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Sep
13thChange of pace : My next career experiment
Every year I get a little older and a little wiser. And the one thing I am realizing about myself is that I thrive on challenges. My natural element is breaking problems down and creating answers. I live for that first 5 minutes after success when you can look back and see a pattern of effort paying off. Which is why I look back at my time at EMC and feel so good about what has happened. I have made a great many friends. I have worked with people that have influenced me greatly. I have made my small dent in the technology world where I could. And beyond all that I have had a blast doing it all. And it would be very easy to stay comfortable and contribute where I am. But, I have been presented with an opportunity to move the ball in a way I have not before. Life is a sequence of opportunities, challenges, and empty-time in between. It is how you handle each of those moments over a long period of time that shapes who you become. This new change for me is both a major challenge and an extremely important opportunity to shape who I become. Which is why I am announcing that I have accepted a position with VMware as an Automation Architect in Cloud Infrastructure and Services. This position presents some very unique challenges and I am joining an amazing team of rockstars. I have very specific challenges in this role [...]
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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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Oct
17thNote to self : Scary choices pay off
Self-reflection is something I don’t do very often. I tend to focus on the next impossible goal and not look back. But, these last few weeks I spent a lot of my time looking back. I have been thinking about what a great run I have had so far here at EMC. If you would have gone back in time and told me (relevant post : Fear and Atmosphere) that I was going to do some of the things I did in the last 1 ¾ years I would have thought you were crazy. To be honest, when I first joined the vSpecialist team I was scared to death I would fail. I was so far outside my comfort zone going to work for a pre-sales organization with a major vendor that I didn’t have a really good idea what my job would be exactly and if I could do it. Fast forward to now and I am sitting here typing on my Mac and thinking of all the impact that the vSpecialist organization has enabled for me. I have been able to move the ball with vAppliance and Virtual Storage hackery. I made a rap video extolling the tenacity of my group (which was watched by the CEO). I spoke at my first conference session (VMworld). I was able to help do things at both EMCWorld conferences that were never done before (VPLEX demo /Labs). And I released a ton of free tools that helped enable my community. [...]
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Jun
30thPowerPath/VE : Free trialIf you are lucky enough to have an EMC backed virtual environment to work with; did you know that you can test drive PowerPath Virtual Edition (VE) for free? Go over to: https://community.emc.com/message/11590 and signup for a free 45 day trial. This of course requires you use ISCSI or Fibre (i.e. block storage) with either VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V. But, if you have always been curious about what a truly intelligent multipathing could do for your environment, then this is a great way to give it a shot. Also check out the information and video on Chad’s site (http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2010/09/emc-powerpathve-54-sp2-vsphere-enterprise.html). Also, you will need to have at least Enterprise level licensing of vSphere for a VMware environment. .nick
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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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