Virtualization

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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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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UNIX Utility of the Day: watch

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Not a lot of people know about the ‘watch’ command, part of the standard complement of GNU tools available on most Linux distributions, as well as many Linux-like OSes such as VMware ESX and the VMware vMA. Simply put, it runs a command at a specific interval for you. So if you want to continually see the number of httpd processes running on a host you could use: watch ‘ps -ef | grep httpd | wc -l” Or maybe you want to watch the temperature on a remote physical host using IPMI. The -n flag changes the number of seconds between the commands: watch -n 60 -d ‘ipmitool -I lan -U username -P password -H host-bmc.address sdr type “Temperature”‘ The …

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VMware Fault Tolerance, Determinism, and SMP

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We’re all at least roughly familiar with Fault Tolerance, a feature VMware added to vSphere 4 to establish a mirrored VM on a secondary host. It’s kind of like RAID 1 for VMs. To do this, Fault Tolerance records the inputs to a primary VM, and then replays it on the secondary VM to achieve the same results. There are two important and somewhat subtle points here that help us understand why Fault Tolerance is limited to one CPU. First, the process records the inputs, not the state of the PC after the inputs happen. If you moved the mouse on the primary it moves the mouse on the secondary VM in exactly the same fashion. If you ping the …

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Why Internet Explorer 9's Power Consumption Matters

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Microsoft blogged about how they worked to reduce the power consumption for Internet Explorer 9: Power consumption is an important consideration in building a modern browser and one objective of Internet Explorer 9 is to responsibly lead the industry in power requirements. The more efficiently a browser uses power the longer the battery will last in a mobile device, the lower the electricity costs, and the smaller the environment impact. While power might seem like a minor concern, with nearly two billion people now using the Internet the worldwide implications of browser power consumption are significant. As a virtualization guy I watch power consumption & battery life work closely. Almost universally, their work to extend battery life also means lower utilization …

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vSoup 5, with Cheeseheads and Badgers

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“vSoup 5 – the USB Deviation” is up now, starring Chris, Christian, and Ed, with Gabrie van Zanten as the guest. I had a lot of fun at VMworld Europe 2010 with all four of these guys, and I’m looking forward to listening to the episode. As a thank you to the guys for having me on vSoup #4 I’m sponsoring the prize this week: a Wisconsin camouflage prize package, complete with an official NFL cheesehead, to celebrate the Green Bay Packers winning the Super Bowl, and a University of Wisconsin – Madison t-shirt in your choice of size and color: red, white, or gray. Both are perfect for parties, especially if you aren’t a sports fan, as nobody will …

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The Easiest Way To Update A Dell Server's Firmware

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With the advent of VMware ESXi there are fewer and fewer good ways to update your Dell PowerEdge system’s firmware, seeing as you can’t just run the System Update Utility from the console OS anymore. Making things more difficult, I think I’ve seen every failure mode Dell’s iDRAC has to offer, from the inability to log into a local repository via FTP when the password has special characters to persistent errors like “Return code mismatch on iDracWrapper.efi” that completely block the updating process. My journey might have been full of pain and thoughts of other vendors but it’s yielded what I think is the single best way of updating Dell firmware: using the Dell Repository Manager to create a bootable, …

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Xangati Webinar Tomorrow – Still Have Some Room

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If you’ve been thinking about blame in your organization, looking at Xangati’s tools (or wanting some good reasons why you should look at them), and want to be part of a good conversation, you should join Brian, Nathanael, and myself for tomorrow’s “Stop the Virtualization Blame Game” webinar. We’re going to talk a lot about how blame happens, why all the different silos within IT feel left out, and what to do about it. The turnout is looking great, but there’s still some room for more. Sign up now! It starts at 10 AM Pacific / 11 AM Mountain / 12 PM Central / 1 PM Eastern.

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