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.

System Administrator Appreciation Day is One Week Away

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I have to thank the SolarWinds crew for reminding me that we, as system administrators, have a holiday coming up. And in particular, bosses, managers, and other herders of nerds should be aware that July 29th is System Administrator Appreciation Day. Yes, sysadmins. You know, those folks that tirelessly respond to pages at midnight. Those folks that come running when your CEO’s laptop has a virus on it. Those folks that virtualized all your servers and saved you lots of money. The folks that run your servers, and networks, and keep things in your data center calm and cool have a thankless job 364.25 days out of the year. Next Friday is a good excuse to thank them. Every sysadmin …

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VMware Scale Up vs. Scale Out: The Big Picture

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Duncan Epping and I were kicking around the whole scale up vs. scale out argument two nights ago on Twitter, which culminated in Duncan’s excellent post on the topic. Aaron Delp also posted some numbers (and a unicorn) where he also adds the consideration for Microsoft licensing. As a Linux guy I hadn’t thought about that style of Microsoft license, and I like that a lot. While Mr. Epping was crunching numbers, so was I. I am firmly of the belief that scaling up is a better idea, because physical infrastructure and its management is not free. It isn’t cheap, either. You need to consider a lot of different things, including storage connectivity, network connectivity, KVM, power, and cooling. You can …

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My Thoughts on Upgrading to vSphere 5

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about upgrading to vSphere 5, mainly the questions of when and how I’d like to get it done. During the launch on July 12th there was a lot of talk about how many QA hours went into vSphere 5 (2 million+). That’s good news. We had some serious problems with vSphere 4 when we deployed it, bugs all over the place, vCenter crashing every couple of days, etc. VMware support wasn’t super helpful in fixing the problems because they didn’t have much experience, and they were unwilling or unable to get Engineering involved. As a result I took a lot of crap from my coworkers about my decision to upgrade things so quickly. To …

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The Manhattan Way

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“We prefer plain dealings and straightforward transactions in America. If you go to Egypt and, say, take a taxi somewhere, you become a part of the taxi driver’s life; he refuses to take your money because it would demean your friendship, he follows you around town, and weeps hot tears when you get in some other guy’s taxi. You end up meeting his kids at some point and have to devote all sorts of ingenuity to finding some way to compensate him without insulting his honor. It is exhausing. Sometimes you just want a simple Manhattan-style taxi ride. But in order to have an American-style setup, where you can just go out and hail a taxi and be on your …

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A Look at VMware Licensing & Environment Growth

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My previous post on VMware licensing changes focused mainly on the question of “will I be able to upgrade my current setup to vSphere 5?” I concluded yes, easily, and if you would like to see how I did it I encourage you to go read the post. It’s pretty obvious that futures will change, though. I’ve always subscribed to the “fewer bigger machines” theory, to which I owe a lot to Steve Chambers. Some of his writings espoused the idea that most IT failures are human error, to which I agree. Coupled with that is the idea that the cost of a server isn’t in the price, it’s in the management of it. So why have more machines, more …

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The Five Stages of VMware Licensing Grief

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Update 8/3/2011: VMware announced updated licensing terms (link is to my post on the matter). As part of the vSphere 5 & Cloud Infrastructure Suite announcements today VMware announced a new licensing model. And, as expected, people are having a fit. A few of us were briefed on this new model last week, and I’ve got a four-day head start on the denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance that seems to follow this change. Let me work through it with numbers from my environment, as an IT professional, in a professional way. Hopefully this will let some people pass from the anger stage to bargaining (perhaps with their VMware sales representatives) and on to acceptance. Before I start, I do …

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Join me for VMware's July 12 "Raising the Bar" Event

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If you haven’t signed up for VMware’s webcast on Tuesday, July 12 you should. They’ll be announcing how Cloud Infrastructure is going to take a “major leap forward.” I’ll be on the ground out in San Francisco with David Davis, Bill Hill, and Eric Siebert and I’ll be liveblogging the event and answering Twitter questions. Considering the event is named “Raising the Bar, Part V” you should probably be able to guess what is going to happen, in light of the Roman numeral (and please don’t think I’m being coy, they haven’t actually told me yet, either). The event starts at 9 AM PDT, which, for most of the US means you’ll need a lot of coffee. But it’ll be …

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Two Things I Really Would Like From Mozilla Thunderbird

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While I was on vacation I noticed that the Mozilla Foundation released Thunderbird 5.0. From the release notes it’s clear that a lot of cleanup work happened with this release, improving “speed, performance, stability and security,” but not very many new or revolutionary features. I like Thunderbird a lot, and I like that they’ve focused on stability more, but I still have two feature requests for future releases. Multi-client synchronization The promise of IMAP is that you are able to check your email anywhere, and it can stay on the server. There are also some nice things about thick email clients, like better searching, easy junk mail processing, offline modes, etc. The problem lies in having two copies of Thunderbird …

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Why "Bring Your Own Device" Is Seriously Flawed

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I was reading Larry Dignan’s ZDNet article (link at the end) on the security implications of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), and thought I’d take it a bit further. For a while now I’ve been thinking that BYOD has some serious issues in general, and is specifically a symptom of the ongoing war between risk-averse IT and personal productivity in the enterprise. 1. A company still has to provide computing equipment to everybody who doesn’t BYOD. Lots of people aren’t going to bring their own device, because they don’t have one, or aren’t paid enough to buy one. As such, a company is going to have to provide them one anyhow. 2. Everybody is going to buy all sorts of …

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Dell, SSD, CacheCade, and H700/H800 Controllers

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Dell’s announcement last week that their rebranded LSI RAID controllers, the H700 & H800, now have the ability to use certain local SSD disks as a read cache tier. This is the “CacheCade” technology LSI has offered since September 2010, and looks functionally similar to technologies like NetApp’s FlashCache, where SSD maintains a copy of “hot” blocks on the fast storage. There are some limitations to it, namely that it will require the H700/H800 models with 1 GB of NVRAM on them, and comes as part of a certain firmware level. The feature will also only work with certain SSDs from Dell, so you can’t plan to just cram a cheap Intel X-25 in there (which is unfortunate, in my …

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