Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Have to admit it I’ve been a bit slow to get on the whole 2.0 bandwaggon – YouTube/Facebook/Blogging other than following a lot of blogs for a couple of years.

But I have now arrived, and found a use for some of it 😉

I recently purchased a Blackberry 8800 from eBay to try it out.

I’ve always been a Treo or Windows Mobile user and hated Blackberry with a passion; mainly because I don’t like the way you have to have an extra data “service” to use their forwarders and a BES etc.. but thought I’d check out the new Blackberry handsets as colleagues seem to rave about them (thats a whole future post..)

Anyways;  the handset had a fault which is tricky to explain but easier to demonstrate. It seems to stem from a loose connection and the handset reboots itself when tapped in a certain way.

So, rather than risk sending it back and the vendor not understanding or being able to reproduce the fault. I took a quick and dirty video using my digital camera (finally found a use for that feature ;)). and uploaded it to YouTube – sent the link to the vendor and they agreed it looked faulty and would need replacing.

No hassle, no argument no fuss and it was an easy way to show them how to repro the fault without being there in person.

video here if you are interested (might want to turn off the sound my voice sounds awful IMHO!) 😉

Anyways big recommendation for Phone Efficient who sell reconditioned/new handsets via eBay… great service and quick to respond, and refunded the return postage costs. Very recommended!

If you’re an infrastructure person there are all kinds of business drivers and company schemes that mean you are often getting mad-cap requests** for changes to your nice, stable, secure infrastructure that lets everyone get on with their job and not have to worry about it.

Not all of them make sense, hopefully most of them are worthwhile but they all need to be done NOW!.

Now, as much as they would like you to, you’re unlikely to give John Doe, head of marketing full access to install complicated software like Microsoft Symantec CA WizzBang Enterprise v666sp4 into your production environment without some kind of testing.

Why?*

• if the production system falls over once someone has installed it people are going to come and beat you until you get it going again
• It’s seemingly innocuous & lightweight (the salesman said so…) data exchange agent that you need to install on all your key hosts may have some nasty incompatibilities with your standard installation – for example it breaks the AV agent or vice-versa, it needs a .net framework that is incompatible or untested with your production .net apps.

Herein lies the problem, you need to install it to check it out, run it against your standard configs, builds, apps etc. and achieve a reasonable level of confidence that the moment you click setup.exe it won’t be a case of not seeing your family again for a long time as servers and networks come crashing down around your ears.

The traditional approach to doing this, and I say traditional as this is what I’ve seen MSCS and all the big consultancy orgs and vendors recommending. Is to get a bunch of servers install the OS and the new app and see what happens.

This has a number of problems in my eyes.

It’s a vanilla/fresh install, it doesn’t have all the upgrades, patches, badly uninstalled apps, lurking data corruption issues that your production hosts have been exposed to.

Change control – great you’ve got it, and everyone has been on the ITIL courses but there is ALWAYS deviation from standard config.

I’ve yet to see any installation that looks exactly like the CMDB says it should, It’s both a management and a technical issue;

• Engineers are people, if someone is on the on-call rota and something needs fixing at 3am they may hack away at it to get things running again, it doesn’t necessarily mean they can remember every non-successful change they made the following morning when they update the problem ticket and incident report.
• Every app under the sun want’s to auto update itself these days, are you really 100% confident you have regression tested every combination of Windows Updates etc. – particularly security updates where there is a security compliance driver to get them out ASAP.
• There is a huge amount of inter-dependency in Windows infrastructures, apps rely on authentication, which relies on AD, which relies on a bunch of .DLLs, which rely on an OS, which relies on sub-components that rely on drivers, frameworks, runtimes etc. if you build from scratch can you really capture all of them – particularly on those hosts that have been around since the dawn of time and nobody knows exactly what they do or, sometimes where they physically (apart from that contractor that left last week :)). are but when they go wrong you know about it straight away.
• someone may have adjusted permissions or group memberships in AD or on a server at some point in the past in a way that would cause that app to fail but would not be picked up by just installing a server and the new app.

I’m not advocating spending so much time testing that the change you wanted to implement is out of date by the time you’ve finished; you’ll never catch everything but within this group of posts I’m hoping to propose a more pragmatic approach using copies of real systems and real data rather than just making some up and hoping for the best.

it’s always easier to install something in a clean environment than in an existing one.

*are you new here?

**For example; “Hi, are you the computer people? We’ve decided to re-brand the company this week and we need to change the Active Directory domain name thing to wizzynewcorpname.net, oh yeah and we need it doing at 1pm tomorrow in-line with the press release, thanks <click>” (yep, that’s a real example!)

huh?

Now this looks like quite a cool idea, if I read it correctly the SDCard fits any standard camera etc. but you can associate it with a number of WiFi access points (home network, cloud etc.)

any pictures you take it buffers up on the card and if there is a recognized WiFI AP in range with an Internet connection it automatically upload the pictures to your choice of web service – Flickr, Facebook etc.

or you can do the same sort of thing to your home PC.

Interesting idea, and not /that/ expensive @99USD – although that’s likely to translate to £100 using the weird US/UK exchange “rate” for technical kit that all manufacturers seem to get away with use.

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/eye-fi/

Although I’m not sure I’d want all of the awful pictures I take uploaded for everyone to see without me filtering them 1st 😉 and I wonder what it does to the battery of the device its inserted into?

the following article details how HP are consolidating 14 datacentres into 1 and taking a smart approach to cooling.

Rather than uniformly cool the datacentre thousands of temperature sensors installed in racks feed back readings to the cooling control system so hot spots can be automatically cooled.

Be cool (ha ha) if HP made this an open specification or product that you could pull all the readings from the datacentre racks and individual servers/blades to control your HVAC systems.

This is ideal for "dynamic" datacentre environments or grid based systems where you might ramp up performance/utilization (and thus power/cooling requirements) in a set of blades and have the HVAC automatically compensate rather than having to physically install the kit with sufficient dedicated space/cooling from day 1.

http://www.techworld.com/green-it/features/index.cfm?featureID=3764&pagtype=all

Interestingly, also mentions the utility power supply being more expensive and unreliable in Bangalore than in the US so they are supplementing the utility power supply with Diesel generators which somewhat harms their overall carbon footprint argument.

Guess the government must be building big comms infrastructure in India to support the booming tech industry over there, cheap labour/construction cost etc. is probably how they forecast such a quick ROI compared with the US/RoW.

And surely, if your datacentre is in a country with a hot climate you’ll spend/use more power over the year than hosting in somewhere like Iceland?

Might be useful to someone, some handy hacks and scripts for doing useful DHCP things, I always found MS DHCP servers lacking these sorts of interfaces to do have DHCP help with "clever" things on Windows infrastructures – particularly in migrations.

http://blogs.technet.com/teamdhcp/default.aspx

These kinds of sites are an example of the good ways blogs can help improve companies images by allowing you to communicate in a manageable fashion to people at the coal-face.

I’ve subscribed to Dick Morrell’s RSS feed for donkeys now, partly cos I find his rants entertaining and mainly because they contain some useful information about interesting OSS projects, heck I even used and donated to Smoothwall in the days before cheap ADSL routers and still use smoothwall/IPCop as a quick way to get some basic firewalling into my VM test environments.

I first encountered Dick when he was at Smoothwall and his inter-personal skills were highly entertaining, if a little tactless when dealing with people on their mailing lists/IRC (I’m sure there’s an archive somewhere if you are interested)

When I saw his post about Eileen Brown* on Monday I wondered how long it would be before the buns started flying, I’ve met Eileen a couple of times and was quite sure she wouldn’t just let it slide.

But does it really warrant legal action? can’t we all get along </hippy mode> I’ve seen far worse & personal come from Dick’s hand to others on the net!

Linkage here so you can make your own mind up…. maybe my signed Smoothwall Xmas card will be worth something on eBay now 😉

http://blog.dickmorrell.org/  and http://blogs.technet.com/eileen_brown/archive/2007/10/19/evangelism-or-marketing.aspx  and http://blogs.technet.com/jamesone/default.aspx

*Another blog I follow as it’s very useful for Exchange stuff

I have downloaded Windows Live Writer as it seems pretty well recommended for people wanting to compose posts off-line.. so here it is 1st blog using it!

Sorry, will try to come up with something more compelling to write about!

I have a couple of posts in the pipeline about building a Virtualised test lab environment on low-end HP SAN hardware, yes an MSA1500!! I can almost hear all the VMWare people withdrawing in horror! but it does work and I can explain why.. more in a couple of days.