May 17, 2012

Being a vSpec : One year under the belt

Today is the one year anniversary of joining EMC as a vSpecialist. Kind of feels like I just got here and compared to some of the vets, I have. Still I think back to my first post on moving to the vendor side of things (Change is good : Fear & Atmosphere) and I am amazed at everything that has happened to me since then. As I pointed out back in that blog post. My goal was to surround myself by people that would challenge me in new areas. That has definitely been the case this year and is still a primary motivator for me. I can also say this job has used a broader set of my skills than any other.

I decided to throw together a video of random pictures from the last year as a vSpecialist. Here is my year as a vSpec:

I am really looking forward to the rest of 2011 and where my career takes me at EMC. Guess that big step in February of 2010 ended up being a good one after all.

.nick

How to UBER : New Celerra UBER VSA Guide

I know the UBER version of the Celerra Virtual Storage Appliance has been out for a while. But, finally with some incredible teamwork from the EMC vSpecialist squad I now present the complete Celerra UBER VSA Guide v1.

This guide weighs out at 98 pages of material covering:

[Read more...]

The VCE Model : Yes, it is different

This post comes out of a slide deck I authored last week for a partner event. I decided I was going to try and illustrate why the VCE model really is such a different approach to other datacenter and private cloud models.

Normally my blog is light on vendor specific commentary. I see myself more as a virtualization geek who just happens to work for an awesome company (EMC) than a hardcore analysis/blogger. But I have seen so much messaging lately that distorts the VCE message, I really felt the need to offer my own perspective. [Read more...]

2010.Close; 2011.Open;

What a year it has been. From just a personal level 2010 has been my banner year so far. I have got more done, met more cool people, had more fun, and learned more than I would have ever thought possible. Here is just a short list of things that have happened for me (in no particular order) [Read more...]

Creating a vApp : UBER UIM

I recently jumped in to help my team create a vAppliance for Unified Infrastructure Manager (UIM). This was to help enable both the EMC and Cisco field teams to demo and standup proof of concepts. As part of this I decided to try and create a web-only wizard for setting up the appliance. I used a combination of PHP/Perl/Bash and smashing my head on the keyboard. I made a short uber-video (just coined that term) which demonstrates how a simple 60 seconds web wizard let’s the user deploy UIM automatically. My goal is web-based configuration for everything I do from now on. [Read more...]

VSA Time : Fix the blue screen

First off, special thanks to Jason Boche for finding the root cause of this issue.

Turns out in an OVA deployment the time syncing with ESX and VMware tools will cause problems with the SSL cert generation. Basically with some setups it will bounce time 5 hours forward *before* the SSL cert is generated. This is related to some time zone funkiness I have a fix for.

Problem is this means that cert is always invalid because it comes from the future where Chad Sakac is fully cyborg and Microsoft just makes wallpaper.

I will build a fix into the future versions. But, if you want to fix now follow this simple step:

Login to Celerra UBER VSA as root. Default user/password is ‘root/nasadmin’.
Make sure time on VSA is synced. Use NTP or set manually.

Run the following command:

/nas/http/webui/bin/gen_ssl_cert.pl

This will regenerate the SSL certificate and should fix any blue screen issues.

Thanks,

.nick