vSoup Episode #7 “Everything is better with Bacon” is now available for your listening “pleasure”. With Sean Clark as our guest, we get into quite a few topics like storage and SQL virtualization. Be sure to check it out!
In related news, VMware has created a Virtualization Podcast directory over on the VMware Communities portal. Way to go John, hopefully the other podcasts will follow suite so we can have one common directory for all of us!
Thanks to the generosity of Todd Wright vNinja.net is now also available via vNinja.com. Todd came out of nowhere and offered to redirect his vNinja.com domain to vNinja.net, since he didn’t have time to do anything with it himself.
I’m very grateful that Todd wanted to do this, and thanks to some quick Apache trickery .com now redirects to .net to make sure Google doesn’t find and penalize any double content.
Thanks again Todd, it’s much appreciated!
VMware vCenter Operations was released to the general public a week or so ago and is available for download right now. As usual you can download a 60 day trial, and get started immediately.
Like other recent management utilities from VMware, vCenter Operations comes in the form of a .OVF template (like vCMA/vMA).
Installing VMware vCenter Operations #
Download VMware vCenter Operations and import by starting vCenter Client, navigate to the “File” menu and select “Deploy OVF template…”
Like everyone else in the vUniverse, I’ve had a play with the very recently released free vSphere Client for iPad. Since everyone, and their mother, has already blogged and reviewed it I don’t see much value in me doing the same.
What I can say though, is that the first impression is pretty great. It looks good, works well and might be one of the apps that finally gives me an actual use case for the iPad. The feature set of the client is pretty basic so far, but it does provide you with a quick overview of your environment.
In the last couple of weeks I’ve been using Microsoft Word 2010 a lot more than I’ve previously done, and at the same time I’ve been switching computers a lot making it somewhat of an annoyance that a lot of the words I use in my documents are not recognized and marked with a wiggly red line underneath it.
If only there was a way to keep the custom dictionary synchronized between computers.
I recently posted Using vMA as a local vSphere Patch Repository, where I outlined how you can use your vMA instances as local file repositories for updates.
This post is a continuation of that concept, but this time I’ll take it a step further and utilize rsync to make sure my vMA instances all contain the same set of patches. Rsync is great for this, as it handles fast incremental file transfers, which is a real time and bandwidth saver in my particular scenario. So, the premise is that you have one central vMA instance, and one or more remote vMA instances that should pull updates from the centrally located one.
I like using http as the transport protocol when patching my vSphere hosts. It’s easy to use and in most cases immediately available over most networks. Since I want to use http as the transport, we need to make vMA work as a http server.
Starting Apache inside vMA #
Luckily, the Apache http daemon is installed, by default, in vMA and to utilize it all you have to do is to start it!
The vMA is a Virtual Appliance that you can download from VMware. It’s primary function is to enable command line based management of your ESX/ESXi systems.
Basically this is a pre-packaged virtual machine that includes vCLI and the vSphere SDK for Perl, which means that you don’t have to build your own management VM or install these tools locally on a management station.
vMA is in many regards seen as a replacement for the ESX Service Console which no longer is present in ESXi.
Bob Plankers, aka The Lone Sysadmin, has posted a series of posts on “the blame game” in modern IT organizations (Blame, Understanding Blame and Preventing Blame).
Bob’s posts are most excellent, and well worth a thorough read. Feel free to head on over and read them now, this post will be waiting right here when you come back.
Are you back yet? In fact, Bob’s excellent rants has inspired me to write my own! No, I’m not going to talk about blame in IT. I have another little pet peeve, and that’s passion.
The fourth edition (Big Fat Pipes with Bob) of the vSoup podcast is now available. This time we had the honor of having Bob Plankers as a guest. Bob runs The Lone Sysadmin, where his recent post “Blame” really resonated well with me personally.
The fact of the matter is that in many cases Bob is right, virtualization admins ends up being blamed for everything.
No matter who’s fault it actually is, though, I’m the one-stop shop now for blame.
How very, very true.
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vNinja.net is the digital home of Christian Mohn and Stine Elise Larsen.
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