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:

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.

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 …

Continue reading “VMworld 2010: PPC-07 Lab Setup”

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.

Well I had some serious issues going to vSphere 4.1 from v4.0U2. The steps for the upgrade seemed straightforward:

1. Upgrade vCenter Server
2. Upgrade ESX

Well, it was not all that easy.

In my last post “IBM DS3400 Redundant Controllers and Bad Batteries, eNet Cable Fail” I realized that I badly configured my SAN from the start. So I bit the bullet and started a process to change the number of spindles per LUN to 11 of 12 disks, with the 12 disk being a hot spare. Performance on SAN LUN is directly proportional to the number of spindles in use by the RAID set and my old setup had 3 Disk LUNs instead of using virtual LUNs ontop of one larger physical LUN.