Musings of Rodos

My inbox got lots of messages today about Savvis releasing more details of their project Spirit that was mentioned at VMworld. You can read the press release.

What was interesting was the mention of security and VMware VMsafe. They don't mention the how of the security feature, you need to go elsewhere to get that piece of the puzzle.

Reflex published a press release today as well, stating that Savvis would be using their technology for Spirit. Puzzle solved.

I met up with the Reflex guys at VMworld a few weeks ago to dig a lot deeper into what they are doing in the cloud, great to see them have a good win like this.

Rodos

Who stole my UCS boot order, well may you ask.

Check out the differences in the following screen grab from UCS Manager for one of my blades (I hacked the two screens together so you could see both at the same time).



Notice the difference between the two? The Configured order has boot from CD and then from SAN storage, the Actual order has the local hard drive in the middle, with the storage at the bottom. Weird thing is, I never made that change.

The issue here is a known bug, in that if a device is not available on boot the BIOS moves it back in the boot order.

To fix it you can apply the boot order again or re-associate the blade, both require a reboot, which does not really matter as your probably never had a successful boot in the first place.

When can this happen? It can occur when you have an outage or failure and things don't come up in the correct order or a timely manner. In my case I had booted my blades whilst the MDS FC switch was down. When the blades did not boot it was obvious that the MDS was not up, however after fixing that it was not obvious why the blades would still not boot. Reason, the boot order changed without me knowing it.

So if you have stack blades all booting from SAN, and let them boot with the boot device unavailable, you will have many blades to quickly fix boot order for.

Its really not a big deal when you know its coming, and now you know! Also if it was not my testing environment I would not have had local drives in there, after all this is stateless computing.

This is why we do comprehensive regression testing peoples, repeat after me, this is why we do regression testing.

Rodos

[Update : The DDTS, bug number, for this is CSCtb48651]

The Private Cloud debate has been raging for a while.

In this video and the associated post James Urquhart from Cisco, details out internal and external as well as private and public clouds.



Rodos

Well here is my video for VMworld 2009 Hello Freedom.

After a week of very little sleep due to the long video blogs I did (hey we all have to try new things) I thought I would end the week with something funny. Okay and attempt to be funny.

Unfortunatley you need to know the people to get the joke at the end but this is to say thinks to the VMware online community that were so welcoming, warm and kind with their words this week. You are a great bunch of people who are keen to share your knowledge and a friendly hello.

Also a great thanks to the VMware communities team, especially John Troyer, for their commitment and passion.

Guys, this one is for you! I hope you get a laugh.

Rodos

P.S. Thanks to all the participants for being good sports and contributing to something that sounded crazy at the time. Sorry to all those great people that I did not run into today and did not make it in as a result, I am thinking of you Dr Troyer!

P.P.S. If you are reading this through RSS the video may not appear, you might have to click through to see it.

Here is my summary video for Day 3.

VMworld 2009 Day 3 Video Summary from Rodney Haywood on Vimeo.

It is a shame that I was not able to post this until now. I stayed up till 3am to record it but the poor internet quality of my hotel meant I could not upload it until after lunch when I finally got access to some decent bandwidth (400K a sec rocked). Still for those who were not there hopefully its helpful.

I have learnt a lot of things not to do in recording these this year, so thats a great outcome in itself. Next time can be better!