Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers is a man who wears many hats. In his professional career he has spent three decades leading teams that design, build, operate, and talk about reliable, secure, and compliant IT infrastructures, both in the public sector and in the high tech industry. He currently focuses on applied security, compliance, and operational resilience for virtualization and cloud platforms.

Notes on Upgrading the VMware vCenter Server Appliance 5.1 to 5.5

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I’ve done a few upgrades of the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) 5.1 now, to the GA release of 5.5 (build 1312297). Here are my observations: You need a second IP temporarily for the upgrade. The way it works is that you deploy a new vCSA, then the two of them talk to each other to do the upgrade. When they’re done copying stuff around the process will shut the old one off and reboot the new one so it’s fully functional. While the need for a second IP is fairly obvious, I managed to overlook it. Don’t specify a hostname for the new vCSA in the OVF/OVA deployment wizard if you don’t want to change the name of the …

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Coho Data

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Over the last year or so I’ve been fortunate to work with a bunch of great folks over at Coho Data, who are coming out of stealth mode with the debut of their storage product, the DataStream[0]. I’ve got a write-up over at The Virtualization Practice on the device, but I’ve also got a prerelease unit running in my lab, and I’ve been liking it a lot. Neither Coho nor EMC nor Nutanix will like this comment, but if an Isilon got frisky with a Nutanix cluster the DataStream might well be the love child. Scale-out architecture and great software smarts on value commodity hardware. For both personal and technical reasons I’ve always liked the Isilon products, and they’ve done …

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VMware vSphere 5.5 & Dell 12G Servers: Reliable Memory Technology

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A few days ago Dell released BIOS updates for their 12th generation servers. Among all the notes about preparations for the Intel E5-2600 v2 refresh there’s one line that’s of interest to those of us thinking about running vSphere 5.5 on our version 1 12G hardware: New Memory Operating Mode setup option ‘Dell Fault Resilient Mode’ This is a patented new technology from Dell, wherein the hypervisor and system hardware can work together to place the hypervisor in a more redundant section of memory. Dell servers have shipped with a variety of tricks to protect against memory faults, things like Memory Page Retire, which will dynamically remove a page from usable memory space if it encounters an error. However, to …

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Troubleshooting Puppet PostgreSQL Locale Mismatches

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I’ve been doing some work lately with VMware Hyperic Server and Puppet, and I’ve been having issues where the Puppet Labs PostgreSQL module refuses to create a PostgreSQL database for me. I try to call it with: class { ‘postgresql’: charset => ‘UTF8’, }-> class { ‘postgresql::server’: config_hash => { ‘listen_addresses’ => ‘127.0.0.1’, ‘manage_redhat_firewall’ => true, ‘postgres_password’ => ‘goatsaresupercool’, }, require => Mount[‘/var/lib/pgsql’], } postgresql::db { ‘HQ’: user => ‘hyperic’, password => ‘sheeparecooltoo’, require => Class[‘postgresql::server’], } …and it throws this error into Puppet’s output: Error: /usr/bin/initdb –encoding ‘UTF8’ –pgdata ‘/var/lib/pgsql/data’ returned 1 instead of one of [0] “No problem,” I said. Since Puppet is kind enough to give me the command it’s trying I switched to the postgres user …

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I Love the VMware vCenter Server Appliance

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Most things in my life that I think are good & excellent are things I started out being very critical of, or at the least greatly disliking. Some of my best friends were some of the most annoying people ever when I first met them. My wife loves to tell the story about us camping in Denali National Park a few years ago, where I absolutely hated the place at first, just to end up a complete fan. And, speaking of my wife, ask me sometime how we met. It seems fitting that I’ve gone from hating the idea of the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) to having an inappropriate man-tech crush on it. To be fair there are a …

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The Canonical List of Hypervisors That Suck

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A recent, uh, discussion on Twitter reminded me that, just like operating systems, all hypervisors suck in some way. Or, at the very least, people complain about each one, and how they cost money, or that they’re free, or that they require support contracts, they don’t require support, they have no support, their support has no clue, they’re fragmented, they have no ecosystem, all they have is an ecosystem, who needs an ecosystem except idiots who can’t code and if you were worth anything you’d shut it and write your own long-distance replication tool instead of complaining about it, they don’t have a community, they do have a community but it’s too small, they do have a community but it’s …

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Shameless Self Promotion – Active System & OpenStack Edition

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I’m continuing to write over at The Virtualization Practice, and it’s been fun so far. Those of you following what I’ve been doing have probably seen me take a real turn towards converged infrastructures in the last six months, both for TVP and for TechTarget. Not that I don’t think the public cloud is attractive to many, but hardware vendors are doing some real interesting things that are keeping on-site IT fairly attractive. Plus the local telco lobbies and myopic/dirty legislators seem to be keeping inexpensive bandwidth, the Achilles heel of the cloud, to a minimum in most non-urban places. Anyhow, we’ve got: A Look at the Dell Active System 800 wherein I’m trying to figure out if Dell’s converged anything …

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SELinux & Return On Time Invested

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I’m a little behind on my reading, but I wanted to address Major Hayden’s blog posts about disabling Security-Enhanced Linux, or SELinux, which brings mandatory access control to Linux. Mandatory access control is a completely different permission model for UNIX-based hosts, and Mr. Hayden feels it is underutilized: After many discussions with fellow Linux users, I’ve come to realize that most seem to disable SELinux rather than understand why it’s denying access. In an effort to turn the tide, I’ve created a new site as a public service to SELinux cowards everywhere: stopdisablingselinux.com. It’s pretty rare for me to argue against a security technology but in my eyes SELinux isn’t a solution to very many problems. I know how SELinux works, what …

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Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 Wish List

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It looks like TechCrunch & USA Today blew an embargo on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 5 beta due to be released, and now lots of places are getting in on the action. I thought it’d be a good time to update my Lightroom wish list from version 4. The leaked posts mention a few new features that make it easier to retouch images, some automation around leveling photos (which would be a godsend for me, I cannot seem to take a level handheld vertical shot), and some catalog improvements. By & large, though, the announcements were pretty content-free, so I’ll definitely need to spin up a virtual machine to see what else they might have added.[0] Here’s my list of …

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Shameless Self Promotion – VCE, TVP, and 787 Edition

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My first-ever post as a member of The Virtualization Practice is up. I’m a little slow, I know: Digesting The Latest VCE News: Vblock 100 and Vblock 200 wherein I criticize Vblocks for not having very much RAM, and attract the attention of Kendrick Coleman in the comments (which is cool, Kenny is great). I’m very much looking forward to writing more stuff with Edward & Bernd & Steve & crew. I’ve also been writing for TechTarget’s “Modern Infrastructure” magazine as a regular columnist, which has been pretty darn different & fun. April’s work is: The Benefits of Insourcing Data Center Operations wherein I wonder if moving to the cloud is like the offshoring & outsourcing manufacturing companies in the …

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