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.

Explaining Things Simply

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Humans try to make everything really, really complicated. Sometimes we need the complexity but we often do it just because we can. We do it without thinking about it, perhaps a subliminal way of telling people to check out our species’ big brains. It’s also the way we write. We write long and complicated emails, memos, documents, blog posts, whatever. We use big words when we could very easily use smaller ones. Think about all the times you’ve used the word “utilize.” You don’t need that word, ever. Another word you never need is “bespoke.” People who use those kinds of words are writing so that nobody will read or understand them, which is a complete waste of time for …

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Cloud Isn't Really About Technology

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If there was one concept about “the cloud” I wish more people understood it is that the cloud is not a technological revolution. Sure, a faster and more pervasive Internet helps, but we’ve had vendor-hosted applications for years. Virtualization has created better opportunities for server infrastructure, lowering barriers to entry and helping us squeeze blood out of things we once treated as rocks. But, despite being almost continuously conflated with “cloud,” it isn’t the cloud. Not by itself. The cloud is about people and about process. It’s about organizations deciding to talk to each other internally, to collaborate and solve problems together. Cloud is about opening the door to automation and security and scalability, asking computers to do what they …

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OpenStack Isn’t Our Savior from Lock-In or Support Costs

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There is an attitude among some now that OpenStack is, or at least will be, our savior from vendor lock-in in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud space, as well as something that will help corporations save a lot of money in licensing fees from VMware. While I see the potential I think there’s more to the picture. To start with, OpenStack will lock you in just the same as a commercial offering, even though it’ll be “open.” If you want to move from OpenStack to another solution to another there will still be a bunch of hassle to move virtual machines and applications, just the same as if you wanted to move between VMware and Hyper-V, or to a public cloud offering. OpenStack …

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Four Things VMware Engineering Can Give Me For Christmas

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I hope everybody out there in the virtualization world is having a great holiday season this year! My religion celebrates Christmas, and these are four things I’d love to see under my Christmas tree this year. 1. IPv6 support at all levels of the VMware stack. For a cloud vendor that fancies themselves as forward-looking, not to mention trying to be the “VMware of Networking,” the lack of IPv6 is pretty embarrassing. I know, I know, the tired argument is that nobody is really looking at IPv6. Well, it’s hard to look at when your vendor doesn’t support it much. 🙂 Chicken, meet egg. This would also help ameliorate the fact that VMware products need an awful lot of IPs …

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VMmark 2.5

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Oooh, a new version of VMmark is out. From Bruce Herndon on the VROOM! blog: I am pleased to announce the release of VMmark 2.5, the latest edition of VMware’s multi-host consolidation benchmark. The most notable change in VMmark 2.5 is the addition of optional power measurements for servers and servers plus storage. This capability will assist IT architects who wish to consider trade-offs in performance and power consumption when designing datacenters or evaluating new and emerging technologies, such as flash-based storage. A long time ago I was pretty skeptical of yet-another-benchmark, but it’s been useful to help compare physical hosts with virtual workloads. Unlike most benchmarks, the results from previous versions are still relevant to the new version. I …

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Changing sshd Port Numbers Continues To Be A Bad Idea

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If you were a fan of my post last month that was basically arguing that you shouldn’t change sshd’s default port  there’s another great post on the topic by Tom Ryder over at his blog, Arabesque. He has a couple points that I didn’t have. You should read his stuff. If you’re not a fan of our point of view you now have another comment section where you can argue the virtues of security through obscurity.

Everything is Covered in Everything

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Quick Public Service Announcement: I’ve noted a resurgence of “OMG POOP SMARTPHONE” stories lately (there was a streak of them a while ago, too), and I’d just like to point out some other things that have bacteria on or in them: Everything on Earth. This becomes pretty clear if you are, or involved with, someone who is pregnant, as pregnancy’s effect on the immune system makes people temporarily suceptible to listeriosis (among most other things). What is listeriosis? It’s an infection caused by Listeria bacteria. Where does Listeria live? ON ABSOLUTELY ALL OF YOUR UNCOOKED FOOD.[0] Nasty? Perhaps. But I liken this to the junior sysadmin that first types “free” at a UNIX shell prompt, and discovers, OMG OMG, that …

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Three Reasons Why Hatred of the Windows 8 UI is a Good Thing

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There seems to be a lot of negative sentiment about the Windows 8 user interface (the interface formerly known as Metro). It might be counterintuitive but I think this is ultimately a good thing. First, mainstream OS user interfaces have stagnated, and I like that Microsoft is thinking about what the next steps might be. I also like that they’re thinking about it in a different way than other OS vendors, especially not emulating Mac OS’ ridiculous skeuomorphism. Trying to maintain some common interface elements between desktops, laptops, and mobile devices seems like a good idea, too. They’re obviously not done thinking about the problem, otherwise they wouldn’t have left the desktop in Windows 8. That’s the main problem people …

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Impressions of Windows 8

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I’ve spent about 20 hours now with Microsoft Windows 8 release running in VMware Workstation 9. I’d looked at the developer preview months ago but not exercised it very much, figuring things would change. Some things did, for the better, but the UI changes, by far the most controversial, stayed pretty much the same. Windows 7 was called the successor to the wildly popular Windows XP but in my mind Windows 8 only succeeds the star-crossed Vista. It’s really too bad that all the seriously cool things — the new task manager, Storage Spaces, all the personalization updates, File History, the task bar improvements, several billion other tweaks — are all being overshadowed by the interface. Desktop PCs are not tablets. …

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Critical Dell BMC Firmware Update

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If you’re running a Dell PowerEdge 1900, 1950, 2900, 2950, 2970, 6950, R300, T300, R605, R805, or R905 there are urgent & critical security updates that have been released by Dell on October 15, 2012. Similarly, there’s an urgent update to the Dell-supplied ESXi 4.0 U4 software. Dell describes the fixes as “Critical Security Update –Urgent BMC Release.” To me that says Dell fixed something that’s remotely exploitable and doesn’t want to say what it was out of fear of tipping off troublemakers. I always like to know what the problem is, figuring that the bad guys probably already know, and it helps me determine my priority for the fix. Moral of the story is that if your older Dell server …

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