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Microsoft officially kills Money (updated)

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I’ve been a loyal Microsoft Money user since 2004 – well, maybe 2003.  My transaction logs go back to mid-2004, but I think I decided to start over with a new data file in 2004.  I’d played with MS Money since 2003 sometime, but I seriously approached it in 2004.  Yesterday, I learned, Microsoft will be killing the product.  It will no longer be for sale at the end of this month and automatic services for the product will go dark in two years.

Microsoft Money was the one product that I haven’t found a suitable alternative for on the Mac.  And having years of data in its proprietary format doesn’t help, either.  Really, there are great Mac software options, including Quicken for Mac (maybe Quicken Financial Life sometime soon), Moneywell or Moneydance.

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AppleDatacenterSoftware

Did Apple lose its chance to capitalize on Vista?

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I read a Digg for an article over at macworld.com entitled Apple has squandered the gift that was Vista.  I’m not sure I agree with the author’s perspective.  In fact, I think what Apple did might have been a very smart play.  After reading the piece, the author’s view seems to be that because Apple still has less than 10% of the market share and that it didn’t introduce a netbook or business laptop (??) that they somehow failed to capitalize on the opportunity left by Vista.  Let me offer a different perspective.

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DatacenterNewsStorage

SAN/Networking/Linux: Using Multipath To Verify and Troubleshoot Connectivity To FC LUNs

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

http://blog.colovirt.com talks about this recent FC switch problem, if you using FC switches, then worth the read. Please read the full post for examples.

 

“

A few days ago there was in error on one of our Cisco MDS 9120 fiber switches. The current environment at this datacenter consists of two Cisco MDS 9120 SAN switches with servers redundantly connected between the two. These switches are used to connect the servers to our fiber channel (FC) storage systems. In this case, the servers are generally mapped to an EMC, NetApp, and two RamSans. Below outlines a basic example of what can be expected from multipathing and the Linux environment when there is loss of connectivity to one leg of the fiber network.

“

 

Source Post http://blog.colovirt.com/2009/05/11/sannetworkinglinux-using-multipath-to-verify-and-troubleshoot-connectivity-to-fc-luns/#more-545

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DatacenterNewsStorage

Choosing SQL Clustering or VMware HA – What is Right?

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

http://professionalvmware.com has a nice write up on SQL clustering, titled : Choosing SQL Clustering or VMware HA – What is Right?

“

May 12th, 2009 by bunchc

This is a big one to try to tackle in a single post, but the question comes up often enough to try. I figure to best answer it, it would help to understand what each does:

VMware HA

What it does: VMware HA will detects host & VM (VM heartbeat, etc) failures. On a failure it will attempt to restart the VM or group of VMs on another node in the VMware cluster.

What it doesn’t: VMware HA will not detect application or OS level failures (excepting VM heartbeat, etc). What this means: Your SQL VM will only fail from its host to another cluster node after a catastrophic failure: Someone sticks a screwdriver into the ESX host, etc.

MSCS (SQL Clustering)

What it does: MSCS will detect the failure of any one of it’s cluster resources, and take the defined action. What does that mean? Each cluster resource can be set to have any number of dependencies and have a failure action like: Move Resource Group. This setup will also protect you from catastrophic failure of a host, in that the SQL services will fail over to a VM that is running on the other node.

What you lose

You lose VMware HA for the 2-4 MSCS VMs. Knowing what MSCS does, that may not be a problem. So long as one sets up appropriate DRS rules to keep the MSCS VMs from running on the same host.

What you DON’T lose

This one is so critical, that I used caps in the section header! Really! Why? Because while you give up some of the more advanced features (HA, etc) going with MSCS, you DON’T (there go them caps again) lose the ability to have HA for the remainder of your VMs. That’s right, your VM web heads, and that accounting VM will still have the advanced features available to them (That is if you have vCenter and are licensed for them).

Other Considerations

Cost. There are associated costs with either method, for instance, VMware HA requires a vCenter license, and vCenter server to make it work. MSCS requires Windows to be licensed appropriately for both nodes. Both solutions require some form of share storage medium.

Supportability. While it can be done, MSCS on ESX adds some complexity into the design that would not other wise be present. Is it a san issue? A VM issue? Heart Beat networking? Each piece that changes from your standard method adds complexity into the solution, and makes it more ‘interesting’ to troubleshoot.

Which is best?

This is really up to you, and what your environment requires. After all, who knows the complexity and requirements of your design better than you. Well… perhaps that Leprechaun from down the street, but alas. With the notes above, it should help clear up the choice.

“

Thanks to the author, I found this interesting, so I wanted to share his work.

Source Page http://professionalvmware.com/2009/05/12/choosing-sql-clustering-or-vmware-ha-what-is-right/

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DatacenterStoragevSphere

vSphere content links, an attempt at consolidation.

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

 

Since Every blog has information at this, I am going to link back to http://www.yellow-bricks.com and http://www.hypervizor.com

vSphere Linkage

Posted by Duncan Epping in April 21st, 2009
Source Link http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/04/21/vsphere-linkage/

“

News / Coverage

VMware

Bloggers Community

Previews

VMware

  • –

Bloggers Community

Check the source for updated posts.

"

The ultimate vSphere4 learning path: Videos, Webcasts, Podcasts, Free online classes and much more By Hany Michael

Source post http://www.hypervizor.com/2009/04/the-vsphere4-learning-path-videos-webcasts-podcasts-free-online-classes-and-much-more/

“

The upgrade path videos from VI3 to vSphere4:
This is your best and first stop in you learning path, these 4 parts videos are very detailed and technical showing you step by step how your upgrade journey will begin and develop:

Live VMware vSphere Overview Webcasts

Live VMware vSphere Technical Webcasts

VMware vSphere Podcasts

VMware vSphere QuickStart Classes

On-Demand VMware vSphere Webcasts

 

“

That is a lot of content, I think both are great, and put together, should be a good source of information.

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ComputeDatacenter

Mid-plane is replaced on our blade enclosure

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

Last night, we undertook replacing our mid-plane in the blade enclosure that had problems last month.  It was the first recommendation from HP support after several hours of working with various teams, but both our internal team and our HP field service guys didn’t feel it was the cause.  Turns out, we may have been very wrong with our initial hesistance, but I’m getting ahead of myself. 

After a month of continued support and working the case, we escalated the case to a level where an engineer reviewed all the steps, troubleshooting, and case information to ensure nothing had been missed and to help diagnose the issue.  He came back to the original conclusion – that after all else was eliminated, the mid-plane must be the culprit.  So, we scheduled the replacement. 

The actual hardware replacement went smoothly and took less than an hour to complete.  The midplane is a lot more bulky the I expected when I first saw it.  It is a single piece of hardware with interconnects on both sides that connect blades to interconnect bays, power sources to power consumers and LCD display to the logic.  But, I guess I was surprised that it was a good 2 to 3 inches thick.  In my mind, I expected a single piece of copper sitting in the middle – yes I realize now that’s stupid.  

Something interesting occurred after replacing the mid-plane.  Apparently, Virtual Connect did not see the system serial number that it expected and so it reverted to its default configuration.  So, word of advice to anyone replacing a mid-plane.  Leave your VC modules ejected so that you don’t lose your domain configuration.  From talking with support, Virtual Connect needs constant communication with the OA to function (another dependancy we were not aware of).  The serial number stored reported by the OA from the enclosure is also very important to VC.  Its part of the configuration file for VC.  It all makes logical sense, but it was not spelled out in the support document detailing the mid-plane replacement.  

After unsuccessfully attempting to restore my backup for the Virtual Connect domain, I opted to build it from scratch by hand.  It took about an hour and half to do for my 5 blades, but I feel better about it.  I am still worried about not being able to restore my VC domain configuration, but I attribute that problem to the hardware replacement.

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ComputeDatacenterVirtualization

HP Blades, Virtual Connect & ESX considerations

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I may have already mentioned that one of our projects for the year is to transition our corporate ESX cluster from 2U hardware onto blades.  The process of transitioning does not come without some concern and some caveots moving to the blade architecture.  We feel that blades are a good fit in our case for this particular cluster (we run several ESX clusters).   Our VMware View deployment is our first production ESX workload on blade hardware.  We have learned a few things from this deployment that might be helpful.

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ComputeDatacenter

VMware View implemented

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

My co-worker, Jason, was tasked with our VMware View implementation and I’m glad to report that its been largely successful and more importantly easy to deploy.  I thought that now was a good time to reflect and share with you how we came to the decision to deploy virtual desktops, where we plan to use them, and what components we have implemented.  

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ComputeDatacenterProjects

Month of silence, because of a blade enclosure

by Philip Sellers
written by Philip Sellers

I can’t believe it, but its been almost a month since my last post.  And what a month its been around my work.  This has been one of the busiest and most difficult months that I can remember with the company.  I have my hands in several different technologies, VMware and our blades are just two of my primary responsiblities.  Over the past month, though, we’ve experienced a catastrophic failure of one of our blade enclosures.   The failure has only occurred once, but the fall-out from this has taken almost a month to work out.  And honestly, we’re still not through working out the kinks.  

Of course, my story has to begin on Friday the 13th…  Sometime around 9:00am, we started getting calls for both our SQL 2005 database cluster and our Exchange cluster.  After investigation, we found that the active nodes were both in the same enclosure and a third ESX host in the same was experiencing problems, too.  The problems were affecting both network and disk IO on the blades.  All of our blades are boot from SAN, so the IO had to be a fiber-channel issue.  

Several hours later, we were finally able to get enough response out of the nodes to be able to force a failover of services for Exchange, shortly followed by SQL 2005.  As I worked with HP support, nothing improved on the affected servers.  We were finally diagnosed with a problem mid-plane on the enclosure.  

 While waiting for the mid-plane to be dispatched to the field service folks, I requested that we go ahead and do a complete power-down on the enclosure and bring it up clean.  This required physically removing power from the enclosure after powering down everything that I could from the onboard administrator.  

After the reboot, everything looked much healthier.  The blades came back to life and everything began operating as expected.  After intense discussions on the HP side, we reseated our OA’s and the sleeve that they plug into on the back side of the enclosure.  Net outcome was the same – everything still operating well.  The OA’s nor the sleeve were loose, so we doubted that was the cause.  

One nugget I learned from HP support (please vett this information on your own), is that the Virtual Connect interconnect modules require communication with the onboard administrators (OA’s).  I’m still not sure I fully understand, but HP support did tell us that if VC lost communication to the OA, its possible that it caused our problems.  If this is so, this smells like very, very bad engineering and design…

Continued investigation on HP’s part has pointed us back to the original diagnosis – a faulty mid-plane.  Only by default did we return to that conculsion, however.  This is the only piece of hardware common to the problems.  Our only other conclusion was that this was a very bad, “hiccup” — which obviously buys us no real peace of mind…  

So, sometime soon, we will be replacing the mid-plane of our enclosure.   I have, of course, lost some faith in the HP blade ecosystem.  We have plans to migrate our corporate VMware cluster onto blades, as well as some Citrix and other servers.  Losing an enclosure like this has un-nerved those plans.  We were fortunate to have drug our feet  to only have 3 blades populated and serving anything at the time this happened.  I will post updates as we move forward…

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DatacenterNewsStorage

VMworld Europe 2009 Wednesday, day two, a view from a far continued.

by Roger Lund
written by Roger Lund

More information from around the web, here we go!

I started the day off by talking in the The VMworld Underground Podcast VMworld Europe 2009 – Wednesday Update

http://www.vmworldunderground.com/forum/topics/wednesday-vmworld-europe-2009

We talked about the following, this was the agenda.

“

1. VDC-OS – I get it now, and I can evangelize the benefits. I know, I’m slow. 🙂

a. vNetwork, vStorage, vNetwork

1b. vCloud

1c. vClient

2. Performance Cute VMs vs a Sun Sparc cluster circa 2002 – Scale out and Scale up efforts from VMware. Why don’t they use SSD drives in these newer benchmarks??!!

3 Citrix subbing Xen for Hyper-V – Citrix replacing Xen with Hyper-V by VMworld San Fran 09′?? Theron Conrey, thinks so and his arguments seem sound to me, a simple unfrozen caveman vExpert.

4. vExpert ?

”

Thanks to http://twitter.com/vseanclark@ http://www.vmworldunderground.com

——————————————–

http://www.yellow-bricks.com has a write up that shows the mood, titled : VMworld day 2 – Random stuff and Data recovery

“

What a day again, and it’s actually not finished cause within a couple of minutes the VMworld Europe 2009 party will start.

The VMTN Experts session was actually, in my opinion, pretty good today. We had way more people coming over that were asking questions or just came over to have a chat with one of the Experts! With the vExperts being announced this morning there was a good atmosphere, even Statler and Waldorf euuuh Boche and Laverick were having fun. For those on twitter and those who have been following the story about VMDougs snuggie, check the video Gabe published, lol.

“

————————-

http://vinf.net/ has a article VMworld Europe Day 2: Keynote that does a great job summing up what went on.

“

vSphere

There were some examples of Oracle OLTP application scaling that have been done in vSphere;

  • <15% overhead on 8 way vCPU VM
  • 24k DB transactions/sec

vStorage – extensible via API, storage vendors write their own thin provisioning or snapshot interfaces that hook into VMware.

vNetwork – Distributed vSwitch maintains network state in vMotion

vSphere = scale, 64TB RAM in cluster

Power thrifty (CPU power management features)

vShield zones follows vm around DRS – DMZ for groups of VMs (demos tomorrow + breakout)

vCenter HA improvements with VC heartbeat, today 60% of people running VC on physical box to isolate management tools from the execution platform, this delivers high availability for them.

vCenter Server heartbeat which provide an Active/passive cluster solution (but not using MSCS) and configuration change replication/rollback; works over WAN or LAN – IP based with floating IP address, efficient WAN transfers.

Monitors/provides HA for the following components;

  • vCenter database
  • Licencing server
  • Upgrade manager

vCenter Scalability; 50% increase in capacity with 3k vms and 300 hosts per vCenter, in addition the VI client can now aggregate up to 10 vCenter servers in a single UI, with search functionality, can report/search.

vCloud

In terms of vCloud, the federation and long-distance vMotion sound a bit like science fiction – but there was the same opinion of vMotion when it was first announced – look at it now, VMware know how to do this stuff

Long-distance vMotion is the eventual goal but there are some challenges to overcome in engineering a reliable solution, but in the meantime SRM can deliver a similar sort of overall service, automating DR failover with array based replication and an electronic, scripted run-book.

long-distance vMotion has some other interesting usecases, enabling a follow the sun model for support and IT services – I’ve written about this previouslyhere – this is a great goal and I would expand this suggestion to include follow the power, where you choose to move services around globally to take advantage of the most cost-efficient power, local support etc.

VMWare building an extensible and customisable portal for cloud providers based on Lab Manager which is likley to be bundled as a product.

The vCenter vCloud plug-in was demoed, this was more advanced that I had anticipated, with the target scenario being you can use one VI client to manage services across multiple clouds.

Virtual Desktop

this is another key initiative and focus of investment within VMware, building up the VDI offering(s) and providing centralised desktops as well as offline/distributed scenarios in future via the Client Virtualization Platform (CVP) – some of my more off the wall thoughts on that here

Key points;

  • Central management
  • Online/offline scenarios
  • Linked clone
  • Thick client push full VM down to machine
  • Patching is challenge – master disk + linked clones
  • Thin-app; makes patching/swapping out underlying OS easier as apps are in a “bubble”.
  • Leveraging ACE server; lock USB etc.
  • CVP – client checks back to central policy server (polling)
  • allows for self-destruct or leased virtual desktop, can’t run away with apps/data

VMware are making heavy investment in PCoIP- providing 3d graphics online offline for high-demand apps (video/graphics) Jerry Chan demoed some of the PCoIP solutions they are working to using Google Earth, whilst impressive – Brian Madden has covered these in more detail here but I did notice that Steve said vClient which is the 1st time I have heard that name.

Finally, there was some coverage of the mobile phone VM platform, which whilst I see what they are aiming for and the advantages of it to a Telco (single platform to test apps against), it’s personally of less interest to me. I do hope that VMware don’t go all Microsoft and start spreading themselves into every market just because they can need to have a presence (live search, live everything etc), rather than focusing on good, core products. Whilst they are the 1st people I’ve heard of seriously working on this I don’t know how it will pan out – but will keep an open mind, I suppose a sandboxed, secured corporate phone build with a VoIP app, some heavy crypto and a 3G connection controlled under a hypervisor could be appealing to certain types of govt. “organisations”.

All in, a very good keynote session – much better focused at the main demographic of the conference and there are some good sessions scheduled for today.

“

———————————————

http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com has their thoughts here.

http://www.thevirtualblackhole.com/virtual-tech/vmworld-europe-2009-day-two

“

It is day two at VMworld Europe 2009 and it has been an amazing event it has been so far. Once of the coolest things I saw and learned about was the Mobile Virtualization Platform or MVP. There was a demo of two virtual machines running on a Nokia N800. This was really cool to see the demo and hear about the technology. I have two cell phones, one personal and one business. I like to be able to separate my personal life from my professional life. This technology would allow me to have both phones running isolated and independently on a single device. Too cool!! I wonder how long it will be before we can start doing M2V or mobile to virtual?

“

————————————-

http://technodrone.blogspot.com posted on the New Maximums for vSphere

“

Announced by Steve Herrod today on stage in Cannes today:

  • 8 virtual CPUs
  • 256GB per VM
  • 40 GB/s network throughput
  • up to 64 nodes per cluster
  • up to 4096 cores to manage
  • full support for Distributed Power Management (DPM), which saves 50% Watts consumption during VMwark benchmarks

“

————————————-

And from VMworld.com the Wednesday keynote.

Wednesday, February 25 (9:00am -10:30am CET) Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and Sr. VP of R&D of VMware

Off for some more reading, enjoy all!

EDIT: some good info here as well, please check out http://blog.baeke.info/blog/_archives/2009/2/25/4104570.html

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