Practical Technology

We had a 15-minute drop in power - enough to kill my 3kva UPS anyways - and storage, hosts, networking, everything dropped, and dropped hard. Issues directly related to the outage: 1.  iSCSI VLAN networking failed to come back up on the Openfiler. 2.  Semi-trashed mysql database on the Nagios VM. 3.  Hosts did not self-power on. 4.  My desktop UPS freaked right out and is now for all intents and purposes, destroyed. Anyways, since I'm busily preparing to (re)take the VCP4 exam (June 8), I fixed things up as best I could (my UPS is in 'power bar' mode and I did not investigate why the hosts didn't come back on) and kept on studying. I'm guessing the hosts thing is a silly BIOS setting.  My UPS is 5-6 years old...but it's an APC unit (BackUPS RS1500), so kinda strange that things would die like this.  The BackUPS RS 800 on the TV stuff is fine. Har, actually now that I think about it, there is a BackUPS 1200 on the wall downstairs... And now th...

Some good advice I received (probably 'received again') when asking which path to take: Admin or Design or both? Admin is the how, design is the why. The how part is fun for me, but the why is far more intriguing and satisfying to unravel.  Design is also fundamental to the how being enjoyable.  "I love it when a plan comes together," I think the quote is. At any rate, the advice for me was to get as many virtualization certs as possible, then worry about the new MCSE for Private Cloud (MCSA+SCOM2012) and/or Exchange certifications.  Am I being blind and following orders?  Hardly, virtualization is my primary IT 'love' - I'd say my home lab spells that out quite nicely. So, with that in mind, here is the exam order: Q2-2012: VCP4 (less than two weeks now!) Q3/Q4-2012: VCAP4-DCA (if it goes well, maybe try for DCD, too) Q1-2013: What's new in vSphere5? course Q1-2013: VCP5 Q2-2013: MCITP: Virtualization Admin (3 exams) Q3/Q4:2013: VCAP5-D...

I hereby submit my favourite engine sounds, in no particular order. Twelve-cylinder BMW 6.0L V12 (X5 Le Mans) -  http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=NtuVxi6hMqI Ferrari 6.3L V12 (FXX Evolution) -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XsCOEHZ1Szw&feature=g-all-u Ferrari 6.0L V12 (599GTO) -  http://www.youtube.com/watch? v=N9ld_K-7-4Y&feature=player_ embedded Pagani/AMG 6.0L V12 (Zonda R) -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uNw6nTngGA Aston Martin 6.0L V12 (Vantage) -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgZlpRdQlRI TVR 6.0L V12 (Speed12) -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ikeyrh9E91w Ten-cylinder Porsche 5.7L V10 (Carrera GT) -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE6ClBsf6rQ&feature=g-all-u Audi 5.2L V10 (R8 LMS) -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=DmutWN6781s Lexus 4.8L V10 -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5R-oi91bd4 BMW 5.0L V10 (M5/M6) -  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaSH2Ntiq60 Eight-cylind...

Update:  8GB flash drive does not actually fix this, so don't go out and buy!  You need to get the hosts patched. Pre-requisites: Running ESXi No local storage (using USB stick) You attach an Update Manager baseline and 'scan'. First you get: 'The host returns esxupdate error codes: 10 . Check the Update Manager log files and esxupdate log files for more details.' So you reconfigure the /etc/vmware/esxupdate/esxupdate.conf file by adding in a path for the log file ( /var/tmp/esxupdate.debug ). Then you get: 'The host returns esxupdate error codes: 99 . Check the Update Manager log files and esxupdate log files for more details.' So as per here ( http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1030330 ) you check that all the paths are correct. /var/tmp/ does not exist. It is actually a link to /scratch/var/tmp, and /scratch doesn't even exist. As per here ( http://www.jonathanmedd.net/2011/06/...

As I've used my lab over the last year or so, I've come to a pretty strong conviction:  If you are simply running 'test' VMs in a throwaway environment you will lose out on some key "free" 'production' experience.  A lot of quotes, but let me try and explain. Suppose we have a test lab with a few ESXi hosts, vCenter, and whatever flavour OS environment you like.  You have an IIS/Apache test site, vCenter, SQL/mysql cluster, AD domain, vcb, that sort of stuff.   All well and good.  One day something in the ESXi/vCenter infrastructure breaks and you get frustrated trying to solve the problem.  No big deal, wipe and replace, right?  Restore from backup with no thoughts. Now, suppose we have the same test lab, but you are running your own website with SQL back-end, monitoring software for both your internal lab environment and a few of your clients' sites, your mail comes in to an Exchange box, your AD site is used by the home PCs for authenticatio...