Apple, Xserves, and OS X Server

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Apple will not be developing a future version of Xserve. Xserve will be available for order through January 31, 2011. Apple will honor and support all Xserve system warranties and extended support programs. Apple intends to offer the current shipping 160GB, 1TB, and 2TB Apple Drive Modules for Xserve through the end of 2011 or while supplies last. Apple will continue to support Xserve customers with service parts for warranty and out-of-warranty service. As of January 31, 2011 Apple will no longer have enterprise-class hardware for sale. This has sparked a massive discussion, because there are a number of pretty vocal people using Xserves to run Mac OS X Server, supporting Mac OS X clients, or as clusters running Xgrid. …

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links for 2010-11-02

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"God Hates Figs" | IMG_8882 | Flickr – Photo Sharing! Perhaps my favorite sign from the Rally to Restore Sanity. Mark 11:12-14 says "The next day as they were leaving Bethany, Jesus was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs. Then he said to the tree, 'May no one ever eat fruit from you again.' And his disciples heard him say it." I guess Jesus was a real jerk when he was hungry.

Remember Permissions on Virtual Switches

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Is one of your VMware vCenter users trying to alter the network settings on a virtual machine? Is it telling them that the network adapter has “Invalid backing” and the network connection information says “this host does not have any virtual machine networks, or you don’t have the permission to access them?” But you checked the permissions on the VM, and they do have permissions… And their role does have the privileges to assign networks to virtual machines… … Before you bang your head against it too much, check Inventory->Networking. You may have forgotten to assign them permissions to the switch itself! (this post brought to you by the last 30 minutes of my life) 🙂

links for 2010-10-29

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Dinosaur Skull Found in Church : Discovery News So the church is built with marble from a known fossil-bearing site, and they've got chunks with fossils in them. I think that qualifies as ironic.

links for 2010-10-28

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BLDGBLOG: Trap Rooms "While finalizing my slides for tonight's lecture at SCI-Arc, I was reading again about one of my favorite topics: trap streets, or deliberate cartographic errors introduced into a map so as to catch acts of copyright infringement by rival firms." The 2011 Ford Edge Sport Brings Vehicles Into The Computer Age — Lag And All "The lag is unbearable at first, but overtime you kind of get used to it — I can only assume in the same sort of way people live with herpes." Great review of the Microsoft Auto 4.0 software platform. I'll wait until a non-US car manufacturer implements it and gets it right. November 11, 2010 Meeting – Green Bay « Wisconsin VMware …

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links for 2010-10-27

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Jilted EMC won’t give its cherry to two-timing Dell • The Register Seriously, Dell should buy Xsigo and do its own Vblocks. Put an Infiniband interface on an EqualLogic array, that’d be a definite advantage over a Vblock, and probably cheaper since its Dell and not the Ferengi^H^H^HEMC Schmidt: I ‘misspoke’ over Street View • The Register Eric Schmidt is more and more like BP’s Tony Hayward every day. At least he is honest that Google couldn’t care less about your privacy, and that they are going to do whatever they please, because they can. Rolling, Rolling, Rolling Shutter « Flickr Blog The iPhone has a rolling shutter on it’s camera, and that can generate some truly odd effects. Why …

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My ESX to ESXi Transition

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There’s been a lot of discussion and hand-wringing regarding the deprecation of VMware ESX in favor of ESXi. People are worried, the sky is falling, OMG OMG. In contrast, I just finished upgrading my three production clusters to vSphere 4.1 (from vSphere 4.0), and I converted everything to ESXi 4.1 in the process. It’s actually really easy and now I’m future-proofed. Here’s how I did it. 1. Upgrade vCenter Server to 4.1. Frankly, the 64-bit vCenter jump is the most troublesome part of all of this for most people. The VMware vCenter Server Data Migration Tool may help if you’re using the SQL Express database, but I just did a database restore from a full backup file I made. I …

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links for 2010-10-26

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access.redhat.com | Red Hat Knowledgebase: Fully-virtualized Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 guests running on AMD Opteron 6000-series based hosts panic on boot "Fully-virtualized guests running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 on AMD Opteron 6000-series (code named "Magny-Cours") based hosts will panic on boot with the following crash signature…" Continuing proof that no good can come from running AMD CPUs. If you run AMD gear and want to keep your VMs up to date, now you're stuck.

links for 2010-10-22

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AWS Free Usage Tier "To help new AWS customers get started in the cloud, AWS is introducing a new free usage tier. Beginning November 1, new AWS customers will be able to run a free Amazon EC2 Micro Instance for a year, while also leveraging a new free usage tier for Amazon S3, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Elastic Load Balancing, and AWS data transfer. AWS’s free usage tier can be used for anything you want to run in the cloud: launch new applications, test existing applications in the cloud, or simply gain hands-on experience with AWS." This is really cool — the best way to get people to use your service is to get them using it for free, …

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How to Install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for VMware vCenter 4

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Update: This document is great for SQL Server 2008 & vCenter 4, but if you want SQL Server 2008 R2 & vCenter 5 I’ve got a new post with those details. I’ve had cause recently to do several new VMware vCenter installations, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to update our documentation on setting up Microsoft SQL Server 2008. Since new VMware vSphere users often find themselves unwittingly becoming DBAs I thought it might help others if I posted it. While I don’t mean this page to become a general support site for vCenter SQL Server installations please leave a comment if something needs to be clarified or corrected, or if I’m doing something dumb here. I consider my …

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