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. Continue reading “vSphere Upgrade: Moving to a BladeSystem”

Originally posted on March 26th. Updated for the Holiday Season!

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:

Any laptop must be able to run the following at the same time within a hosted virtualization solution such as VMware Workstation or Fusion.

• VMware vSphere ESX 4
• VMware vSphere ESX 4i
• VMware vCenter Server on Windows 2008
• Virtual Storage Appliance (I use OpenFiler at the moment)
• Firewall
• Development Environment for my security script Continue reading “Moving from Windows 7 to Mac OS Snow Leopard (Updated)”

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.

The Switch

First I installed W2K8 64 Bit and on that installed the AD, DNS, and DHCP roles. So far so good. After promoting the server to AD, I had a simple but effective AD server. The key was to allow DHCP to update DNS, and combine everything on one node. So far I had two nodes, one for Samba/AD and one for DHCP/Internal DNS.  Since I need DNS to properly reflect AD, I needed to use Microsoft’s DNS.

Step 1:

Install and Configure AD.

Step 2:

Configure DNS. This step required me to copy over my existing DNS to the new server. Since one was Linux and the other was Windows, I just re-entered the small amount of data I had.

Step 3:

Configure DHCP. Once more I just re-entered the data.

Step 4:

Shutdown existing DHCP/DNS VM.

Everything was going smoothly.  The last step was to move VMs and hosts from my Samba/AD configuration to the Microsoft AD configuration. This did require me to reboot all my window boxes, once to remove from the old domain and then once to add to the new domain. However, most of my windows boxes but two are purely for testing. So this was just time consuming. The two I had to be careful about just required me to verify no users were on the systems. Then add to the Domain.

Up and Running

Compared to how long it took me to get Linux PDC working, as best I could, at the time to getting Microsoft AD up and running, Microsoft’s AD was very fast, easy, and simple. Continued management is also simple.

The tool I needed to test was the HyTrust Appliance. Look for a whitepaper on this on The Virtualization Practice’s analyst site. However, I have now used it for all tools I am testing with no major issues. Including joining ESX/ESXi to the AD domain via the contained Likewise integration.

Microsoft AD just works and for me to say something like this about Microsoft is a good thing. I like things that just work.

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 developers.  We wanted to wow our audience, which in the end I believe we did. We displayed and used the vGhetto Client from VMware vMA, my Mac OS X laptop, and an iPad.  However, to get to the final set of demos required quite a bit of setup. I want to discuss this setup further so that others can duplicate what we did.

Hardware

The lab for the demos ran on three hardware devices. The first was an i7 Mac Book Pro with 8GBs of memory and a 512GB SSD. SSD was a great benefit for the demos as we will be running quite a few VMs. The second bit of hardware was of course an Apple iPad. The third however, no one really saw within the environment and was a Dlink DWL-G730AP. This last device is a USB or wall powered Access Point which provided DHCP within the demo environment as well as the ability to connect the iPad to the environment without needed to worry about whether or not the VMworld wireless was running.

Virtual Machines

The environment consisted of the following VMs:

• OpenFiler 2.3
• VMware vSphere ESX 4.1
• VMware vSphere ESXi 4.1
• VMware vCenter 4.1
• VMware vMA 4.1

These VMs ran within VMware Fusion 3.1.1 with 2 networks in use. The bridged network was connected to the AirPort device and then to the Dlink DWL-G730AP device. This network contained all the management appliances for each ESX host, OpenFiler, vCenter, and vMA. The second network was host-only and was for the vMotion and Fault Tolerance networks to be created by the demo scripts.

Even a demo should contain necessary security separation. You really need to demo using what you want to happen in reality. To that end, we never logged in as an Administrator or root user, but as the vMA410 and vi-admin users who had the proper permissions within the environment.

Software

The software we used was Perl based, which required us to ensure the proper bits were installed within MacOS X as well as VMware vMA. To that end, two new vGhetto Installer scripts were created: vghetto.sh and vghetto-osx.sh. These are available via SVN using:

svn co https://vghetto.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/vghetto vghetto

The scripts are located within the installers directory. Each of these scripts setup the environment for running the vGhetto Client as well as the scripts. If you wish to use VNC from vMA then uncomment the last line of the vghetto script. This last line installs select components of X11R6 and Gnome within vMA as the Perl/TK vGhetto Client will not work with just the TWM window manager. I am sure there is a reduced set of packages that will work but we had limited time to organize this configuration.

What we found was that both MacOSX and vMA were missing quite a few pre-requisites to even  use the vGhetto scripts. For MacOSX this also required the download of the vSphere SDK for Perl from the VMware download site. Then running the vghetto-osx.sh script from within the directory where you stored the installation image for the vSphere SDK. Not only would the script install dependencies but will also install the vSphere SDK for Perl when required to do so.

These two scripts do all the heavy lifting so that you can make easy use of the vGhetto scripts and Client. Actually, there is also a demoprep.sh script you can use to create the same demos used within PPC-O7.

Other than one slight problem with OpenFiler, all the demos ran without a hitch. We were even able to configure FT on a VM even when shared storage was not available.

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. Continue reading “New Mail Server: Zimbra? MailScanner?”

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. Continue reading “Fedora 12 Upgrade Lead to 640×480 Display Resolution — Solution”