Virtualization

Bad Day For People Who Actually Patch

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Let’s just say that if you’re running VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3.5 Update 2 you probably can’t power your VMs on anymore. DOH. Unfortunately, that’s me. I updated everything on Sunday after testing for two weeks, and I can’t even imagine how I’d test for this. The whole idea of patching sucks. There are always bugs, and you always trade one set of bugs for another when you upgrade. Of course, you use testing to try to figure out if there are more bugs or less, but things like this always show up. I’ve been meaning to write a longer post about patching, especially in the wake of this DNS debacle, but Michael Janke’s post “Patch Now – What Does It …

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Virtualization: Get On The Bandwagon

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Scott Lowe, Martin MacLeod, and I were interviewed by odinJobs about virtualization technology, namely how you get started with the technology. I always get self-conscious when I see an interview posted, but it looks like all three of us were on the same page. It’s really nice to see their takes on where we’re at and where we’re going. Thanks guys, and thanks to Carl Williams for setting it up!

Not Virtualizing Everything, or Know Your Dependencies

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I’ve commented before on how I generally object to plans to virtualize absolutely everything in a data center. It looks like Eric Siebert agrees with me in his article on recovering servers after power failures: Virtual servers can be even more problematic. If you have all your DNS servers virtualized which cannot be started because of network or shared storage issues, you can run into problems starting other servers and services that rely on DNS. Consider having at least one physical DNS server or having one or two DNS servers running on local storage instead of shared storage. Running services from VMs might be a great idea, especially if you’re using techniques like anycast DNS. It’s also pretty useful for …

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VMworld 2008

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As of 10:50 AM CDT I have a flight to Las Vegas for VMworld 2008. This means I’m completely registered and ready to go, waiting only for the course reservations to open up and the date to arrive. This should be fun, especially since I’ve never been to Vegas before. I’m not really a gambler, so I’ll have to find other ways of amusing myself. Anybody have any suggestions for things I shouldn’t miss? And what else are people up to during the week?

VMware CEO Shake Up Thoughts

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I’ve been reading some of the coverage of the Diane Greene/Paul Maritz swap today, as well as the new revenue projections. I first caught Om Malik’s take, read Bernd Harzog’s comments on Paul Maritz, and then went from Adam Lashinsky’s blog post to his October 2007 Fortune article on Greene. Something there caught my eye (in bold): Tucci chairs VMware’s board, which is stacked with EMC people; of the six members, three are current or former EMC executives and two are EMC directors. (Greene is the sixth.) Greene appears bemused she has stayed on; as her husband points out, “If you look at her résumé, this is far longer than any other job she has ever held.” Her contract, signed …

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!(I Heart Dongles)

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A post over at vinf.net about unsupported USB devices appearing after using the VMware Converter reminds me that I’ve been meaning to complain about something[0]: Dongles mean that I can’t virtualize your software. If you’re a software developer and you think that you can protect your software from piracy by using a hardware-based protection scheme please realize this: If I can’t virtualize your software it’s likely that I’m not going to buy it. Just ask yourself: will what I’m doing work in a virtual machine? If the answer isn’t a definite ‘yes’ then you’re doing it wrong. Virtualization is here to stay, so invest in your future and figure it out, people. ———————— [0] Like me complaining about something is …

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PeopleSoft & VMware

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Even though PeopleSoft is part of Oracle (and possibly subject to their anti-VMware support policies) our apps guys checked to see if VMware was an option. As it turns out, PeopleSoft solution 200955472 entitled “Does Peoplesoft support VMWare” has the answer: yes. PeopleSoft certifies our products (PeopleTools and EnterpriseOne Tools) on certain operating systems (including Windows 2000*, Windows Server 2003, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, etc.), not on specific hardware configurations. Therefore, as long as a customer configures VMWare virtual machines with supported operating systems, we will treat them as though they are independent (non-virtual) systems and provide full support. Our support team will attempt to resolve issues using our own environments with the same operating system. We will treat VMWare …

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ConfigCheck vs. Appliances

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So I grabbed a copy of Tripwire’s ConfigCheck for ESX and ran it on one of my test ESX Servers. Sure enough, it found a bunch of defaults that haven’t been changed, and has made recommendations. Now my question is: is ESX 3.5 an appliance or a host OS? Do I actually want to make the recommended changes? Will it mess up something in the future when a patch from VMware assumes something about my environment that isn’t true because I’ve changed it? Exactly how much do I want to go messing around with things like NTP settings when the recommended way to configure NTP is through VirtualCenter? I look forward to a time when ESX 3i is on par …

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Leopard on ESX Would Be Nice

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A few days ago Team Fusion posted about Apple Mac OS X 10.5 being their 61st supported OS. That’s pretty darn cool. Thing is, though, it doesn’t make a darn bit of difference to me. Instead, I’d really like to run Mac OS X in ESX Server. I don’t even care if I have to buy Apple Xserve hardware to do it. I’d love to see Mac OS X guests in VirtualCenter, able to use VMotion, snapshots, HA, cloning, and all the enterprise features we already have for Windows, Linux, Netware, and Solaris x86. It would also be very cool to see Mac OS X virtual desktops. Imagine how easy it would be to switch people over then. As it …

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Virtualization Versions

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Ryan over at vmhero.com is pondering what the numbers behind Virtualization 1.0, 2.0, etc. mean. I wish him luck with that. Personally, I’ve never heard any actual, real-life sysadmins refer to anything by those terms. I don’t have a Virtualization 2.0 environment, I have an environment that lets me get things done. And sometimes I upgrade it. Then I go home for the day. I do have one question, though. What version of virtualization will get us SkyNet? Actually, SkyNet uses a lot of physical hardware, so maybe it isn’t virtualized very well. I hope those creepy red eyes are low-voltage. In a weird twist of fate, I went to lunch before posting this and came back to Don MacAskill …

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