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.

Ah, Details

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A few days ago I’d written about the fix for VMs rebooting after being VMotioned. In the comments there was some speculation about what the big problem would be for ESX 3.5 Update 3. That question was just answered: “Virtual Machines may unexpectedly reboot after a VMotion migration to an ESX 3.5 Update 3 Host OR after a Power On operation on an ESX 3.5 Update 3 Host, when the VMware HA feature with Virtual Machine Monitoring is active.” KB 1007899 has the information you want. I nominate VMware ESX for inclusion in the software defect hall of fame, alongside Mediawiki and Sendmail.

links for 2008-12-12

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Estimate VirtualCenter database size from the VI Client | VM /ETC VM/ETC usually has good stuff, but if the database size estimator is news to you as a VMware Virtual Infrastructure admin you should be fired. Update: I figured that most VI admins would have known this already. I’m a big fan of Rich’s VM/ETC, didn’t mean to insult him personally (which I’m sure I just did). I figured it was a slow news day over there (I get those, too). Sun to upgrade its general purpose cloud computing facility (with xVM Server?) | virtualization.info “Sun has just temporary shut down its cloud computing facility at Network.com.” Sun is adrift. Solaris lacks direction and purpose, their hardware business is floundering, …

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Get VMworld Into Your Budgets

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It’s budget season where I work. We operate on a chargeback model, so this means that I get to guesstimate what I’m going to need to spend next year, look into my crystal ball to see what I’m going to bring in, and then figure out if I can keep my chargeback rates the same or not. Infrastructure folks like me are at the bottom of the budgetary food chain, so changes to my rates have serious implications for people higher up. It’s been pretty nice to be able to drop the chargeback rates of virtual machines year after year, as hardware gets faster but the workloads remain fairly constant. Dropping your prices is definitely easier than raising them. Something …

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links for 2008-12-11

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Life Is Crap | Shop the Life Is Crap Official Store The whole "life is good" product line makes me want to scream. It was just a matter of time until someone evened it out.

VMware Fault Tolerance = RAID 1

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“Are you planning to use VMware Fault Tolerance when it’s released?” “Probably not,” I reply. “Why not? It looks really cool.” “Sure, if you don’t have stable hardware or a stable hosting environment. There are probably other scenarios that I haven’t thought of where it’ll help, though.” “What? No… it’ll be cool if you have an application crash or something.” “Wrong. Fault Tolerance is to VMs what RAID 1 is for data. Whatever happens on disk 0 happens on disk 1. So if you delete a bunch of files they disappear from both disks, and you still need to restore from backup. You only see benefits if one of the drives dies. Fault Tolerance keeps two VMs in sync that …

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Trivia Answers

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Aw, man, I got so busy yesterday I forgot to actually post the answers to the trivia. So here it is. Sorry about that! Not that I really need to post them, since the commenters had all the right answers (collectively). 1. Who invented the first compiler? Grace Hopper. 2. What optical phenomenon is the basis for fiber optics, and also is how most automotive rain sensors work? Total internal reflection. 3. An early form of RAM was magnetic ceramic rings with wires threaded through them. What was the more common name for this memory? Core memory (and hence the term “core dumps”). 4. What computer systems had the operating system called UNICOS? Cray supercomputers. 5. What designation did Intel …

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Sufficiently Advanced

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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” – Gray’s Law (hat tip to Joshua Brauer at Adding Understanding for calling my attention to Gray’s Law)

links for 2008-12-09

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Atlassian Developer Blog – Wiki4k Nowadays you don't see much code written to be small… a web server & wiki in under 4 KB is cool. Though it's also a testament to all the crap built into Java by default. Wikipedia Blocks British Editors Amid Censorship Flap | Threat Level from Wired.com This is retarded. Obviously nobody is for child porn but most people, minus the obtuse puritan freaks at the IWF, are in favor of common sense. Makes me wonder how many years until U.S. citizens are subject to this same Big Brother crap. Unique Transparency Program Uncovers Problems with Voting Software | Threat Level from Wired.com This is pretty cool. I like how they can do this, by …

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Trivia

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It’s Tuesday, so it’s time for some trivia. I’ll post the answers around 2 PM CST. Feel free to beat me to it in the comments. 1. Who invented the first compiler? 2. What optical phenomenon is the basis for fiber optics, and is also how most automotive rain sensors work? 3. An early form of RAM was magnetic ceramic rings with wires threaded through them. What was the more common name for this memory? 4. What computer systems ran the operating system UNICOS? 5. What designation did Intel give 80486 CPUs with defective floating point units?

Check and Upgrade VMware Tools

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Been waiting for this fix, now found in ESX350-200811401-SG: VMotion might trigger VMware Tools to automatically upgrade. This issue occurs on virtual machines that have the setting for Check and upgrade Tools before each power-on enabled, and the affected virtual machines are moved, using VMotion, to a host with a newer version of VMware-esx-tools. Symptoms seen without this patch: Virtual machines unexpectedly restart during a VMotion migration. The guest operating systems might stall (reported on forums). Note: After patching the ESX host, you need to upgrade VMware Tools in the affected guests that reside on the host. In my environments we use the “Check and Upgrade Tools” feature for our Windows hosts, so when they reboot to pick up their …

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