Video of Discovery STS-133 Launch

My wife took this video of the Space Shuttle Discovery STS-133 launch on February 24, 2011 at about 4:53 PM from Space View Park in Titusville, FL.

Look for more pictures on my SuffolkSky.com blog later this afternoon.

Here is an amazing video of the launch taken by a passenger on a commercial airline leaving Orlando. Incredible!

Road Trip!!!

Headed down to Titusville, FL to (HOPEFULLY) watch the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery on mission STS133. This will be our third attempt to catch this launch (3rd times a charm).

You can follow the mission status updates and watch the launch live at SpaceFlightNow.com.

I hope to be tweeting from Space View Park tomorrow afternoon.

My Week in Geek – February 18, 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).

It has just been one long week. TGIF and we have a long weekend. I have a lot of stuff to do on the school lab but I am hoping to be able to take advantage of the Monday holiday and do absolutely nothing.

Hope your week was better than mine. Enjoy the links.

1. Had an issue with X on an Ubuntu 10 VM after the VMware tools upgrade. Should have disabled the graphical log in anyway since we don’t really use it. If you need to disable the graphical log in here is a link that will help.
    
2. I don’t mind coming to work, but this eight hour wait to go home is just bullshit. Told you it has been one of those weeks.
    
3. Here is a really nice Visio Template/Layout for a high level overview of your virtual Datacenter Layout. Nice.
    
4. How to configure OpenFiler iSCSI storage for use with VMware ESX. Great storage solution for a home VMware lab. I use this for both iSCSI and NFS storage in my home lab.
    
5. This week I downloaded the UBER Celerra VSA but I have not had time to mess with it yet. When I do get around to it here is the How to UBER: New Celerra UBER VSA Guide.
    
6. We are looking into an online/live help option for our web site. I have checked out several online services and I think we have settled on using an open source solution called Crafty Syntax. Has anyone had any experience with this. We do not expect very heavy traffic and it looks like this should meet most of our needs, if anyone has any thoughts on it one way or another I would appreciate hearing them.
    
7. Here is another VCAP-DCA Prep video from Eric Sloof on How to Configure SNMP on ESX/ESXi
    
8. VMware released the first update to 4.1 this week. The release notes for vSphere 4.1 Update 1 can be found here. Going to be a few weeks before I get to updating our environment.
    
9. The VMware Performance Trouble shooting guide has been updated to 4.1 – The wew Troubleshooting Performance Related Problems in vSphere 4.1 Environments guide can be found here.
    
10. Next week on February 24, 2011 we are headed down to Titusville, FL to (hopefully) watch the liftoff of the Space Shuttle Discovery for mission STS-133. I will take LOTS of pictures.
     

Have a great weekend! If you get to take advantage of the Monday holiday have a great day off.

LMAOSHMSFOAIDMT

Laughing my ass off so hard my sombrero fell off and I dropped my taco…

Have a great day (it has got to be better than yesterday).

My Valentines Day Gift from Sandy

And it is bad ass..

Check it out here…

Cowboys vs Aliens

Saw a post on this one that said something like “What was Harrison Ford thinking?”

I am pretty sure AWESOME is exactly what he was thinking.

My Week in Geek – February 11, 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).

1. Anybody seen Kaviza’s VDI in a box? We do not have any current initiatives to deploy virtual desktops – at least not this year – in our environment yet but I am sure we will start looking into it soon. I thought this looked interesting. Anyone using it in a test or better yet production environment?
    
2. Had an issue with the school lab ESXi hosts running as VMs getting a PSOD when booting after enabling EVC on the lab cluster. This article here helped fix it. Thanks!
    
3. Here is a great post on how to reserve memory and CPU resources for a VM without effecting HA slot sizes by using resource pools. Nice solution.
    
4. Eric Sloof over at NTPRO.NL also did a video early this week on manipulating the slot size in a VMware HA cluster.
    
5. Good step-by-step article on performing image level backups of VMware guests using AVAMAR 5.
    
6. Did you know that the new Starbucks Trenta size will hold an entire bottle of wine?
    
7. The VMware vSphere Hardening Report Check script has been updated so that is now based on the latest vSphere 4.1 Hardening Guide (Draft).
    
8. Having a hard time managing VM snapshots? Here is a great script that checks for snapshots and if it finds one emails the person that created the snapshot. Here is another one that simply finds and removes all snapshots.
    
9. New (to me) blog I ran across when doing some research on vMA: Ray Heffer – The Enterprise Technology blog. This vMA post is what lead me to the blog. What kept me reading was his LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP) Guide – good stuff.
    
10. Here is a really good article on how to set up your virtual switches to use a Network Packet Analyzer on a Virtual Network. Very easy to monitor your virtual network traffic with you favorite packet analyzer – WireShark.
     
11. Did some VMware PowerCLI scripts for the school lab this week. Basically I had to create a script to automate the introduction of bugs/issue into the student environment and then a grading script to go through their environment and check that they were corrected or which ones they missed. Found a lot of great information here, and here, and also over here, and of course here.
     

Let’s end the week with some fun! This is a couple of weeks old now, but if you have not seen it, it is definitely worth a watch. Check out this awesome EMC 2011 Sales Kickoff video that was originally posted over here.

 
Have a great weekend!

The Making of Volkswagen’s The Force Commercial

I still think the commercial is AWESOME and these out takes from it our GREAT!

Apparently the kid that played Darth Vader in the commercial got the opportunity to meet James Earl Jones (who was the voice of Vader).

SNOWPOCALYPSE 2011!!!

It snowed last night, not much but yes the ground is white and schools are closed. There is probably two inches or so on grassy areas and I did have to use a broom to clear the snow off my windshield this AM – a pain in the ass yes, but not the end of the world and certainly not a SNOWPOCALYPSE, SNOWICANE, WINTER BLAST, or REPENT NOW THE END IS NEAR event the local news folks make it out to be whenever a bit of ice falls from the sky.

The roads were in pretty good shape but work still had a 2 hour delay and everyone on the Interstate has completely forgotten how to drive. Here is an inclement weather driving tip for you – hang up the god damn cell phone and pay attention to what the hell you are doing!

The first part of this Dodge commercial give a pretty fair idea of how things go around here when the weatherman even mentions snow (that’s right it just takes a mention). They started closing and delaying things last night well before the first snow flake fell.

Have a great day!

VMware PowerCLI Function to Modify Virtual Machine Configuration Options

I was looking for a powershell script to set a few virtual machine security options for a school lab. The configuration keys I need to set are isolation.device.connectable.disable, isolation.device.edit.disable, and RemoteDisplay.maxConnections.

I found a function used to set RemoteDisplay.maxConnections here. By changing the RemoteDisplay.maxConnections it could be used to also change the other options so I modified the function to accept another parameter for the setting you want to add or change.

Here is the function:

Function Set-ExtraOptions{
param(
    [string[]]$vmName,
    [string[]]$KeyName,
    $KeyValue
)
    $vmConfigSpec = New-Object VMware.Vim.VirtualMachineConfigSpec

    $extra = New-Object VMware.Vim.optionvalue
    $extra.Key="$KeyName"
    $extra.Value="$KeyValue"
    $vmConfigSpec.extraconfig += $extra

        $vm = Get-VM $vmName | Get-View
        $vm.ReconfigVM($vmConfigSpec)
}

And here is how you call it:

Set-ExtraOptions -vmName VM_NAME -KeyName KEY_NAME -KeyValue KEY_VALUE

To set isolation.device.connectable.disable to FALSE for LabVM-A just call the function like this:

Set-ExtraOptions -vmName “LabVM-A” -KeyName isolation.device.connectable.disable -KeyValue FALSE

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