New address!

Hey! Quick post here to let you know you can now access the blog from http://www.virtualpotholes.com!

Stay tuned. I should have some super fun stuff on the way!

The Winds Of Change

Heads up: This is a personal blog post. I’ll return with the nerdy stuff soon.

Ever noticed that when you make one life change, it seems an avalanche of change hits right at the same time? I can’t make small changes in my life. They usually happen as a wholesale change in what I do with my life. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I moved to a city 100 miles away and got my first apartment and changed jobs. When I moved in with my fiancee, we moved to a “new to both of us” area of Pittsburgh, changed jobs, and went on our first vacation together.

So of course, I decided to make a life change recently. I’m incredibly happy to announce that I’m now a member of the Varrow team and thus will be moving to North Carolina. After we get settled, we come back to Pittsburgh and get married. All in the span of two months. In addition to changing jobs, I’m changing what I do as a job. In my previous positions, I’ve been the system administrator for internal IT with the companies at which I’ve been employed. I’m transitioning to the external partner side for the first time. This brings a number of challenges for me. It’s a mostly new way of handling business for me. I’ve had previous experience handling this from an internal standpoint when I worked for a large company that needed strategy help across multiple sites. The travel is regional, but still a great deal more than the 25 minute drive to work I previously had.

Looking forward to the challenges and meeting every single one with a smile.

VMware + SMB = How?

Today at VMware Partner Exchange (#VMwarePEX for those on the Twitters), VMware CEO Paul Maritz spoke on the topic of virtualizing small businesses. That got me thinking. If I were a SMB, defined by VMware as under 1000 seats, what are my resources to virtualize? Do I have storage on the ground that I can leverage? Am I buying overpowered servers that I can take advantage of? Do I have a staff that can handle the maintenance of such a system?

My feelings is that SMBs that could take advantage of virtual environments would require shared storage and some beefier hardware to host it all. Beefier hardware is simply a matter of buying bigger servers, nothing complicated there. It’s the shared storage that becomes the issue. Storage isn’t exactly cheap. Disk prices are now far higher than they were a year ago, so the disks you buy have to count. Having hot spares, RAID 6, and all of the complexity and flexibility that a full size array provides dramatically cuts into your disk count and usable storage. Many SMBs don’t have the cash to buy double the number of disks that they would require to hit the amount of storage they need to operate.

How do we fix this? How do we work with the limited resources to handle storage, but still make it highly available and fast? VMware’s vSphere Storage Appliance and HP’s Virtual SAN Appliance are a good start. Advances in technology in this space will likely determine who wins the SMB market. Interestingly, I haven’t heard of anything coming from EMC, Hitachi, or Netapp. EMC does have a VSA, but it is primarily for testing purposes and doesn’t have the ability to combine commodity storage across multiple physical hosts. I wonder if this push by VMware will spur on EMC/Hitachi/Netapp to make a product focused on this market?

This will be an interesting market to watch as the enterprise becomes saturated and this technology makes its way down to the SMB market.

Did I miss your favorite storage product for use with commodity disk? Leave it in the comments!

UBER Network Fuser: Tips and Tricks

If you follow me on Twitter (@ajkuftic), you probably have read my laments of missing functionality between VMware Workstation and Fusion. Specifically, the lack of a tabbed interface (mostly an organizational complaint) and Virtual Network Editor. I considered going with one network and dealing with it, but then one of the greats, Nick Weaver, came through with a wonderful tool to restore the missing Virtual Network Editor called UBER Network Fuser. If you haven’t been to his blog, you’re missing out on one of the biggest treasure troves of amazing tools to make your home lab awesome. Once you get all of the fun toys, go on Twitter and thank Nick Weaver (aka @lynxbat). One of the most helpful and smartest guys in the business.

Back to the tool. As Nick explains in his blog post, the tool is designed to give Fusion users the ability to create multiple virtual networks beyond the basic NAT, Bridge, and Host Only options. While those are good for most users just wanting to virtualize a Windows/Linux box or two, it’s very limited when trying to build an “Inception” style home lab. What Nick’s tool does is give a nice GUI for configuration options that required knowledge of how VMware Fusion handles its networking setup.

It works REALLY REALLY well. The options are straight forward and everything is well thought through. Nick’s walkthrough is really good and you should absolutely watch it before using the tool. I’ve been using it since the day it came out and it’s made my lab a really well organized place to be. I figured I’d document some tips and tricks here to help others who want to use the tool.

Some Tips:

• Each created network is a full Class C subnet (255 hosts). If you decide to use Nick’s built in option for DHCP, the range starts at 128 and goes to the end of the subnet. If you want to set static IPs on the subnet, set them before 128 and you’ll be fine.
• DO NOT try to edit the config files to add your own DHCP options (like a local DNS box). If you want more granular control past handing out addresses, build a DHCP VM. You’ll need it if you want to mess with PXE or vSphere Auto Deploy anyways.
• The router address for the subnets is 192.168.xxx.2, not .1. .1 responds to ping, but 2 is the gateway.
• The creation tool uses a random number generator to determine the third octet of the subnet. If you’re clumsy and click “Reset to Defaults”, you will lose all of your networks. You will need to create new networks, re-assign the networks to the vNICS, and readdress everything, Yes, I did this. Yes, I tried to get the random number generator to give me back my networks. No, it didn’t work.

One frustration is that it requires Fusion to not be running to make changes. This is to make sure Fusion has control of the network configuration while it’s running. Shutting down your entire lab to make one tiny little change isn’t very fun. Suspending and resuming takes a lot of time when you run more than 3-4 VMs. There are ways to get more granular to the individual VM, but require being VERY careful as you will be editing critical files to your VMs.

To add a vNIC and place it on one of your custom networks, do the following:

1. Shut down the VM. Fusion cannot hot add hardware.
2. Add the vNIC.
3. Go to the location of your VM , right click it and click “Show Package Contents”
4. Find the <VM Name>.vmx file, right click it and click “Open With” and select TextEdit
5. Scroll to the bottom of the file and you should see an area with a bunch of “ethernet1.” options.
6. Add the following two lines:
   1. ethernet1.connectionType = “custom”
   2. ethernet1.vnet = “vmnet10″
      1. This value is determined by going to /Library/Preferences/VMWare Fusion and opening the “networking” file
      2. Look for the subnet that matches to the vNetwork
7. Save the file and close TextEdit
8. Go to Fusion and open the Virtual Machine Library
9. Right click on the VM, click Delete.
10. Make sure to click Keep File
11. Drag the VM back into the Virtual Machine Library
12. Fire up your VM

I hope this helps others get the most out of Nick’s awesome tool. Thanks Nick for putting it together and making Fusion a better place for home labs! If you have things to add to this list, please leave them in the comments!

DIY Whiteboard

Confession: I like to draw. I like to diagram. I love to teach ideas by drawing them out. I imagine you like to do so as well. The problem is that while you can do that on paper, sometimes standing and drawing it bigger makes it easier to see and understand. Enter the whiteboard. Long a mainstay in the conference rooms of the world, they eventually trickled out to the offices and cubicles. They didn’t come out full size though. That would cost way too much money. So many have made do with the 2′x2′ whiteboards that they could get their hands on and couldn’t do much more than draw tiny diagrams.

NO MORE!

I wanted a big whiteboard for my home office. I did not have a big budget for this. So I did some Googling and found the DIY Whiteboard.

For $20, I had not one, but TWO 4′x4′ whiteboards on my walls that work every bit as well as a commercial whiteboard. It took all of 10 minutes to hang them and I’ve erased them multiple times. They do require cleaner for each erase to get back to a clean whiteboard, but you can use isopropyl alcohol as an effective (and far cheaper) alternative.

A few additions to John Murch’s post:

• I put two nails in the bottom of each board to keep them from flapping
• I have the same boards at work and used a 2″ clamp to go over a cube wall
• You don’t need to cut them into 4′x4′ segments. I did that just to get them into my car
• Yes, the picture hangers are more than capable of holding the boards up

Update: Just realized that my 5th grade science teacher had 1′x1′ pieces of tile board that we as whiteboards in his class. Totally forgot about it until now.

Changing IPs on your vCenter host

I ran into a few little issues in the lab today that I’d thought I’d document. I was working on migrating my hosts from the vCenter Appliance (which is awesome in my ways) to a more robust, dedicated vCenter VM with accompanying SQL Server. The idea (provided by the great @MBLeib) was to minimize the amount of RAM vCenter would eat and provide a usable platform for other VMware products that utilize SQL Server, like VUM. Also, it allows some target practice at SQL Server without getting my hands too dirty.

Issue #1: Why oh why oh why would my hosts connect to, and subsequently disconnect from, my vCenter server? Over and over again? Seemed like a fun way to get a Tuesday evening started, I guess. As I was moving the servers from one vCenter to another, I decided to rip them away by connecting to them without disconnecting them from their previous (and now offline) vCenter. Strike 1. I then proceeded to disable and enable the Windows firewall in some hope that that would be the fix. Strike 2. I finally fired up the old vCenter and reconnected to the hosts and their connections remained stable. But one little thing popped out at me: the IP of the “previous” vCenter server. It was an odd 192.xxx IP that I don’t use on my home network. I’m staring at my monitor saying “Where did that come from?”. So I checked the settings on the VM running my vCenter server and sure enough, I was using NAT. So I turned that off and changed the IP to something in my home network IP scope. Which leads us to….

Issue #2: VirtualCenter services can be finicky. Once the IP was changed I figured I would fire up the vCenter client and get to configurating (A far more fun word to say than type). No bueno. If you tried to start the service, it would sit and spin. The vpxd.exe process would show up in Task Manager, but not really do anything. It was clearly getting hung up on something. So I started to dig around and hit some log files when I noticed this:

Seems like something is locking up the vCenter database. I hopped over to the SQL server and bounced the SQL services and ta-da, VirtualCenter services were able to start. I’m sure there’s a cleaner way to bounce the old connection from the SQL server, but as this is my lab, I can bounce the services when I want to.

Next up: Storage fun!

Database Fun In The Lab

I got a chance to play around in my lab and rebuild a few things I had been meaning to. One was to separate my vCenter server and its associated database. I split the two into separate servers to give me the flexibility to add other databases on without issue (ex. VUM). I had the SQL box setup and ready to go, but ran into an issue where the installer wouldn’t recognize the DSN I had created. I got an error that read “‘vcenter’ is using an unsupported ODBC driver” and wouldn’t continue. I created the DSN correctly but did not have a 64-bit ODBC driver. So I googled around and found a download for the 64-bit SQL Server Native Client.

Once I installed the driver and recreated the DSN, the install recognized it and allowed me to continue.

Oh, and then I ran into an issue regarding database logging setups that Hersey Cartwright already documented. Set the database logging to simple or deal with a full log drive later!

Bring Back VMTN!

Recently Mike Laverick (he of http://www.rtfm.co.uk fame) started a social media and VMware community campaign to bring back VMware Technology Network. For those new (including myself when Mike brought this up) to VMTN, it was a subscription program started by VMware that was very similar to Microsoft’s TechNet. It allowed subscribers to use VMware Workstation 5, GSX Server 3,  ESX Server 2, and the P2V Converter in non-production environments. It was an affordable way to get into VMware and play around with it in a long term fashion. They shut it down in 2007 under the premise of giving away the ESX hypervisor.

Many younger admins like myself don’t have the resources (read: cash) to plunk down $3500 for an Enterprise Plus license, not to mention vCenter to manage it or SRM or vCloud Director to toy with. Microsoft, meanwhile, offers Hyper-V through TechNet (it’s a role in Server 2008 R2). The price is right at $200-$350, depending on whether you want enterprise features or not. It’s a legal path to a lab, versus the options of using 60 day trials and rebuilding over and over or pirating the software (which is quite real).

So please VMware, reinstate the VMTN program! You may think: “How could this be done? How would we price this?”. Don’t worry about that. Check out Josh Atwell’s post in the forum. It’s dead on on pricing and rewards for the community.

Help the young admins and bring back VMTN!

Young and Contradictory

It seems a pattern is growing. Paul Maritz talks, I blog. Quick fact about me: I’m 27. I would be one of the “under 35″ people that Paul was referring too. I also happen to be one of the likely few who disagree with his vision. Paul, and by extension VMware, see the “under 35″ crowd as the heirs to the throne. The crowd that will bump curmudgeonly old sysadmins out and take virtualization to the top. There are a multitude of problems with this. Let me break them down

Virtualization has to mean more than VMware

VMware is the clear leader in the sector and clear leader in the industry. I don’t think there are any doubts on that. What they are not, are the clear leaders in cost. It should not cost as much or more than the physical hardware to license a host. It just shouldn’t. Especially when looking at development/testing workloads. Sure there are savings, but when you can run all of that on 6 year old re-used hardware, it’s tough to make the cost savings argument when you’re getting twice the average lifetime of that server and not paying for network or SAN storage. This is where Hyper-V begins to shine. If you have a license for 2008 R2, you have a license for Hyper-V. No one has discussed the tiering of hypervisors. For stuff that doesn’t require live storage migration or host profiles, maybe it makes more sense to spin up VMs on Hyper-V instead of VMware. Even Xen has a possible Tier 2 spot. My suggestion to VMware is to create a base license that includes ALL features (storage vMotion, host profiles, dVS, etc), and charge for vRAM. Make them in packs of 16 GB or even 32 GB. Maritz mentioned that SMB is growing in IT spending. This allows them to get into the game without spending a ton on licenses. It also makes it fair between small and large customers by allowing them to choose what they pay for. This can bring costs down and make VMware a more viable option to SMB.

“Under 35″ doesn’t mean fresh thinking

The under 35 crowd is filled with fresh college grads and sysadmins with limited experience. Very few colleges are teaching storage and virtualization concepts or given hands on lab time. Most career learning happens on the job, learning from more seasoned veterans. Without experience, they will follow in their footsteps and maintain the status quo. VMware, Microsoft, or Citrix could make serious inroads by pushing into universities with lab environments. Especially with the new, more supported, nested VM abilities of vSphere 5. Offer discounts on licenses and certifcations. In addition, the storage vendors could also be involved. NetApp and EMC both have simulators or virtual storage appliances. Offer “Cloud” courses on storage and virtualization techniques and hands on labs. Microsoft has done that for years, and it’s worked out very well for them. You can bring more educated college grads into the workforce with good base knowledge that they can grow off of.  If VMware wants the under 35 crowd to inherit the throne and take them to the top, they need to get to them early.

Google + VMware = Head In The Clouds

As an avid user of Twitter (@ajkuftic), I see a lot of updates from around the virtualization/cloud industry come across my timeline. One in particular really got me going the other day. I decided to wait a few days and build my thoughts. Here’s the phrase that got me riled up:

“We now have a tale of 2 journeys – IT and End Users” – Paul Maritz, CEO of VMware at EMC World

I see where he’s coming from. He’s in a room in front of a bunch of partners and implementers. He’s speaking at a function of his parent company. He’s rallying the troops. I get it. The problem though is that his phrase sounds ridiculous to many organizations. End Users and IT are still very much hand in hand. End Users still dictate what IT does and doesn’t do. We all wish we could, but without End Users IT doesn’t exist. They ARE the purpose for IT. IT can build a whole sky full of clouds, but if End Users can’t use the things they need to use it was worthless.

Google is now pushing people to the cloud as well. With the release of Google Music Beta, Chrome OS, Chromebooks, and Chromeboxes, they’ve made their goals and apparently just won the enterprise. I’m going to be real honest here. ChromeOS is a glorified web browser. There are a LOT of enterprise apps, mostly homegrown, that will not work in this scenario. Organizations will need to rewrite their apps as web apps to be able to be used or be forced to build a Citrix infrastructure to support use of these apps. All that does it create a layer of complexity for the user. The costs just don’t add up in favor of the End Users. It ends up in favor of Google and Citrix. Students will love Chromebooks and will be able to do quite a bit with them. Heck, I’d love one. Here’s the funny part. I already have one. It’s called a regular PC. Download Chrome and go. You can do ANYTHING the Chromebook can do.

I know the cloud is the future. I just don’t know if the End Users see it that way.