Sometimes the path to learn something means using very different tools along the way. In my case, I have been learning more on the developing virtual network world along with some of the new DevOps toolsets popping up.
As part of this I have started using KVM as a hypervisor on an Ubuntu 11.10 platform in a portion of my home lab. I have learned quickly that getting something simple done in vSphere can be a bit of a chore in the KVM world. But on the flipside, KVM has been a fun learning experience in understanding virtualization in a more raw format.
One of these challenges I have decided to share is a simple one. I was wanting to play with the Dell-created DevOps deployment tool: Crowbar. Crowbar is an wrapper for OpsCode Chef Server. While a pretty slick little utility to research in the cloud deployment and automation space; one glaring problem is it is designed to run on Dell PowerEdge servers. Since I don’t have PowerEdge servers lying around anymore I needed to run this in a virtual machine. This in itself isn’t a huge problem as a virtual machine can pretty much match most of the logical hardware pieces needed. But, the one problem I ran into was that Crowbar out of the box likes to have a couple interfaces with the ability to tag VLANs itself. In a bare-metal world connecting 802.1q trunk ports to a server is pretty common. And even in the VMware vSphere world you can create trunk portgroups for a guest VM using documented methods(See VGT). But the problem I ran into is how do I pass a trunk port through in KVM/QEMU when using the default bridge-utils setup (not using ovswitch in this case)? [Read more...]

The late recap post : AKA Top 7 things I learned in 2011
2011 was a banner year for me in accomplishing great things and learning new lessons. To recap my 2011 I thought I would share:
Top 7 Things I Learned in 2011
1. I must be doing something right
This is the obligatory stats part of my list. Comparing 2011 to 2010 I doubled my visits, unique visitors, and pageviews. Time on site went up about 33% per visit which may just be because I cleaned up the look and made it easier to find stuff. The most interesting thing is my traffic has been much higher in the last half of this year. It is yet to be seen if I can keep this up in 2012. [Read more...]