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!

Blogging from the iPhone

I’ve had my iPhone for about a week now and I’m still exploring all the cool features (there’s an app for that). I was one of those folks that always figured my cell phone just needed to be a phone, and really that’s all mine ever was – until now. What an awesome piece of technology!

I can check my email, get my bank statement, listen to music, play games, track the ISS, and even blog! I am in fact writing this blog post on my iPhone.

So far I have been playing with some of the free apps (there a 100s of them) and I am pretty impressed with the quaility of the free apps. The wordpress app that I am using to post this allows me to post to all of my blogs and moderate the comments on each of them and it’s FREE!

Very cool!

I’ll post a bit more about some of my favorite apps in another post

Have a great weekend!