Virtualization

I Love the VMware vCenter Server Appliance

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Most things in my life that I think are good & excellent are things I started out being very critical of, or at the least greatly disliking. Some of my best friends were some of the most annoying people ever when I first met them. My wife loves to tell the story about us camping in Denali National Park a few years ago, where I absolutely hated the place at first, just to end up a complete fan. And, speaking of my wife, ask me sometime how we met. It seems fitting that I’ve gone from hating the idea of the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) to having an inappropriate man-tech crush on it. To be fair there are a …

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The Canonical List of Hypervisors That Suck

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A recent, uh, discussion on Twitter reminded me that, just like operating systems, all hypervisors suck in some way. Or, at the very least, people complain about each one, and how they cost money, or that they’re free, or that they require support contracts, they don’t require support, they have no support, their support has no clue, they’re fragmented, they have no ecosystem, all they have is an ecosystem, who needs an ecosystem except idiots who can’t code and if you were worth anything you’d shut it and write your own long-distance replication tool instead of complaining about it, they don’t have a community, they do have a community but it’s too small, they do have a community but it’s …

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Shameless Self Promotion – Active System & OpenStack Edition

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I’m continuing to write over at The Virtualization Practice, and it’s been fun so far. Those of you following what I’ve been doing have probably seen me take a real turn towards converged infrastructures in the last six months, both for TVP and for TechTarget. Not that I don’t think the public cloud is attractive to many, but hardware vendors are doing some real interesting things that are keeping on-site IT fairly attractive. Plus the local telco lobbies and myopic/dirty legislators seem to be keeping inexpensive bandwidth, the Achilles heel of the cloud, to a minimum in most non-urban places. Anyhow, we’ve got: A Look at the Dell Active System 800 wherein I’m trying to figure out if Dell’s converged anything …

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SELinux & Return On Time Invested

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I’m a little behind on my reading, but I wanted to address Major Hayden’s blog posts about disabling Security-Enhanced Linux, or SELinux, which brings mandatory access control to Linux. Mandatory access control is a completely different permission model for UNIX-based hosts, and Mr. Hayden feels it is underutilized: After many discussions with fellow Linux users, I’ve come to realize that most seem to disable SELinux rather than understand why it’s denying access. In an effort to turn the tide, I’ve created a new site as a public service to SELinux cowards everywhere: stopdisablingselinux.com. It’s pretty rare for me to argue against a security technology but in my eyes SELinux isn’t a solution to very many problems. I know how SELinux works, what …

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Shameless Self Promotion – VCE, TVP, and 787 Edition

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My first-ever post as a member of The Virtualization Practice is up. I’m a little slow, I know: Digesting The Latest VCE News: Vblock 100 and Vblock 200 wherein I criticize Vblocks for not having very much RAM, and attract the attention of Kendrick Coleman in the comments (which is cool, Kenny is great). I’m very much looking forward to writing more stuff with Edward & Bernd & Steve & crew. I’ve also been writing for TechTarget’s “Modern Infrastructure” magazine as a regular columnist, which has been pretty darn different & fun. April’s work is: The Benefits of Insourcing Data Center Operations wherein I wonder if moving to the cloud is like the offshoring & outsourcing manufacturing companies in the …

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VMware vCenter Server Appliance & NTP

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If you’re trying to configure NTP on the VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) 5.1 builds 799730, 880472, or 947940 according to the official documentation you might be seeing what I’m seeing: vcenter:~ # yast2 ntp-client add server=0.us.pool.ntp.org Error: Cannot update the dynamic configuration policy. vcenter:~ # yast2 ntp-client enable Error: Cannot update the dynamic configuration policy. This appears to be a SuSE bug. Seems serious but it isn’t, the commands actually do complete correctly. If you want to check the work just use the command: cat /etc/ntp.conf to check for lines starting with “server” near the bottom. /sbin/chkconfig ntp on will enable the service at boot, and /etc/rc.d/ntp start will start it immediately if it isn’t started. /usr/sbin/ntpq -p will …

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Preparing Linux Template VMs

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Dan over at Bashing Linux has a good post on what he does to prep his template VMs for use with Puppet. He’s inspired me to share how I prepare my Linux VMs to become a template. He’s got a few steps I don’t have, mainly to prep for Puppet, and I have a few steps he doesn’t have. One big difference is that I don’t prepare my template images for a particular configuration management system, but instead bootstrap them once they’re deployed. Why? I use my templates for a variety of things, and sometimes the people who end up with the VMs don’t want my management systems on them. It also means I have to handle some of what …

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Uptime Is Not Something To Be Revered

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Slashdot has a link to a tribute video to a Sun that was up continuously for 3737 days. That’s 10.23 years. It’s like a sequoia tree seeing the passage of civilization around it: My thoughts on this: The data center and infrastructure powering this machine was built in such a way as to keep this thing powered continuously for 10 years. Whoever built and ran that infrastructure was doing a good job. It’s a generalization but I bet there are very few cloud providers that can boast anything like that. That version of Sun Solaris is reliable enough to keep operating for years without disruption. Most OSes are, by the way, even Microsoft Windows. That particular hardware is reliable enough …

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What Content Creators and Consumers Should Do Now That Google Reader Is Dead

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So the tech world is freaking out about the announcement that Google Reader will go offline on July 1, 2013. There’s been talk about this for a while now, along with talk that RSS is dead. This feels like the biggest blow to 141+ character social media in history. And why did it happen? I think Dave Winer and Bruce Schneier sum it up: Dave Winer: “Next time, please pay a fair price for the services you depend on.” Bruce Schneier: “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re Facebook’s customer, you’re not – you’re the product,” Schneier said [at the RSA Conference]. “Its customers are the advertisers.” Google Reader’s biggest problem was its API. A good API leads to a …

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Last Chance: 2013 Top VMware & Virtualization Blog Voting

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It’s getting to be the end of the week, and voting closes on the 2013 Top VMware & Virtualization Blogs tonight at midnight. Why don’t you take a moment to go over there and vote? I’d be honored if you’d vote for me, but happy if you just went and showed appreciation for all the hard work the virtualization blogger community does to provide lots of free information to the IT world. You can spend a minute saying thank you, right? 🙂

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