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.

Should I Convert My Old Servers to ESX?

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Frequently asked question: My company is virtualizing our data center. Should we buy new servers or turn the ones we have into ESX servers? My usual answer is a question: “How old are the servers you have?” Average answer: “Somewhere around three years old.” My reply: “Get new servers.” Why new servers? Because, performance-wise, they smoke your old servers, and have all the new technologies like Extended Page Tables, VT-x, VT-d, etc. RAM is often a limiting factor for how many VMs you can get on a physical host. Newer servers can have lots of RAM on them, more inexpensively than old servers can have lots of RAM on them. New servers often come with four NICs built in — …

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links for 2009-04-08

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Lifehacker – Trillian Astra Handing Out Invites Willy Nilly – trillian If you were thinking about trying the Trillian Astra beta I offer you this: I've already uninstalled it. It doesn't seem to be able to work right with XMPP chat servers, which is kind of a big deal these days. Just like the old versions of Trillian it tries to do lots of things and does everything very poorly. I know it's a beta, which explains the crashing, but the UI is terrible, too. Time to see if there's a new version of Psi… Video-In and Magnetometers Could Introduce Interesting iPhone App Possibilites – Mac Rumors The more sensors the better, in my opinion. A magnetometer might also be …

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How Much Capacity Should I Have For VMware?

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Frequently asked question: How much capacity should I have in my VMware environment? My stock answer to this: N+1 in each cluster. If you have N physical hosts worth of work in a cluster, have N+1 physical hosts. That way you have spare capacity for maintenance operations, and you can take a whole server completely out of the cluster by VMotioning its workload to the spare machine. Think about your servers as buckets, and your workload as water. If you have 30 gallons of water in 6 buckets, where will you put 5 gallons of water when you need to drain one of the buckets? You need an empty bucket that’s as big as the largest bucket you have. In …

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links for 2009-04-07

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Alaska's Mount Redoubt – The Big Picture – Boston.com The 1200X SEM photo of the ash is cool. See all those edges? That's why volcanic ash is nasty and abrasive. Those edges are all very sharp, even if they are minuscule. Further down: a UW – Madison contribution. Always cool to see. Microsoft will allow Windows 7 users to downgrade to XP | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com Microsoft is succumbing to corporate America refusing to move forward. Problem is, XP is solid, and nothing else since has been. When a guy like me is happier with a beta OS instead of a released, "stable" one, well, yeah. If I didn't have a hybrid hard disk (blech) in my laptop …

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Servers Too Cold?

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Dear Readers, Has anybody ever had a server get too cold? I’ve seen them get too warm, but there’s very little data about the cold end of things. Can anybody tell me what happens? I’m mainly talking about servers. We do have some IBM tape drives that don’t like the cold, but that’s understandable. In the cold I’d expect issues with fans, especially the cheap ones with sleeve bearings. What else?

links for 2009-04-06

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Performance Anti-Patterns | ACM Queue “Want your apps to run faster? Here’s what not to do. By: Bart Smaalders, Sun Microsystems” Good stuff here. 7591 vaccum tubes in original boxes – $50 a) Nice spelling of vacuum. b) This guy removed the glass tops to clean them. *sigh* Only vacuum left is an almost perfect one between this guy’s ears.

FeedBurner Hosed

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In the last few days, since April 1, my RSS feed subscriber count on FeedBurner has plummeted, now just a little over a third of what it has been for a long time. It looks like lots of people are having this problem, as well as email subscribers not getting any email. Perhaps Google should apply the “beta” designation to FeedBurner, too. I’ve figured that this was some sort of reporting problem, because a 60% change in readership numbers is a huge error, and catastrophic for people who have ad deals, apply for funding and grants based on statistics, etc. In typical Google style there’s just one little mention of this on their blog: Issue: We are observing reduced subscriber …

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What If

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I have to stay current on my blog reading… I missed the “Eric Whitacre Extravaganza” a few weeks ago in Minneapolis. It would have been really cool to hear the new Nox Aurumque performed by St. Olaf, and one of those events my mom and brother would have wanted to see, too. I credit my ex-girlfriend Susannah for introducing me to Whitacre’s work, in that she was part of a group that sang Water Night, Cloudburst, and Lux Aurumque two summers ago. BYU renditions have since been permanent fixtures on my iPhone. I just spent the last 30 minutes replaying the Conspirare version of What If, over and over and over. I agree with Mr. Whitacre’s description as “a very …

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