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.

I Heart Wikis

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Raymond Chen, of Microsoft fame, has a great blog post entitled “If there’s a problem with a wiki, then you can fix it; that’s why it’s a wiki.” One paragraph stood out to me: “In other words, if you see something wrong, fix it yourself. Don’t just stand around saying somebody should do something. Be someone. Because on a wiki, there is no default value for somebody.” We’ve been using Atlassian’s Confluence as a wiki at work for ages, and love it[0]. They have a starter program where most of their software is $10 for 10 users. If your team is small and you’re not already using a wiki this is a great way to go. For $30 you get …

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Tags in VMware vSphere 5.1

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Mike Preston has a short post & video about the tag features in VMware vSphere 5.1: Just think, say you have hundreds, or thousands of VMs.  You can now more align the way you categorize things inside of your business within vCenter, and sort/search on those custom tags. From the moment I saw the tag features I’ve been pretty optimistic about them. They’d be useful for tagging VMs with all sorts of information, like billing, locations, tiering, or even as a makeshift CMDB by tagging admins, applications, etc. It also wouldn’t surprise me if they were eventually used to drive features like various storage and network profiles, replication, etc. Just set the right tag and everything just takes care of …

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On Using Alternate Ports for SSH

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There’s a post I read the other day that’s really been stuck in my craw (link is below). It was about the effects of moving SSH to an alternate port. The post starts out like this: Best practices state that you should run ssh on an non-standard port. Unfortunately some programs use port 22 by default and it isn’t obvious what the switch is to change this port. First, whose best practices say this? Some self-appointed security expert on the web? I ask because this sort of activity is known as “security through obscurity” and isn’t regarded well as a security tactic. The Wikipedia article on security through obscurity has a section called “Arguments For” which reads more like an …

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Statseeker

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I was fortunate have been invited to Gestalt IT’s Network Field Day 4. I’m a systems guy so it seems odd that I’d go to a networking event, but as silos in IT fall and virtualization wants to do everything in software there’s quite a lot for a guy like me to contribute. Even if it’s just to add a different point of view to some of the network-centric discussions with vendors. Anyhow, one of the vendors we spoke with was Statseeker. They make statistics gathering software for network equipment. You might be inclined to think that network performance monitoring is a pretty dull topic, and you may have noticed that I usually don’t write specifically about products here. The …

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Statistics Rollups Are Evil

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It’s pretty common for statistics-gathering software, like MRTG, Cacti, VMware vCenter, etc. to roll statistics up over time by averaging them. This helps save space, as well as cut down on the processing needed to look at & graph the data. The problem is that the process is lossy. These systems save disk, memory, and CPU by averaging the data over longer and longer time periods. Those averages remove spikes and make the data less and less representative of what actually happened on your system or network. It also makes it damn near useless for planning and troubleshooting. Let’s start with an example I drew up in Excel to simulate something like vCenter recording an application server’s CPU load every …

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VMworld US 2012: Day Two

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Day two for me (Monday) was spent running around the Solutions Exchange, talking to vendors. The keynote was excellent, and it was nice to hear that my Enterprise Plus licenses are becoming vCloud Suite Standard licenses. vRAM is dead, too, which is nice. Didn’t make it to any sessions, but that’s okay. That’s what the other days are for! The vExpert meeting was excellent, and I appreciate the appreciation everybody has shown for my work. Thanks folks. The evening was spent checking out CloudPhysics and talking with some extremely awesome startups & VCs. Serious stuff but fun, and I owe Frank Denneman a big thank you for including me (thanks dude). I followed that with the #vFlipCup tournament. I was …

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VMworld US 2012: Day One

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Day one was a weird day, roaming the city before the Solutions Exchange “Welcome Reception.” Was trying for breakfast at The Pork Store on Haight but ended up at Squat & Gobble, which was excellent. If you get time to go over there the Crab Cakes Florentine is tasty (that’s the plate photo below). Afterwards we walked down to the Ferry Terminal at the end of Market St. If you haven’t been in that building there are some great food vendors in there. There was also an America’s Cup boat heading down the bay. v0dgeball was successful, though I didn’t attend, instead getting an update from Mark Vaughn who was one of the referees. My understanding is that the Arista …

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VMworld US 2012: Day Zero

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Flew in around 3 PM, took the BART over to the hotel, checked in and headed out to Fisherman’s Wharf for some In-n-Out Burger action. Ended up at Rogue Ales, and were so enamored with their beer that we missed the #vBeers. By the time we were ready to head over many of the international & East Coast folks were heading to bed, so we diverted to 21st Amendment. Tasty beer there, too. At Rogue I’d suggest the Hazelnut Honey Brown Ale, at 21st Amendment the HQT which is an ancient Egyptian recipe. We also took a swing through a cocktail bar called Rickhouse, which looked very cool but we were in a mood for beer. That burger is a …

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Tips for VMworld US 2012 & San Francisco

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As VMworld US 2012 approaches rapidly I’ve been thinking about the things I like to do in San Francisco, and the useful things I have learned over the years. If you have thoughts here about things that I’ve missed or are wrong about please add them in the comments! Transportation: From SFO I usually take the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, to the Powell St. station. It’s cheap at $8.25 a person and relatively fast, though you’ll have to hoof it from the station to your hotel then. If you have more than one person a cab might be okay, but expect the ride to cost $50-$60. Shuttles are also a cost-effective way to travel, $17ish from SFO to …

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3 Reasons These VMware vTax & Licensing Rumors Are Great

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“What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.” – Mark Twain I have to say that, if they’re true, I’ve got three reasons to be happy about the VMware licensing rumors that CRN is leaking. First, you may remember from the vSphere 5 launch that I was one of the folks pointing out that due to the fact that you can pool your vRAM licensing it was likely to have little effect in the short term, and shouldn’t stop anybody from upgrading to vSphere 5. The pain would come in the medium-term for folks that practice the “fewer, bigger machines” approach to virtualization (a practice I promote). Thirteen months is definitely “medium-term” …

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