Archive for February, 2008
February 29, 2008
Once you’ve followed the installation process and have your active and passive nodes setup you may not actually be able to failover and mount the stores - it fails and logs an event 9317 from MSExchangeSA as below;
The fix is to register an SPN for each cluster node as per this KB article - why setup doesn’t do this for you I don’t know?
add-ADPermission -Identity “cn=exchange-cms,cn=computers,dc=mydomain,dc=com” -User “node-cl1$” -AccessRights WriteProperty -Properties “Validated-SPN”
You do this using the Exchange Management {Power}Shell Applet using the following command.
One thing to bear in mind - particularly if you are implementing a CCR cluster across mode than one physical site (single subnet required) you’ll need to wait for each node’s respective AD Domain Controller to replicate the changes.
Once that was completed I could fail over the cluster nodes perfectly.
Posted in CCR Nodes, Ex2007 SP1 Update, Exchange, Exchange 2007, Reference, Windows, Work | No Comments »
February 29, 2008
As noted here and here, they’ve done it - lets hope they don’t stuff it up - Platespin have a good roadmap in my book - particularly around virtual DR/BC with their Forge product.
Novell had, and to some extent still do have very good technical products but they just make such a mess of integrating them all and making it easy to deploy and support which is one of the reasons MS beat them in the server wars…. the virtualization wars are the current battleground!
Posted in Fingers crossed, Novell, Platespin, Purchase | No Comments »
February 27, 2008
As the Hoff posts here and on VMTN here. the proposed vulnerability that you can manipulate and possibly compromise a VM during a VMotion process isn’t exactly major, it’s clever.. but - like anything if you don’t follow the best-practice recommendations then you expose yourself to these risks… same reason they recommend you lock your server room or don’t have blank passwords - this attack is akin to gaining physical access to the hardware or being able to sniff a physical switch port - in this instance, it’s “virtual” hardware.
VMWare have always recommended keeping the VMotion traffic on a separate VLAN or network.
the other vulnerability where VMTools can be compromised on is different, but again preventable.. and not enabled on server instances of VMWare.
Posted in ESX, Geeky, Security, VMWare, VMotion, vulnerability | 1 Comment »
February 27, 2008
Cool site here of a company called image metrics, they produce systems to map facial expressions to computer models and graphics for films and games.
show reel on this page
Cool stuff.
Posted in 3D Graphics, Animation, CGI, Computer Imaging, Geeky | No Comments »
February 27, 2008
I’ve had this problem for the last week where if you try to download a file in firefox the download status window doesn’t display although the file actually downloads.
you can fix this by going to %appdata%MozillaFirefoxProfiles and deleting the downloads.rdf file.
Posted in firefox | 2 Comments »
February 27, 2008
A bit of a disappointment; we’re trying to do a WinPE 2.0 CD/DVD based installation for our Windows 2003/2008 standard blade servers in an HP c7000 enclosure.
Installing from a .ISO image presented to the iLo via the virtual media applet is dog-slow (5-10 times slower than from a physical CD/DVD- why is this? - surely its technically possible to make this access run faster and GigE chipsets are cheap-as these days. I’ve been through every combination of switching/duplex/port config and even via a cable directly into the Blade OA.
The same issue seems to manifest itself on traditional rack mount HP servers - the iLo just isn’t fast enough to make this a workable solution, unless you are really patient.
I know we could use the RDP and do it as a PXE type installation over the network to each blade, but this doesn’t really achieve what I want…
Most customers maintain an OoB (Out of Band) network to which all of the management interfaces (iLo, DRAC, etc.) are connected to. the reasoning for this is obvious; if you loose your main core switching network you can get access via a totally different physical network and path to assist in troubleshooting.
For this same reasoning I would like to use this method to build servers from a master boot CD/DVD image, you can present a .ISO image to a server via the virtual media applet on the iLo. We have a fully end-end build process that sets up the HP array controllers, flashes BIOS and installs the OS and drivers etc. from a CD/DVD.
We just update the boot CD .ISO file as required and its flexible and it doesn’t rely on any deployment infrastructure (PXE server, RDP server etc.) so we can port it between customers and data centres, VM’s and physical machines and do a bare-metal builds without requiring any build/network infrastructure in place.
This isn’t just limited to a Windows OS - I tried the same with an ESX installation; took over an hour (compared to 5-10 mins from a local CD)
Posted in Automated Installation, BL460c, Datacentre, Disaster Recovery, GigE, HP, HP Blade, Rant, Unattended, WAIK, Windows PE, Work, blade, c7000, iLo | 12 Comments »
February 27, 2008
Have been playing with a few new widgets, and I figured out how to add HTML code into the pages that wordpress.com hosts.
If you need to do it - just add a “Text” widget and then you can put any HTML code you like in that and it gets processed as part of the page load.
So, for now I’ve added clustrmaps - only takes a couple of mins - instructions here
I’ve also added Feedburner for my RSS feeds, I’ve seen a big spike in traffic to my blog over the last week
I’m trying to figure out where it is coming from… the default wordpress.com stats (where this site is hosted) don’t really go into much more detail than number of hits; and it doesn’t seem to tally up with the search-engine results or click referrals - so maybe that will shed some light on it.
Otherwise pop a comment on this post and let me know what you find interesting and I’ll try to tailor some content around your needs, the How to deploy a virtual machine from a template seems to be the most popular post so far.
Posted in Geeky, Networking, New Blog, Web 2.0, Wordpress, clustrmaps, feedburner, hosted blog, stats | No Comments »
February 26, 2008
Interesting article here on some stress testing VMWare have done running Exchange 2007 under virtualization on VI3.5.
It’s working.. .and working well, now - official support?
Posted in ESX, Exchange, Grid, IBM, Microsoft, Outlook, Performance Stats, Reference, VMWare, Windows | No Comments »
February 23, 2008
Stumbled across this site earlier; looks like there is some good practical information here if you are looking for how to handle Exchange backup and disaster recovery.
Sites like this are so much more valuable than the usual vendor white-paper approach as they show people’s real world experiences, mistakes, etc.
This is an employee from a commercial data recovery organisation, but this kind of resource is good for information sharing with the community…. and if it really goes wrong and you need to get into raw disk data recovery you have a level of confidence in their services and knowledge… an example of how blogs can deliver “business value”.
Posted in Disaster Recovery, Exchange, Reference | No Comments »
February 21, 2008
Martin’s post here prompted me to blog something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
Virtualization projects and services are cool; we all understand the advantages in power/cooling and the flexibility it can bring to our infrastructures.
But what about support, if you are a service provider (internal or outsourcing) you normally need to be able to offer an end-end SLA on your services. typically this would be backed off against a vendor like Microsoft or Oracle via one of their premium support arrangements.
From what I see in the industry, with most software vendors especially Microsoft there is almost no way a service provider can underwrite an SLA as application/OS vendors give themselves significant scope to say “unsupported configuration” if you are running it under a hypervisor or other VM technology… Microsoft use the term commercially reasonable in their official policy - who decides what this is?
I would totally accept that a vendor would not guarantee performance under a hypervisor - that’s understandable and we have tools to analyse, monitor and improve (Virtual Centre, MOM, DRS, increase resources etc.). but too many vendors seem to use it as a universal “get out of jail free card”.
Issues of applications with dependency on physical hardware aside (fax cards, realtime CPU, DSP, PCI cards etc.) In my entire career working with VM technology I’ve only ever seen one issue that could be directly attributed to being caused by virtualization - and to be fair that was really a VMTools issue; rather than VMWare itself.
Microsoft have an official list of their applications that are not supported here - why is this? speech server I could maybe understand as it would probably be timer/DSP sensitive - but the rest? Sharepoint? I know for a fact ISA does work under VMWare as I use it all the time.
Microsoft Virtual Server support policy http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897613
Support policy for Microsoft software running in non-Microsoft hardware virtualization software http://support.microsoft.com/kb/897615/
Exchange is specifically excluded (depending on how you read the articles)
· On the Exchange Server 2007 System requirements page it only mentioned Unified messaging as being unsupportable in a virtual environment http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa996719.aspx
· Yet on TechNet it is clear stated that “Neither Exchange 2007 nor Exchange 2007 SP1 is supported in production in a virtual environment” http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb232170(EXCHG.80).aspx
Credit due to a colleague for pulling together the relevant Microsoft linkage
But I know it….
a) works fully - I do it all the time.
b) Lots of people are doing this in production with lots of users (many people at VMWorld US last year)
c) VMWare have a fully-supportable x64 hypervisor - It’s just MS that don’t
What is the industry going to do about this?, I asked this question of peers a lot at VMWorld and at BriForum; and to be honest everyone has the same concern but have a few different approaches;
Dont’ tell/ask - 99% of the time a tech support rep won’t know its running under VMWare/a.n.other hypervisor so why complicate matters by telling them - could of course back-fire on you!
Threaten - “If you won’t support under VMWare we’ll use one of your competitors applications”; however this only really works if you are the US govt. or Globocorp Inc. or operate in a very niche application market.
Mitigate - reflect this uncertainty in an SLA, best-endeavours etc. this would kill most virtualization efforts in their tracks for an enterprise customer.
The same support issue has been around for a long time; Citrix/Terminal Services, application packaging, automated installations, etc. are treated as “get out of jail free cards” by support organisations…
But whilst there are some technical constraints (usually only affecting badly written apps) with terminal services and packaging, virtualization changes the game and should make it simpler for a vendor to support as there is no complex runtime integration with a host OS + bolt-ons/hacks it’s just an emulated CPU/disk/RAM you can do whatever you like within it.
So - the open debate; what do you do? and how do you manage it?
Please comment…
Posted in Citrix, ESX, Exchange, Geeky, Microsoft, P2V, Performance Stats, Rant, Terminal Services, Virtual Center 2.5, Virtual Grid, Windows, Work | 4 Comments »
February 20, 2008
There is a new site here (disclaimer: it does seem to be promoting a commercial service, but has some useful information that has been put into the public domain); describing some methods to roll your own P2V backup approach; I’ve not read in detail yet; but looks like Frane Borozan has solved some of the challenges I’ve encountered in the past automating the Free VMWare Convertor tool.
When I get some time I will revisit my build a better test lab series (and update it!) I hope to be able to integrate some of Frane’s ideas.
Thanks to Techhead for passing on the link; we worked together on the platform underlying the Build a better test lab series and he did a lot of work on the P2V and post-P2V automation tasks - he’s got a lot of handy scripts for doing this on an HP platform
Virtualized DR is going to be big this year; I have a long line of customers with this high on their list of priorities… Both for cross site 100% VMWare implementations and for the ability to backup/restore physical platforms to VMWare grid in a DR situation.
It just makes so much sense; no delay whilst racking & stacking recovery kit or problems restoring to different hardware etc. your admin’s can even do it from home - which can have some significant advantages in the event of a natural disaster like Katrina or floods like we had over the last couple of years in the UK
PlateSpin Forge is something we are seriously looking at as well as Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery Server Edition (who win a prize for extending the longest, most annoying product name! despite acquiring it from Veritas).
Will be an interesting year; I’m sure Sungard and all those recovery centre facilities will be moving to a grid/resource rental model rather than pure rack/floor space and retained hardware on-contract.
Posted in ESX, Fluid datacentre, Forge, Grid, Handy, P2V, P2VDR, Platespin, Symantec Recovery, VMWare, Virtual Center 2.5, Virtual Disaster Recovery, Virtual Grid, Windows, Work | No Comments »
February 20, 2008
Along the same lines as the handy Exchange 2007 reference posters I blogged about a while ago; there are now similar offerings for Windows Server 2008.
These are quite handy, and I’m all for visual aids 
Download them here.
Thanks to Brett for the handy linkage
Posted in Handy, Windows, Windows 2008 | No Comments »
February 19, 2008
It seemed to be taking an age to load my blog pages, so sorry about that - I’ve removed it for now.
From looking at my blog stats, not sure if that’s why I got 3 times the average number of visits yesterday the How to deploy a virtual machine from a template post suddenly got a shed-load of hits?
Posted in Blogging, Problem with my blog, Sorry, Widget, Wordpress | 1 Comment »
February 18, 2008
Post here on the terminal services team blog, about why they’ve changed this switch to /ADMIN in Windows 2008/Vista SP1/XPSP3.
This is the first I’ve heard of it, not a huge issue but I can see a potential problem where the /console switch is ignored, again not huge but a bit of an annoyance just to change a bit of syntax?
if you have device CAL’s and normally use the /console switch to remotely administer a machine to my understanding that doesn’t allocate a device CAL to your admin machine (or whatever machine you are admin’ing from at the time)
What if you use this method to administer terminal servers, doesn’t this silently ignoring just eat one of your device CALs (permanatly if you do it often enough from a machine)?
The article says:
The /console switch is silently ignored. You will be connected to a session to remotely administer the server.
The /console switch is silently ignored. You will be connected to a standard Remote Desktop session that requires a Terminal Services client access license (TS CAL).
Posted in Terminal Services, Vista SP1, Windows, Windows 2008 | No Comments »
February 18, 2008
Handy site here, where you can share plug-ins for Virtual Centre 2.5; I can already see a couple of useful ones (Storage VMotion and Add Port Groups).
This could be the start of a really useful community of user-contributed plug-ins.
Nice.
Thanks to Scott
Posted in ESX, Plugin, VMWare, Virtual Center 2.5 | No Comments »
February 12, 2008
James O’Neil has a good post here - an example of how he used ImageX to quickly build and maintain his own vista system image with his typical apps.
Also handy for reference as he shows how to split very large images across multiple CDs using the /split switch.
Posted in Automated Installation, IMAGEX, Microsoft, SYSPREP, Unattended, Vista, Vista SP1, WAIK, Windows, Windows PE, Windows Update | 1 Comment »
February 12, 2008
What a handy tool; if you download the app you can select which Microsoft OS/Applications you need patches for and it will download them all via the Windows online catalog to a source directory and then compile a script to auto install them all - it will even generate a .ISO file and handle dependencies and reboots - v.handy (and more efficient) if you need to quickly present it to a bunch of virtual machines with no Internet access or are on a site with slow internet access.
Excellent; now as far as I know Microsoft have no mechanism for doing this other than downloading all the patches manually… even with the Vista RTM images I built last week it had nearly 100Mb of OS patches alone!
Screenshot of the available options in the app - download it here
OS Updates - multi-language too
Office Suite Updates too
You can even get all the patches for everything and it will compile it into a DVD .ISO image - I’ll definitely be using this - hopefully you can use the info it downloads to slipstream update a vista .WIM image - will have to try that in a couple of weeks.
(original link from a post on slashdot)
Posted in Dial up killer, Home Network, Home Office, IMAGEX, Microsoft, Office 2007, SYSPREP, Unattended, Vista, WAIK, Windows, Windows Update, Work | 1 Comment »
February 11, 2008
Over here and here like the idea of combining FC and Ethernet in one chassis;
They’re not cheap though, more info and viewpoint here and spec here looks to be the next step up from 6500 series catalyst.
Cool
Posted in Cisco, Datacentre, Networking, Virtual Fabric, Virtual Grid | 1 Comment »
February 11, 2008
There’s an interesting post over on Forrester research blog by James Staten. he’s talking some more about data centres in a container; making the data centre the FRU rather than a server or server components (Disk, PSU etc.).
This isn’t a new idea but it I’m sure the economics of scale currently mean this is currently suitable for the computing super-powers (Google, Microsoft - MS are buying them now!) - variances in local power/comms cost could soon force companies to adopt this approach rather than be tied to a local/national utility company and their power/comms pricing.
But just think if you are a large out-sourcing type company you typically reserve, build and populate data centres based on customer load, now this load can be variable; customers come and go (as much as you would like to keep them long-term this is becoming a commodity market and customer’s demand you are able to react quickly to changes in THEIR business model - which is typically why they outsource - they make it YOUR problem to service their needs).
It would make sense if you could dynamically grow and shrink your compute/hosting facility based on customer demand in this space - thats not so easy to do with a physical location as you are tied to it in terms of power availability/cost and lease period.
New suite build out at a typical co-lo company can take 1-2 months to establish networking, racks, power distribution, cabling, operational procedures etc. (and that’s not including physical construction if it’s a new building) - adopting the blackbox approach could significantly reduce the start-up time and increase your operational flexibility
Rather than invest in in-suite structured cabling, rack and reusable (or dedicated) server/blade infrastructures why not just have terminated power, comms and cooling connections and plug them in as required within a secured warehouse like space.
Photos from Sun Project Blackbox
You could even lease datacentre containers from a service provider/supplier to ensure there is no cap-ex investment required to host customers.
If your shiny new data centre is runs out of power then you could relocate it a lot easier (and cheaply) as it’s already transportable rather than tied to the physical building infrastructure; you are able to follow the cheapest power and comms - nationally or even globally.
As I’ve said before the more you virtualize the contents of your datacentre the less you care about what physical kit it runs on… you essentially reserve power from a flexible compute/storage/network “grid” - and that could be anything/anywhere.
Posted in Blackbox, ESX, Fluid datacentre, Geeky, Grid, Grid Storage, Parallel, VMWare, Virtual Fabric, Virtual Grid, Virtual Switches, Web 2.0, Work, blade, datacenter in a box, follow the comms, follow the power | 1 Comment »
