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Feb
27thVMware & Puppet : One More Step ForwardI wake up everyday committed to not doing things the same old way. That is why my title has that funny word ‘Automation’ in it. I am tasked with finding a way to make what is fragile, expensive, risky, and complex; easier to manage. While most of what I am working on at VMware is not ready for the light of day. There are some things that have come out of our work that would have a greater benefit being in the public space. If you are even an infrequent reader of this blog (which given my posts lately, is everyone) you know that I am a huge fan of PuppetLabs. More than that I am a huge fan of automation using DevOps-style toolsets enabled by community development. Right now I belong to an amazing team of crazy talented engineers. I rarely go a week without seeing something that makes me wish I was capable of doing a backflip. I am proud to announce that today some of that magic is now being put in a place for everyone. Today VMware and PuppetLabs are releasing the first set of modules for managing VMware environments. This brings a bunch of new features for the first time: Management for the vCenter Appliance /w Complete initialization – Just point as a VM that was deployed from the OVF and it will standup vCenter. Datacenter and Cluster configuration – HA, DRS, and more. The one caveat being EVC (but coming soon) ESXi Host – [...]
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Nov
28thNow for something completely different : Ubuntu 11.10, KVM, & VLAN trunking
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 [...]
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Nov
7thFor Advanced Users : UBERAlign API / CLI / Powershell
From the beginning I knew some UBERAlign users would want to go into power user mode. The UBERAlign Console was designed to allow for easy use for the average Joe. But, there are people out there with the desire, guts, and ability to script and automate that want more. So this post will inform you on two other options for UBERAlign. 1. The CLI Each vAligner is a Ubuntu Linux VM. On the VM is a set of binary files that do all work. One is a startup file for initializing, one is a daemon for accepting new jobs via the REST API, and the final is the actual magic behind the scenes. From the beginning UBERAlign was designed to be run from the command line. In fact back months ago the vSpecialist actually got a copy of this to try out and help me test. So for those that do not want to use the Console here are some reasons and instructions on how to run alignment, reclaim, and alignment+reclaim jobs manually. Some of the reasons you may want to do this: Hate MS Windows – Since the console is a .Net WPF app some Mac users (@mcowger) have already asked how to skip using a Windows VM. VM size is too big – If the VM is more than 50% of the size of the datastore then a snapshot of it can potentially cause an out of space issue if it grows to full size (which and align [...]
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Nov
3rdStraighten up with a new UBER tool : Presenting UBERAlign
NOTICE: For more info on UBERAlign Advanced (API / CLI / Powershell) features also read the new post here: http://nickapedia.com/2011/11/07/for-advanced-users-uberalign-api-cli-powershell/ You know how in cartoons they show a small snowball rolling down a hill until it grows into a massive beast of a snow boulder? Well, that is kind of how my most recent UBER project has gone. I know it is a been a little while since I have released a tool for the community and I am hopefully making that up with my newest creation: UBERAlign. The idea of creating this came from the lack of a decent free alignment tool out there for VMware admins. Most every other one at there was either something you had to purchase or you had to be a customer of the vender to get access to it. And even after getting access these tools were either (in my opinion) limited in what they did, how they did it, or had become obsolete in a console-less vSphere 5 architecture. For those they don’t know, alignment with Virtual Machine disks on top of Storage Arrays has been a performance issue for a long time. I won’t go into long detail explaining the problem or the benefits to alignment. There are great posts by Duncan (http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/04/08/aligning-your-vms-virtual-harddisks/) and Kevin(http://www.blueshiftblog.com/?p=300) on what the issues are and some of the tools available. So my goal in creating UBERAlign was to once and for all create a free and powerful tool resolve this issue for everyone in the VMware [...]
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May
15thEMC World 2011 : AKA the last 3 months of my life
This post will cover so much of the last few months of my life that I don’t even know where to start. I am sitting here in the Las Vegas airport trying to remember all the details of how I got to this spot. It really started at the beginning of March when I moved to the vSpecialist Technical Enablement team. The TE team is tasked with arming the front-line vSpec with information, tools, messaging, and more to do their jobs more effectively. Another aspect of the TE team is they usually provide many of the keynote and session demos for the conference and partner events like EMC World or VMworld. Also, the TE guys have been running the EMC Hands On Labs for over a year now at events across the US. Within a week after joining I had a discussion with my boss, Chris Horn, about the how the existing Hands On Labs (which he pioneered and maintained) could be improved and expanded for EMC World. The goal was to do something much more like the experience the VMworld labs provide. Chris had been talking with the EMC Demo Cloud team about using cloud-hosted labs they could provide to the users in Las Vegas at EMC World. After a few long conversations I committed to write the lab automation that would take a session in the Demo Cloud and automate it straight to a user at a desk across the country. Not a small feat and honestly I [...]
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Apr
8thNew UBER Model : UBER VNX (NFS) v1
I am crazy heads down on a massive EMC World 2011 project right now. One bad side effect is I have not had time to keep up with the stuff I normally do on the side for EMC. This includes updates to the UBER VSAs (virtual storage appliances). I did get one *internal* one done recently but nothing for my community. Yet, almost a month ago, one of the teams behind the EMC VNX released a VSA for it. I helped do some testing and built an UBER version but did not have time to finish testing and bug fixing. The good news is I got my head enough above water on my main projects to dedicate some time today to squash the last big bug and finish this VSA. So I present for your free (unsupported) use: the EMC UBER VNX (CIFS/NFS) VSA v1. Details: First off, NFS/CIFS only. Long story on this but this VSA only has this enabled. The engineering teams have a multiprotocol(and much more) version but it is not quite ready for public yet (though it is coming). New VNX Unisphere. Looks even better. Cool new stuff and even slicker arrangement. One datamover only. Think of this version 1 as the beginning of a new series. I have not had the time to make the multi-DM version yet. Same greatness as before (Network auto add, storage auto add, quick wizard setup). And some caveats: I tested everything I could but this is going to be [...]
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