Category Archives: Virtualization

Welcome To The vExpert Class of 2012

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It appears that I’ve been placed in some rarified company. In keeping with my goals for this year, I wanted to start writing more about virtualization. I do a lot of work with it in my day job and figured I should devote some time to talking about it here. I decided at the last minute to sign up for the VMware vExpert program as a way to motivate myself to spend more time on the topic of virtualization. Given that I work for a VMware partner, I almost signed up through the partner track. However, it was more important to me to be an independent vExpert and be considered based on the content on my writing. I’d seen many others talking about their inclusion into the program already via pictures and welcome emails. So it was that I figured I’d just been passed over due to lack of VMware content on my blog.

On Sunday, April 15th, VMware announced the list of vExperts for 2012. I browsed through the list after I woke up, curious to see if friends like Stephen Foskett (@SFoskett) and Maish Saidel-Keesing (@MaishSK) were still there. Imagine my surprise when I found my name in the first page of the list (they alphabetize by first name, and I’d signed up under “Alfred”). I was shocked to say the least. This means that I can now count myself among a group of distinguished individuals in virtualization. I’m an evangelist now, even if just officially. I’ve been a huge advocate of using VMware solutions for servers for a while now. This designation just means that I’m going to be spending even more time working with VMware, as well as coming up with good topics to write about. It also makes sense to me that with my desire to chase after the VCAP-DCA and VCAP-DCD to further my virtualization education, the blogging opportunities for these topics are very possible.

A vExpert isn’t the final word in virtualization. I recognize that I’ve got quite a bit to learn when it comes to the ins-and-outs of large scale virtualization. What the vExpert designation means to me is that I’ve shown my desire to learn more about these technologies and share them with everyone. There are a lot of great bloggers out there doing this very thing already. I’m excited and humbled to be included in their ranks for the coming year. I just hope I can keep up with the expectations that come with being a vExpert and reward the faith that John Troyer (@jtroyer) and Alex Maier (@lxmaier) have show in me.

Solarwinds – Network Field Day 3

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The first presenter up for Network Field Day 3 was a familiar face to many Tech Field Day viewers.  Solarwinds presented at the first Network Field Day and has been a sponsor of more events than any other.  It’s always nice to see vendors coming back time and again to show the delegates what they’ve been cooking since their last appearance.

We started our day in the Doubletree San Jose boardroom.  We were joined by Joel Dolisy, the Chief Software Architect for Solarwinds and Mav Turner (@mavturner), the Senior Product Manager for the network software division.  After introductions, we jumped right into some of the great software that Solarwinds makes for network engineers.  First up was the Solarwinds IP SLA Monitor.  IP Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a very important tool used by engineers to track key network metrics like reachability and latency.  What makes IP SLA so great as opposed to a bigger monitoring tool is that the engineer can take the information from IP SLA and use it to create actionable items, such as bringing down an overloaded link or sending trap information to the third-party monitoring system to alert key personnel when something is amiss.  One of the sore spots about IP SLA from my perspective is the difficulty that I have in setting it up.  Thankfully, Solarwinds thought of that for me already.  No only can the IP SLA Monitor show me all the pertinent details about a given IP SLA configuration, I can even create a new one on the fly if needed.  IP SLA Monitor allows me to push the configurations down to a single router, or to multiple routers as quickly as I can select interfaces and metrics to track.  It’s a very interesting product, especially when you know that it grew out of a simple way to manage Voice over IP (VoIP) call metrics.  When Solarwinds realized the potential of the program, they immediately added more features and enabled it across a whole host of protocols.  If you’d like to try it out on a single router, you can download the free version here.

During the presentation, I asked Solarwinds about adding some additional wireless troubleshooting capabilities to the product lines, courtesy of a request from Blake Krone (@BlakeKrone).  One thing that Joel and Mav said was that Solarwinds adds the large majority of their new features based on customer response and request.  I do admire that a company that is so highly regarded by most engineers I know is willing to sit down and make sure that customer needs are addressed in such a manner.  That way, the features that get added into the program really do come from the desires of the userbase.  The only thing that might give me pause this arrangement is that Solarwinds may be missing an opportunity to drive some development around new features by waiting for people to ask for them.  Many times I’ve looked at a piece of software and seen a curious feature in a list only to realize that I never knew I needed it.  I hope that Solarwinds is keeping up with the rapid pace of software development and ensuring that the hottest new technologies are being supported as quickly as possible in their flagship Orion platform.

One thing that Solarwinds took some additional time to show off to us was their Virtualization Manager.  An acquisition from Hyper9 last year, Virtualization Manager allows Solarwinds to hook into the VMware vCenter APIs to find all kinds of interesting things like orphaned VMs or performance issues.  You can create custom alerts on these data points to let you know if a VM goes missing after a difficult vMotion or if your hypervisors have become CPU or memory bound.  You can also archive configs and perform capacity planning and a whole host of other useful features.  One of the nicest things, though, was the fact that the UI was completely devoid of Flash!  Everything was written with HTML5 so that there is no need to worry about whether you’re using the correct device to manage your VM infrastructure’s web portal.  This was a big win for the assembled delegates, as management systems that require proprietary scripting languages or horrendously laggy and memory hungry plugins tend to make us cranky at best.

We also had some good discussions toward the end around building Linux-based polling devices and how extensible the querying capabilities can be inside of Orion.  I think this kind of flexibility is huge in allowing me to craft the tool to my needs instead of the other way around.  When you think about it, there aren’t that many companies that are willing to provide you the framework to rebuild the tool to your environment.  That’s one thing that Solarwinds has in the their favor.

If you’d like to learn more about the various offerings that Solarwinds has available, you can check them out at http://www.solarwinds.com/.  You can also follow them on Twitter at their new handle, @solarwinds

Tom’s Take

Solarwinds has been making tools that make my life easier for quite some time.  They’ve also been offering them for free for a while as well.  This is a great way for people to figure out if the larger collection of tools in the Orion suite will be a good fit for what they want to do with their network.  I think the large number of tools can be daunting for an engineer just starting out or one that’s in over their head.  While the overview we received was a wonderful peek at things, Solarwinds needs to take the time to be sure the educate users to the tool capabilities, both free and paid.  I also feel that Solarwinds needs to take the time to develop some software functionality independently of user requests.  I know that the majority of the features they build into their tools are requested by users.  But as I said above, sometimes the feature I need is the one I didn’t know could be done until I read the release notes.

Tech Field Day Disclaimer

Solarwinds was a sponsor of Network Field Day 3.  As such, they were responsible for covering a portion of my travel and lodging expenses while attending Network Field Day 3. In addition, they provided me with a coffee cup.  They did not ask for, nor where they promised any kind of consideration in the writing of this review/analysis.  The opinions and analysis provided within are my own and any errors or omissions are mine and mine alone.

Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator – Review

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I’ll be honest.  Orchestration, to me, is something a conductor does with the Philharmonic.  I keep hearing the word thrown around in virtualization and cloud discussions but I’m never quite sure what it means.  I know it has something to do with automating processes and such but beyond that I can’t give a detailed description of what is involved from a technical perspective.  Luckily, thanks to VMware Press and Cody Bunch (@cody_bunch) I don’t have to be uneducated any longer:

One of the first books from VMware Press, Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator (I’m going to abbreviate to Automating vSphere) is a fine example of the type of reference material that is needed to help sort through some of the more esoteric concepts surrounding virtualization and cloud computing today.  As I started reading through the introduction, I knew immediately that I was going to enjoy this book immensely due to the humor and light tone.  It’s very easy to write a virtualization encyclopedia.  It’s another thing to make it readable.  Thankfully, Cody Bunch has turned what could have otherwise been a very dry read into a great reference book filled with Star Trek references and Monty Python humor.

Coming in at just over 200 pages with some additional appendices, this book once again qualifies as “pound cake reading”, in that you need to take your time and understand that length isn’t the important part, as the content is very filling.  The author starts off by assuming I know nothing about orchestration and filling me in on the basics behind why vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) is so useful to overworked server/virtualization admins.  The opening chapter makes a very good case for the use of orchestration even in smaller environments due to the consistency of application and scalability potential should the virtualization needs of a company begin to increase rapidly.  I’ve seen this myself many times in smaller customers.  Once the restriction of one server to one operating system is removed, virtualized servers soon begin to multiply very quickly.  With vCO, managing and automating the creation and curation of these servers is effortless.  Provided you aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty.  The rest of Part I of the book covers the installation and configuration of vCO, including scenarios where you want to split the components apart to increase performance and scalability.

Part II delves into the nuts and bolts of how vCO works.  Lots of discussions about workflows that have containers that perform operations.  When presented like this, vCO doesn’t look quite as daunting to an orchestration rookie.  It’s important to help the new people understand that there really isn’t a lot of magic in the individual parts of vCO.  The key, just like a real orchestra, is bringing them together to create something greater than the sum of its parts.  The real jewel of the book to me was Part III, as case study with a fictional retail company.  Case studies are always a good way to ground readers in the reality and application of nebulous concepts.  Thankfully, the Amazing Smoothie company is doing many of the things I would find myself doing for my customers on a regular basis. I enjoyed watching the workflows and Javascript come together to automate menial tasks like consolidating snapshots or retiring virtual machines.  I’m pretty sure that I’m going to find myself dog-earing many of the pages in this section in the future as I learn to apply all the nuggets contained within to real life scenarios for my own environment as well as that of my customers.

If you’d like to grab this book, you can pick it up at the VMware Press site or on Amazon.

Tom’s Take

I’m very impressed with the caliber of writing I’m seeing out of VMware Press in this initial offering.  I’m not one for reading dry documentation or recitation of facts and figures.  By engaging writers like Cody Bunch, VMware Press has made it enjoyable to learn about new concepts while at the same time giving me insight into products I never new I needed.  If you are a virtualization admin that manages more than two or three servers, I highly recommend you take a peak at this book.  The software it discusses doesn’t cost you anything to try, but the sheer complexity of trying to configure it yourself could cause you to give up on vCO without a real appraisal of its capabilities.  Thanks to VMware Press and Cody Bunch, the amount of time and effort you save from buying this book will easily be offset by gains in productivity down the road.

Book Review Disclaimer

A review copy of Automating vSphere with VMware vCenter Orchestrator was provided to me by VMware Press.  VMware Press did not ask me to review this book as a condition of providing the copy.  VMware Press did not ask for nor were they promised any consideration in the writing of this review.  The thoughts and opinions expressed herein are mine and mine alone.

2011 in Review, 2012 in Preview

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2011 was a busy year for me.  I set myself some rather modest goals exactly one year ago as a way to keep my priorities focused for the coming 365 days.  How’d I do?

1. CCIE R&S: Been There. Done That. Got the Polo Shirt.

2. Upgrade to VCP4: Funny thing.  VMware went and released VMware 5 before I could get my VCP upgraded.  So I skipped straight over 4 and went right to 5.  I even got to go to class..

3. Go for CCIE: Voice: Ha! Yeah, I was starting to have my doubts when I put that one down on the list.  Thankfully, I cleared my R&S lab.  However, the thought of a second track is starting to sound compelling…

4. Wikify my documentation: Missed the mark on this one.  Spent way to much time doing things and not enough time writing them all down.  I’ll carry this one over for 2012.

5. Spend More Time Teaching: Never got around to this one.  Seems my time was otherwise occupied for the majority of the year.

Forty percent isn’t bad, right?  Instead, I found myself spending time becoming a regular guest on the Packet Pushers podcast and attending three Tech Field Day Events: Tech Field Day 5, Wireless Field Day 1, and Network Field Day 2.  I’ve gotten to meet a lot of great people from social media and made a lot of new friends.  I even managed to keep making blog posts the whole year.  That, in and of itself, is an accomplishment.

What now?  I try to put a couple of things out there as a way to hold myself to the fire and be accountable for my aspirations.  That way, I can look back in 2013 and hopefully hit at least 50% next time.  Looking forward to the next 366 days (356 if the Mayans were right):

1. Juniper – I think it’s time to broaden my horizons.  I’ve talked to the Juniper folks quite a bit in 2011.  They’ve given me a great overview of how their technology works and there is some great potential in it.  Juniper isn’t something I run into every day, but I think it would be in my best interest to start learning how to get around in the curly CLI.  After all, if they can convert Ivan, they must really have some good stuff.

2. Data Center – Another growth area that I feel I have a lot of catching up to do is in the data center.  I feel comfortable working on NX-OS somewhat, but the lack of time I get to configure it every day makes the rust a little thick some times.  If it wasn’t for guys like Tony Mattke and Jeff Fry, I’d have a lot more catching up to do.  When you look at how UCS is being positioned by Cisco and where Juniper wants to take QFabric, I think I need to spend some time picking up more data center technology.  Just in case I find myself stranded in there for an extended period of time.  Can’t have this turning into the Lord of the CLIs.

3. Advanced Virtualization – Since I finally upgraded my VCP to version 5, I can start looking at some of the more advanced certifications that didn’t exist back when I was a VCP3.  Namely the VCAP.  I’m a design junkie, so the DCD track would be a great way for me to add some of the above data center skills while picking up some best practices.  The DCA troubleshooting training would be ideal for my current role, since anything beyond a simple check of vCenter is all I can muster in the troubleshooting arena.  I’d rather spend some time learning how the ESXi CLI works than fighting with a mouse to admin my virtual infrastructure.

4. Head to The Cloud – No, not quite what you’re thinking.  I suffered an SSD failure this year and if it hadn’t been for me having two hard drives in my laptop, I’d probably have lost a good portion of my files as well.  I keep a lot of notes on my laptop and not all of them are saved elsewhere.  Last year I tried to wikify everything and failed miserably.   This year I think I’m going to take some baby steps and get my important documents and notes saved elsewhere and off my local drives.  I’m looking to replace my OneNote archive with Evernote and keep my important documents in Google Docs as opposed to local Microsoft Word.  By keeping my important documents in the cloud, I don’t have to sweat the next drive death quite as much.

The free time that I seem to have acquired now that I’ve conquered the lab seems to have been filled with a whole lot of nothing.  In this industry, you can’t sit still for very long or you’ll find yourself getting passed by almost everyone and everything.  I need to sharpen my focus back to these things to keep moving forward and spend less time sitting on my laurels.  I hope to spend even more time debating technology with the Packet Pushers and engaging with vendors at Tech Field Day.  Given how amazing and humbling 2011 was, I can’t wait to see what 2012 has in store for me.

VMware vSphere: What’s New [5.0] – Review

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As I spend a lot of my time in training and learning about new technologies, I thought it might be a good idea to start reviewing the classes that I attend to help my readers figure out how to get the best out of their training dollars.  Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the 2-day VMware vSphere: What’s New [5.0] class.

If you are thinking about becoming a VMware Certified Professional (VCP), you’re going to need to go to class.  It’s a requirement for certification.  I don’t necessarily agree with this though.  No other certification I hold requires me to go to class.  The CISSP requires a certain level of experience, and when I looked at the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) requirements, they said that their required class could be waived with demonstrable experience.  So the fact that VMware is making me go to class is kind of irritating.  That’s even taking into account that my employer sees the usefulness of staying certified and lets me attend a large number of classes.  I really feel for the independent contractors that need to be VCPs to get into the field but can’t afford to either pay for the class or take the time off for 2-4 days to attend one.  There should be some kind of waiver for people that can demonstrate experience with VMware.  Yes, I know that if you are a 1-step removed VCP (VCP4 in this case) you don’t have to go to class.  Yes, I know that there are very good reasons to make people attend class, such as keeping current with new technology and ensuring your certified user base is up on all the new features.  Yes, I know that the costs of the class are necessary for things like facilities rental and materials.  Just because I understand why it’s required and why it’s so expensive doesn’t mean I have to like it.  But, I digress…

I chose to take the 2-day What’s New class because it was a quicker way to go through the requirements as well as being valid for upgrading my VCP3 to a VCP5 until February.  The 2-day What’s New class is a condensed version of the 4-day Install, Configure, and Manage (ICM) class that introduces VMware to those that are new to virtualization.  Being condensed, the prerequisites for the course state you must be familiar with VMware.  While you don’t need to be intimately familiar with every aspect of the hypervisor and it’s settings, you had better at least be comfortable logging into vCenter and doing some basic tasks.  There won’t be much time for hand-holding in the What’s New class.

The materials for the 2-day class are a 270-page student manual with the slide deck from the class printed in note-taking format and an 80-page lab guide.  The student guide has ample annotations of the slide deck as well as space for taking notes in class.  The lab guide has places to record the information for your student lab pods so you aren’t constantly flipping back and forth to remember what your vCenter or ESXi servers are named.  The lab guide went into good detail about each task, making sure that you knew where to go to enable features or perform tasks.  The lab guide is great for those that want to do a little more practice after leaving the class in a personal lab environment.

The material covered in the class focused on the new features in vSphere 5 and how it’s different from vSphere 4.  Special attention is paid to the new storage features and the new deployment options for ESXi servers, like stateless Auto Deploy.  Thanks to the ample amount of lab time, you have a great opportunity to reinforce the topics with actual examples rather than just staring at static screens on slides.  If you get a really good instructor (like we had), you can even see live configurations of these topics on their lab machines.  Rick, our instructor, made sure to show us live examples every chance he had rather than just relying on stuffy slides.  He also did a great job going into depth on topics that deserved it, like VMware HA changes and elections.  By the way, for anyone that has ever complained about HSRP elections or STP root bridge selection, you should really check out http://www.yellow-bricks.com and get Ducan Epping’s vSphere Clustering Deep Dive book.  Therein, you will learn in vSphere 5, 99 is greater than 100 when performing HA elections.  I’ll give you hint: lexical numbers don’t follow normal rules…

Tom’s Take

Overall, I found the condensed version of class to be a much better value than the 4-day ICM course.  On the other hand, I’ve also been working with VMware for the last 3 years, so I had a good grasp on the basics.  For someone that isn’t familiar with the way virtualization works, the 4-day ICM class will give you a much more measured understanding and more time to play with the basics.  For those that have already gotten their feet wet with VMware and are just looking for a tune up or need to go take the VCP5 exam, you can’t go wrong with the 2-day short, short version of the class.  It’s going to save you a good deal of time and money that you can use to buy more licenses for vRAM.

If you’d like to see more details on the VMware education offerings or sign up for a VMware class, head over to the VMware Education Website at http://mylearn.vmware.com/portals/www/

Unable To Access User-Defined Storage Service

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In my VMware vSphere: What’s New [5.0] class this week, I learned why having a lab environment to test things is very important.  I also learned that some bugs are fun to try and fix.

vSphere 5 introduced a lot of new features focused on storage.  One of these is Profile Driven Storage.  This allows users to create tiers for datastores and ensure that those profiles can be attached to VMs at a later date.  This would be very useful for someone that has ultra-fast SSD arrays like those from PureStorage alongside SAS or SATA arrays.  You can define the gold tier as the SSD array for VMs that need fast storage access, silver tier for slightly slower SAS drives and bronze tier for the large-but-slow SATA datastore.  I like this idea of allowing users to define their storage capabilities into easy to assign tiers.  However, we hit a bug when we tried to implement it in the lab.

After we created the tiers in VIClient, we went to assign them to the datastores from the Home -> Datastores and Datastore Clusters section.  When we right clicked on the datastore and chose “Assign User-Defined Storage Capability” we got hit with this error:

Unable To Access User-Defined Storage Service

Huh?  You let me configure the silly thing?  It’s got to be there somewhere!  Let me assign it to something.

Odds are good that if you are seeing this error, you’ve also installed the vSphere Web Client.  Another great option for users that don’t want to install the VMware Infrastructure Client, the Web Client allows you to access VMs from Firefox or Internet Explorer and manage them just like you would from the VIClient.  This would be useful for those out there that are running OS X and currently don’t have a way to manage VMs unless they launch the VIClient from a virtual machine or other emulated environment.  The Web Client software needs to be installed on a Windows (or Linux) machine in order to respond to requests from web browsers.  For many users that run OS X, the logical choice would be to install the Web Client service on the Windows-based vCenter Server and then use Firefox to remotely access the web client afterwards.  That’s what we did in the lab.

The problem lies in that the Web Client service conflicts with the Profile Driven Storage service.  I’m not sure if they use the same port numbers or if they just collide in memory space or something.  As long as the Web Client service is running, the Profile Driven Storage options cannot be configured on a Data Store.  The fix is somewhat simple:

1.  Open the Service console on your vCenter server.

2.  Find the VMware Web Client service.

3.  Stop or disable it.

4.  Restart VIClient.

Simple, huh?  You can now assign the User-Defined Storage profiles to all the datastores you’d like.  When you finish, close out VIClient and restart the Web Client Service so your Mac folks can administer VMs.  Just remember that every time you want to use Profile Driven Storage, you’re going to have to bounce the Web Client service.

One can only hope that this particular bug gets fixed in an upcoming point release of vSphere 5.  Not a show stopper, but I can see how it could cause issues for those that don’t know from the less-than-helpful error message where to look for help.  I’m just glad I found it in a learning lab and not in production.

BYOD: High School Never Ends

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There is a lot of buzz around about the porting of applications to every conceivable platform.  Most of it can be traced back to a movement in the IT/user world known as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), the idea that a user can bring in their own personal access device and still manage to perform their job functions.  I’m going to look at BYOD and why I think that it’s more of the same stuff we’ve been dealing with since lunch period in high school.

BYOD isn’t a new concept.  Contractors and engineers have been doing it for years.  Greg Ferro and Chris Jones would much prefer bringing their own Macbooks to a customer’s site to get the job done.  Matthew Norwood would prefer to have just about anything other than the corporate dinosaur that he babies through boot up and shut down.  Even I have my tastes when it comes to laptops.  Recently though, the explosion of smartphones and tablets has caused a shift toward more ubiquitous computing.  It now seems to be a bullet point requirement that your software or hardware has a support app in a cloud app repository or the capability to be managed from a 3.5″ capacitive touch screen.  Battle lines are drawn around whether or not your software is visible on a Fruit Company Mobile Device or a Robot Branded Smarty Phone.  Users want to drag in any old tablet and expect to do their entire job function from 7″ screen.

However, while BYOD is all about running software from any endpoint, the driving forces behind it aren’t quite as noble.  I think once I start describing how I see things, you’ll start noticing a few parallels, especially if you have teenagers.

- BYOD is about prestige.  Who usually starts asking about running an app on an iPad?  Well, besides the office Gadget Nerd that ran out and stood in line for 4 hours and ran out of the store screeching like kid in a candy store?  Odds are, it’s the CxO that comes to you and informs you that they’ve just purchased a Galaxy Tablet and they would like it setup.  The device is gingerly handed to you to perform your IT voodoo on, all while the executive waits patiently.  Usually, there is some kind of interjection from them about how they got a good deal and how the drone at the store told them it had a lot of amazing features.  The CxO usually can’t wait to show it around after you’ve finished syncing their mail and calendar and pictures of their expensive dogs.  Wanna know why?  Because it’s a status symbol.  They want to show off all the things it can do to those that can’t get one.  Whether it be due to being overpriced or unavailable from any supply chain, there are some people that revel in rubbing people’s noses in opulence.  By showing off how their tablet or smartphone gets emails and surfs the web, they are attempting to widen the IT class gap.  Sound like high school to you?  Air Jordans? Expensive blue jeans? Ringing any bells?  The same kind of people that liked to crow that their parents bought them a BMW in high school are the same ones that will gladly show off their iPad or Galaxy Tab solely for the purpose of snubbing you.  They could really care less about doing their job from it.

- BYOD is about entitlement.  I could go on and on about this one, but I’ll try to keep it on topic.  There seems to be a growing movement in the younger generation that you as a company owe them something for coming to work for you.  They want things like nap time or gold stars next to their names for doing something.  No, really.  This naturally extends to their choice of work device.  I’m going to pick on Mac users here because that particular device comes up more often that not, but it extends to Linux users and Windows users as well.  The “entitled” user thinks that you should change your entire network architecture to suit their particular situation.  Something like this:

User: I can’t get my mail.

Admin: You’re using the Fail Mail client.  We’re on Exchange.  You’ll need to use Outlook.

User: I’m not installing Office on my system!  Microsoft is a cold-hearted company that murders orphans in Antarctica.  Fail Mail donates $.25 of every shareware license to the West Pacific Tree Slug Preservation Society.  I want to use my mail client.

Admin: I guess you could use the webmail…

User: How about you use the Fail Mail Server instead?  They donate $2 of every purchase to fungus research.  I think it’s a much more capable server than dumb old Exchange anyway.

Admin: <facepalm>

I hope this doesn’t sound familiar.  One of the great joys of IT is telling users you aren’t going to reinvent the wheel just to mollify them.  However, in many cases the user demanding your change everything happens to sign your paycheck.  That does have the effect of ripping out one mail server or reprogramming a whole tool because it used/didn’t use Flash/HTML 5.

- BYOD is about never changing your perspective.  I have an iPad.  And an iPhone.  And a behemoth Lenovo w701 laptop.   And I use them all.  Often, I use them at the same time.  I see each as a very capable tool for what it’s designed to do.  I don’t read ebooks on my iPhone.  I don’t run virtual machines on my iPad.  And I don’t use my laptop for texting or phone calls.  Just like I don’t use screwdrivers like chisels or use a pipe wrench like a hammer.  However, there are some people that like picking up one device and never putting it down.  These people seem to believe that the world would be a more perfect place if they could sit in their chair and do their whole job from a touch screen.  They feel that moving to a laptop to type a blog post is a travesty.  Being forced to use a high-powered graphical desktop for CAD work is unthinkable.  I have to admit that I’ve tried to see things from their perspective.  I’ve tried to use my iPad to take notes and remotely administer servers.  Guess what?  I just couldn’t do it.  I’m a firm believer that tools should be used according to their design, rather than having a 56-in-one tool that does a lot of things poorly.

Tom’s Take

I think keeping your tools capable and portable is a very good thing.  I hate software that can only be run from a Windows 2000 server or needs a special hardware dongle to even start.  I love that tools are becoming web-enabled and can be used from any PC/Mac/toaster.  However, I also think that things need to be kept in perspective.  BYOD is a Charlie Foxtrot just waiting to happen if the motivations behind it aren’t honest and sincere.  Simply porting your management app to the App Store so the CxO can show off his new iPad while complaining that we need to scrap the company website because it uses Flash and no one will bother using their dumb old laptop ever again is really, really bad.  Give me a compelling reason to use your app, like a new intuitive interface or a remote capability I wouldn’t normally have.  Just putting your tablet app out so you can sound cool or fit in with the popular crowd won’t work any better than wearing parachute pants did in high school.  Except, this time you won’t get stuffed into a locker.  You’ll just lose my business.

Xangati VDI Dashboard – Review

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A few weeks back, I got a sneak peak at the new VDI Dashboard product from Xangati.  They had given us a very quick overview of it at Tech Field Day 5 but I got a special one-on-one opportunity to get a product demo.  What follows is information about what I saw.

With virtualization become such a hot topic in today’s IT environments, it’s only natural that people want to extend the benefits of centralized management and reduced hardware expenditure costs to the desktop level as well.  VMware is accomplishing this through the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), which allows end user desktops to be virtualized and loaded on less powerful hardware.  The main processing is done on the back end by the vSphere for Desktops servers and presented to the users via PC over IP (PCoIP).  This allows the user to experience the same desktop they would normally have, but make it portable across a variety of devices.  This kind of reminds me of the ultimate extension of a roaming profile, only in this case the profile is your whole computer.

This process isn’t without issues, though.  Before, the network was merely a transport medium for data moving from PC to server or PC to the Internet.  However, when you abstract the operation of a PC to the point where it requires the network to operate, there can be an entirely new set of variables introduced into the troubleshooting process.  Even things that we might normally take for granted, like watching a video, become bigger issues when the network is introduced as a medium for transporting all the data to a user endpoint.  Factor in that the virtual team is usually not integrated with the network team, and you end up with a situation that often results in finger-pointing and harsh words.  What’s needed in the ability to gather information quickly and easily and display it in an easy-to-read format for the team that might be troubleshooting the issue.  Enter Xangati and their VDI Dashboard:

This product gathers information from various different points in your VDI as well as your network and displays it in easy to decipher graphs and tables.  For those in more of a hurry, the health index at the top allows at-a-glance digestion of the overall health of the VDI system.  When everything is working as it should, this number will be nice and green.  once problems occur and monitoring thresholds are triggered, the color will go from worrisome yellow all the way to problematic red.  This all occurs in real time, so you can keep up with what goes on as it happens.  This is useful if you have a group of people that all come to work at the same time and spool up 10 or 20 new VDI systems as they log on for the day.  You can view the impact this has on your VDI and network from the dashboard.  You can also see when a user may have an adverse impact on the system from doing something they consider innocuous, such as watching an HD video and consuming much more PCoIP bandwidth than their non-video neighbors.

In addition, the DVR-like functionality present in Xangati’s other products is extended here as well.  You can “rewind” the view to a point where the problems started occurring and begin troubleshooting from ground zero.  This is a decided advantage because as busy network rock stars, we aren’t always staring at our Single Pane of Glass (SPoG) when a problem happens.  The ability to backtrack and see all the events leading up to the problem gives us the ability to take decisive corrective action quickly and efficiently.

Tom’s Take

I don’t have a large VDI setup to manage, but if I did I would consider the VDI Dashboard closely.  It’s got a great view for all the things that could cause your deployment to go haywire.  Easy to read with tons of great information about all the individual components that comprise the total VDI, this tool makes it very simple to diagnose issues and take corrective steps quickly to limit impact on your users.  I haven’t played with it myself, but what I’ve seen makes me happy to know that when my users reach the point where I need to virtualize their Facebook Interface Terminals and LOLCat Creation Devices, I can count on Xangati and their VDI Dashboard to give me up-to-the-minute information.

If you’d like to learn more about Xangati, you can check out their website at http://xangati.com.  You can also follow them on Twitter as @XangatiPress.

Disclaimer

Xangati gave me a one-on-one presentation prior to the release of their product and provided me with a press kit containing the image above.  I was under no requirement to write an article describing my briefing.  The opinions and views expressed in this review are mine and mine alone.

Tips for Virtualizing Cisco Unified Communications Manager

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I’ve seen a lot of chatter lately about virtualizing Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) and other applications on Twitter.  It seems that installing CUCM in a VM for the purposes of study or replicating a customer environment is a popular option, since the CUCM software can be powered up at will and doesn’t require a rack full of application servers.  However, when attempting to install CUCM in a VM, there are some things that need to be taken into consideration.  This isn’t necessarily going to be a step-by-step guide to the installation of a virtual CUCM system.  If you’re looking for that, I suggest you head over to http://www.blindhog.net and check out some of their excellent resources.  They even have some play-by-play videos that you can follow along with.  That being said, here are some things to keep in mind when virtualizing your CUCM cluster.

1.  Make sure your VM specs match the requirements. The biggest roadblock to the installation of CUCM in VMware is matching your server specs to the requirements.  For the installation of CUCM or Unity Connection, you are going to need to reserve a minimum of 2GB of RAM and a 72 GB hard disk.  Note that the RAM requirement is in addition to the RAM requirement of your workstation if you are installing your VM in VMware Workstation.  If the CUCM installer can’t see 2GB of RAM when it checks your hardware specs, it will quit and notify you that you don’t appear to be installing on a supported system.  Once you have completed the installation of CUCM, you can reduce the RAM of the VM to 1GB with no serious effects besides things running a little bit slower inside your CUCM environment.  If your laptop only has 2GB of RAM, it’s probably time for an upgrade if you want to try and run CUCM in VMware Workstation.  The hard disk requirements are just as strict.  72GB is the minimum needed for installation.  I’ve never really had any luck with using thin provisioning on the volume, so I always pre-allocate the space when I create the VM in order to be sure to not have any errors during installation.  For the record, if you are trying to install a CUCM Business Edition (CUCMBE) system in a VM, the minimum specs required are 6GB of RAM and 147GB of disk space.  Anything less will cause the installer to think you are installing on something other than a 7828 server and only offer you the choice of CUCM or Unity Connection, not the combined CUCMBE.  For the purposes of VM labbing and learning, it’s actually slightly more efficient to run CUCM and Connection in two separate VMs and integrate them together rather than using CUCMBE.

2.  Know the licensing caveats. Ever since CUCM 5.x was released, the reality of licensing has been present with us.  As I previously talked about, there are three types of licensing on a CUCM server.  Each of these licenses are tied to a MAC address.  In the versions of CUCM from 5.x all the way up to 7.0, this MAC address was the physical MAC address of the first NIC in the CUCM server.  If you wanted to install new licenses on the system, you had to ensure they were tied to the MAC of the first node, usually the publisher.  Once people started installing CUCM in a VM, which wasn’t officially supported in the 7.x train but was possible, it became apparent that a simple MAC licensing scheme wasn’t going to cut it any more, since a VM can be programmed with a specific MAC address fairly easily.  Around the time 7.1(2) was released, Cisco changed their licensing structure to use something called a “License MAC address”.  To prevent unscrupulous users from simple changing the MAC address of their VM and moving the system to new hardware, the License MAC performs a hash calculation of the following user-defined settings at install time:

  • Time zone
  • NTP server 1 (or “none”)
  • NIC speed (or “auto”)
  • Hostname
  • IP Address (or “dhcp”)
  • IP Mask (or “dhcp”)
  • Gateway Address (or “dhcp”)
  • Primary DNS (or “dhcp”)
  • SMTP server (or “none”)
  • Certificate Information (Organization, Unit, Location, State, Country)

Once these values are determined, a 12-character MAC-like address is kicked out and used for the MAC in the license files.  If you want to see what address is generated after installation time, you can run the show status command from the server CLI.  You can also use this handy answer file generator on Cisco’s website ahead of time.  That way, you can have your license MAC ready ahead of time in case you need to move your hardware.  In a lab scenario, however, you’re probably best to either do with the demo license files that are installed with the basic CUCM system or have some other licenses rehosted on the new CUCM VM.  The demo license includes one node license and 150 Device License Units (DLUs) for phone registration, so they should cover most small deployments.  The only side effect is the presence of red text on the home page alerting you to the fact you are running your cluster on demo licensing.  If you want to implement a customer’s environment in a VM for testing, I’m not sure how you would do that if they have more than one CUCM node or more than 150 DLUs.  I’ve been asking Cisco about this for quite some time, but I haven’t found any answers yet.

3.  Be ready for the support issues. If you are trying to virtualize CUCM on any version prior to 8.x, you are going to find support hard to come by.  When the VM boots up, you need to agree to a notice telling you that this is not a supported scenario and no TAC assistance is available.  The SNMP service doesn’t work properly on the pre-8.x versions in VMware, so that function will be unavailable.  Most of the hardware related issues or strange error messages are hard to decode, and since most people doing this are learning CUCM for the first time, it can be mystifying to figure out if this message is something normal or something caused by VMware.   The best resource I’ve found is at the aforementioned http://www.blindhog.net website.  The comments on their virtualizing CUCM posts are almost like a set of forums for some of the error messages you might see.

As long as you keep these things in mind when going through your installation, you shouldn’t run into any premature issues.  Those can be saved for all the fun you’re going to run into once you get the server installed and are trying to figure out calling search spaces and media resource group lists.  If you have any questions about virtualizing CUCM, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.  I’m going to work on more scenarios for virtualizing CUCM, so hopefully I’ll have some more posts on this in the future.

Why Virtualize Communications Manager (CallManager)?

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With version 8.x of Cisco’s Communications Manager (CallManager or CUCM) software, the capability to virtualize the OS in VMware is the most touted feature.  Many people that I talk to are happy for this option, as VMware is quickly becoming an indispensable tool in the modern datacenter.  The ability to put CUCM on a VM gives the server admins a lot more flexibility in supporting the software.  However, some people I talk to about virtual CUCM say “So what?”.  They’re arguments talk about the fact that it’s only supported on Cisco hardware at the moment, or that it only supports ESXi, or even that they don’t see the utility of putting an appliance server on a VM.  I’ve been thinking about the tangible reasons for virtualizing CUCM beyond the marketing stuff I keep seeing floating around that involves words like flexibility, application agility, and so on.

1.  Platform Independence – A key feature of putting CUCM in a VM is the ability to divorce the OS/Application from a specific hardware platform.  Anyone who has tried to install CUCM on a non-MCS knows the pain of figuring out the supported HP/IBM hardware.  Cisco certified only certain server models to run CUCM.  This means that if the processor in your IBM-purchased server is 200Mhz faster than the one quoted on the specs, your CUCM installation will fail.  This means that Cisco has a hard time buying servers when they OEM them from IBM or HP.  Cisco has to buy a LOT of servers of the exactly same specifications.  Same processor, same RAM, same hard disk configurations.  This means moving to new technology when it’s available become difficult, as the hardware must be certified for use with the software, then it must be moved into the supply chain.  Look at how long it has taken to get an upgraded version of the 7835 and 7845 servers.  Those are the workhorses of large CUCM deployments, and they have only been revised 3 times since their introduction years ago.

Now, think about virtualization.  Since you’ll be using the same OVA/OVF templates every time to create your virtual machines, you don’t need to worry about ensuring the same processor and RAM in each batch of hardware purchases.  You get that from the VM itself.  All you need to do is define what virtual hardware you are going to need.  Now, all you really need to do is worry about certifying the underlying VM hardware.  Luckily, VMware has taken care of that for you.  They certify hardware to run their ESX/ESXi software, so all you need to do as a vendor like Cisco is tell the users what their minimum supported specs are supposed to be.  For those of you that claim that this is garbage since vCUCM is only supported on Cisco hardware right now, think about the support scenario from Cisco’s perspective.  Would you rather have your TAC people troubleshooting software issues on a small set of mostly-similar hardware while they work out the virtualization bugs?  Or do you want to slam your TAC people with every conceivable MacGyver-esque config slapped together for a lab setup?  Amusingly, one of those sounds a whole lot more like Apple’s hardware approach, and the other sounds a lot like Microsoft’s approach.  Which support system do you like better?  I have no doubts that the ability to virtualize CUCM on non-Cisco hardware will be coming sooner rather than later.  And when it does, it will give Cisco a great opportunity to position CUCM to quickly adapt to changing infrastructures and eliminate some of the supply chain and ordering issues that have plagued the platform for the last year or so.  It also makes it much easier to redeploy your assets quickly in case of strategic alliance dissolution.

2.  Failover / Fault Tolerance – Firstly, vMotion is NOT supported on vCUCM installation today.  Part of the reason is that the call quality of a cluster can’t be confirmed to be 100% reliable when a CUCM server has 100 calls going out of an MGCP gateway and suddenly vMotions to a cluster on the other side of a datacenter WAN link.  My own informal lab testing says that you CAN vMotion a CUCM VM.  It’s just not supported or recommended.  Now, once the bugs have been worked out of that particular piece of technology, think about the ramifications.  I’ve heard some people tell me they would really like to use CUCM in their environments, but because the Publisher / Subscriber model doesn’t support 100% uptime in a failover scenario, they just can’t do it.  With vMotion and HA handling the VMs, hardware failures are no longer an issue.  If there is a scenario where an ESXi server is about to go down for maintenance or a faulty hard disk, the publisher can be moved without triggering a subscriber failover.  Likewise, if the ESXi system housing the publisher gets hosed, the publisher can be failed over to another system with no impact.  I don’t see a change to the Pub/Sub model coming any time soon, but the impact of having an offline publisher is greatly reduced when you can rely on other mechanisms to ensure that the system is up.  Another thing to think about is the fault tolerance of the hardware itself.  Normally, we have an MCS server with two power supplies and a RAID 1 setup, along with one or two NICs. Now, think about the typical server used in virtualization in a datacenter.  Multiple power supplies, multiple NICs, and if there is onboard storage, it’s usually RAID 5 or better.  In many cases, the VMs are stored on a very fault-tolerant SAN.  Those hardware specs are worlds better than any you’re every going to be able to achieve with MCS hardware.  I’d feel more comfortable having my CUCM servers virtualized on that kind of hardware even without vMotion and HA.

3.  True appliance behavior – A long time ago, CallManager used to be a set of software services running on top of an operating system.  Of course, that OS was Windows 2000, and it was CallManager version 3.x and 4.x.  Eventually, Cisco moved away from the Services-on-OS model and went to an appliance solution.  Around the 6.x release time frame, I heard some strong rumors that said Cisco was going to look at abstracting the services portion of CUCM from the OS and allow that package to run on just about anything.  Alas, that plan never really came to fruition.  The appliance model works well for things like CUCM and Unity Connection, so the hassle of porting all those services to run on Windows and Solaris and MacOS was not really worth it.  Now, flash forward to the present day.  By allowing CUCM to run in a VM, we’ve essentially created a service platform divorced from a customer’s OS preference.  In CUCM, the OS really acts as a hardware controller and a way to access the database.  In the terms of server admins and voice people, the OS might as well not exist.  All we’re concerned about is the web interface to configure our phones and gateways.  Now, there has been grousing in the past from the server people when the VoIP guys want to walk in a drop a new server down that consumes powers and generates heat in their perfectly designed datacenter.  Now that CUCM can be entirely virtualized, the only cost is creating a new VM from an OVF template and letting the VoIP people load their software.  After that, it simply serves as an application running in the VMware cloud.  This is what Cisco was really going after when they said they wanted to make CUCM run as a service.  Little to no impact, and able to be deployed quickly.

Those are my thoughts about CUCM virtualization.  I think this a bold step forward for Cisco, and once they get up to speed by allowing us to do the things we take for granted with virtualization, like running on any supported hardware and vMotion/HA, the power of a virtualized CUCM model will allow us to do some interesting things going forward.  No longer will we be bound by old hardware or application loading limitations.  Instead, we can concentrate on the applications themselves and all the things they can do for us.