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.

9 Things You’ll Love About vSphere 6.0

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vSphere 6.0, finally. It’s been in beta for what seems like an eternity. Betas are like Fight Club, where the first rule of participation is that you may not talk about your participation. But today’s the day that changes, as VMware just announced 6.0. A lot of rough edges were smoothed in this release, and all the limits have increased again (64 hosts per cluster, etc.). Beyond that, though, there’s much to like. Here are nine things I think are pretty neat about 6.0. 1. Centralized Services (PSC, Content Library, Update Manager) VMware has acknowledged that there’s a fair amount of “meta-administration” (my term) that goes on for vSphere. To help curb that they’ve created the Platform Services Controller, which is …

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Latest ESXi Turns Off Transparent Page Sharing, So Watch Your RAM

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Transparent Page Sharing is a technology from VMware that essentially deduplicates memory. Instead of having 100 copies of the same memory segment it keeps just one, and returns the savings to the user in the form of additional free capacity. In a move that further encourages people to never patch their systems VMware has set the new default for Transparent Page Sharing to “off.” They did this in the latest Updates to ESXi (ESXi 5.5 Update 2d, for example). More specifically, in order to use it by default you now need to configure your virtual machines to have a “salt,” and only VMs with identical salts will share pages. To specify a salt you need to manually edit a virtual …

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How to Install CrashPlan on Linux

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I like CrashPlan. They support a wider range of operating systems than some of their competitors, they have a simple pricing model, unlimited storage & retention, and a nice local, mobile, and web interfaces. I’ve been a customer for a few years now, and recently have switched a few of my clients’ businesses over to them, too. What I don’t like is that they don’t seem to support Linux very well, which is typical of companies when their installed base is mostly Windows & Mac. Most notably, their install instructions are sparse and they don’t tell you what packages you need to have installed, which is important because cloud VMs and whatnot are usually “minimal” installations. I’ve attempted to open …

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Why Use SD Cards For VMware ESXi?

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I’ve had four interactions now regarding my post on replacing a failed SD card in one of my servers. They’ve ranged from inquisitive: @plankers why would you use an SD card in a server. I’m not a sys admin, but just curious. — Allan Çelik (@Allan_Celik) January 22, 2015 to downright rude: “SD cards are NOT reliable and you are putting youre [sic^2] infrastructure at risk. Id [sic] think a person like you would know to use autodeploy.” Aside from that fellow’s malfunctioning apostrophe, he has a good, if blunt, point. SD cards aren’t all that reliable, and there are other technologies to get a hypervisor like ESXi on a host. So why use SD cards? 1. Cost. Looking at …

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How to Replace an SD Card in a Dell PowerEdge Server

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We use the Dell Internal Dual SD module (IDSDM) for our VMware ESXi hosts. It works great, and saves us a bunch of money per server in that we don’t need RAID controllers, spinning disks, etc. Ours are populated with two 2 GB SD cards from the factory, and set to Mirror Mode in the BIOS. The other day we received an alarm: Failure detected on Internal Dual SD Module SD2 We’d never seen a failure like this so we had no idea how to fix it, and the Internet was only slightly helpful (hence the point of this writeup). Here’s what we did to replace it. Note: I’m certified to work on Dell servers, and have been messing with …

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Deduplication & Write Once, Read Many

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It’s probably sad that I see this and think about deduplication & WORM. This fellow achieved a 27% deduplication rate, though. Think of all the extra letters he could tattoo on his back now! For those of you who don’t speak English natively I assume he was going for “Mississippi.”  

Table Stakes for Storage Arrays

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I was just looking at Andreas Lesslhumer’s post about blog posting volume in the virtualization community, and it’s depressing. I didn’t blog a whole lot here last year. Why was that? Because I was writing elsewhere! Speaking of that, the first half of my “Six Features You Absolutely Need on Your Storage in 2015” list is up over at The Virtualization Practice, wherein I outline what the table stakes are for enterprise storage arrays, get only slightly snarky about why we’re still discussing, as an industry, why & how to use flash, and highlight the good work some vendors are doing (SolidFire, Dell, and Tintri in this post, more in next week’s second part). Check it out.

You Cannot Use open-vm-tools to Customize VMs

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Homer Simpson: Kids: there’s three ways to do things; the right way, the wrong way and the Max Power way! Bart: Isn’t that the wrong way? Homer Simpson: Yeah, but faster! My biggest pet peeve with open source is that projects don’t ever solve whole problems. They get 60% of the way to solving a whole problem and then run off to chase another squirrel. The most recent example of this is VMware’s recommendation to use the open-vm-tools packages that ship with modern distributions of Linux. Dumbest recommendation ever. Why? Because the project got to 60% of the solution and stopped, effectively solving no problems for anybody. From what appears to be a VMware employee on the open-vm-tools mailing list archives: > …

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CentOS 7 Refusing VMware vSphere Guest OS Customizations

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So I just spent two hours of my life trying to get my CentOS 7 VM template to deploy correctly with a vSphere customization specification. No matter what I did it would customize the VM, then uncustomize it, essentially leaving me with the template again. I finally asked our oracle and savior, Google, and two amazing things occurred. First, I found the answer. About three weeks ago a fellow named Jeff Burns asked this same question on Server Fault, then answered his own question five minutes later (this is often what happens to me immediately upon filing a support case). He built on something I’d seen in /var/log/vmware-imc/toolsDeployPkg.log, where the VMware Tools couldn’t figure out what the OS is and …

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Apple Lawsuit Over iOS Advertised Capacity

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In case you hadn’t seen it, Apple is being sued over the fact that a 16 GB iOS device does not have 16 GB of space usable on it. The Verge has a good story on it, link is below. In contrast, Macworld’s Susie Ochs has published a whiny, elitist article entitled “Apple faces dumb lawsuit over the size of iOS 8.” This link is also below if you’d like to witness the cesspool that Macworld has become. I don’t think the lawsuit is dumb, at all. On one hand computers have never included the space consumed by the OS when listing their storage capacities. Consider that an OS installed on a PC stays fairly static over the life of the …

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