May 21, 2012

Now 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 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...]

Retrospective Thanks (VMware, Dell, Cisco, EMC)

In my career I was a late starter and fast riser. It wasn’t too long ago I was plugging in monitors and crawling under desks (a job I still highly respect). I owe a lot of my success to my supportive Wife who while she was raising my children, let me spend hours reading complete histories of LAN switching or reference book on WAN protocols. Not to mention every RFC under the sun. I owe a lot to my aggressive nature of never losing a fight whether it was an annoying Outlook bug, or an 801.X config that wouldn’t work right. But I also owe a lot to the technologies that I invested my time and effort behind who ultimately made my career. I bet on certain companies and technologies and they came through for me time and again. And so in this short blog post, I want to say thanks. So here are my thanks to the top 4 companies that have made me valuable by staying valuable in the information technology arena.

1. VMware

My first experience with VMware was very early on from listening to a Dell solution architect talk about where they were going. This was back when vMotion was just a rumor and still seemed impossible. I went on to work for a company that did a big virtualization shoot-out. At the end of the shoot-out my recommendation was VMware. I was strongly impressed by their focus on stability and running at the enterprise level. Unfortunately, the company chose another virtualization product(I left shortly after). After I left they found out the hard way what an enterprise virtual product needs and within a year they switched to VMware after going through a very painful experience with the other product.
The next company needed me for specific skills but when problem arose with their *free* virtual development solution, I pitched an idea to convert everything to a VMware platform. I must have had to pitch it a hundred times and I even called one meeting with every development team in one big room to explain how VMware works. After selling it for months I finally got the funds and approval. It was a complete success and allowed me to move production infrastructure services like Exchange, LCS 2005, SQL servers, data warehousing, and file servers down the road. I was able to be the guy that got my company from 15% to 80% virtualized within three years. When we needed to be agile with environments or cheap(aka consolidated) with hardware purchases I had changed the culture to make this possible. But I owe my thanks to everyone at VMware for not only maintaining a stable product, but having incredible support, education services, aggressive improvement cycles, and strong community support. I would not be where I am now without the guys and gals at VMware doing what they do.

2. Dell

Whether it was their servers, switches, or workstations I have been involved in Dell shops since my first IT job. They have been consistent with their excellent documentation, strong support, and great product. My favorite part about Dell is their consistent commitment to integrating with major players like EMC and VMware. When it came down to solutions that needed to work with SAN and virtualization options I had, Dell had already put in the work to make sure they were the logical option. I have had a very difficult time not choosing Dell in datacenter projects that involved VMware. I recently made my first trip to a Dell Executive Briefing and left very impressed with their commitment to really providing value and not just selling a product. Dell for me is a company designed to be invested in the long-term benefits and not short-term margins.

3. Cisco

My first praise for Cisco is that their certification programs still really matter. In a world of paper certs the Cisco network programs are still are a great way to prove your worth and actually study for comprehension. I could go on about stable and feature rich routing and switching but the one place where Cisco really paid off for me was their ASA firewall line. I put my reputation on the line pushing to change my current employer’s firewall devices to Cisco solutions. The things I was able to do with multi-tier VPN, securing site-to-site tunnels, network segmentation, troubleshooting, and improving security blew all expectations out of the water. Shortly after I was able to implement unified wireless solutions that solidified Cisco as an integral part of our infrastructure. It is tough to be at the top and still provide consistent value over many different business lines. Cisco gets kudos for giving me tools to be productive.

4. EMC

While not the cheapest storage option at first glance EMC does bring one consistent thing to the table every time, you can bet your job on it. I have never met people from company where they passionately believe in their product like the EMC folks I have run into. And EMC is definitely in this list for the early adoption of VMware (in integration and corporate stock) which made it a de facto choice early on. Every time I have a design to build, I evaluate a product for what it can do for me.  And EMC consistently provides storage products that not only do what is needed but open up possibilities that you hadn’t thought of. Similar to Cisco this is a company that could very easily surf on market-share. But they are aggressive at staying on top and in turn has paid off for me.

So just to clarify, I am not paid by any of the above. I am just thanking these firms for making my investment in them pay me back. And I know that someone could argue that X firm could have done Y for me in the same place. But, in my particular case I have benefited greatly from four companies and just wanted to say thanks where no one else might have.

Who knows what tomorrow brings? Maybe VMware will start giving free licensing to Osama Bin Laden or EMC starts stealing candy from orphan babies in Calcutta. But at least right now these guys are on my list.

So thanks

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Dell Server LCD Update Script

So here is the back story on this idea/script:

I was at my VMware Fast-track class in Dallas when the instructors mentioned an interesting story. They said they knew of a IT shop that had a pretty strict policy on labeling their servers.  That was fine and good pre-virtualization. But after moving to a VMotion-enabled VMware cluster they had the problem of their servers not matching their labels. So did they change the policy? Nope, they got magnetic labels and had an admin run down to the server room every time they used VMotion. True?  Maybe, but it got me thinking.

Why not use the front panel LCD on newer Dell servers to list what VM‘s are residing on the host? I pitched the idea to the instructors and they thought it was spiffy. A couple months later I have finally given it a shot. I debated whether to try and write this in C but opted to use Bash because it is easier to implement and I am so rusty at C it isn’t funny(and I should be spending those hours on Powershell).

To start off here are the prereqs:

  1. Dell OpenManage installed and running on the ESX host (needed for ipmi drivers)
  2. ipmitool 1.8.10 installed (SCP over, ./configure, make, make install….)
  3. My lcd_update.sh script

I wrote the script to only use what was available on the ESX 3.5 host(besides prereqs). I place mine in the /root folder and put “/root/lcd_update >> /dev/null &” into my /etc/rc.d/rc.local file to make it start on boot.
If you prefer you can just start it manually with nohup.

The script is pretty simple. It takes inventory of what VM’s are running and lists them on the LCD using IPMI. It keeps a semaphore file in /etc to keep track (index) of what VM it listed last. The Dell LCD can only display 14 characters (unless someone out there figured something else out) so if your VM name is longer it will be truncated. Overall the effect is pretty slick and with the way it is timed it appears to be a scrolling marquee of server names. Also, if you host has no VM’s or there is a problem with vmware-cmd it will just list the ESX hostname (it will trim a FQDN).

I am sure major improvements can be made to this and I am planning on writing one for server health and hosts in maintenance mode. This is more of a ‘can it be done’ utility and my first *public* script for something VMware related.

***Update*** v .2

I changed the script to use vmware-vim-cmd instead of vmware-cmd.  This should give a list of VM names instead of just taking the name from the VMX file (incase they don’t match). Kudos to Duncan Epping’s post @ Yellow-Bricks which gave me the idea.

***Update***

Scott(@DellTechCenter) from www.delltechcenter.com has posted a video of the output: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Slm3MDMD7Dc