Archive for October, 2009

I’m catching up on my recordings on Sky+ box, and listening once again to Jools Holland’s Later. Anyway, due to a cancellation – this girl was brought into to do a couple of numbers. Well, all I can say thank god, for the cancellation.

On the surface people will try to dismiss her as being to similar to other singers, like Amy Winehouse. But I don’t think so – she’s still got here own unique sound.

Enjoy!

Oh, and below this video – this is the official video for “New York”. Personally, I prefer the live version but then I always do:

Well, it’s nice to see the engineers get some credit (shame his video is cut to ribbons!)… But I guess they have it fit on youtube.com

The second video features the rather cute looking, Maria Basmanova (she’s the Senior Member of Technical Staff, and software engineer) . She discusses some of the features of SRM.

Well, not to be outdone by the recent launch of an Irish and Scottish User Group – the North of England has rose to the challenge! Although tagged a “Leeds VMware User Group”, then plan is to exume from the ashes of its abortive beginning a Northern User Group, so people like me who turn ashen at the thought of going to “dat der London” have some place closer to home to go to! . I’m hoping my fellow Northern in crime, Tom Howarth will be able to make it too!

I’m hoping to be at the meeting in November – although I’m booked to be somewhere, that somewhere could be cancelled – which means I can be there, and perhaps even speak. I will be definitely at the next meeting in March 2010 – date/time/location to be confirmed.

I know this new user group needs to attract members – but additional volunteers for the Steering Committee- ideally existing VMware Customers…

Details below – please make clear your intention of coming to this forum post:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1384890

Date & Time: Wednesday, 18th November 2009 at 14:00
Host: Brendon Higgins
Speaker: Chris Kranz
Venue: The Wellington, 88 Wellington Street, Leeds, West Yorkshire LS1 4LT

You are invited by the Chairman of the West Yorkshire branch of the British Computer Society to attend the inaugural meeting of a Leeds VMWare user group. Anyone with an interest virtualisation is welcome and leading stakeholders will support this event by attending. However this is a user event and priority will be given to vmware administrators wishing to attend.

The venue is in Leeds town centre and only a short walk from the train station and local car parks. A big thank you to the Wellington for allowing us use of the room free of charge for this first event.

The primary goals of this event are:

• Discover techniques for troubleshooting VM performance issues
• Meet and exchange ideas with peers
• Develop the format and agenda for the next meeting
• Recruit volunteers to help with next meeting

If you wish to attend please reply to this thread so that I may track interest. The room will hold 70 but only half of that is practical for the round table events due to the noise of other people speaking on the next table.

Agenda

2 PM
Welcome and introductions

2:30 PM
A formal presentation and Q&A session with Chris Kranz, on techniques he uses for troubleshooting VM performance issues in his role of “Senior Technical Consultant” for vmware virtual partner b2net

3:30 PM
Round table discussions on various topics related to VMWare

• Backup and Recovery
• Performance
• Reporting and Monitoring
• VCP Exam
• vSphere
• Getting from development to production
• ‘Open mike’

5 PM
Finish – Is that a pub down stairs? May stay for just a quick pint… 
Thank you for supporting this endeavour.

Unearth by my pal Vaughan Stewart of NetApp, from his twitter…

http://www.cracked.com/blog/using-windows-7-may-lead-to-murder/

Well, I guess I will signing up for a 30-day eval then. After checking out the eval download page I was surprised/disappointed to see that there is no SRA to download for the HP Lefthand Networks VSA or the NetApp…

Corma Hogan has written some extremely useful guides about how to setup SRM 4.0 with either:

• Steps to setup 3PAR Inserv arrays
• http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1471
  
• Steps to setup EMC Clariions
• http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1227
  
• Steps to setup EMC Celerra (iSCSI)
• http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1233
  
• Steps to setup EMC Celerra NAS Replication
• http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1602
  
• Steps to setup IBM SVC
• http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1601
  
• Steps to setup NetApp NAS Replications
• http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1603
  
• Steps to setup NetApp arrays
• http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1229

This is quite funny. vCenter 4.0 allow to deny yourself your own rights. That’s right, as the administrator you can block or remove your own privileges to an object. Once you remove your own rights, the object then disappears from the inventory – which means of course you can’t select it again to add yourself back in! It’s not unlike the Microsoft experience, where in NTFS permissions you fail to include an administrator and receive the access denied message. At least with NTFS permissions – you can right-click the folder and add yourself back in. Not so with vCenter permissions.

Another interesting weirdness is when you are member of multiple groups – so if you add in group1 and group2, your member of both – one has read and the other has administrator – your effective permission would be the most restrictive one – read. This can show itself when you accidentally add in a built-in group to which the administrator account is also a member like – Remote Desktop Users or Domain Users. If you give one of these built-in groups a lower-privilege – you can find your own privileges diminished to such a degree that you will looking for another vCenter administrator account to give yourself rights.

I’ve seen this happen in my own lab environments – when I haven’t been engaging the brain – and dismissed it as an anomaly that would hardly ever happen. Until last week one of my students (in fact a couple of them) did precisely this (because the lab instructions told them too!) We ended up having to create a temporary local user account (who wasn’t a member of any of the built-in groups) and giving them access to the Local Administrators group on the vCenter box. Fortunately, local “Administrators” group in the Windows SAM was still listed as being an “Administrator” in vCenter. Not that would pass any audit in most corporates nowadays…

Up until last week I was ashamed to say – that I always thought NPIV (N-Port Virtualization) was merely an obscure and un-utilized (by many) feature of a VM that was introduced in Vi3.5

It wasn’t until I was chatting to some HP guys who work on the HP Blades that the importance of NPIV became apparent to me. I guess this say much about my lack exposure to blade technologies since the very early blades. I’ve been spending too much time with conventional 2U/4U boxes by all accounts. NPIV is critical in blades because each HP enclosure has just 4 FC ports. NPIV allows these ports to broken down into 16 ports one side of the enclosure, and another 16 on the other side – offering up to 32 WWN IDs with NPIV. These in turn can be presented to the blades as separate WWNs.

One of the things I learned last week was that when you create a brand new copy of Window XP, it defaults to using IDE as the disk type in vSphere4. Like many I simply re-used my existing template of Windows XP (which actually goes as far back as ESX 2.0) and upgraded the tools and hardware so I hadn’t spotted this before. Anyway, last week I needed a new copy of Windows XP, and for reason I can’t be arsed to explain my template wasn’t available. In the end it was just as easy to install a clean copy to a vSphere4 VM. At the back of mind I knew at some stage I would need to reach for my LSI Logic.flp file, and press F6 to tell Windows XP’s installer to use the driver. In the end I didn’t need it…

It’s not immediately obivious that Windows XP defaults to an IDE drive in vSphere4 because you still see the point of the wizard that asks what controller type you want to use. The IDE controller doesn’t appear as option/default unless you use the “custom” option and get to the end of the new virtual machine wizard: