The Lone Sysadmin

• WGBH: Wisconsin's White Deer Herd
  I'd love to see one of these deer.
• President Obama calls Air Force One flyover 'mistake' day after low-flying plane terrifies New York
  A) Props to them for not using Photoshop. B) Quit living in fear, people. Seeing Air Force One should be a really cool moment, and if you'd use your head it would be. It has been for me.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Yet another frequently asked question: My company is getting more serious about virtualization. Should we keep using our fibre channel SAN or switch to iSCSI or NFS?

My usual answer is a series of questions: What technology do you know best? How big is your SAN? Why are you thinking about switching? What’s your performance like? What will it cost?

The thing is, I never have an answer. Whereas some common virtualization questions have easy answers this one depends heavily on what you’re trying to do. iSCSI is a great way for small- and medium-sized organizations to get into cluster filesystems. With 10 Gbps Ethernet you can get SAN-like performance, too, but 10 Gbps NICs are as costly as fibre channel HBAs. If you already have a fibre channel SAN you may already have a lot of what you need. There are large iSCSI-based virtualization implementations, there are large NFS-based ones, and obviously large FC-based ones, and a lot of good reasons to choose any of them.

Sometimes there’s a massive savings with one of the technologies, or there’s a particular storage vendor that you like that only does iSCSI, NFS, or fibre channel. If there is not a compelling reason to go one direction or another, and everything you’re evaluating is on the Hardware Compatibility List, I’d make the call based on what I know and limit the number of new things I’m trying to do at once.

Update: Commenters are chiding me for not mentioning NFS, and the chiding is a good thing. I don’t use NFS, but a lot of people do, and they love it. The problem I’ve had with NFS is that VMware doesn’t seem to think it’s as cool as other options, because their certification of NFS-based arrays seems to lag or not exist in a number of cases (like for SRM). As such I tend not to suggest it, because I don’t want to see someone get trapped with it. However, with Storage VMotion, migration to a new storage technology is easy, so it’s not a problem anymore. As such I’ve updated the post. Thanks guys!

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This is the fourth post in my series of “what VMware questions do I hear most often?” The first three questions were:

1. How much capacity should I have for VMware?
2. Should I convert my old servers to ESX?
3. What kind of servers should I buy for VMware?

If you think of a question you’d like me to answer please put it in the comments. Thanks!

Popularity: 8% [?]

• Atlassian Stimulus Package
  $5 for a 5-user license of Confluence or Jira — that's a great deal if you were looking at getting into wikis or issue tracking. Even if your company is big, if it's just going to be your IT staff, or just as a proof-of-concept for documentation, this cannot be beat.
• Norm Stamper: 420: Thoughts on Pot vs. Alcohol from a Former Police Chief
  Fairly interesting, especially from the point of view of law enforcement.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Around the places I work (and the non-profits I work with, too) we use Atlassian’s Confluence wiki software. With Atlassian offering $5 licenses for Confluence and Jira through the end of the week I thought it’d be a great time to write about how we use our wiki.

We love wikis because:

1. They let us easily add & maintain documentation. Let’s say that someone finds an error in a document I wrote (it happens). With old static documentation, like HTML, someone would need to find me and tell me how to fix it. Then I’d need to actually fix it, and re-publish it. With a wiki the person who finds the problem can click “edit” and fix it themselves without using two staff members’ time.

2. I can tell who edited what, and what they changed. When I discover that someone changed my document I can tell who did it, when they did it, and I can compare their version to my version to see what changed. I can also “watch” certain documents so I get notified when they do change.

3. Meeting agendas are easy to maintain. Need something on the agenda for the weekly team meeting? Add it yourself. Likewise, during the meeting I can take notes right in the meeting agenda page, and avoid needing to transcribe my notes later (if ever).

4. I can integrate other media, like mailing lists, calendars, and checklists, with my documents. Many of the teams I work with have a web presence, a documentation repository, and a mailing list. A wiki like Confluence can pull all those together into a single searchable archive. Where was that list of servers with expiring warranties? Email? Wiki? Who cares — just search for it. Need a checklist? Just create one as a wiki page. Need a project calendar? Just use the built-in calendar plugin.

5. No more format fights. Some of my coworkers insist on using text files for documentation. Some use text files with RCS. Some with CVS. Some with SVN. Some do the same with HTML. Some love Microsoft Word. Some use OpenOffice.org Calc, or Excel. And with Excel are you saving as .xls or .xlsx? ARGGGH. The wiki ended all of those format fights, especially since tables can have sortable column headings. Additionally, we licensed the Gliffy plugin, which lets us do basic diagramming right in in a wiki page. No, it isn’t as powerful as Visio, but most of the time we don’t need all that power, either.

6. No more document storage fights. Before the wiki we had documents in home directories. In with applications themselves. Out on the file server shares. As HTML. On desktops of servers. On desktop workstations. It was a mess, especially when someone was out of the office and we needed that data. Now we have a single place for our documentation, which gets backed up centrally, and is easily searchable.

7. While wikis are best when open, sometimes you only want to open them to a few people. Confluence has a permission model that lets you give some folks access and keep others out. It also has good anti-spam features to go with the discussion features, too, including methods like CAPTCHA.

Atlassian has always offered limited-time evaluation licenses, but for us it’s taken over a year to really get all of the different parts of our organization into using the wiki. A $5 renewable starter license for 5 users is a great, zero-risk way to get started with a world-class wiki application, especially for a small IT department. Heck, you also get support, too. The same goes for Jira, a great issue tracker that integrates with Confluence. All in all, something you probably shouldn’t pass up.

Popularity: 7% [?]

• Wikipedia for Spies: The CIA Discovers Web 2.0 – TIME
  I've heard about Intellipedia before, it's really interesting how they manage it. I like the idea of "shepherds."

Popularity: 4% [?]

• Virtual Geek: EMCs VMware Storage Strategy – The 3rd Shoe Drops
  This is cool stuff. The DRS-for-storage part is what I'm craving the most.
• Jim Leff's Slog: How to Save $5000 on Your Logo
  "Scrawl an ugly, primitive, childish, highly-unsatisfactory mock-up of what your entirely unartistic brain is picturing. Give it to the artist." This Jim Leff guy is dead on here. It's hard to be creative, and it's hard to know what someone else is thinking. Which means a big bill if someone has to start from scratch for you, creatively.
• Rumor: Fox May Cancel Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
  Oh, I'm sure they will. Basically if it's a show I like it'll get nuked. It's too bad the SciFi channel doesn't have the budget to pick something like this up. At any rate, more reason to just cancel my cable service altogether.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Another frequently asked question: What kind of servers should I buy to start my VMware cluster out?

My off-the-cuff answer: “the biggest machines you can afford at least three of, from whatever vendor you like the most,” followed by “it depends.”

Part of the great thing about virtualization, especially with VMware, is that you can use VMotion to move everything off of a running machine. This means that you need a place to put that workload, though (think of my “buckets of water” analogy). If you buy two machines you have to keep one empty, and 50% of your cluster capacity sits idle. If you buy three machines you can use two of them, and 33% of your cluster capacity sits idle. Four machines, 25%.

Of course, you don’t want to buy machines smaller than the workload you’re going to virtualize. If you want to virtualize an application that will need 8 vCPUs you want to consider carefully whether you’d want to purchase 8-core servers or go for something like a 16-core machine.

CPU isn’t the only consideration. You need to think about RAM sizing, too. Do you get three machines with 256 GB of RAM each or seven with 96 GB of RAM? What’s the sweet spot for pricing, versus the size of your largest VM? What does it cost for each new server you put in, in incremental costs, like KVM, SAN, and network switch ports? That should play into this, too, because those things aren’t free, and they contribute to the cost of the environment. Would you rather spend $3000 on infrastructure costs or put that $3000 into the machines?

As you see, and as with many things in IT, there’s no “best way” to do things. It’s all about you, your workloads, and your budget.

——————————–

This is the third post in my series of “what VMware questions do I hear most often?” The first two questions were:

1. How much capacity should I have for VMware?
2. Should I convert my old servers to ESX?

If you think of a question you’d like me to answer please put it in the comments. Thanks!

Popularity: 6% [?]

• Metairie man says stranger chewed, swallowed after taking bite out of his arm – Breaking News from New Orleans – Times-Picayune – NOLA.com
  I agree with Boing Boing — zombies? But it's probably just drugs.
• How to Handle Criticism — Copyblogger
  Nice succinct list. I use the "nobody's right" one a lot. For every person I have tell me a blog post is wrong, I have another saying that I'm right on. You make your own decisions, you invent your own reality, and others might share in that or not.
• gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": the "ignore everybody" cartoon
  I like this. I might print it out and hang it in the doorway of my office.
• Official Google Blog: Will it lens?
  I've been thinking that this sort of thing might be the future of the lens in my old 50" standard definition projection TV.
• Extreme borrowing in the blogosphere
  Good commentary on quoting in blogs. I see a lot of "extreme borrowing" in the VMTN blogs, and some sysadmin blogs, and it just doesn't sit right with me. When I quote someone I try very hard to quote something interesting to pique my readers' interest in following the link.
• Standalone Sysadmin: How NOT to cool your server room
  I've seen stuff like this. It's usually shortly before I re-evaluate my consulting fee structure.

Popularity: 4% [?]