I recently upgraded my entire infrastructure. The cost of going to 3 new servers at the latest hardware compared to going to a blade center was finally equal. In general, 3 2U DL380s are less expensive than upgrading to a c3000 blade enclosure and over the last several years I have been fighting with this decision. Finally, it was made for me. The price was attractive enough. 3 Blades were purchased with space for 5 more available within the enclosure. This upgrade-ability is what pushed me over to blades from the lower cost DL models.
Edward L. Haletky, aka Texiwill, is an author, analyst, developer, technologist, and business owner. Edward owns AstroArch Consulting, Inc., providing virtualization, security, network consulting and development and TVP Strategy where he is also an Analyst. Edward is the Moderator and Host of the Virtualization Security Podcast as well as a guru and moderator for the VMware Communities Forums, providing answers to security and configuration questions. Edward is working on new books on Virtualization.
Moving from Windows 7 to Mac OS Snow Leopard (Updated)
I was in the market for a new Laptop, given that mine is at least 3 years old and starting to show its age with non-working USB ports, one blown power supply, and failing batteries. My requirements are slightly above the average:
vSphere Upgrade: Moving to Active Directory
I do quite a bit of application testing within the virtual environment and I have found that an increasing number of virtual appliances require Active Directory in order to access these appliances complete functional set of the product. I feel this is short sighted as there are many other directory servers which can be used such as LDAP, NIS, eDirectory, etc.
I was using up until recently a Linux PDC which made use of Samba v3.4, OpenLDAP, and Kerberos. Unfortunately, this is having increasing problems with modern versions of windows and virtual appliances. Time to switch to AD.
VMworld 2010: PPC-07 Lab Setup
I recently co-presented with William Lam a session on the vGhetto Scripts and Client at VMworld 2010. The PPC-07 talk was within the Technology Exchange for Developers sub-conference of VMworld 2010. For an extra few hundred dollars you were able to sit in on sessions by Carter Shankln, William Lam, and other VMware vSphere SDK …
New Mail Server: Zimbra? MailScanner?
I get lots of spam. There seems to be nothing I can do about it so I believe I need to find a better scanner/mail platform. So I went looking for something different. Currently I use Amavisd/Postfix/ClamAV/SpamAssassin, which when properly configured SHOULD find nearly all Spam. But alas, I believe after the most recent upgrade the configuration was shot. Even the bayesian learning system did not really learn anything new, and I kept getting the same old mail. This was/is annoying at best.
So I looked into Zimbra. Zimbra ships as a Virtual Appliance which was perfect for my needs and a 10 user limited license is fairly inexpensive as in free.
Fedora 12 Upgrade Lead to 640×480 Display Resolution — Solution
I recently upgraded my Fedora 12 Linux Machine on which I do development to the latest Kernel. After a reboot, I noticed the display went from my normal 1920×1080 down to 640×480. In addition, the monitor itself complained that this was not an optimum setting. I knew something was wrong, so I did the following:
* Went to the NVIDIA site and downloaded the latest drivers, mine were just a little old. After installing them, the problem was not solved.
* Logged in with the 640×480 resolution and ran gnome-display-properties and noticed it could not determine my monitor type.
* I searched the web some at this point and found two posts.