Month: March 2010

Delays, delays, and delays

Well, I’m still working on the vApp post, but it’s been a little while since I’ve put anything online.

The lab is, naturally, in a pretty constant state of flux, and I’ve dramatically minimized and consolidated my hardware. But that’s having a little bit of an adverse affect on performance (what a shocker, right?!). The impact is much greater than I had originally anticipated, but that should be resolved later today when a new machine will appear when the UPS guy magically appears at my doorstep 🙂

Add to that some messy travel back home from Alabama, family time, and home demolition this weekend, I’ve been a little tied up away from the lab.

So keep your eyes on this spot, a post with actual content will be coming soon, I promise!


Miscellaneous Mac Mayhem

So, I’m a MacHead, I’ll admit. So I share things when I find them.

First off, MacHeist just launched their nanoBundle 2 – 7 apps for $19.95! Go check it out!!

Today, MacUpdate Promo is running Blogo (which I use to write this blog, BTW) for a budget-friendly $12.95!

And last, but not least, how often do you use the optical drive in your portable Mac? I can say that I don’t use mine all that much! I was thinking about this the other day, and asked my friend Google, as I thought I had seen something about replacing the Superdrive in a MacBook with a hard disk once upon a time. Lo and behold, MCE Technologies showed up, and for $99, you can get a Superdrive bay replacement to put a hard drive in. And for a little more, you can get a drive preinstalled in it!

I thought this was great because I’ve been thinking about dropping a SSD in this machine for the performance, but I was concerned about the lack of storage space. See, this machine is my primary system, and I really do use a lot of the space. I buy music, TV shows, and movies from iTunes, store all kinds of documents, and generally take up all kinds of space. So SSD is not cost effective in general. But now, I can, within reasonable financial boundaries, get the system performance of SSD, and still maintain the capacity I know and love 🙂

So there are my Mac tidbits for the day.

-jk


Ramblings on ESXi

As VMware continues the push to a Service-Console-less world with ESXi, there are things that we may want to contemplate with our customers.

Something that came to mind earlier today was logging. ESXi, by default, has a built-in syslog, but it writes logs to a local memory-based file system. That means that when the host goes offline, the logs just go away. There is a method by which one can redirect those messages to a specific Data Store, but let’s face it, centralized logging is all the rage! If nothing else, it provides a remote facility that won’t be modified if someone gets into the ESXi host and cleans entries up after they’re done. To me, that’s some pretty important security. So how does one redirect syslog on an ESXi host, you ask?

It’s as simple as changing a single Advanced Setting via the vSphere client. Take a look at this brief blog entry atVirtualizationAdmin.comby David Davis:http://blogs.virtualizationadmin.com/davis/2010/02/22/how-to-redirect-esxi-system-logs-to-a-central-syslog-server/

Some other things we want to think about in the transition will ultimately all be COS-related, that being the biggest difference between ESX and ESXi.

Does the customer have agents running in the COS for anything?

  • Backup agents – Perhaps it’s time to revisit backup strategies and methodologies.
  • Hardware management agents – Insight Manager, OpenManage, etc – Many of these functions are being replaced through vendor-specific CIM providers. VMware has available 4 total ISOs for ESXi Installable – one for each of the major vendors (HP, IBM, Dell), and the basic ESXi. The vendor-specific distributions have the appropriate CIM providers cleanly integrated. We should work with our customers in their labs to determine if the CIM providers have the functionality necessary for their specific environments.

Scripts in the COS – customers have developed many scripts to help with management activities in the ESX environment. It is time to begin investigating the transitioning of these scripts to a remote environment. There are a couple of directions that a customer could take in porting their scripts

  • vCLI – the vCLI is a set of tools available from VMware to provide much of the COS toolkit on a remote host. The vCLI is available in 3 forms: a Windows installable package, a Linux installable package, and the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). The two installable packages can be installed on and run from a Windows or Linux environment. The vMA is a Linux-based Virtual Appliance that can be integrated into a customer’s environment and is designed to provide a prepackaged remote scripting environment for a virtual infrastructure. The vMA provides a number of benefits over the installable vCLI tools such as FastPath Authentication to streamline session authentication functionality without compromising security and simplified deployment as an OVF appliance.
  • PowerShell/PowerCLI – PowerShell is fast becoming a favorite management and scripting toolkit of ESX administrators, partially due to the overwhelming number of Windows administrators that have inherited the responsibility of managing the virtual infrastructure. The PowerCLI toolkit from VMware is a robust set of cmdlets and objects to be used from PowerShell scripts to work with a virtual infrastructure
  • Other SDKs from VMware – VMware provides SDKs for API access from Perl and Java as well, if those languages are more to a customer’s liking

There are still some pieces of functionality that are missing from this stack, admittedly. I’ve spoken with customers about the lack of tools available to manage things like RAID controllers from ESXi. Many of these things are up to the hardware vendors to implement, but VMware can be a conduit for functionality requests as well. We can work with customers to file feature requests through VMware (http://www.vmware.com/support/policies/feature.html). When filing such a request, please be as specific as possible regarding what functionality is being requested. Using the above-mentioned RAID controller management as an example, a good feature request may document that a user would like to be able to add disks to a RAID array, create a new RAID array, destroy a RAID array, and rebuild a RAID array after disk replacement. The more specific the requests are, the move VMware can help implement the functionality.

Expanded functionality seems to be the focus of the next release of vSphere (from the small amounts of info flowing out of VMware’s recent Partner Exchange), and the product continues to improve. Just because a customer doesn’t want to migrate now is no reason to put off testing, evaluation, and porting of the customer-developed management tools.

Just remember, I’m a consultant and a trainer, and these are the kinds of things I think about 🙂

-jk