it is not Michael Jackson TV 1, but rather My Journey To VSphere. I started two weeks ago with this post. So let us start with Part 1. Today I will discuss the topic: Benefits and Justification https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/once-upon-performance-issue.html Fri, 04 Dec 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/12/once-upon-performance-issue.html if you were following me on Twitter - you would have noticed this week that I was extremely busy with troubleshooting and solving a serious performance issue that I encountered. First things first - the environment. Multiple ESX 3.5 Clusters residing on NFS across multiple Datastores coming from same Storage. On average these hosts are utilizing 50-70% RAM and 20-30% CPU. The machines run without any noticeable issues. Next - the incident. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/deep-security-7-trend-micro-vmsafe.html Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/deep-security-7-trend-micro-vmsafe.html Trend Micro have now joined Altor Networks and Reflex Systems with their new offering that utilizes VMware’s VMsafe technology. I expect we will be seeing more and more of the Security Companies release their products that will utilize VMsafe From the Product Page Protect physical, virtual and cloud servers from malicious attack Trend Micro Deep Security 7 provides advanced protection for servers in the dynamic datacenter, whether physical, virtual or in the cloud. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/my-journey-to-vsphere-update-1.html Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/my-journey-to-vsphere-update-1.html My policy is not to update to new releases until they have stabilized for a decent period of time. Therefore, we have not yet performed our upgrade to Version 4.0 yet. We were waiting for the release of Update 1 before migrating the system to version 4. I have been using ESX4 since the private Beta, but not on a production environment. Over the upcoming period I will share with you the process of the upgrade from 3. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/testing-network-failover-with-powercli.html Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/testing-network-failover-with-powercli.html Two weeks ago I wrote an article about How To Bring Down A Single NIC In ESX?. In that post you could see that in order to test this you had to go into the console of the ESX and run the commands on the console. Already then I was thinking, why not do this from PowerCLI, without having to log into each host. So here we go.. For the examples sake: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/have-have-revisited.html Wed, 25 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/have-have-revisited.html If you remember about 6 months ago I wrote an article about the fact that hot add of any kind of virtual hardware in the free free version of ESXi. I thought I would revisit the problems I had now that Update 1 was released last week. The host has been upgraded to ESX4i Update 1 I took a Windows 2008 Guest OS. Firstly, I noticed - CPU Hot plug was not available. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/71-663-exchange-2010-beta-exam.html Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/71-663-exchange-2010-beta-exam.html 71-663: Pro: Designing and Deploying Messaging Solutions with Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. If you pass the beta exam, the exam credit will be added to your transcript and you will not need to take the exam in its released form. Availability Registration begins: November 23, 2009 Beta exam period runs: December 1, 2009– December 21, 2009 Receiving this invitation does not guarantee you a seat in the beta; we recommend that you register immediately. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/disconnected-esx-host.html Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/disconnected-esx-host.html Got a call today. Panic!!!! All VM on an ESX host just went grey – all disconnected. Trouble shooting steps: Ping ESX host Service Console – All ok Look in the VI client what is with the server – NOT OK – all machines are greyed out – (hey that is what they said wasn’t it). SSH into the Service console - All ok https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/is-today-day-for-update-1.html Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/is-today-day-for-update-1.html No official sources, but a small bit of detective work. I hate rumors, but it has already started on Twitter. What a day! View 4 and vSphere update 1 tomorrow! — Barry Coombs (The Doodle Guy) (@VirtualisedReal) November 18, 2009 Trickles of info also from here and here. The talk is that View 4.0 will only work with ESX(i) 4 Update 1. View will be released tomorrow. From the View Press Release https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/release-that-was-not.html Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/release-that-was-not.html Ok so the detective work was not 100% correct. If it was not for unforeseen circumstances then we should have had a release today So why was there no release? The only thing I found was from Andre Leibovici’s Blog VMware uncovered some upgrade issues from View 3 to View 4 and the new unofficial date slipped to Monday 23/11. It also looks like the vSphere 4.0 Update 1 has also slipped to the same date. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/access-console-in-linux-guest.html Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/access-console-in-linux-guest.html Have you ever had the issue of wanting to go into the console of a Linux Virtual Machine that is running at RUNLEVEL 5 (GUI) - because you are one of those Linux geeks who think that GUI is for the weak? Seriously though - sometimes you need to access the console - to try and fix up something that cannot be done in the GUI. On a Linux host you would usually press CTRL+ALT+F1 (of Fx - depending on which console you would like). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/onyx-go-forth-and-powercli.html Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/onyx-go-forth-and-powercli.html I have been waiting for this ever since it was announced at VMWorld 2009. Carter Shanklin just announced tonight! Been waiting to try “Project Onyx” the PowerCLI script generator for VMware vSphere? Check out https://is.gd/4Wxmc Here is a small Demo Go forth and PowerCLI’ze !! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/yep-i-passed-my-vcdx-admin-exam.html Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/yep-i-passed-my-vcdx-admin-exam.html On October 26th, I sat the VCDX Administration Exam. Today I received notification that I passed. Now if you were following me on Twitter then you would have seen that I was not at all happy with the feeling I left the Exam with. Well back from the #vcdx Admin exam - 2/3 sick kids and am not at all happy with the feeling I left with after the exam BAH! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/how-to-bring-down-single-nic-in-esx.html Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/how-to-bring-down-single-nic-in-esx.html I was installing a new ESX Host today, and before putting it into Production, I wanted to test that the Network Failover was working correctly. Now instead of going over to the server and pulling out network cables, I started to think, there must be a way to do this (like all good administrators do) from the comfort of my desk. Easiest would be – Log into the switch and shutdown the port. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/patching-your-esxi-host-without-vcenter.html Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/patching-your-esxi-host-without-vcenter.html VMware Update Manager is the Enterprise tool for Patching your ESX Hosts and for some also the tool used to patch your Windows / Linux Guests as well. This is all fine and dandy, but what is you do not have all of your ESXi hosts connected to your vCenter? Why would you so that – you may ask? Well in my environment, we have several labs that are running their Environment on a ESXi Whitebox,with the free ESXi License. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/vcenter-client-for-windows-7-and-server.html Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/vcenter-client-for-windows-7-and-server.html VMware have released an official KB regarding the problem that we have all known about for ummm… how long is it already :) ? Cannot launch vSphere Client after installing in Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2 I guess that all the traffic that Joep Piscaer was getting on his blog post on the subject will start to slow down now. VMware – we are still waiting on a permanent fix for this! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/useful-statistics-tool.html Mon, 09 Nov 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/11/useful-statistics-tool.html This is not a ESX or a virtualization tool but for those who are interested in tracking their blogging traffic. First thing is to install Google Analytics on your blog. I will not go into the details of how that should be done, Wordpress and other blogging platforms have plugins to do this for you. Once you have it defined, you can either: Go into the site every day and check you statistics. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/10/how-vmware-helps-combat-viruses.html Wed, 14 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/10/how-vmware-helps-combat-viruses.html I am not talking about a new Anti-virus solution or a new product, even though VMware does offer VMsafe for this exact purpose. Today I was hit with a very clever phishing attack. Details can be found here. In short a customized email that was sent to large number of employees specifically addressed and personalized.The link was to a a site that looked like a Outlook Web Access page with a message telling that the IT support should click on the file to update your settings. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/10/how-to-create-exe-package-in-windows.html Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/10/how-to-create-exe-package-in-windows.html A colleague (thanks Natan) of mine reminded me of a simple but not very well know feature that exists in Windows. We all download software from the Internet or install applications off a CD or some other media. This is also true if you need to install/transport information into a VM that is not connected to your network. Some people package them as Zip files, some as ISO’s and some as exe files. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/10/vcp-410-second-shot.html Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/10/vcp-410-second-shot.html VMware will allow for those who have failed their first attempt at the VCP 410 exam to go for a second shot - FREE OF CHARGE! It is a two part process. Enroll in the 2nd Shot Upgrade Program You should will receive a voucher number from VMware that you will enter when purchasing your exam that will entitle you to the free second shot - in case you fail. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/10/veeam-monitor-45.html Tue, 06 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/10/veeam-monitor-45.html Veeam have released a new version of their Free Monitoring product The following is a list of new features in the Veeam Monitor 4.5: Full Veeam Business View integration for business‐centric performance monitoring,reporting and alerting. Please refer to this video for more information on this feature Configurable custom views which represent “intersection” of groups from different Business View categories, for instance: only show VMs with department “Marketing"and purpose “Desktop”. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/and-i-do-use-memory-over-commit.html Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/and-i-do-use-memory-over-commit.html One of the most ridiculous things that Microsoft are saying as of late is that the feature in vSphere that allows you to over commit memory, is not such a big thing and that most people do not use it anyway - here here and here. If you saw my previous post you will see that I managed to double the amount of virtual machines running on the same host (from 8 to 16 VM’s running Windows 2003 Server 1GB RAM) without changing the 8GB RAM configuration on the host. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/how-to-manage-vmware-server-20x.html Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/how-to-manage-vmware-server-20x.html When VMware released the free product VMware Server 2.0.0 version, they decided to get rid of the Console client application. Was this a good thing? Some say no, some say that it was, personally - I think it was a mistake to ditch the Console. A bit of background. When you install Server 2.0.x, bundled with it you get an Apache/Tomcat installation on your host. Now this is something that I find personally annoying. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/nehalem-processors-are-great.html Wed, 23 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/nehalem-processors-are-great.html A client came to me a few months ago requesting help with a problem they had. They have a system that does some (I guess you can call it) grid computing. They were using 20 desktops with XP to compute perform some calculations, and the the process was taking 10 hours , utilizing ~100% CPU on each machine throughout the process. Because of a change that was made in the algorithm, the process would now take 22 hours to complete, for the same amount of calculations and that was not an acceptable result. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/windows-2000-rip.html Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/windows-2000-rip.html From this this post on Technet - we can finally say that if you have a Windows 2000 Server in your enviroment - GET RID OF IT!!!!!! (or at least before July 13, 2010) Another small thing to note - Service Pack 2 for Windows 2003 - was the last, there will be no no SP3. Here is the short version. Windows 2000 Server Extended Support for Windows 2000 Server will end on July 13, 2010. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/my-new-year-resolutions.html Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/my-new-year-resolutions.html According to Jewish religion, the year is based on the lunar calendar and coming up at the end of this week is Rosh Hashanah - the beginning of the new Jewish Year. No, I am not getting religious on you all, but it is a good time for self refection on what I have done this past year, and what I would like to accomplish in the upcoming year. I was asked to prepare the vision for where we are going in the next year compared to where we are today. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/ftp-client-in-esxi.html Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/ftp-client-in-esxi.html This one I saw from a tweet] from lamw. ESXi 4.0 does have an ftp client in the unsupported console for anyone that is interested: http://bit.ly/moZkT — William Lam (@lamw) September 14, 2009 Of course activating the shell console on ESXi is not supported - I do not need to remind you about that. But, if you already have done it and would like to transfer files in and out of your ESXi host with FTP, here is how. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/performance-troubleshooting-for-vmware.html Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/performance-troubleshooting-for-vmware.html A new white paper has been published by Hal Rosenberg from VMware it is a 51 page document, with step-by-step walkthroughs of how to troubleshoot performance problems on an ESX host regarding all aspects - Network, Storage, CPU, RAM, Guest, and Host. The troubleshooting process starts with the top-level troubleshooting flow in Top-Level Troubleshooting Flow. However, the introductory material includes background information that is important for the successful completion of a performance troubleshooting effort. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/search-engines-are-they-biased.html Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/search-engines-are-they-biased.html So who would you believe? Microsoft or Google? Quick search for VMware on Bing and on Google Or are they just not as good as one another? Quick search for Barack Obama on Bing and on Google You be the judge. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/vsphere-blogging-contest-it-begins.html Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/vsphere-blogging-contest-it-begins.html From the WebEx that held this evening (IDT 21.00), VMware will be announcing a new bloggers contest that will be focusing on specific technologies over the next few months. Keep your browsers open and refreshing automatically (until John gets the page up) pointing at this page - where the contest will be announced. (Update.. - The page is now live) So what is VMware looking for? (I have cut the email address - until the official announcement) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/how-to-prepare-for-enterprise-plus.html Thu, 10 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/how-to-prepare-for-enterprise-plus.html Last week I prepared a short explanation of what changes there are in vSphere Licensing in anticipation of the upcoming date of December 15, 2009 whereas we will no longer be able to purchase vSphere ESX Enterprise. Think this is a good summation of what your options are, and thought that I would share it with the community. It is always good idea to be pro-active, instead of re-active. With the release of vSphere at the end of May 2009, the licensing Structure for vSphere has changed from the previous structure that we are accustomed to in VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/master-luc-lucd22.html Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/master-luc-lucd22.html I would like you all to give a very warm welcome to Luc Dekens. Luc is one of the Masters of PowerCLI Forums. If you have a question about Powershell and VMware - he is the guy to ask - and he will answer! He has finally started a Blog - I advise you to follow each and every post - it is a gem https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/more-vmworld-2009-numbers.html Sun, 06 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/more-vmworld-2009-numbers.html Continuing this post from Dave Lawrence - VMworld 2009 by the numbers I will add a few of my own. 29 video interviews done by John Troyer on the VMworld Live [Ustream channel](https://www.ustream.tv/channel/vmworld 23 (at least) new VCP4’s 251 blog posts that came through on PlanetV12N about VMworld 7600 Tweets that have accumulated in my inbox (I use Twinbox) Since the beginning of VMworld 35MB - The amount of storage space - those 7600 tweets use in my PST 11 Blog posts on my blog about VMworld 2009 (and counting) - AND I WAS NOT EVEN THERE! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/best-of-vmworld-2009-contest-winners.html Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/best-of-vmworld-2009-contest-winners.html Category: Business Continuity and Data Protection Gold: Vizioncore Inc., vRanger Pro 4.0 Finalist: Veeam Software Inc., Veeam Backup & Replication Finalist: PHD Virtual Technologies, esXpress n 3.6 Category: **Security and Virtualization Gold**: Hytrust, Hytrust Appliance Finalist: Catbird Networks Inc., Catbird vCompliance Category: Virtualization Management Gold: Netuitive Inc., Netuitive SI for Virtual Data Centers Finalist: Veeam Software, Veeam Management Suite Finalist: Embotics Corp., V-Commander 3.0 Category: Hardware for Virtualization Gold: Cisco Systems Inc. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/new-free-products-from-vizioncore.html Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/new-free-products-from-vizioncore.html Vizioncore have released 3 new products that are free. vControl vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management provides multi-VM control and task-based automation to reduce VM administration and improve consistency. Furthermore, vControl Multi-Hypervisor Management allows organizations to automate manual and repetitive tasks while enabling a cost-effective solution for high availability in the data center. Working across multiple platforms, including VMware ESX/ESXi, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and Sun Solaris Zones, vControl gives administrators the power to manage single or multiple VMs one-by-one or simultaneously. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/vmware-go-will-you-go.html Wed, 02 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/vmware-go-will-you-go.html VMware has announced the Beta release of their new management product for ESXi free - VMware GO. From the short summary of the product VMware Go is a Cloud based application that enables you get up and running quickly with VMware virtualization in a completely automated fashion. Web Browser Interface Easy-to-use Wizard Quickly create ESXis Easily add VMs Manage ESXis and VMs Ok I have already gone through the motions of installing. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/vmworld-for-masses-not-in-sf.html Tue, 01 Sep 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/09/vmworld-for-masses-not-in-sf.html For all of you people (like me) who are not able to attend the conference in San Francisco – a post on the VMWorld communities about a decent number of sessions that you can view online (for free) None of these sessions are available as live sessions at the conference. Here is the Available List: BC2082 VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Performance and Best Practice BC2253 Pain-free VMware Agentless Backup AND Recovery - VCB & Beyond https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/cloud-api-technology-preview.html Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/cloud-api-technology-preview.html This was from an announcement from John Troyer I saw a demo of a plug-in that utilizes this a while ago The forum is now live https://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/forums/vcloudapi From the Q&A vCloud API General Description What is the vCloud API? The vCloud API is an interface for providing and consuming virtual resources in the cloud. It enables deploying and managing virtualized workloads in internal and external clouds as well as interoperability between clouds. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/f5-live-app-migration-between-clouds.html Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/f5-live-app-migration-between-clouds.html F5 Announced today that they were providing with their BIG-IP can VMotion from one site to another without downtime. First the VM is sVmotioned from one storage to another, and then Vmotioned, F5 BIG-IP will redirect the to the remote site, including live sessions that are currently in progress. Taken from the Demo on their Site In this webcast we will demonstrate how to perform a secure live migration of a VM from one cloud to another, without downtime, and without user disruption using LTM, GTM and vCenter APIs. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/vmware-studio-20-ga.html Mon, 31 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/vmware-studio-20-ga.html Release Notes General Availability Release | 31 August 2009 | Build 1017 Last document update: 25 August 2009 New Features in VMware Studio 2.0 The following features were added between VMware Studio 1.0 and 2.0: Ability to create multiple-VM appliances, or vApps, to run on VMware vSphere. More provisioning engines including ESX/ESXi 3.5 and 4, VMware Workstation 6.5.1, and VMware Server 2.0. Build support for Windows Server 2003 and 2008 (32-bit and 64-bit) virtual appliances. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/useful-vmworld-2009-info.html Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/useful-vmworld-2009-info.html Wifi Complimentary wireless access is available to all conference attendees in specific areas. Look for “VMworld2009” in your list of available wireless networks. The wireless network supports 802.11 a/b/g protocols and there is no WEP key. Once you connect to the network, just launch your Internet browser to gain access. If you need help connecting, please see the conference staff at the information desks located throughout the conference. Email stations Sponsored by HP, where you can check email, confirm and print your schedule, and fill out overall conference surveys, are located throughout the VMworld conference venue. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/vmworld-conferences-2010.html Wed, 26 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/vmworld-conferences-2010.html I know we are all busy with next weeks VMworld 2009 in San Francisco but a small heads-up for next year Next year the conferences will be back-to-back VMworld US 2010 – Aug 30-Sep 02 in Moscone Center, San Francisco Vmworld Europe 2010 - Oct 11-14, Bella Centre, Copenhagen Mark your Calendars!!!! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/one-simultaneous-live-migration.html Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/one-simultaneous-live-migration.html For those of you who have not heard yet, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 was RTM a few days ago. One thing I noticed on a post on the Microsoft Virtualization Blog was a reference to some of the details that are in the upcoming release (granted this is for the RC and I cannot attest to this being the same for the RTM version) and found these little points of interest. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/powercli-storage-vmotion.html Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/powercli-storage-vmotion.html I had to to migrate 43 Virtual Machines today, from one Datastore to another. The environment is still not upgraded to vSphere yet. Options I had: sVmotion Plug-in Command line PowerCLI I found the most efficient to be the following Get-Folder "<Folder Name>" | get-vm | Move-Vm -Datastore <New_DataStoreName> -RunAsync The plug-in was too many mouse clicks, and the command line - I have never tried - so I do not know if you can run it against multiple machines https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/first-phd-in-virtualization-history.html Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/first-phd-in-virtualization-history.html Well I am back from vacation - I was in Europe and also spent two wonderful days in Prague. I came across a small piece of history there and think I found the first ever Doctor that used Virtualization, and it was way way back in 1708. This comes from a statue that is located on the Charles Bridge in Prague, and no I did not touch the photo in any way https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/what-happened-to-export-vm-in-esx4.html Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/what-happened-to-export-vm-in-esx4.html I have been meaning to blog about this for a while so hear it is. One of the features I used in ESX3i was the option to export a VM once it was powered off. This made the option of moving a VM off a stand-alone host to different Storage on different hosts a very easy process. In ESXi 3.5 And save it anywhere on your local Drive https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/esxi-patches-my-response-to-jeff.html Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/esxi-patches-my-response-to-jeff.html Jeff Woolsey posted a comparison of disk footprint of ESXi and Windows 2008 Hyper-V server. Not getting into what I think of it yet, just a few facts and misconceptions before I start. Since then these patches have been released for Windows 2008. I could not find a list of specific patches for Microsoft Hyper-V server 2008 R1 - because it is not listed as a product under Microsoft’s Security site - not under Microsoft Hyper-v Server, Hyper-V, Windows Hyper-V, the only thing that I could find which was remotely was for Windows Server 2008. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/storage-drs-and-new-things-at-vmworld.html Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/08/storage-drs-and-new-things-at-vmworld.html It is less than 1 month to VMWorld 2009 in the Moscone Center in San Francisco (August 31-September 3, 2009). A great conference to start with, and picking up more and more momentum as we draw closer. This is the main Virtualization Event of the year, and the only one for another 14 months - seeing that VMware has decided to “consolidate” the European and US events back-to-back, which I personally think is not a good idea (but enough has been said on the blogosphere about this subject) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/happy-sysadmin-day.html Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/happy-sysadmin-day.html Very quick post for this morning Show your appreciation for SysAdmin - https://www.sysadminday.com Lots more here https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/install-esx-on-your-laptop-i-had-crazy.html Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/install-esx-on-your-laptop-i-had-crazy.html And so this started today with a Twitter post. If you know it or not I am a big enthusiast of trying to install ESX on all kinds of hardware - especially Whiteboxes that are not on the HCL. I have tested it on a number of HP, Dell and IBM desktops. The great thing about this is - it mostly works, it is completely not supported, but a lot of fun to do. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/vi-client-install-in-disconnected.html Mon, 27 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/vi-client-install-in-disconnected.html Yes disconnected environments do exist! I mean completely and totally disconnected. NO INTERNET!!! Well I had one of those today. My customer has a network which is completely and physically disconnected from the corporate LAN and therefore also not connected to the internet. This because of the nature of the information that is on this secluded network, that no option for anything to go in or out over the wire. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/how-heavy-is-your-esx-load.html Fri, 24 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/how-heavy-is-your-esx-load.html Well ok.. This could be taken the wrong way (and all of your with the dirty minds should be ashamed of yourselves - ha ha). On one of my previous posts - How Much Ram per Host - a.k.a Lego - I gave a hypothetical scenario of 40 1 vCPU VM’s on a single host as opposed to 80 VM’s on one host. There was one thing I neglected to mention, and because of a issue with a client this week, I feel it is important to point out. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/promotional-drawing-for-free-vmworld.html Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/promotional-drawing-for-free-vmworld.html No I am not offering one - VMware is. Hot off the press from Twitter - starts now until Midnight - July 24, 2009. The idea is for you to register for the conference and therefore become eligible to win the pass for free. If you read the fine print though on the Terms and Conditions you will find that there is a shorter route. Good luck!! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/vmware-workstation-unity.html Thu, 16 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/vmware-workstation-unity.html One of the little known features but, at least I think so, the coolest gems in the last few versions of VMware Workstation is Unity Mode. Access applications within virtual machines as if they were part of the host operating system desktop with “Unity” view Two perfect use cases: In most big corporate environments - Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook are the de-facto tools used for email. If you are like some of those who refuse to use Microsoft OS - then you have to resort to using Evolution, which does not always work well. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/presentations-from-israel-vmug.html Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/presentations-from-israel-vmug.html I was waiting for these to come in they have arrived, and I think that you all could benefit from these presentations. vSphere, What’s New? - Technical Overview - Ofir Zamir (Team Leader SEs, VMware Israel) and vSphere Upgrade and Best Practices - Ben Hagai (VMUG Leader) and Yaniv Weinberg (Senior Consultant at VMware) Good presentation from all three of them. Enjoy! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/vcp4-beta-exam-why-i-will-not-take-exam.html Wed, 15 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/vcp4-beta-exam-why-i-will-not-take-exam.html I was invited (amongst a good number of others that were in the Beta) to sit the Beta Exam. I have decided not to take the opportunity. Only two days left by the way. Why you should? Beta Participants receive a good discount on the exam The privilege of becoming one of the 1st few to achieve the VCP4 Certification The privilege of contributing to the testing process for the rest of those that will take the exam in the future Why you should not? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/how-much-ram-for-esx-server-aka-lego.html Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/how-much-ram-for-esx-server-aka-lego.html I started to read the sample chapters that Scott Lowe released from his upcoming book, and one of the parts were about the subject of scaling up vs. scaling out. A slight bit more of an explanation as to what I mean by this. Should I buy bigger more monstrous servers, or a greater number of smaller servers? Let us take a sample case study. We have an environment that has sized the following: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/vmotion-issues-78.html Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/07/vmotion-issues-78.html In the current series of posts I am writing on running a vSphere lab on ESX 1, 2 and 3, I wanted to set up an NFS shared storage between my 2 ESX hosts to test vMotion. I ran into an interesting issue which I could hardly find any mention of on the web. We all know that there are countless amount of posts about vMotion failing at 10% or failing at 90% but not anything about 78%. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/esx-40-running-vsphere-lab-part-3.html Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/esx-40-running-vsphere-lab-part-3.html We continue our Saga. Part 2 ended with configuring our cluster and now we go onto shared storage and vMotion. If you looked at the previous topology of my lab you will notice that there was no interface configured there for shared storage. That was a small oversight on my part which I corrected by adding a additional NIC, by the way, that is why I love working on virtual machines as a lab - hardware does not cost anything! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/esx4i-build-171294-released.html Tue, 30 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/esx4i-build-171294-released.html From a query on the VMTN forums, I found this one. It seems there has been a release (very very quiet one… sshhhh..) from the original GA code version 164009. It now seems there are two versions of ESX4i floating around now. ESX4i ESX4i Free  There are no release notes for the new version, so I do not know if anything changed. Feelers are out on Twitter - for more info. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-8.html Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-8.html Here is my solution for Event 8. Here we had to go through the hard drive and report which folder was using up all the space on the drive. #First we set the path $path = Read-Host "Which folder would you like to scan?" #assign what we want to get to a variable $myfolders = get-childitem $path -force -recurse | where-object{$_.PSIsContainer} #initiate an empty variable $mycol = @() #now we loop through all the folders foreach($folder in $myfolders) { Write-Host "Processing Folder $folder" #Create and initialize a new variable with two fields Name, SizeMB $myObj = "" | Select Name,SizeMB #here we measure the actual size of the folder [int]$DirSize = "{0:n2}" -f (((Get-Childitem $folder. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/esx-40-running-vsphere-lab-part-2.html Fri, 26 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/esx-40-running-vsphere-lab-part-2.html So Part 1 was about setting up the test environment. This part will be about setting up a cluster. But before we can do anything with setting up clusters we need to set up networking. This might be a bit complicated to understand so bear with me. Just a small recap. The host (esx-sandbox2) has 3 vm’s: ILVSPHERE-TEST ESX4-1 ESX4-2 As this is a setup in a box first we have to go into how the host is set up. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/esx-40-running-vsphere-lab-part-1.html Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/esx-40-running-vsphere-lab-part-1.html I started out on my quest for getting a vSphere environment up for testing of the new technologies. I already had a Beta environment running - but for those of you who did not realize our Beta serial numbers expire on June 30th, 2009 - so you will have to update your labs anyway. I have a dedicated Blade server for this purpose, and IBM HS21 E542 CPU (Quad) with 2GB of RAM and 150GB HD. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-7.html Tue, 23 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-7.html Here is my solution for the Beginner Event 7 Here we had to create a logging solution for script # ------------------------------------------------------------------------ # NAME: ReplaceWordInWord.ps1 # ------------------------------------------------------------------------ $mypath = "c:\temp\test.doc" $logfile = "c:\temp\logfile.txt" #first we will see if the logfile exists $exists = Test-Path c:\temp\logfile.txt if ($exists -eq $true) { Remove-Item C:\temp\logfile.txt } New-Item -path c:\temp\ -Name logfile.txt -type "file" #Create the logfile  "$(get-date)-- Created Log file: $logfile" | Out-File ` -Encoding ascii -Append $logfile  $objWord = New-Object -ComObject word. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-6.html Thu, 18 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-6.html This is my solution for Beginner Event 6 Here we got a script that was not working and had to debug it. #========================================================================== # NAME: Beg_6.ps1 # # COMMENT: Key concepts are listed below: #1. Uses wscript.shell to create three shortcuts on the desktop. The first is a shortcut #2. to this actual script. It uses the scriptfullName property to assign the path. #3. The second is a simple Web site URL shortcut. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-5.html Mon, 15 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-5.html Registry keys. Sorry for the silly humor - don’t know how and why Tonto got in there. Thanks to Rob Rohr - for helping me out here. # first we define some variables $ourpath = "HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings" $Maxdl1_0 = "MaxConnectionsPer1_0Server" $Maxdl = "MaxConnectionsPerServer"  #for IE8  $ie8path = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MAXCONNECTIONSPERSERVER" $ie8path1_0 = "HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_MAXCONNECTIONSPER1_0SERVER" $ie8Max = "iexplore.exe"  function upsertReg($path, [string]$name, [int]$value, [string]$propType) { "Path: $path" "Name: $name" "Target Value: $value" # verify path exists $keyExists = Test-Path $path if ($keyExists -eq $true) { # check if named registry item exists at path $reg = get-itemproperty $path if ($reg. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-3.html Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-3.html This is my solution for Beginner Event 3 Here we have to parse a file and split it into two and rename the original file # Read the input file $InputFile = ".\Shot Put.txt" #Get the content of the file $Content = Get-Content $InputFile #create the two files $outfile1 = ".\Shot Put A.txt" $outfile2 = ".\Shot Put B.txt" #We now parse the file and divide it   { if ($line -match "^\\s\*$") #We have reached the end of a paragraph foreach ($line in $Content) {$outfile = $outfile2} else {$line >> $outfile1} #The rest we put into the first file } #Rename the file Rename-Item -path '. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-4.html Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-4.html This is my solution for Beginner Event 4 Connecting and extracting data from a Access Database and retrieving the best result. Now of course you could get the correct result with an SQL statement, by I preferred to do it Powershell (this is actually what the whole purpose of this competition is for) $adOpenStatic = 3 $adLockOptimistic = 3 $objConnection = New-Object -comobject ADODB.Connection $objRecordset = New-Object -comobject ADODB.Recordset $objConnection. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-1.html Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-1.html If you have not heard about it yet - the Summer Scripting Games 2009 have started. Well I am one day late (sorry!!) but I was trying to figure out the solution for the Event for Day 1 -Beginner - it was late last night and my brain was not working too well. So I looked online today and want to thank Hugo Peters for helping me out with his solution for this event. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-2.html Wed, 10 Jun 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/06/powershell-scripting-games-day-2.html Here is my solution for Day 2 - Beginner All the information is retrieved from WMI #First we get the info from WMI $computer = "Localhost" $mycomp = Get-WmiObject Win32_Processor -ComputerName $computer # We Output our Info Write-Host -ForegroundColor Green "Strength Evaluation for" $computer Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "Speed:" $mycomp.MaxClockSpeed"Mhz" Write-Host -ForegroundColor Yellow "L2 Cache Size:" $mycomp.L2CacheSize #We will check if the data is null or not if ($mycomp. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/hot-add-and-have-have.html Wed, 27 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/hot-add-and-have-have.html One of the new features that were added to ESX4 is Hot-Add. What this feature does it allows you to add additional RAM or vCPU to your VM (if the operating System supports it) Like any good vAdmin - I have upgraded my personal ESX box to Version 4. This is a whitebox with ESX3i installed. Upgrade process was pretty simple as you can see in this previous post. So if you noticed in my previous post after installing your license is a 60-day Evaluation with all the bells and whistles like below https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/veeam-fastscp.html Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/veeam-fastscp.html One of my valuable tools that I use is Veeam’s FastSCP. A while back they introduced a new version that was compatible with ESX3i - which was a great blessing! Today I tried to connect to my ESX4i server and I found that it would not. Received an error: I started to look on their support forum, but could not find any mention of ESX4i - so I reverted to Twitter. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/virtual-thoughts.html Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/virtual-thoughts.html No, I have not started to become philosophical and all, this is about a new podcast that will be held this evening. The forum will be non-VMware centric, non-security centric podcast on virtualization technologies. Virtual Thoughts will tackle several items to start, like Licensing, Performance, Open Source tools, Cross Platform products, etc. This is not a product show but a bringing together of a discussion about these and other pressing issues, and questions in the industry. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/esx3i-to-esx4i-update.html Sat, 23 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/esx3i-to-esx4i-update.html Released with the new version on Thursday was a upgrade package from ESX3i to ESX4i After you have downloaded the package – proceed to update your host. The example below is a VM installed with latest build of ESX3i (158874) Open the VMware vSphere Host Update Utility (this will not work with the VI 2.5 client – it must be the vSphere 4.0 version) and select the host you would like to upgrade https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/vsphere-40-beta-thanks.html Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/vsphere-40-beta-thanks.html Many of the bloggers that are active in the community, participated in the vSphere 4.0 Beta, I was amongst the chosen few. We were all under NDA, sworn to secrecy and not allowed to publish any info as to what the world was in store for. Later on down the road some information started to leak out, questions about vSphere and the NDA arose, but let bygones be bygones. Knowing something that others don’t is kind of fun – but at times can also be frustrating – I mean you want to discuss your opinions, experiences and disappointments with others – but you actually can’t – because you are under NDA. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/vsphere-hcl.html Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/vsphere-hcl.html As of now there is only an online HCL. Till the official documents are released – here are the documents in PDF Systems Guide I/O Devices Storage/SAN https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/vsphere-is-born.html Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/vsphere-is-born.html Well not really born, but it went GA now. After a decent amount of Twitter traffic going back and forward first regarding the knowledge base that started to show up with vSphere KB’s and documentation that was posted Download Link is Live The rush is on!!! As long as the servers are not running under Hyper-V they won’t crash… https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/vmware-online-virtualization-forum.html Sat, 16 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/vmware-online-virtualization-forum.html The Agenda has been released for this event. Attend the Online Virtualization Forum on June 9th and 10th, 8:00am–1:00pm PDT. Don’t miss this opportunity to: Network with VMware product experts, customers, partners and other IT Professionals. Attend 30-minute presentations and get the latest info on VMware solutions, products and industry trends. Access real-time information from industry leaders without the hassle or expense of travel. Create a multi-media resource kit, including white papers, videos and podcasts. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/kodiak-003-released.html Fri, 15 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/kodiak-003-released.html I received an email this morning that Bluebear have released a new version of the management. Here are the changes from the release notes Kodiak 0.0.3 Release Notes: Thanks for downloading Kodiak! This version of Kodiak represents a significant change in our server-communication architecture. We’ve added a schema-compliant request/argument builder engine that populates requests based on known information. This makes building requests much easier. A lua scripting engine. Each server connection gets its own independent Lua script. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/enable-evc-on-cluster.html Thu, 14 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/enable-evc-on-cluster.html One of the wonderful useful features that was released with ESX 3.5 U2 was Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC). From the release notes: Enhanced VMotion Compatibility – Simplifies VMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations. Enhanced VMotion compatibility (EVC) automatically configure server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers. After EVC is enabled for a cluster in the VirtualCenter inventory, all hosts in that cluster are configured to ensure CPU compatibility for VMotion. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/error-converting-to-template.html Mon, 11 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/error-converting-to-template.html Today I came across an issue that seemed to be strange. I tried to convert a template to VM in order to apply some patch updates. When trying I got a error message: So I went into the folder where the template was located to see if I could see anything there. What I found was that there for some reason was that there already a vmx file in the folder which was causing the convert process to fail. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/short-vsphere-presentation.html Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/short-vsphere-presentation.html I presented an overview of some of the new features that are upcoming in vSphere to my colleagues today. VMware vSphere Presentation https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/vsphere-pricing-comparison.html Thu, 07 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/vsphere-pricing-comparison.html I wanted to put up this post mainly for myself, but I sure you can find this useful when trying to compare the differences between VI3 and vSphere. There have been a numerous amount of technical details and improvements with the new version. but in this post I want to address the price differences VI3 Pricing and vSphere Pricing. All prices include 1yr Gold Support. Here is what I will take with me from this comparison. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/i-would-love-rolls-royce.html Wed, 06 May 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/05/i-would-love-rolls-royce.html With the Virtualization world buzzing and with latest Microsoft announcement from today that the Windows 2008 R2 Hyper-V Server will be completely free of charge (and will come with Live Migration and HA) and the prices and licensing of vSphere A few questions have come up: Will this change completely take over the SMB market with a product like this? Because of the above what will happen to the enterprise market? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/will-we-be-forced-to-pay-more-pt-2.html Mon, 27 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/will-we-be-forced-to-pay-more-pt-2.html To continue my previous post about the Enterprise license not being available after December 15, 2009. I received several comments – some on the blog and some I received offline, but the picture has become clear. When vSphere launches, there will be 4 tiers Standard Advanced Enterprise Enterprise Plus Thereafter: The Foundation License will be will be terminated immediately Enterprise will stay available until December 15, 2009. Starting December 16th, 2009 there will be 3 tiers only https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/another-myth-buster-yeah-right.html Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/another-myth-buster-yeah-right.html Extra Layers – cost more – Bah Rubbish !! It is the Enterprise features that Hyper-V (even in R2 – that to remind you all is at least 6 months away) does not have - that makes it all worthwhile! Over Commit – don’t nag about something you cannot do. How many times do we have say this? This is a feature that we use. All the time and enjoy using it – and we get better results than you bring about in your video. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/will-we-be-forced-to-pay-more.html Thu, 23 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/will-we-be-forced-to-pay-more.html VMware announce their licensing changes and I wrote about it in a previous post. I noticed something on a document that (I gather) was released by VMware Marketing and brought to the blogosphere by Jason Boche. The title is, “VMware vSphere 4 Cheat Sheet”. If you look carefully at the above document you will see on on page 3 of the document it is stated that vSphere Enterprise version is going to be available for sale only until Dec. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/say-hello-to-vsphere-powercli.html Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/say-hello-to-vsphere-powercli.html So all the buzz have quieted down – I think have approx 600% less traffic coming in through Twitter than I had yesterday. All the news about the products names – version changes etc. etc. But I do not recall that there was a mention of one small but extremely important part that will also undergo changes. The SDK’s and Toolkits. This I got from the VMware Developer Center Blog. What is new in vSphere SDKs &Toolkits…. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/vsphere-4-so-what-is-new.html Tue, 21 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/vsphere-4-so-what-is-new.html Well I think my speculation was not far off. if you read my previous post I speculated that we would not get anything Unofficial Release Date - May 21, 2009. We got this from the day that you can start purchasing new licenses Jason Boche posted a few noticeable items about the licensing changes. Let me see I can make a bit of sense for what we are getting. All of this comes from the https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/how-long-should-you-keep-vm.html Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/how-long-should-you-keep-vm.html I saw this post post on Simon Gallagher’s Blog Using Virtualization to Extend The Hardware Lifecycle. Simon made a good point. Can we take the physical hardware out of the equation? Well I guess that is exactly what VMware and virtualization is doing. We are no longer dependant on physical servers any more. I would like to however raise another point of view. Correct, the easiest solution for a system residing on aging hardware is to P2V the system to a VM – and it seems that I have solved my problem. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/april-21st-what-will-we-get.html Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/april-21st-what-will-we-get.html So many have already posted about the Virtualization announcement that is planned for April 21st, 2009 (here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here). You can see from the amount of announcements on the Blogosphere that this is a highly anticipated event. (By the way all of the blogs posted above have a huge wealth of information that I highly recommend you frequent whenever you have a chance) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/vi-client-vulnerability-security-alert.html Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/vi-client-vulnerability-security-alert.html I picked this one up on Twitter and Secunia. Another reason to to upgrade to VC 2.5 U4 VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client Password Disclosure Weakness Secunia Advisory: SA34585 Release Date: 2009-04-06 Critical: Not critical Impact: Exposure of sensitive information Where: Local system Solution Status: Vendor Patch Description: A weakness has been reported in VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client, which can be exploited by malicious, local users to disclose sensitive information. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/new-vmware-product-releases.html Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/new-vmware-product-releases.html NO! it is not the new ESX version! (there are other products that VMware sells besides ESX you know) Besides Update 4 for ESX and ESX3i that were released last week: VMware Player 2.5.2 VMware Workstation 6.5.2 VMware Server 2.0.1 What’s New With this release of VMware Player, certain new features and support have been added. Support for New Guest Operating Systems VMware provides support for the following operating systems for Player 2. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/not-another-esxtop-post.html Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/not-another-esxtop-post.html Well Actually yes. Because there is so much useful information about this reporting and troubleshooting tool, I wanted to add my own. I was pointed to very useful document regarding esxtop. Granted it has been a relatively popular topic lately, Both Jason and Duncan have very good posts on the subject So take a look at the document Interpreting esxtop Statistics https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/vcenter-25-u4-my-take.html Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/04/vcenter-25-u4-my-take.html Well I have been meaning to put up my experiences out on the web about what has happened with my attempts (and partial success) with the installation of vCenter 2.5 U4. Now for me the nicest new additions in this update were: Guest Operating System Customization Improvements Performance Overview Charts So I set out to install this update. Pretty straight forward. The install went smoothly – Database was upgraded – Update manager the whole works. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/guessmyos-plug-in-from-h9labs.html Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/guessmyos-plug-in-from-h9labs.html So it seems that Andrew Kutz is having a nice time since he joined Hyper9. He has released a new plug-in for all our use. So what does it do? It changes the icons for the VM that you have to reflect their OS. There are Icons for Windows and Linux at the moment. Seamless download at 1mb (zip file enveloping an msi file) – Installed within 2 minutes and working perfectly. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/vsphere-beta-and-nda.html Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/vsphere-beta-and-nda.html In the past 2 weeks or so there has been a lot of info that is starting to be posted about the next generation of ESX. Just to name a few Duncan Epping, Eric Sloof, Rich Brambley, MalaysiaVM, have all posted some extremely interesting content with previews of features and new additions to vSphere – which is currently in private Beta. Now the question came up in the forums about the NDA (and righteously so! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/hyper-v-live-migration-fail.html Mon, 23 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/hyper-v-live-migration-fail.html It seems that Microsoft have a knack of demoing products to the public that “don’t do what they are supposed to” - and it happened again. When?: Friday, March 20, 2009 8:00 PM Pacific Time (US & Canada) Where?: TechNet Webcast: Road Map for the Future of Virtualization (Level 300) To see what happened you will have to register to see the recording – and move over to minute 38:00 to see exactly what happened. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/i-wonder-what-hp-have-planned.html Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/i-wonder-what-hp-have-planned.html HP started a new campaign “The Guy Who Lives in the Server Room” How you can follow us to freedom Step 1: Admit you have a problem Fear not, HP is here; seek refuge from your data center woes on our HP ProLiant Facebook page. Share your stories, post your pictures, help a fellow “Guy Who Lives in the Server Room,” but best of all – sign up to watch releases of all 6 episodes. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/azure-and-hyper-v.html Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/azure-and-hyper-v.html Last week Azure went down for 22 hours – and this Microsoft’s Cloud solution. Reading Hoff’s post I learned that the reason that this happened was: What Happened? During a routine operating system upgrade on Friday (March 13th), the deployment service within Windows Azure began to slow down due to networking issues. This caused a large number of servers to time out and fail. How much do you all want to bet that this “routine operating system upgrade” was a patch installation that Microsoft released? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/vmware-vcenter-mobile-access.html Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/vmware-vcenter-mobile-access.html So today a little surprise was released by VMware, vCenter Mobile Access. Below is a short demo released with the announcement. A small excerpt from the product overview: Ever wish you could restart a virtual machine or migrate it to another host from the convenience of your mobile phone? With VMware vCenter Mobile Access, you can… VMware vCenter Mobile Access allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/scvmm-2008-r2-beta.html Mon, 16 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/scvmm-2008-r2-beta.html I found this in my inbox this morning ( I saw that this was mentioned here as well: Dear SCVMM beta tester, As a past beta tester of the System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 software, we wanted to notify you at that new Beta release of the “R2” release for VMM 2008 is now available on Microsoft Connect for download. What is VMM 2008 R2 Beta and what are its new capabilities? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/renaming-your-vcenter-update-manager.html Thu, 12 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/renaming-your-vcenter-update-manager.html I have the VUM (vCenter Update Manager) Server installed on a seperate machine (vm of course) than my vCenter Server. Now this of course is the most natural and logical way to patch your ESX servers, all you need to do it create your baselines, remediate your servers and hey presto, after a reboot you are fully patched. so this was working for a while on a test machine using an MSDE database. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/new-vi-plugin-hyper9-client-search.html Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/new-vi-plugin-hyper9-client-search.html Well yes it is experimental, but if you have tried their product, I am sure that you will see the benefit of what it can do for you. Now they have also released a plugin that will allow you to utilize the full power right in your VIC. Thanks to Alex Barett for bringing this to my attention. Plugin can be downloaded here. They also have the H9Labs Alert & Monitoring Applet as well. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/excessive-cpu-usage-on-domain.html Tue, 10 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/excessive-cpu-usage-on-domain.html Now this has nothing to do with Virtualization, but it is still very handy, so I thought I would share it with you all. Yesterday I started to receive alerts from our monitoring system that our DC’s were constantly using almost 100% CPU. Now of course this is not normal. Because of the high CPU usage I started to get more alerts of FRS replication issues, DNS problems and I saw a snowball slowly gathering momentum. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/vmug-israel-march-2009.html Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/vmug-israel-march-2009.html Today was our Israeli Quarterly VMUG in Tel-Aviv Lead by Ben Hagai. About 75 people there (the group is growing every time) Schedule was: Re-cap from VMWorld in Cannes Cisco Nexus 1000V ESX Storage Best Practices VMware Appspeed New Technologies Demonstration 1. Re-Cap - quick overview of technologies from Cannes. Well nothing really new here that has not been posted all over the internet over the past week. One thing that I did learn that was new, that with Vmware Fault Tolerance - If the host fails, the second VM will take over (become the primary) and a new secondary VM will be created on another host in the cluster. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/tiny-bit-of-powershell.html Mon, 02 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/tiny-bit-of-powershell.html Even though I was not there - the VI Toolkit lab, Lab 11 was highly popular and you can voice your opinion on that if you would like. Now Carter Shanklin was so kind to give me permission to publish the VI toolkit examples that were presented on the Hands-on Lab at this session. Luc Dekens , Hugo Peeters and Stephen Campbell also got an honorable mention in the document. This is more of a note to myself of how to perform common tasks with the VI Toolkit and a historical reference. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/statistics-for-february-2009.html Sun, 01 Mar 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/03/statistics-for-february-2009.html Busy month it has been… (Sounds a bit too much like Yoda) The increase in my blog traffic was quite large this month. The most popular item was of course the VMware Visio stencils which have been downloaded almost 7,000 times in the last 10 days. A good boost was also the addition of my blog to Planet V12n. Thanks for the vote of confidence! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/new-maximums-for-vsphere.html Wed, 25 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/new-maximums-for-vsphere.html Announced by Steve Herrod today on stage in Cannes today: 8 virtual CPUs 256GB per VM 40 GB/s network throughput up to 64 nodes per cluster up to 4096 cores to manage full support for Distributed Power Management (DPM), which saves 50% Watts consumption during VMwark benchmarks So much info flying around and coming in so fast, that I am sure, that most of it will be dealt with in more detail, once everyone has the time. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/vcenter-on-linux-beta.html Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/vcenter-on-linux-beta.html As was mentioned by Duncan Epping - the beta for Virtual Center on Linux is out. Comes an OVF package so it can be imported easily into all Vmware products. It is based on Centos using Just Enough Operating System (JEOS) You will need a an Oracle 10 Database Does Not support Monitoring Alarms No LDAP No VM Customizations No VI Web Access No Plug-ins No Local DB Scheduled Tasks Maps Update Manager SRM Converter Enterprise Guided Consolidation More info here https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/vcenter-server-heartbeat-announced-at.html Mon, 23 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/vcenter-server-heartbeat-announced-at.html Well even though the announcement was only today at VMWorld Europe 2009, the cat was let out of the bag, (not by me..but here here and here) so I will provide a bit of what I learned about the product from the webcast on February 10th. We were asked not to disclose anything until the announcement in VMWorld in Cannes. Session will be at the upcoming VMworld in 2 weeks in Cannes - (DC10 - Chosing a Solution for vCenter Server Availability) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/hyper-v-technologies-wrong-information.html Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/hyper-v-technologies-wrong-information.html Well this is nothing new, we see this all the time, but today it really annoyed me. During a lecture I participated in today with a Microsoft Partner at Microsoft offices in Israel today, one of the slides were comparing costs between VMware and Hyper-V. 1 Host - 4 guest VM’s Hyper-V VMware Windows 2008 Server $2,500 $2,500 Hypervisor - (Built-in) $5,800 (3. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/hyper-9-has-new-addition-to-their-team.html Thu, 19 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/hyper-9-has-new-addition-to-their-team.html Hyper-9 is a company that is working on field of retrieving more detailed information from your Virtual Infrastructure. I have beta tested their product over the past month and have to say that it looks promising. They announced today that Andrew Kutz has joined their Team. Andrew was the one who wrote the GUI plug-in for Storage vMotion. They will be in Cannes next week, so be sure to look them up. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/debian-50-vmware-image.html Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/debian-50-vmware-image.html Duncan Epping posted on twitter a few days ago Debian now has a new version out, and of course in no time at all, Simon has released a VMware image of the OS. If you would like to receive the announcements here. Below is the announcement. Thanks Simon! Good evening! == Debian Lenny (Debian 5.0) The Debian Lenny ThoughtPolice VMware image is available for immediate download: https://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/#debian5.0 Torrents and http downloads available, the torrent faster. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/opscheck-is-now-live.html Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/opscheck-is-now-live.html Tripwire (or vWire) have released a new tool - OPSCHECK - that will check your VMotion configuration between your hosts. OpsCheck helps ensure your systems are configured to support VMware VMotion by rapidly analyzing ESX 3.0, 3.5, and ESXi hypervisors, and provides troubleshooting guidance for VMware VMotion. How useful will this tool be? Will let you know after I have tested it. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/vnc-built-in-backdoor-part-2.html Tue, 17 Feb 2009 00:44:00 +0200 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/vnc-built-in-backdoor-part-2.html In continuation of my previous post about this issue with VNC and direct access to a vm through the service console. In my original findings, I stated that this was possible with both ESX3i and ESX 3.5. I opened a SR with VMware on this issue. Together we have been trying backward and forward to troubleshoot the issue and try and re-create the scenario on ESX 3.5 hosts. Now we came across the fact that it was not consistent, some hosts would allow direct VNC access and others would not. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/vcenter-physical-or-virtual.html Wed, 11 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/vcenter-physical-or-virtual.html Every now and again, this comes up. It did again 2 Days ago on Dave Lawrence’s Blog I still feel that in spite of all the benefits and extra redundancy you get with vCenter as a VM, it still feels like putting too much of my precious eggs in one basket. According to VMware - 60% of all vCenters are Physical - and 95% run of them use an SQL database. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/future-of-cluster-services.html Mon, 09 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/future-of-cluster-services.html For those of you don’t already know, VMware have a new feature coming out in there next version. I am lucky enough to be part of the Beta group who is busy testing this. The feature is called VMware Fault Tolerance. All of this info has been publicly exposed and even demonstrated. Fault Tolerance Demo - VMware Roadmap In a nutshell. We all know that one of the greatest features that are available today with VI is HA (High Availability). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/now-how-do-you-like-this-built-in.html Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:06:00 +0200 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/now-how-do-you-like-this-built-in.html Firstly let’s start with how this came about. I was trying to allow permissions to a user to a certain VM on an ESX3i Server. This is a the free edition. There is no option to allocate permissions on the VM/Resource pool level. Here you can see what I mean: OK so how do you give some console access to a specific machine? Well there is a small little trick that is from way back. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/so-how-do-you-like-your-feeds.html Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/so-how-do-you-like-your-feeds.html There are those who like to get updates immediately when something changes in a feed, there are those who like to get notified once a day (something like a daily digest idea from Yahoogroups) Well I actually like a bit of both. I like to receive a daily mail that I can over the articles on the commute to work each morning, and during the day while I am connected to get updates in my browser. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/so-when-will-we-see-release-of-next.html Thu, 05 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/so-when-will-we-see-release-of-next.html Rumors rumors……. This came up on SearchVMware (Hannah Drake - Associate Editor of SearchVMware.com) **The release of VMware Infrastructure 4 is slated for first half of this year. What will happen to the current VCP exam, which focuses on VI3? ** Typically, when an updated product is released, the older product will continue to be the focus of the exam for the greater part of a year. In this case, VMware would make the announcement that it’s retiring the VI3-focused VCP exam in a year. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/so-where-is-virtualization-heading-it.html Tue, 03 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/02/so-where-is-virtualization-heading-it.html Chad Sakac works for EMC, and has blog of course. He wrote a wonderful post last week about getting the most you can out of IP storage for ESX. The post itself was great because it was a joint project from 6 different people from 5 different companies all working together to share great info for the virtualization community. The post can be found here. Another great post he made today - So… What’s the “BIG picture stuff " going on under the covers? https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/once-upon-time.html Thu, 29 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/once-upon-time.html A bit of nostalgia.. Look how far the world has come since then… https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/converting-linux-virtual-machine-with.html Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/converting-linux-virtual-machine-with.html I was entrusted with the task to try and migrate a VM from Xen 3.2 to ESX. Well you would think that is a trivial task - it should be. But let us not forget that we are talking here about version 3.2, which is two generations back from the current Citrix Xensource which is in use today. After successfully migrating it I would like to share with you the procedure. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/exporting-virual-machines-to-another.html Fri, 23 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/exporting-virual-machines-to-another.html A potential client (hopefully will be a major client in the future) came to me with a requirement to consider ESX3i as their next platform for a stand-alone lab (x30). The major setback at the moment was the ability to easily export VM’s from one Lab to another. They needed to exprt the image off of host relatively often. Now why they were not using ESX in the first place and why they are continuing not to do so, and why they would not go for an enterprise solution, that is a whole different story, which I will not get into. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/my-new-esx-whitebox.html Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/my-new-esx-whitebox.html So I finally got around to installing a box for myself to play around with at work. Of course I do not want a noisy server running under my desk (I am sure that my co-workers in the room would not be too happy with it either..) so I had to go for something quieter.. Lo and Behold my new Whitebox!! HP DC 7800 Desktop with 8gb RAM 250gb HD Sata drive, running ESX3i and as quiet as a kitten. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/veeam-fastscp-30-for-esxesxi-public.html Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/veeam-fastscp-30-for-esxesxi-public.html It is finally out. The biggest addition to this Beta is the fact that it works with ESX3i. Get it here https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/roundtable-was-no-go-tonight.html Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/roundtable-was-no-go-tonight.html Due to unforseen technical difficulties (Talkshoe messed up I guess) the roundtable was lots of fun but not audio. Will see you all in a week!! Chat was fun though… Whoa!! - Hold on - it happened in the end started only 35 minutes late. So we talked a bit about Exchange on VMware - but this was just a small teaser for the proper thing next week. Thanks John for working to get it going. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/why-are-there-two-vmware-vmtn_12.html Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/why-are-there-two-vmware-vmtn_12.html I came across something really weird today. Vmware have lots of community forums, and while trying to make some order in the alerts I receive from the forums, I noticed that there are two communities that deal with the same thing, but are in different places, with different content. and this one Now I asked the group of Virtual folks on Twitter and the answers I have received so far is: https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/so-how-are-you-all-doing-with-scvmm.html Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2009/01/so-how-are-you-all-doing-with-scvmm.html That was actually meant to be highly sarcastic, it seems that the folks in Microsoft thought this would be a good idea (acutally it would be very good - if it would work properly..) So you can control vCenter with SCVMM but it seems that when you want to remove it, typically like microsoft does, it leaves a lot of “leftovers” behind. So I personally would like to have my environment back the way it was before Microsoft started to play with and Eric Grey posted on his blog what is left over when you remove SCVMM. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/esx3i-enterprise-virtualization-and.html Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/esx3i-enterprise-virtualization-and.html Well the Atari part is because of a post on PlanetVM, but seriously though the question is should ESX3i be installed on non-HCL machines? Here are my 2 cents (or agurot in local currency).. Yes and no.. Decisive don’t you think? Yes It gives people the chance to test out what ESX can do. The capabilities, the features, limitations and benefits. It is free, so why not use it. It can run off of a USB stick, so it will run on pretty much anything… It does work when installing it on all sorts of hardware. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/new-free-ebook.html Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/new-free-ebook.html Microsoft have published a new book - granted it is on Virtualization - the Microsoft way, but still should be something to go over. Understanding Microsoft Virtualization. This is the book for IT professionals who want to learn more about the latest Microsoft virtualization technologies, including Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.5, Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization, and Microsoft Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. The book also examines other virtualization-enabling technologies from Microsoft including Windows Server 2008 Terminal Services, Roaming User Profiles, Folder Redirection, and Offline Files. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/community-technology-preview-3-ctp3-of.html Wed, 24 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/community-technology-preview-3-ctp3-of.html So the folks at Microsoft have been busy, just in time for Christmas and the Holidays. Well you know that is the advantage of living in Israel (and being Jewish…) - we don’t celebrate Christmas - we celebrate Chanukah (which is not directly related to the Gregorian calendar) so business is as usual here… Selected New and Updated Features in Windows PowerShell V2 CTP3 (Please refer to Release Notes and Help topics for more details) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/recap-of-what-happened-throughout-year.html Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/recap-of-what-happened-throughout-year.html Rodney Haywood has compiled a post of what happened over the last year in the VMware / Virtualization world. It gives a pretty good picture of what has been going on - milestones mainly as to what has been introduced in the Virtual world. There is a lot to absorb. I sometimes wonder - if I only had another 4-6 hours in my day - then I would manage to maintain control of all the information that flies around the technological world - let alone absorb and use/try some of the stuff. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/time-to-change-passwords-again.html Wed, 17 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/time-to-change-passwords-again.html Do you all know how one of the biggest headaches you have is changing all the service accounts and administrative passwords on a regular basis? Well I did that this week. This entailed changing passwords on almost 10 different accounts, local administrator passwords on over 100 servers, Local services, and tasks running under these accounts. It wasn’t so bad though the only real headache is the changing of the local passwords on the servers, the services and the tasks. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/comparisons-comparisons.html Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/comparisons-comparisons.html Ahh….. Come On!!!!!!!!! VMware vs Hyper-V comparison. Jason and Scott have said more than enough on the matter. People should get their facts straight!!!! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/my-top-virtual-appliances.html Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/my-top-virtual-appliances.html EWeek posted their Top 5 Virtual appliances. They are all good applications, but all of them are products that cost moent and cost a lot. So I thought about how about compiling a list of my own most used Appliances (in no particular order) from the Virtual Appliance Marketplace Janus VM Ultimate Deployment Appliance v1.4 Openfiler Damn Small Linux If I come up with some more, I will let you know. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/dutch-vmug-2008.html Sat, 13 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/dutch-vmug-2008.html So some of my friends in NL had their annual event yesterday, the Dutch VMUG 2008. But this gets me thinking. What is the purpose of a VMUG? Well this was taken from the Vmware web site: The VMware User Group (VMUG) program is designed to encourage and support communities of VMware users who want to hold regular meetings in their local area. The purpose of these gatherings is to provide a forum in which VMware users can share best practices and expertise, and VMware can in turn obtain feedback from the user community. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/new-online-hardware-compatibility-guide.html Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/new-online-hardware-compatibility-guide.html So yesterday VMware released a new application online that allows you to search for your hardware to see if it is supported with ESX systems We got this one from John Troyer (and thanks to Duncan for letting us know). But… The the small print at the bottom says: THE HARDWARE COMPATIBILITY GUIDE IS UPDATED FROM TIME TO TIME WITHOUT NOTICE. FOR THE LATEST HARDWARE COMPATIBILITY GUIDE, PLEASE GO TO THE FOLLOWING LINK https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/which-books-should-every-vi-admin-read.html Thu, 11 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/which-books-should-every-vi-admin-read.html Well if you actually have time to read things which actually are printed on paper that is.. Edward L. Haletky - a VMware Communities User Moderator, has put a list together on the Virtualization Wiki, that everyone and anyone who is serious about virtualization should read. The list is here. Happy reading!!! https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/active-directory-health-check.html Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/active-directory-health-check.html Well I have spent the past two days with a Microsoft PFE (Premier Field Engineer) who has been doing a quick health check for issues in our domain. This does not replace an Active Directory Risk Assessment Process (ADRAP) - but was a highly informative and educating session. ADRAP Objectives Perform a detailed analysis of an organization‘s Active Directory environment. Review Active Directory configuration. Improve availability by eliminating single points of failure and by verifying that fault tolerant designs are in place. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/now-if-only-i-would-earn-these-numbers.html Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/now-if-only-i-would-earn-these-numbers.html I would have so much more time to blog here. This is not what a VCP earns in Israel….. :) And I actually have both certifications…. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/report-from-israel-vmug.html Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/12/report-from-israel-vmug.html So what did we have: Client story from Siemens PLM software Well I got there late (damn so much traffic that I am not used to..) but I have seen the presentation before, so there was nothing new to tell about it. Virtual Desktop Technical Deep Dive (VMware View - it is now called) VDI was a good product, but this.. this looks like … wow.. I will have to get hold of an evaluation copy to try it out. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/israeli-vmug-will-take-place-on.html Sun, 30 Nov 2008 21:07:00 +0200 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/israeli-vmug-will-take-place-on.html On the schedule: VMware Virtual Desktop Technical Deep Dive EMC Recover Point Product announcements and upcoming technologies (from VMworld 2008) It should be a good morning … https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/so-what-to-do-with-60-or-so-servers.html Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/so-what-to-do-with-60-or-so-servers.html I wanted share with you a bit of what is happening with a process on how we can save money with virtualization. About 3 years ago or more, Virtualization was not the mainstream for most companies, personally, my current employer did not really get into it until about 18 months ago. So… we are doing our yearly review on what hardware warranty will end and at the moment it looks like that I will have over 60 physical servers that will need to be replaced or have a maintenance contract applied to them for the next year. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/clearing-connection-list-of-your-vi.html Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/clearing-connection-list-of-your-vi.html That small drop-down list on the IP Address/Name fiels can get a bit cluttered after you start working with a large amount of servers and start a lot of testing. So how do I clear the list you may ask? HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware\VMware Infrastructure Client\Preferences Remove the entries you want from the list and hey presto!!! Thanks for the info Duncan https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/changing-custom-notes-on-virtual.html Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/changing-custom-notes-on-virtual.html I wanted to do a bit of housekeeping for all the VM’s floating around. I got to the state that there are machines that I do not know who they belong to, when they were installed and who is the responsible party in case the **** hits the fan. That is where the VI toolkit comes to the rescue !! What I did was added to addiditonal fields for each machine. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/esx3i-console-commands.html Fri, 14 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/esx3i-console-commands.html Well we all know that OFFICIALLY VMware does not support any kind command that are running locally on the host of ESX3i. Of course there is a way to enable SSH to an ESX3i box But the question is how to run these commands?? Well you can do a lot.. vim-cmd is the command you are looking for: Few examples: vim-cmd hostsvc/datastore/listsummary - will give you a list of all the datastores on the host (local and remote) https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/virtualization08-in-israel-nov-12-2008_12.html Wed, 12 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/virtualization08-in-israel-nov-12-2008_12.html Personally I think it was mostly a waste of time. Nothing new was said - most of the talk was about VDI (not that I have anything against it) but there was no OOMPH!! in it. Hope the next Israeli VMUG will be better. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/and-now-for-something-funny.html Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/11/and-now-for-something-funny.html So every now and again you come across something that makes you laugh - today was one of those days. It seems that someone in VMware has a good sense of humor. I found this line in a log file of one of my VM’s today. 11 16:07:40.032: vmx| VMX has left the building: 0. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/06/vmware-to-rescue-again.html Fri, 29 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/06/vmware-to-rescue-again.html Well a colleague of mine had an issue today. A physical server running VMware server with 2 vm’s on it. One VM’s disk “exploded” and we were left with 0% (yep that is right) free space on the HD of the physical server. Now if this was a small VM then that would not be a problem but the vmdk was 120 GB in size (even though inside the VM it was only using 40GB). https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/08/israeli-vmug.html Sun, 03 Aug 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/08/israeli-vmug.html The Israeli VMUG group has been started. First meeting will be on 25/08/2008. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/07/so-what-is-going-on-in-virtualization.html Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/07/so-what-is-going-on-in-virtualization.html ESX3i is going to be free (just one of the places that this was mentioned) Powershell VI toolkit - Man this is better than bread and butter!!! and of course if you think you know what you are doing you could would win an all expenses paid trip to VMWorld 2008 in Las Vegas. https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/04/ok-let-get-going.html Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:00:00 +0000 https://blog.technodrone.cloud/2008/04/ok-let-get-going.html Ok. I was in TechEd 2008 in Eilat, Israel 2 weeks ago. It was highly informational. The new technologies that were presented there (i.e. Server 2008, Hyper-V etc. etc. etc.) are something that is definitely worthwhile looking into. At the moment, what I have “on my plate” in my day to day job is and upgrade from VI3 to 3.5. That includes all ESX hosts and the virtual center. I have successfully installed VMware Server 2.