Virtualization Archives

Tips for VMworld US 2012 & San Francisco

August 21, 2012 by Bob Plankers

As VMworld US 2012 approaches rapidly I’ve been thinking about the things I like to do in San Francisco, and the useful things I have learned over the years. If you have thoughts here about things that I’ve missed or are wrong about please add them in the comments! Transportation: From SFO I usually take the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or BART, to the Powell St. station. It’s cheap at $8.25 a person and relatively fast, though you’ll have to hoof it from the station to your hotel then. If you have more than one person a cab might be okay, but expect the ride to cost $50-$60. Shuttles are also a cost-effective way to travel, $17ish from SFO to …

3 Reasons These VMware vTax & Licensing Rumors Are Great

August 21, 2012 by Bob Plankers

“What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.” – Mark Twain I have to say that, if they’re true, I’ve got three reasons to be happy about the VMware licensing rumors that CRN is leaking. First, you may remember from the vSphere 5 launch that I was one of the folks pointing out that due to the fact that you can pool your vRAM licensing it was likely to have little effect in the short term, and shouldn’t stop anybody from upgrading to vSphere 5. The pain would come in the medium-term for folks that practice the “fewer, bigger machines” approach to virtualization (a practice I promote). Thirteen months is definitely “medium-term” …

VMware Engineering, Are You Fixing Anything?

August 19, 2012 by Bob Plankers

I was just reading Josh Andrews’ account of a serious bug still present in the latest releases of VMware vCenter 5.0 (5.0b): This bug has been known for a while and while U1 contained some mentions about fixing it – we now have U1b and the problem still exists…. Make sure you have a cluster with HA and/or DRS turned on…. Enable VM Storage Profiles… Now return to your cluster summary to verify HA and DRS have been turned off and all settings have been lost. This is epic bad stuff here, because if there’s one good way to mess a lot of things up it’s to disable DRS. Especially if you have a vCloud Director setup, since if you shut DRS off …

Chinwag With Mike Laverick

June 26, 2012 by Bob Plankers

If you work with VMware software you probably are familiar with Mike Laverick and his RTFM Education site. He’s an accomplished, brilliant, and funny guy, he’s written what is essentially the missing manual for Site Recovery Manager, and he also does a ton of “chinwags” where he talks to various people in the tech industry on camera. They’re great, and I have watched many of them. Shortly before I took some time off here Mike and I recorded a session where we talked about why I think virtual appliances are built poorly, the realities of single panes of glass, Rackspace & cloud maintenance “strategies,” and the convoluted system I built to back up and secure my personal data. He posted …

How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Automate

June 25, 2012 by Bob Plankers

My wife and I had a daughter, almost two months ago now. Going into it, I completely underestimated how single-tasking kids are. My grand plans of blogging (at all) and writing and doing all sorts of big cool things while I had time off were suborned by a lot of seemingly simple tasks. Feed her. Feed myself. Change her diaper. Rock her. Clean up the house. Try to get some sleep. As a result, the only big thing I’ve been able to do is read a couple of novels, a few pages at a time. Well, that and keep a kid and a wife healthy and relatively happy. I see a lot of parallels between my last two months and …

Thoughts on the VMware Code Leak

April 25, 2012 by Bob Plankers

VMware has confirmed that there was a theft of the ESX source code around April 8th, 2012. I have some non-linear thoughts on this whole thing. First, the code is from 2003 & 2004, and for ESX. ESX was the big, bloated hypervisor that shipped with whole Linux installs, and the purported 300 MB of source code sounds like they might have code for a lot of the Linux utilities that shipped with. So what? The newer version is ESXi which forgoes the Linux install in favor of being very small. That said, I’m going to assume they have the source code for the base hypervisor itself. I’m also going to assume that some of the hypervisor code from then …

Upcoming Virtualization & Sysadmin Events in Wisconsin

April 23, 2012 by Bob Plankers

There are a number of virtualization & sysadmin events coming up in Wisconsin in the next two months. Here are the ones that I know of, if you know of more please comment and I’ll add them. Madison’s first ever #vBeers is Thursday, April 26, 2012 at the UW-Madison Memorial Union. I’m putting it together, if you’re in the area please stop by. It’s supposed to be in the upper 50° F range outside so we’ll probably be inside in the Rathskeller. No signup needed. Please come and keep me company. Stephen Foskett is setting up Milwaukee’s first #vBeers for May 1, 2012, at the Miller Time Pub, 7 to 10 PM. You can sign up via Eventbrite. So far …

How To Increase Your "% Virtualized" Rates

April 5, 2012 by Bob Plankers

The #VirtualizeDell tweet chat today got me thinking about what stops most virtualization implementations around 50-75%. These are just some thoughts on ways to kick things loose. @LethaW commented “[that some of them are] sneaky and underhanded, and I love it.” I took that as encouragement. Needless to say, your mileage may vary. Problem: Physical hardware is required or requested by vendors. Solutions: Actually check to make sure that a vendor does require physical hardware. For example, Oracle doesn’t require it for many things, but there’s this misconception out there that they do, and I hear it from DBAs a lot. Consultants will also tell you a wide variety of things, too. Check the facts. Get it in writing. Don’t …

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