Virtualization

Excuses

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So I’ve been writing a lot on Blame, Understanding Blame, and Preventing Blame over the last two weeks, and my thoughts have inspired some good discussion. Vendors have even gotten into it, with Xangati and I teaming up for a webinar next Thursday, February 24th to talk about blame and ways to deal with it. The focus will be mostly on different aspects of blame, and there will be a brief product demo of the excellent Xangati Management Dashboard at the end. If you liked their free version it’s a chance to see the full thing and be part of a good discussion. Lots of good reasons to attend so go sign up now!. All that aside, I feel that …

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Reality vs. CxOs

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I made a comment last week on Twitter in response to an HP presenter’s topic of IT Sprawl, at Tech Field Day: “Just because the CxO doesn’t understand what all those servers do doesn’t mean it is sprawl.” I’m not really going to elaborate much more on sprawl right now. What I do want to point out is a little synchronicity in Stephen O’Grady’s post, “Not Dead Yet: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Java,” partly because it’s a good read, partly because I love to hate Java, and partly because it has one of the best Venn diagrams I’ve seen yet this year: I’ve always liked what the RedMonk guys have to say, because they’re developer-focused, and I’ve …

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Preventing Blame

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I’ve been writing lately about Blame and my attempt at Understanding Blame. I guess I didn’t mean to turn this into a miniseries but there’s been a lot of interest. Including from Xangati – it turns out they’ve been talking about this same topic, in the context of their products, of course, but they’ve got some really cool stuff going on with their Management Dashboards and free tools. I’m glad others think so, too. Though I don’t know if Sean Clark’s calling them “Skynet” constitutes a compliment, though. 🙂 At least the end of civilization will be well monitored. Anyhow, they’ve asked me to help host a webinar on the topic, a conversation & forum on blame, why it happens, …

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vSoup #4 – Big Fat Pipes (With Me!)

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For the first time in a week I plugged my iPhone in to sync, and it’s pulling down what I think might be my first official appearance on a podcast, on vSoup episode #4. I met Ed, Christian, and Chris at VMworld Europe last year, and I have to confess that when they asked me to sit down with them for this episode I was so excited about it that I put it in my calendar wrong. I appeared online, ready to chat, exactly 24 hours too early. Thankfully Ed was diplomatic about it: “Dude, it’s tomorrow.” You can check out what’s being talked about in each episode (and see a great photo of me) over at vSoup.net, and the podcast …

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VMware vSphere 4.1 Update 1

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I don’t know about you folks, but I’ve been waiting for vSphere 4.1 Update 1 for a while. So has my BCS support guy, Mike, since I keep opening up cases on things that are fixed in it. These last few weeks have seemed quite repetitive like that. By the way, none of the problems I’ve reported are listed in the release notes, which reaffirms my thoughts on all software patches: lots of stuff gets fixed in each one, but very few things make it into the public documentation. VMware tends towards less information for releases, leaning more towards security fix information than functionality fixes. Certainly they’re not as bad as Apple, with their terse “fixes and performance updates” summaries. …

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Understanding Blame

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On Tuesday I posted about how virtualization teams are the one-stop shop for blame. There was some excellent commentary on it, from people who represent all areas of IT. Two things became clear: Everybody blames everybody. App admins blame virtualization admins. Virtualization blames storage and networking. Networking blames virtualization and storage. Storage blames virtualization. Blame isn’t unique to one area of IT, or even to IT among the human race. Nobody likes to think that they’ve messed up, and nobody likes to admit an error, so it’s easier to point the finger at others. Heck, often people don’t even know they’ve made an error, so it’s got to be someone else’s problem. A subset of comments I received, some privately, …

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Blame

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The idea of the “good old days” is usually false, especially in IT. With one exception, there hasn’t been a better time to be in IT or working with technology. The exception is virtualization and blame. Back in the day it used to be the storage guy’s fault, directly, when the storage was slow. Or the network guy’s problem. Or the app admin, with their inefficient apps. Maybe it was the guy who runs the LDAP servers. Maybe it was the OS vendor, or the hardware vendor shipped us a lemon. Now, though, it seems that it’s always the virtualization guy’s fault. For everything. Virtualization has turned IT into a nanny state. Because virtual environments sit between applications and nearly …

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Labels Should Only List Properties of That Particular Object

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Labels should only list properties of the object to which they’re affixed. This may mean some education about the hierarchy of things, but, with very few exceptions, putting a label on one object with data that belongs to another object is a recipe for problems later. “What problems?” you ask. Well, at the least you’re increasing the amount of work you need to do when you change something. Got IP addresses on your cable labels? Add an IP to a server and you need to change the cable’s label, too, otherwise you have incomplete documentation. Same thing with DNS names, too. Or application information. Incomplete and incorrect data on labels leads to assumptions, and assumptions lead to outages, problems, and …

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Fibre Channel over Token Ring Presentation @ WI VMUG

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I made a presentation to the Wisconsin VMware Users’ Group on Tuesday, January 18, 2011 on the Fibre Channel over Token Ring Alliance and its role in the future of the technology. It was short and it turned out pretty well, and I have to thank all the attendees, as well as Rod Gabriel, for laughing at the right spots and having a good sense of humor. We need more humor between vendor presentations, for sure. The notes for the slides are below each. I am not aware that a video was made, but if you know of one leave me a comment. Thanks! Put simply, FCoTR is the best features from two proven technologies, married into the storage protocol …

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A Compendium of Concerns About ESXi

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Over the last few months I’ve been cataloging the complaints I’ve heard about the deprecation of VMware ESX, in favor of ESXi. I’ve been running 100% ESXi since shortly after the vSphere 4.1 release. In the words of Samuel L. Jackson as Jules in Pulp Fiction, “well, allow me to retort!” “I have software installed on the Console OS, and I need to keep doing that.” ESX wasn’t really a Linux box, it was an appliance. Sure, in a lot of ways it looked like a Linux box, but it was missing a lot of useful packages, with no maintainable way to add them. Yes, you could copy the RPMs from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but then you’d have software …

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