Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: Geeky
And you thought your ESX lab at home was big..
Posted by on August 7, 2008
Chad has an interesting article and set of photos here about the joint Cisco/EMC/VMWare lab they maintain to test v.large implementations.
Excellent stuff, makes any of my labs pale into insignificance, especially my garage geek temple.
I definitely agree with Chad that they should publish the details of solutions that didn’t scale too well as well as those that did; if only for the allies (EMC, VMWare, Cisco) 🙂 to get feedback on if the market wants those kind of solutions that didn’t work; or at least to show where there is room for improvement to focus dev/R&D effort – but validated.
11/8 Links fixed
Hey, I Broke Photosynth
Posted by on August 3, 2008
Lol, more sites should have error messages like this – this would be far more entertaining (but maybe less useful) than a PSOD or BSOD 🙂
Funky USB Device Entries After Using VM Converter..
Posted by on July 6, 2008
I’ve noticed this a couple of times, if you P2V a VM from VM Workstation to ESX using VM Converter – it brings across a virtual USB device which isn’t supported by ESX.. if you look at the properties you get the following amusing entries..
Now, I wish I really did have a funky USB dongle, or doohickey… sounds useful!
A Closer look at Green IT and Microsoft’s new Container Data Centre in Chicago
Posted by on May 24, 2008
Link here – good visualisation about 10mins in of how their new Chicago data centre is laid out internally.
With virtualisation breaking the traditional hardware/OS ties; this is becoming an increasingly appealing way of managing commodity compute grid resources for large organisations. Mike makes some good points about the de-comissioning of servers on a large scale where you are adding 10’s of thousands on a regular basis – you need to take them out at some point too, and that’s time consuming. at this scale of operation It’s more efficient to make the the container and/or datacentre the field replaceable unit (as I discussed a while back) in this scenario.
Also interesting point that water consumption may be the next environmental touch paper for legislation and disclosure for IT shops.
SpinVox: The Future of Voicemail
Posted by on May 20, 2008
SpinVox is changing the game for busy people..
I don’t know about you but I tend to treat my mobile (USA:cellphone) phone as my personal contact device, in that I use it to manage both my inbound and outbound communications and plug that into my daily work/life workflow.
Because I travel about a lot for business (and in my spare time also) I give everyone my mobile number, rather than a fixed line as its far more likely to reach me and I don’t have to track numerous voicemail/UM numbers, I also gain a unified call log and history on a single device so I can refer back over time to find numbers I would have otherwise lost.
I have a fax to email service for the same reason for the odd occasion I need to receive a fax… I can get it anywhere and file it electronically.
However the fact that people have my mobile number does not (for me at least) set the expectation that I will be at their beck and call, or answer on demand – I make use of caller ID to screen my calls, I’ll make no secret of that; I manage my workflow during the day and quite often other people’s sense of “urgent” is different from my own [unless you are actually my boss of course – when your calls will usually be answered directly], and at the end of the day I need to balance the needs (…of the many) people who want me to do something for them, and my ability to actually do so and carry on with my day to day workload.
So for example people that ring from lines with withheld numbers will almost always be allowed to go to voicemail, unless I am expecting such a call; I know most people have no control over corporate switchboards but I’ve never understood the logic of withholding caller-ID, especially from a large organisation as you can make the number almost anything, even a central or local office switchboard number if you don’t want to expose people’s regional DDI’s. it also works to their advantage as I’ll be better prepared to speak to them if I know what they want to know – clever as I am I don’t always know everything off the top of my head!
This often means I have a fair number of voicemail’s building up to listen to, and unfortunately more often than not the spare time I have to listen to the messages is whilst on a train or car when I don’t have a pen handy to jot down that number – or am more likely to leave the number written on the copy of the metro on the train.
Now, this is where I’ve found Spinvox really useful in the last couple of weeks; it’s essentially a paid-for service that you use to replace your normal o2/Vodafone/etc. voicemail service. you change your divert on busy/unavailable settings to point at an assigned geographical number (in my case in 0208 one, so it’s inclusive in any bundled minutes your tariff includes rather than a national rate 0870, 0845 etc.).
It offers the normal voicemail features where you can call a special number (again geographical, rather than national-rate etc.) to listen to the actual messages and set your greeting message etc.
But the advantage of SpinVox is it’s ability to convert the speech into text, which can be delivered to you either as an SMS text message or an email (my preference).
I was a bit skeptical at first, but I was very, very impressed after using the 7 day free trial. so much so that at one point I doubted that there was any technology behind it at all and that they were employing a large battery of English speaking monkeys to listen in and type it all up… their website assures me that this isn’t the case and they use a tiered architecture of several speech-text engines depending on the content as some are better at number recognition etc. (can’t find the original link to that article so will keep digging)
It also does an excellent job of transcribing phone numbers and extracts the caller-ID from the caller if it’s available so no hunting around for that elusive pen!
If there is a word in the message Spinvox can’t transcribe or has made a guess at it marks it with a “____” or (?) and if you want to hear the subtle intonation of the person who left the message, each message includes a quick code so you just dial the Spinvox retreival number and key in *03 for example and it will replay the message – a godsend compared to the usual next, next, next drudge with most voicemail systems.
For example – here is a real message left for me.. (names and numbers changed to protect the innocent, but if you really can do my extension cheaper than they can – please do call :)).
You received a new voicemail from +4420812312312:
———-
“Hi there Vinf my name is Bob. I’m calling from a company called XYZ Construction. We received your details via our website regarding your extension. I was wondering if you could give me a call back when you get the message. My telephone no. is 0800123123, in order to discuss the project further. Thank you, bye.”
– spoken through SpinVox
———-
Message received at May 8, 2008 1:25:55 PM
If you wish to listen to this message, call your voicemail on +44207xxxxxxx and press *08
For assistance, see www.spinvox.com or email service@spinvox.com
Thank you,
SpinVox
So, back to the point; email delivery of the text content of voicemail messages into my Outlook Inbox allows me to flag, follow-up, set reminders, file, delete etc. and integrate them into my normal daily workflow so I ensure I can manage any resulting actions.
Previously I’ve found where I have had a large number of unheard voicemail messages (due to holiday or long meetings) it takes longer than I’d like to listen to them all; as they often overlap or are irrelevant due to the elapsed time and let’s be honest people (myself included) tend to ramble when they are leaving information in brain-freewheeling mode on an answer machine, or just say it’s X – call me back, which isn’t all that helpful.
So dealing with such a pile of messages, especially when compared to the quick gratification of dealing with normal emails – where you can scan, easily re-read and file, mark for follow-up etc. means dealing with voicemail often fell to the bottom of my priority pile. This, in turn means I risk missing that one important message or take longer to respond to people (yeah I’m a fickle sort of guy – make my life easier and I’ll get back to you quicker… I’m sure I’m not the only one)
In meetings, it’s also ideal – because they’re delivered as SMS or email they also turn up on my Blackberry so I can glance at them during the meeting and make a value/balance decision on wether I should step outside to respond. Doing this in 1:1 meetings might be a bit rude as someone is dedicating their time for your use. But for larger meetings or conferences where you are not always involved or contributing to everything it’s a discrete way of making a judgement call on what requires your current attention.
Overall I’m very impressed, sometimes I’ve seen it take up to 10mins to deliver a converted message (maybe there really are monkeys involved :)), and it’s a bit annoying that the caller (on my o2 network anyway) gets a “your call is being diverted, please hold..” message rather than just cutting to Spinvox as it does with o2’s own voicemail service – but I guess that’s a network feature rather than Spinvox and it’s not a huge deal.
The billing is interesting, and to be honest I think a little bit unclear, as you are basically signed up once your 7 day trial is finished and I’ve not really had any visibility of how they bill other than a message on the last day of the trial saying my account had been charged £5, call customer services otherwise. I can only assume it’s doing this via reverse-SMS billing – for me, this is handy rather than having to manage another subscription and set of card details, however I could see that bothering some people.
Note: I have a “company phone” and don’t always see the bills, so I’ll probably be expecting a call from accounts at the end of the month to query it!
Another use which I hadn’t thought of is for deaf and people with hearing problems, this is ideal as they often make heavy use of text and email to exchange information as they are often unable to call people directly as not everyone has a minicom type setup, I see they are offering text to speech services
They also have a variety of blog/social network interfaces on the way; I don’t think these would be much use for me, but you never know… it takes a while to type these things up, but I’m pretty sure it’s clearer if I’m forced to think about what I’m writing than if I were allowed to ramble at a translator 🙂
In summary it’s an excellent service, and one that I would be happy to pay for myself (even if the billing process is a little unclear, to me and the other user’s I’ve polled anyway) I wonder how long before this technology is adopted by the carriers themselves… it’s got to be the next step, everyone I know hates normal voicemail. most current Unified Messaging systems I’ve seen don’t offer this type of functionality, they’re still geared towards dealing with audio content.
Lastly, one feature that could be quite useful is a web based system for listening to the actual voicemail messages from a PC, rather than dialling into the Spinvox system – although I wonder if I really would use this, it’s so accurate in converting the audio!
Steve Richards blog on work/life balance has a good post on dealing with email overload, that could be extended to take on management of voicemail if you combined it with SpinVox as I mention above – it all ends up in one place which allows you to manage it… rather than drown in it.
I’m not the only one finding it useful, some further reading from other SpinVox Users…
http://www.atmasphere.net/wp/archives/2008/05/14/with-spinvox-im-reading-your-voicemail
http://darlamack.blogs.com/darlamack/2008/05/how-did-i-live.html
http://www.womworld.com/nokia/3305/spinvox-a-lifeline-for-busy-users/
http://davestronach.wordpress.com/2008/05/02/spinvox-voicemail-to-text/
Running ESX 3.5 and 3i Under VMWare Workstation 6.5 Beta Build 91182
Posted by on May 18, 2008
Following on from my earlier post I upgraded my installation to the new build of 6.5. it un-installed the old build and re-installed the latest without a problem, took about 30mins and required a reboot of the host OS.
All my previously suspended XP/2003 VM’s resumed ok without a restart but needed an upgrade to the VMTools which did require a restart of the guest OS – all completed with no problems.
Now, onto installing ESX….
I used the settings from Eric’s post here to edit my .vmx file
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000”
monitor.virtual_exec = “hardware”
monitor_control.restrict_backdoor = “true”
Note – you need to select an x64 Linux version from the VM type drop down, if you have to go back and change it via the GUI after you’ve edited the .vmx file it overwrites the Ethernet card “e1000” setting to “vlance” so you need to edit again otherwise the ESX installer won’t find a compatible NIC and won’t install.
it was initially very slow to boot; 5mins on my dual core laptop with only one error – which was expected..
To improve the performance I changed my installation to run the non-debug version of the Workstation binaries (rename the vmware-vmx.exe to vmware-vmx-debug.exe)
note: this isn’t recommended unless you know what you are doing, VMWare will rely on the output from the debug version of the code if you need to report any issues)
It also seems to work for the installable version of ESX 3i… (although I’ve not quite figured out the point of that version yet :)).
Install prompt
it did fail with an error the 1st time round..
this was because I had specified an IDE disk as per the ESX instructions, I changed it to a SCSI one and it worked ok.
Finished..
The ESX 3i install has a footprint of about 200Mb on disk, and ESX 3.5 uses 1.5Gb.
I’m going to keep the 3.5 install on my laptop and will try to use linked clones to maintain a couple of different versions/configs to save disk space.. I’m sure I could knock up a quick script to change the hostname/IP of each clone – if I do I’ll post it here.
Why would you want to do this? well because you can, of course 🙂 and its handy for testing patch updates and scripts for ESX management etc.
I will also try to get a ESX DRS cluster running under workstation with a couple of ESX hosts and shared storage over iSCSI using something like OpenFiler as shown here. won’t exactly be production performance, but useful for testing and demo’ing.
Universal Power Supply for all your Electronics
Posted by on May 12, 2008
Engadget has a write up of a great new idea here, a universal and intelligent power brick from Green Plug that is capable of charging devices and shutting down when complete to save the planet, as well as display how much power is/has been consumed.
it’s an excellent and long overdue idea; unfortunately it requires the devices themselves to be aware and compatible – this area of technology cries out for an open standard to aid adoption in the same way that interfaces like USB and Ethernet have become ubiquitous.
I wonder if the “green” lobby and consumer awareness of efficient power usage will help to encourage this and push it on the market place, although it does look like the Green Plug technology is a single vendor owned and licenced solution, rather than an open standard – which would make buy-in from manufacturers difficult.
Getting buy-in from the major, competing manufacturers to adhere to a public standard must be an easier approach than a single partner – who could thus obtain a monopoly.
Although, as Engadget point out all the device manufacturers currently make a fortune from selling replacement power supplies so will they really be that bothered?
I for one would be happy to pay £50-75 UK pounds for a smart, universal power supply and for my various electronic devices to come without one in the box – I would simply buy one or two chargers as I need (maybe one for home one for the bag).
Even better if the charger is like a USB hub and can connect/charge several devices at once (ideal for a travel scenario), adopt the interchangeable plug method that Apple and Blackberry use for their chargers to support different countries/outlet types.
Reduces waste, power consumption and the big box of random and unidentifiable power supplies I have in my study!
Sadly this much collaboration between competing electronics companies for a “standard” doesn’t always have a good history (Betamax/VHS HD-DVD/Blu-Ray) ah well, I live in hope….
VMWare Workstation 6.5 Beta – Run Multiple Copies of Outlook/Exchange via Unity
Posted by on April 30, 2008
I use a single laptop for my day-day use, it has all the stuff i need, I run Vista and Office 2007, for our corporate mail we use Exchange like everyone else and I use Outlook Cached Mode to work online/offline..
My own personal email is also an Exchange mailbox – provided by fasthosts (why – well, because..ok?) the problem with this is that I can’t have a single copy of Outlook connected to more than one Exchange server at the same time or run multiple instances of Outlook (I’ve tried all the hacks and Thinstall etc.), and to be honest even if I could it would probably violate the security policies of all the involved organisations as it would be quite simple for an Outlook-aware worm to try to propagate itself across multiple organisations or harvest confidential details.
The problem is further compounded by the fact that I often work on long-term customer projects and have to have a mailbox on their Exchange system as well… which leads to multiple diary sync nightmare, maybe I’ll blog about that some other time).
So at present I have 4 Exchange mailboxes that I need to keep track of, auto-forwarding mail between them is a no-no, I used to be an Exchange admin and I’ve lost many bank holidays due to corporate->Hotmail NDR mail loops!
So, up until now I’ve had to run one full Outlook client and multiple OWA clients in a browser, which is ok as long as I’m connected to the Internet, but no good if I’m on a train unless I want to close and restart Outlook with multiple profiles, which is a pain especially when you are collaborating on a project between multiple organisations. To be honest as good as OWA 2003 is it’s no substitute for a full outlook client. (still waiting for Fasthosts to go to Exchange 2007, oh and enable EAS!).
So, anyway a solution – VMWare Unity, this is a feature like Parallels for the Mac which lets you “float” an application window out of a guest VM to the host desktop meaning you can use the applications without working within a single VM’d desktop window.
VMWare Fusion also has the same feature, but Workstation 6.5 is the 1st time its been available on the PC platform.
To use Unity you need to have upgraded the virtual machine to 6.5 “hardware” by right clicking on the VM in the sidebar pane (below) and install the latest VM Tools – it also only seems to support XP at present, or at least it didn’t work on the Server 2003 VM I had.
Boot the VM… and install the latest VM tools.
VM Workstation Screen – note VM is set to “Unity mode”
My Vista desktop (yes, I have the start bar at the right hand side – widescreen laptop!) with the popup menu for the VM, showing all the start menu for applications installed within in it.
the following screen shot is Calculator running from inside the XP VM but in a single window on the Vista desktop – note the red border and the 
icon, denoting that its presented via Unity.
It even shows up on the start bar with the correct icon; although this doesn’t seem to work until its been run a couple of times; I assume it needs to cache an icon or something.
it also seems to respect the window snapshots you get whilst Win-Tab between applications, even for pop-up windows
Technically I can use this to run n x Windows XP/Outlook 2003 VM’s presenting Outlook through to my Vista desktop and comply with all organisations security policies, as each VM and its respective copy of Outlook runs in isolation from each other with the relevant company-specific AV client (or at worst, the same level as if I were using a machine connected to a public network in that they all share a vm network) – I don’t enable shared folders between the VMs.
It’s still a beta feature at the moment, and there seem to be a few bugs particularly when resizing windows sometimes it doesn’t work properly and double clicking to expand to full screen overlays the start-bar on my vista machine.
And it does seem to get confused sometimes and not allow keyboard input, so you have to flick back to non-unity mode and then back to continue, and sometimes a reboot of the guest VM but it is an early build so I would guess this will be resolved.
As an added bonus VM Workstation seems to allow the Vista host OS to go into sleep mode even whilst VMs are running, this is something I’ve not had much luck with in the past – it would generally refuse to sleep when I closed the lid (but thats not a scientific comparison… it may have just been bad luck!)
So, the pay-off – 2 copies of Outlook (2003 and 2007) seemingly running on the same desktop, alt-tab works ok and you have access to all the functionality of both without having to switch between or run multiple OWA sessions and from a security perspective it’s not really any different from having 2 physical PCs in front of you (slight memory overhead, but my laptop has 4Gb RAM, so not a huge issue).
Opening attachments is obviously going to be a bit of an issue, as you’ll technically need an individually licenced instance of Office 2003 in each VM as they can’t (yet) exchange data between them… and that would compromise the security principal.
Opening a URL in Internet Explorer when Firefox is your default Web Browser
Posted by on April 3, 2008
I use Firefox for 99% of my Internet activities, however there are still some web sites and applications that won’t work fully (or at all) within Firefox.
Normally I use the IETab extension to render particular tabs within Firefox using the IE render engine.. this allows all my browsing to stay within one tabbed Window and is easy to use.
However we have an SSL based VPN for corporate access and I occasionally directly access some HP iLO’s Neither work well with Firefox; I like to spawn them both in a separate IE window to keep them separate from my normal browsing.
If I create a shortcut to these URLs from the desktop etc the default URL handler is Firefox.
So a quick cheat is to create a shortcut to IE then adjust the shortcut properties (right click, properties) and append the URL you want to open in IE under the ‘target’ entry.
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 
