Battle: Los Angeles

Battle: Los Angeles
In theaters March 11, 2011

Battle: Los Angeles website is here – http://www.battlela.com/

Migration from vCenter 4.0 to 4.1 – One Geeks Journey…

When we first deployed VMware back in early 2008 vCenter was not yet supported running as a VM (at least I do not think it was). Since we were new to the technology as a whole I don’t think I would have run vCenter as a VM until we were able prove the stability of it in our production environment. Over the past few years I think VMware has proven itself as being robust and impressively stable so much so that we have virtualized every thing that is not nailed down tied to specific hardware – Exchange, Microsoft SQL, AD, web servers, application servers, etc. Since we need/want to upgrade to vCenter 4.1, it also seems like as good a time as any to go ahead and run vCenter as a guest VM.

Currently our vCenter is on a separate physical box running Windows 2003 with 4 GB RAM and a single 2.66 Ghz dual core processor. The vCenter database is on Microsoft SQL 2005 also running on the same physical box. The hardware we have in place would support running vCenter 4.1 but since 4.1 requires a 64 bit OS, and ours is currently running on 32bit, I am going to upgrade/migrate vCenter to a new guest VM running Windows 2008 R2 64. I am also going move the vCenter database to the new VM (I know it is not necessarily best practice to run the DB on the same box as vCenter but my environment is small and it should work out ok – if not I will move the database to another server at a later date) which is running Microsoft SQL 2005 x64.

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Dropbox File Sync and Sharing

Dropbox is a neat service/app that allows you to sync files and folders across multiple computers AND access those files from anywhere. A Dropbox agent is installed on each computer you want to sync and a “Dropbox” folder is created. Any files or folders you place in the Dropbox folder are automatically synced to Dropbox online and any other computers you have the agent installed on.

Dropbox also allows you to share and sync folders with other Dropbox users or give public access to files that are placed in a “Public” folder. I tested out the Public access and I was able to give other, non-Dropbox users, online access to files by just sending them URL to the file – this could be very handy, just remember the “Public” folder is just that so watch out what you put in there. Mobile access is available with apps for the iPhone, iPad, Andriod, and Blackberry.

The Basic Dropbox service gives you 2GB of Dropbox storage for FREE and there are paid levels for 50GB and 100GB. Once you create an account you can earn an extra 250MB of storage (up to 8 GB of total storage) for each person you refer to Dropbox. A buddy of mine got an extra 250 for me so sign up using this link so I get an extra 250 for you. (Thanks!)

I would fight off a velociraptor to protect my @Dropbox. http://db.tt/UJeK5SH

My Week in Geek – January 28, 2011

A weekly post (hopefully!?) of blogs, articles, sites, gadgets, issues, and other stuff I have found that is of interest to me (and I remembered to bookmark).

My Week in Geek for the week ending Friday, January 28, 2011

1. I have been doing a lot of reading on setting up and using Private VLANs (PVLANs) primarily to isolate our testing/lab environment. Found a bunch of great articles including a Concept Overview of PVLAN on vNetwork Distributed Switch in the VMware KB, a VMware KB article on configuring PVLANs on a vNetwork Distributed Switch, a vimeo video by Eric Sloof on Configuring Private VLAN ids, and a configuration reference for PVLANs and a Cisco Nexus 5000 (even though this one is tailored to the Nexus 5000 it can be applied to any Cisco switch with and IOS that supports PVLANs). Lot of good info!
    
2. I am into amateur astronomy and astrophotography and here is a great little online eyepiece comparator tool. Just choose your scope and eyepiece and it does all the FOV, magnification, eye relief, and other calculations for you.
    
3. VMware just recently released two new advanced certifications, the VCAP-DCD and VCAP-DCA. Here is a nice list of study and preparation resources for folks interested in taking the one of these new exams.
    
4. The console to a Windows 2008 Server R2 (64 bit) is very sluggish. I have had this problem in my production environment and in the school lab environment. Console access to 2003 servers (32 bit) and XP (also 32 bit) desktops using the vSphere client is fine but on VMs running Server 2008 R2 (64 bit) the mouse is jumpy and it is almost unusable (connecting directly to the VM via RDP works fine). I found this VMware Community post and then this more up-to-date post on the issue. I updated the VMs’ mouse drivers, increased the video RAM, and updated to the WDDM video adapter driver – all of this did improve things considerably but the console is still a bit jumpy and sluggish compared to other (32 bit) VMs. Good to know I am not the only one that has had this issue – see here and here.
    
5. Over the last couple of weeks there has been some buzz on twitter, in the VMware Community forums, and in blogs about migrating from ESX to ESXi. With the release of vSphere 4.1 last summer VMware announced that 4.1 would be the last release of ESX, future releases would include only ESXi. We recently migrated our environment from ESX to ESXi without issue, and we have not had any issues with managing the environment. Here is another article on convincing your boss that the move to ESXi is a good idea. The letter provides some great talking points on the advantages of migrating to ESXi. What’s the difference between the two? Here is a VMware KB article that compares ESX and ESXi 4.1.
    
6. Here is an article on creating snapshots from ESXi Tech Support mode. With VMA, PowerCLI, and/or the vSphere client I am not sure why you would need to do this from TSM mode but I guess it is good to know it can be done.
    
7. Is NFS A Viable Protocol For Converged Networking? I currently use NFS to store VM templates, ISOs, and such but not production VMs. I have used it for test VMs in the past and it does seem to work fine but I did not do any real benchmarking. I also read a great article this week on the performance advantages (and disadvantages) of enabling Jumbo Frames for storage and vMotion but I forgot to bookmark it and have not been able to find it again here it is – Jumbo Frames Comparison Testing with IP Storage and vMotion.
    
8. VMware has released a draft of the vSphere 4.1 Security Hardening Guide last week. The draft will be available till approximately the end of February 2011 and VMware is looking for comments. The official document will be available after the draft period. Here is a post by virtuallyGhetto that list the changes between the 4.0 and the 4.1 guide and VMware has a comparison here.
    
9. iPhone Replacing Your Wallet! Very cool and like the author of the post I am also ALL IN! After a couple of glitches and some employees that were not quite sure of what was going on I was finally able to use the new Starbucks Mobile Card app. I think it would be awesome if my phone replaced my Visa and/or my check card.
    
10. Looking for some storage options for your lab? Check out these post on Installing and Running the Celerra Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) in your vSphere Lab Part 1 and Part 2 are available with parts 3 through 7 of the series promised to follow soon. I currently use Openfiler to provide iSCSI and NFS storage for my home lab but I am going to give the Celerra VSA a look.
     
11. YouTube Video of Bubba Blackwell’s World Record Jump of 40 EMC Symmetrix VMAX – “Big Iron Jumping Big Iron” – Love it! This was part of the EMC Record Breaking Event a couple weeks ago. Cheesy – yes – but it is so worth watching again (and again).
     

Have a great weekend!

Free Snowboards!!! That’ll Learn You…

This is great!!! I saw this ad around twitter, didn’t think it was real. Finding out the back story to it made my day! Take care of your customers or they may just take care of you.

Oh look the offer has been extended to March 2011!!! Just ask for Fatty, Tattooey, Fuzzy, or Shorty – man that is great stuff!

Great Morning Geek Tweets

Just a couple of great tweets this AM.

@Marksteelenz had this to say: Having nerdgasms over VMware. This shit is awesome

and this is an awesome one by @FrankDenneman – apparently eating, having a private life and sleeping is not business critical behavior.

Have a great day! It’s almost FRIDAY!

New Theme

Changed the MyGeekFinds.com theme to one that will hopefully make post easier to read. The name of the theme is REDiance and I found it here but the author’s website is not longer accessible so I removed the link from the footer.

Still have some work to do and this is probably not the last change, but it would be great to hear what you think.

Thanks!

Sucker Punch Movie

This looks pretty awesome. Set to be released March 25, 2011.

The official trailer is pretty bad ass…

and so is the second one…

The website is here http://suckerpunchmovie.warnerbros.com/

Great Tweet…

This came across my twitter feed yesterday and I thought it was spot on…

@ChildRoland67 tweeted: My @VMware environment has been so stable for so long, I’m not sure I’d know what to do anymore if it broke.

Our VMware environment is also very stable and the issues that we do have from time to time are usually self-induced

RVTools Version 3.0

RVTools 3.0 has been released.

Version info (Changelog) can be found here and you can download it from right here.

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