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.

Rackspace's Terrible Maintenance Plan

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Update, 3/21/12: please read the comments, too — we got a good response from one of Rackspace’s folks. I got a note today from Rackspace, where I have two virtual servers in their Rackspace Cloud. It was opened in the form of a support ticket, waiting for input from me, but with the text of the support ticket labeled as if I entered it, which was weird. As part of our ongoing effort to provide you with the best Cloud Servers service possible, we routinely perform maintenance and upgrades of our underlying systems. The majority of these are performed non-disruptively, however maintenances sometimes arise that impact Cloud Servers instances. At this time, a Cloud Servers host update is required that …

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CMDBs Suck: Keeping Track of Servers, Applications, Addresses

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My third post over at thwack, the Solarwinds forums, is up, asking how you keep track of servers, applications, IP addresses, warranties, etc. It could also be titled as “CMDBs Suck.” This is one area that everybody does differently, and there’s some good stuff going on. There’s also some ridiculous stuff going on. I think people put too much information into their CMDBs, particularly information that the CMDB cannot be authoritative for, so it gets out of sync. On the other hand, CMDBs often don’t have complete information about applications, so a sysadmin gets called for everything when it should really be the app guy. I want to hear about it, and I thought it’d be a good way to …

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Three Failings of Virtual Appliances

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I’m torn when it comes to virtual appliances. I love them because they make a lot of installations absolutely brainless. I hate them because the people that create them make assumptions that are ridiculous and unsupportable. Here’s the three ways I hate them the most: 1. There’s no good way to back them up. For organizations that haven’t gone the “whole VM” backup route there are very limited choices for backing these things up. Sometimes the virtual appliance has some method to export the configurations and data, but often not. And when there is a method it’s usually a web interface that cannot be automated. What I want: virtual appliances should be able to export their configuration and data on …

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How To Boot Into The Apple Boot Camp Menu

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One of my goals for this blog is to make things that are difficult to find on the Internet less difficult to find, and one of those things is the key to hold in order to boot into the Apple Boot Camp menu at system startup. Finding that information once a year when I need it is always a many-step process, because the Apple documentation is wordy and doesn’t just come out and say: Hold the Option key down. Or Alt if it’s a PC keyboard.   There’s also the Boot Camp control panel, too, but obviously you did not, or could not, use it, which is why you were searching for the keystroke combination instead. Hopefully you didn’t have …

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AIX 6.1 & 7.1 Daylight Savings Time Issue

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If you’re running IBM AIX 6.1 or 7.1 at various SP & TL levels you might want to pay attention to a potentially big timezone/DST issue that my AIX coworkers have been struggling with this week. In short, the Daylight Savings Time code doesn’t work right and causes the time to change at incorrect times. In many cases a reboot is required to make things work correctly. The support document from IBM says: AIX systems or applications that use the POSIX time zone format may not change time properly at Daylight Savings Time start or end dates. Applications that use the AIX date command, or time functions such as localtime() and ctime(), on these systems may be affected. … You …

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Dell PowerEdge 12G Is Here

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Over the last week there’s been a number of different posts about the new Dell PowerEdge models, the 12th generation (12G) of their server line. I was briefed both by Dell technical staff and by Dell executive staff on the Rx20 lineup and I took a few notes. I was mainly briefed about the Dell PowerEdge R620, R720, R720xd, which will be in the first wave of refreshes. The higher-end models, like the R820 and R920, and the cloud & HPC focused C-series, will be part of another release soon after, and reach into the higher-end E7 CPU models (8 way, 10 cores) from Intel. The new mid-range hosts are built around the Intel Xeon E5 CPUs, also known as …

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Is it possible to have too much monitoring?

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In the category of shameless self-promotion[0] I’m one of the SolarWinds thwack Ambassadors for the month of March, and I’ve posted my first discussion topic, asking whether it’s possible to ever have too much monitoring. If you’re not familiar with thwack it’s the SolarWinds community site, it’s great. I’ve been in orbit around SolarWinds since Networking Tech Field Day #1, and I’m happy to take a few topics that are more discussion-oriented and post them over there. SolarWinds also has a whole bunch of free tools there, like a Wake-On-LAN tool I’ve used to wake my VMware ESXi hosts up from standby, a VM-to-Cloud calculator to let you see how expensive it would be to take all your VMs and …

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Take A Break

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I recently returned from a two week trip to New Orleans, for rest & relaxation. And it reconfirmed for me my suspicions that sometimes the best thing I can do, from a process & procedure standpoint, is to leave for a while. Banks usually have a mandatory absence policy as part of their internal controls. The United States’ Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) encourages all financial institutions to require employees to take no less than two weeks of vacation every year: During this time, their duties and responsibilities should be assumed by other employees. This basic control has proven to be an effective internal safeguard in preventing fraud. In addition, such a policy is viewed as a benefit to the …

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The Realities of Single Panes of Glass

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The folks at Virtualization Tech Field Day 2 were tweeting about single panes of glass (I think they were playing buzzword bingo) and reminded me of my feelings on the topic. I’ve never thought a single pane of glass was all that special, or necessary. Once upon a time, when I was the IT guy for a small environment, I never used them because I didn’t feel like dealing with the hassle of tying everything together, arbitrarily creating dependencies and unnecessarily complicating my life. Now, as an “enterprise” guy, I can’t use a single pane of glass to see into my storage, network, backups, etc. because of the politics & silos with the storage, network, and backup teams. And even if …

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5 Minutes with vCenter Operations Manager 5

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I installed the new vCenter Operations Manager 5 about an hour ago. Whoa. I had the pleasure of meeting Kit Colbert, Praveen Kannan, and Martin Klaus last April when they were in town, and I know they, and the rest of the team, have been doing a lot of work on the product. It really shows. Here are my first impressions, literally. 1. The install procedure is very straightforward, in that I was able to get it fully installed without reading any documentation. The product is a vApp now, and comes with two components, the Analytics VM and the UI VM. You need two IPs, and despite the OVF import process prompting for the IPs those IPs need to be …

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