The Lone Sysadmin

I’ve commented before on how I generally object to plans to virtualize absolutely everything in a data center. It looks like Eric Siebert agrees with me in his article on recovering servers after power failures:

Virtual servers can be even more problematic. If you have all your DNS servers virtualized which cannot be started because of network or shared storage issues, you can run into problems starting other servers and services that rely on DNS. Consider having at least one physical DNS server or having one or two DNS servers running on local storage instead of shared storage.

Running services from VMs might be a great idea, especially if you’re using techniques like anycast DNS. It’s also pretty useful for creating test environments for your infrastructure services. The thing is, VMware uses DNS, so if you don’t have a physical box running DNS and DHCP you have a dependency loop. Likewise if your SAN gear needs DNS to start, or you connect to your iSCSI volumes using DNS names. Having at least one physical machine running DNS and DHCP makes life a lot easier in a crisis.

Moral of the story is twofold: you need to know what your dependencies are and account for them, and VMware has dependencies like everything else.

• Dear Diary: It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen | Good Morning Silicon Valley
  This is pretty cool — they’re going to post Orwell’s diary entries day by day exactly 70 years after he wrote them.

“Going to” means you know. ‘Should’ means you know nothing.

“Those servers should come up cleanly after a reboot.”
“That storage array upgrade should not cause an outage.”
“The customer should be fine with this.”

Right.

If you can’t say “going to” then you need to do more work.

Update: if you think I’m wrong don’t take it personally, join the comments where the beatdown is already happening. Please, no nails in the 2×4s, though. :-)

As of 10:50 AM CDT I have a flight to Las Vegas for VMworld 2008. This means I’m completely registered and ready to go, waiting only for the course reservations to open up and the date to arrive.

This should be fun, especially since I’ve never been to Vegas before. I’m not really a gambler, so I’ll have to find other ways of amusing myself. Anybody have any suggestions for things I shouldn’t miss? And what else are people up to during the week?

• The Fishbowl: A Public Service for the FSF
  Charles Miller being a lot nicer than I would have been in addressing the FSF vs. Apple debate. Good points & links, too.
• Angry man shoots lawn mower for not starting - Yahoo! News
  “A woman who lives at Walendowski’s house reported the incident. She said he was intoxicated.” From the state that just figured out it is illegal to have sex with a corpse because the corpse didn’t give consent. Apparently we have nothing better to do.

• Ext2 On Singularity
  UW-Madison’s CS department representing itself with a graduate project porting ext2 to MS Singularity. Cool.
• Apple’s Year Ahead: Slashing Mac Prices To Boost Market Share? (AAPL)
  I would buy a Mac if it were price-competitive with PC hardware.

• Howto: Check if a LUN is being locked by the host? » Yellow Bricks
  This is very useful if you are running a number of ESX servers, clustered.

I just bought a Nikon D80. I’ve wanted a digital SLR for ages, and with the help of my good friend Jon I finally sucked it up and bought one. Now I just have to figure out how to use it. Which means that, for a while, I’m going to take a photo of everything I see.

Lesson here: autofocus doesn’t work very well on fires.