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.

Speaking at LOPSA Madison

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If you’re in the Madison, WI area I’ll be speaking at the meeting of the Madison chapter of LOPSA tomorrow. My presentation is entitled “VMware: The Quick and the Dead” and I’ll be talking about my VMware experiences and environments, what works, what sucks, and how to make Virtual Infrastructure a tool that helps you get things done. It’s at: 2310 Computer Sciences 1210 W Dayton St Madison, WI, 53706 United States Walk into the center atrium and take the green elevators to the second floor.

Wait As Long As Possible To Purchase Hardware

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It seems to me that the longer you wait to purchase server hardware the more bang for your buck you’ll get. Whole generations of technology come and go inside a single calendar year. Vendors release new products constantly, driving the price of the old technology down. The $25,000 you were going to spend to get X performance will get you 1.5 * X in a year. I’m putting together quotes for $7,000 replacements for $50,000 servers, four years old. Another way to look at it is to buy only what you need at the time. Deploying an application and need a development environment? Buy just a development environment. Wait to buy the production hardware until you need it, and run …

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links for 2007-06-12

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Best Week Ever » Blog Archive » BWE SPORTS: The Difference Between Baseball Fans and Hockey Fans The Profit Calculator — New York Magazine claros.org: Products – Chat jcole’s weblog: Jeremy Cole’s take on life. » Blog Archive » Scaling out AND up, a compromise RAID isn’t going anywhere anytime soon (I agree wholeheartedly with Jeremy)

Safari on Windows, iTunes as the Finder

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(writing this inside Safari)  My take on Safari on Windows: eh, cool. It is fast. Fast ain’t everything, though, but Firefox is really pissing me off lately. Between crashing, leaking RAM, leaking RAM then crashing, there is a lot of room for an ultra-stable web browser. Hopefully Safari is it. It is nice that all the same keystrokes work for stuff in Safari as they did in Firefox. I also think it’s interesting how the new Finder is just the iTunes interface. Do people really like Cover Flow that much that they have to put it everywhere? Who cares? I do like how Apple said the iPhone SDK is the browser. Good for you, Apple. Interesting that there was little …

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Most. Confusing. Product. Description. Evarrr.

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“The PowerEdge 1950 is a high performance, highly available and scalable, ultra-dense 1U rack general-purpose server ideally suited for edge-of-network, infrastructure, thin client/server-based computing and high performance computing cluster environments. The PowerEdge 1950 is designed to reduce complexity in the workplace by increasing commonality among Dell’s next generation of servers while delivering the greatest value possible.” Couldn’t that be said with fewer buzzwords? Like: “The PowerEdge 1950 is a high performance 1U general purpose server, configurable for just about any workload you might have, large or small. It is perfect standalone or in a cluster, with as many or as few high-availability features as desired. It is designed to reduce complexity and costs by increasing the number of features and …

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links for 2007-06-09

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Welcome to BakersEdge.com: Bakers Edge – Edge Brownie Pan, Brownies, Corner Brownies, Edge Brownies, Brownie Recipes Heh, an edge on every brownie with this pan.

Best Reply To An Email Of Mine

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Over the last couple of days one of our monitoring systems has been noting a growing number of defunct/zombie processes on one of our servers. It happens from time to time and is an application problem, so I sent the following to the guys that maintain the app: VOID has been slowly creating more zombie processes over the last two days. Was 17 yesterday, now is 27. Their reply: That’s because you have to kill the VOID before it spawns any more. If you waste your time on the zombies you’ll run out of mana and health before you get to the VOID, unless of course you’re willing to use a potion. Ah, yes, should have known that. Now I …

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Features I'd Like To See In VMware Virtual Infrastructure

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I’ve been doing a lot of work lately in my VI3 clusters, namely bringing new machines online. There are a few things that I’d love to see added to the product that would make my life better. Cluster-wide SAN rescan. I’ve been moving machines around in clusters and changing the storage, and going to each machine to rescan sucks. I wrote a script to SSH in to the boxes and run the rescan scripts, but it would be cool if there was a button in VirtualCenter that took care of it for me. Expose more information about the LUNs in VirtualCenter. It’s sometimes difficult to figure out what LUN I want to deallocate. If I could see more information I …

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You Don't Have A Crystal Ball (So Shut It)

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Do you have a crystal ball? Can you see the future? No? So why are you solving future problems now? Can’t we wait until we’re actually having the problem, and use our time to work on solving problems we’re actually having (in the present)? How do you know that your solution fixes the problem when we don’t know what the problem will look like? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

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