Category Archives: IT

VMware Technology Network Subscription – Bring it Back!

One of the biggest beefs I’ve had with VMware over the last few years, and I apologize to everyone to whom I’ve already ranted about this to, is that they don’t have program that is like Microsoft’s TechNet.

What’s so great about TechNet, you might ask?

With the TechNet subscription you get access to everything that Microsoft offers  – with full retail keys.  This isn’t some time bombed trial, this is the real deal.  You get access to all of their software from the distant past right up through early release betas of their software – like the upcoming Windows 8 and Server 2012.  This is essential for long term test VMs and testing software with what can be complicated, involving installs like Active Directory and Exchange, for example.  Also, you get access to the creme of their productivity software crop like Project and Visio.  Best of all its “only” $200 to start and $150 to renew.  If that sounds expensive, remember that a single Server 2008 R2 license can  run you $700 alone, and the productivity software can also run hundreds of dollars.

Why might Microsoft sell this subscription if they could get so much more money for each project by forcing you to buy real licenses for real products?  It’s pretty simple, really. As individuals, we are not going to buy this software at these prices, and would then turn to free or cheaper alternatives.  Microsoft must know that  TechNet sub is something a very technical person is going to buy – like IT Professionals.  What IT Professionals use at home directly influences what they use at work – and business purchases are Microsoft’s bread and butter, they’ll tell you this to your face no matter how much it seems like they are about conquering the home PC.  Having your home PCs run Windows and Office is just another way to keep business running what their employees know and can be efficient with.

Back to the VMware Technology Network Subscription (VMTN).  They used to have a similar program that let you use full versions of their software in your home and labs and many attribute this program with the rapid adoption of VMware in the Enterprise space – since you could play with it on the cheap and gain confidence in it, then it made sense to champion it within your organization.  VMware discontinued it about five years ago (or so…) when they made clear that Windows GSX Server (VMware Server) and VMware player were free products that could be used.  GSX has totally gone the way of the dinosaur now, and while VMware player is immensely useful in some tasks, it doesn’t allow you to play with the Enterprise features that you might actually want from VMware.

VMware does offer a free version of their bare metal hypervisor, ESXi.  The problem?  This Hypervisor also does not allow you to experiment/implement any of the Enterprise features that differentiate VMware from the rest – and it doesn’t even allow for any scripting automation, another of VMware’s strengths.  This very much limits the usefulness of the platform.  It should be noted that you can get sixty day trials of just about everything VMware offers easily online, but the issue there is that the “big” offerings like SRM and VDI are so intricate in their setup that it can take easily longer than sixty days to get them fully off the ground if you are just doing it in your free time.  You also have to completely scrap the entire setup, from ESXi to vCenter to these addons as they are all tied to that same sixty day time frame.  Want to do it again?  You need a new email address to sign up for the trial again!

The elephant in the room is this – Microsoft is very serious about taking VMware’s ball and going home with it.  Virtualization was the #1 focus of Server 2008 R2 SP1 and it appears that Server 2012 will continue the trend.  IT Professionals that are using TechNet will have easy access to using Hyper-V in all of its glory (and 2012 is looking much easier/sweeter than 2008 R2 SP1) already.

Even with my VCP and years of VMware experience along with a fairly sizable investment in specialized RAID hardware for native disk redundancy in my home lab, Server 2012 looks mighty attractive for my home platform.  It doesn’t need to be this way, VMware.

I am not the only one who thinks so.

Agree?  Raise your voice.  VMware is missing a big opportunity here and anyone invested in VMware from a technical expertise level or from a shareholder level knows the dangers of competing with Microsoft (just ask Novell or the other companies they have left bloodied in their wake.)  Do the right thing, VMware.  Let me pay you a little money so I can recommend your products to those with the big checkbooks.

–Nat

New Phone

This wasn’t going to be that big of a deal.  Kristin and I just made a pact to step into the current decade and get data plans on our phones – and get phones worthy of data plans.  Blackberry’s circa  2007 just didn’t do enough with the data plan to make it worthwhile.

It bears noting that we were able to move to unlimited data (2GB highspeed, 50MB capped roaming) and 1000 anytime minutes (up from 750) for $10 a month.  You have to love T-Mobile for their pricing if not their coverage, which is definitely a disadvantage.

In any case, Kristin gave me a new phone (permission to purchase one) for my b-day.  Requirements?  T-Mobile.  Qwerty. 3G (for reasons mentioned later, beyond the data rate).  Not an iPhone  because they have no 3G on T-Mo and they are flippin’ expensive, plus we are not already in the Apple ecosystem and have no desire to join it.  Android but only an ICS (Android 4.x) or soon to be ICS because the mess that is Android 2.x + carrier customization makes me want to gag and I don’t want to have to root my phone to make it usable. Windows Mobile, very dependable interface/performance, not a lot of handset options though.   Blackberry, best QWERTY in the business but fading from relevance and the newer handsets (needed for T-Mo 3G) are also pretty darn expensive.

Well, the Android options were too expensive and I deemed the H.M.S. Blacktanic an unwise investment.  That left me with WinMo (some would say I was going that way all along… maybe, I do miss my Zune but I think it was a justified move) and there happened to be one phone that met my requirements, the Dell Venue Pro.  I’d love to link that to the Dell site which was live last week, but it has since disappeared which probably has something to do with the phone being cancelled on March 8th.  Sigh.  I still bought one from Amazon though.

Thoughts on the phone to follow soon!

–Nat

Building the VT Class Server

Based on my previous experience in teaching my Virtualization (VT) class, I knew that I needed to have something portable to host the various VT environments on.  This is what I have assembled for this years class, after testing it as a pure Hyper-V server it is clear that it is very capable.

Processor:

AMD 1090t, Six Cores @ 3.4 Ghz (200 Mhz mild OC)

Motherboard:

MSI 880G ATX Motherboard

This has worked out really well as the onboard video means that I don’t have to worry about a video card and the NIC was automatically discovered by both Server 2008 R2 SP1 and ESXi 5.  This along with the 1090t set me back “only” $170.

RAM:

16GB (4x4GB) Kingston Hyper-X DDR3 1333 ($60)

Hard Drives:

1x Samsung 470 128GB SSD ($115 used), 1x OCZ Petrol (Indillix based) 128GB SSD ($110 AMIR), 1x Hitcahi 250GB 7200 RPM Drive (old), 1x Seagate 7200RPM drive (older), 1x 16GB USB3 Drive (For ISO files under Hyper-V only, connected to an add in 1x PCIe USB3 card, $16)

The hard drives were really the crucial piece.  Under ESXi 5 and prior to the SSD drive investment creating VMs was a fine experience when done one at a time, but when ten groups of students tried to do it the system just crawled along due to the lack of disk IO.  It took nearly two hours just the students to activate Hyper-V and reboot the VMs a couple times.

Just this weekend, under stress testing, I was able to create ten Server 2008 R2 SP1 VMs under Hyper-V simultaneously and it only took 10 minutes!   That’s a huge improvement!

Case/Power Supply/DVD Drive:

Cooler Master Elite 310, Cooler Master GX 450W/Samsung DVD-RW.  $30, $25, & $18 respectively.

So, for about $550 I’ve built a PC that can act as a server for my class and that I also have access to 24/7.  It draws about 200W under load and spends its “spare time” running the BOINC Client and helping to save the world from various maladies.  I am pretty happy how it turned out, I think it is fairly balanced from a CPU/RAM/Disk standpoint.

–Nat

 

 

Linked Clones: Lab Manager vs vCloud Director v1.5

One of the big “features” added to vCloud Director that allows it “parity” when compared to the outgoing Lab Manager is the re-introduction of Linked Clones.  These Copy-On-Write (CoW) disks provide for VMs that are actually little more than differencing disks from a base disk.  Using Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions, this is common to preserve disk space for all of your XP/W7 desktops you are spawning and allows you to better utilized small, expensive SSD drives.

Well, in LM and vCD, it is supposed to save space too. One beef I have with the current implementation in vCD is that it is actually worse when compared to LM.  The root of the issue, you see, is that in Lab Manager you could cleanly create a VM from a template, this would stay thin provisioned and it would act just like a classic VM, no linked clones and no CoW.  Well, in vCD you always get a linked clone no matter how you provision the VM if your Org has fast provisioning enabled.  This is also true for consolidations, where in LM you get a clean VM as result and in vCD you continue to get a linked clone, chain length of one.

In the long run, this is going to negatively impact disk space utilization.  As you are forced to always write to the differencing disk with Linked Clones, LM actually offered a nifty hybrid approach that allowed for overwriting the base disk when the VM was freshly provisioned or freshly consolidated.  This is a step backwards that I hope VMware will address.

–Nat

I found a big Prime Number!

“Dear Primefinder,

Congratulations! Our records indicate that a computer registered by you has found a unique prime number. This computer is running BOINC, is attached to the PrimeGrid project, and is assigned to the Proth Prime Search. What makes this prime unique is that it’s large enough to enter the Top 5000 List in Chris Caldwell’s The Largest Known Primes Database.

Since you have auto-reporting selected, the following prime was submitted on your behalf:

Added 105269 : 4695*2^781278+1 (235192 digits)

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me and we will surely resolve any problem.

Once again, congratulations on your find. Thank you for participating in PrimeGrid.

John Blazek of PrimeGrid”

Very exciting! 😀

–Nat

A Simple Tool For Installing Windows

More and more frequently, I don’t put an optical (cd/dvd) drive in many of my computers – especially it is a completely new build or a new build into an old case that has just an IDE drive but the motherboard supports SATA only.  In the past I have done many an install from USB thumb drives of windows operating systems.

There is an issue with using USB drives for installs, however.  They are tiny.  Constantly, I am spending more time looking for the USB thumb drive than actually installing the operating system.

This morning, an epiphany.  I looked into my back pack and what was there?  Two external portable hard drives.  You can use those too, I discovered.  As a bonus, it is actually faster than  my janky old 4GB thumb drive to copy files too and installation time is still vastly quicker with a hard drive than it is using a DVD or CD.  A couple links (I used the first successfully, follow it step by step and it will work…)

http://www.istartedsomething.com/20081104/tip-make-your-pdc-2008-usb-hard-drive-a-bootable-windows-7-install-disk/

http://sqlblog.com/blogs/john_paul_cook/archive/2009/01/19/11249.aspx  <– xcopy commands for those that favor that.  NTFS support, too.

I hope this helps you as much as it has helped me – finally I can quit fuming about where that little black thumb drive is.  I’ll probably start misplacing my hard drives now, though…

–Nat

Remember Remember November…

Wow, that went by ridiculously fast.

Some of the fun things that happened in November:

  • Gabe started attending daycare.
  • We drove down and spent a rather uncomfortable night in Ames so that we might surprise Liz on her birthday (the 5th) at a surprise Tailgate party.  Success!
  • Gabe got a head cold during this weekend and proceeded to start sleeping incredibly horribly.  Screaming when he woke up at 3am, he also woke up angry every two to three hours.
  • Sean came and got to experience this first hand.  At least he was a great sport about it and it was great to hang out with him in person for the first time in too long.
  • Gabe attained his five month birthday, which we celebrated with some great pictures, including a series of him rolling over.  He now does this regularly.
  • We had a weekend with nothing to do and I hung a bunch of Christmas lights, even some way up high that I had sworn to Kristin that I would not do.  Hopefully she is happy 🙂
  • I discovered the fun (?) of participating in distributed computing contests.  Sound interesting?  Check out the forum at http://forums.anandtech.com/forumdisplay.php?f=15
  • We discovered that if your infant wakes up and is upset at night, it’s likely that they are not getting enough sleep during the day.  More naps for Gabe, and a 6:30 PM bedtime rather than 8PM made a noticeable improvement in his sleeping behavior.
  • Thanksgiving!  We traveled to Iowa and enjoyed seeing family and friends and helped my family decorate for Christmas and buy a Black Friday TV.  While it may be hard to believe that they had bought that huge Console HDTV eight years ago, what is harder to believe is that we wrangled that big guy into the basement without causing lasting damage to a)ourselves b) the TV or c) the house.  Good work!
  • Kristin and I did some cross shopping in electronics for each other for Christmas during the week leading up to Black Friday.  It’s safe to say we’ll both be happy with the result.
  • Liz is handy with the electronics and such and is gaining confidence there.  Nothing magic was happening behind the big TV and I think she is realizing that it might be daunting but ultimately very doable to hook up and configure all these things.  Impressive 🙂
  • I bought one thing on Black Friday.  The week leading up to it was much more engaging.
  • The Vikings sucked all month and it didn’t matter if I listened, watched the game with Derek and Meghan or at Dale and Diane’s.  Wow.
  • Diane continued to bless us with her assistance, it’s hard to believe what would we would do without her.
  • Gabe decided that he wanted to roll over and sleep that last night in November and has been doing it the couple nights since.  It is freaking crazy how much nicer this makes our nights – he only wakes up once!
November in a nutshell with likely many important things missing…
–Nat

SSD State of the Union

Anand from Anandtech.com tweeted this – Pick a drive from Intel, Crucial or Samsung and avoid nearly everything else. I would personally add Kingston to the list to buy.

Firstly, I think the 64GB drive size has been really popular as it is the first tier you can get that really gives you a reasonable amount of space to work with. Basically, those vendors fall out like this (the first three are notable because they largely use controllers they engineer themselves or source from those making Enterprise drives):

Intel: Reliability is tops, performance and features are second, and they want fat margins (admittedly) and so they make you pay more per GB.

Crucial: Performance and features are of equal importance as reliability, pricing is fairly to very competitive. They want into the market.

Samsung: Reliability is tops, performance and features are second, and they really do most of their sales to OEMs like Apple so their NewEgg type pricing isn’t too competitive outside of their 64GB drives.

Kingston: Price is tops, followed by reliability, followed by performance. They are maybe 50% (or less) as fast as others on random IO writes (not a large part of normal workloads…) but they are reliable and the pricing cannot be beat if you can deal with large rebates.

 

For example, my SSD usage has looked like this: I have a 40GB Intel SSD in my main PC for my C: drive. I bought it on a great sale for ~$70 when the only other real options were Intel 80GB for ~$200 and the OCZ crap using Indilix and the freshly minted Sandforce controllers that are seemingly notorious for having issues and constant beta fixes rolling out. I had to move things like my page file and Windows 7 User Profile folders to a secondary drive. That said, despite the paltry write speed it is incredibly responsive and holds my 7 install plus all my productivity apps like Office with ~30%+ free space. I would be really comfortable on a 64GB drive.

On Kristin’s PC I wanted her to not have to monkey with moving things around and folder redirection and so bought here a 96GB Kingston 100V+ drive.  The plus indicates slightly better performance than the vanilla 100V line and the size should allow her to use the drive exclusively with a secondary 7200RPM drive for things like Steam, Guild Wars and Starcraft 2 and pagefile.  This drive came in at $95 after a whopper of a $50 mail in rebate which came very quickly.

My Dad’s PC has an awesome storage subsystem with a Sata 3 (the latest and greatest SATA standard) 64 GB Crucial M4 as a cache drive with a 1TB Western Digital Sata 3 Black Drive.  The SSD cost about $115 and has been on brief sales in the ~$90 range.  The great thing about this approach is that my Dad can deal with a simple and spacious 1TB C: drive while enjoying the speed of a SSD 90% of the time.  For those that follow storage performance on a larger scale, 64GB of fast SSD for a terabyte of SATA is a nice spot to be, the vast majority of the time what you want will be cached.  The trade of is that 10% of the time (which is an edcuated guess) you are going all the way to the SATA to get what you want, so the first time you access a file and maybe sometime later you will have the performance of the slower spinning disk versus what you’ve come to expect of your SSD.

I’ve used SSD drives from Kingston and ADATA in other builds with good results – I think we are nearing the time when any ~$500+ build is going to include an SSD versus a pricey processor as having nice system drive does so much for general usage of the PC versus new CPU for anyone that already has a dual core or better.

–Nat

ESXi Whitebox Hosting

For quite some time, the blog has been running as an Ubuntu VM running in VMware Server on Windows Server 2008.  If you said “yuck!” – you’re right.   It is a decidedly 2009 setup that I wanted to update before a rapidly developing new Juchems makes working on projects like this a luxury.

Moving to VMware ESXi means that I will necessarily have the VMs running much closer to the hardware for better performance, and the most recent release has good support for many newer operating systems as VMs.  It will also be quite “headless” – no monitor, keyboard or mouse needed for 99.99% of the life of the server.

Perhaps the nicest part of using VMware Server vs ESXi was that it was an “all in one” solution where I could work on VMs etc without installing anything on the rest of my computers.  The downside was that it wasn’t particularly speedy, updated for newer operating systems and had one too many levels of “stuff”; VM/VMware Server/Windows OS versus the new VM/ESXi setup.

The “Old” hardware:

AMD 5400+ x2 (2.8Ghz dual core)

8GB DDR2 800 Mhz (4x2GB)

Gigabyte nVidia 430 Chipset ATX motherboard

160GB Seagate 7200.9 (160 GB Western Digital Raptor died a year ago or so…)

Onboard video & LAN

 

The “New” hardware:

Core i3 2100 (3.1ghz dual core + hyper threading)

8GB DDR3 1333 Mhz (2x4GB)

Gigabyte H61 mATX motherboard

250GB Samsung Spinpoint (will be joined by a 750GB Western Digital Green shortly)

On-CPU video/Intel Pro 1000 NIC

 

The old case, Seasonic 330W power supply and fan setup was kept as-is.

 

Having ESXi 4.1U1 install without much issue was quite a relief.  The onboard nic was not detected with the built the default ESXi driver set, but the Intel nic was obviously picked up without any hassle.

I think that 8GB is a sweet spot with a dual core processor.  More RAM and I would have felt an urge to go with a quad core – and spend more money.  The motherboard only has two ram slots so I am safe from that temptation.  I think that I’ll be able to run about ten vms on this guy, what they would all even be I can’t imagine right now.  Five with good performance will meet my needs for the foreseeable future.

The Migration

I copied the VMs first locally to my main workstation and then tried to simply upload them to the ESXi server.  This resulted in a scsi error when I tried to power them on – failure.  The next step was using ESX Standalone Converter to change the VMs from “workstation” to “server” VMs and I have to say that this tool from VMware works great in that regard.

The Ubuntu VM was stubborn in the fact that eth0 had the static IP configured but the new network card was known as eth1 so the blog was down for an additional ~20 minutes while I sorted that out.  The Server 2008 R2 VM moved over easy peasy but needed a VMware tools update.

All in all I was pleasantly surprised at how well it went.  TeamJuchems is now hosted on a completely modern hosting platform that should offer plenty of performance for the foreseeable future.

–Nat

WebOS – what could have been

What really makes money in our Information Age?  Software.   What’s the best way to sell software?  Sell a hardware device that only runs your software.  Apple, and their tens of billions of dollars in revenue each month is a poster child for this line of thinking.  The xbox 360 and PS3 are even better examples of hardware sold for a loss initially in order to lock in consumers for software sales.

HP could have gotten in on the pie if they had been a little (a lot?) smarter.

Just recently, last Friday, HP decided to stop making phones and tablets using an operating system known as “WebOS” that they acquired along with its creator Palm about a year ago for $1.2 billion.  WebOS is similar to iOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android in purpose but offers a few unique features like multitasking, for which it was built from the ground up.  In getting out out of the business, HP decided to take a huge hit on their Touchpad (iPad competitor) hardware, essentially writing it off to the tune $100 million, and sell it at epic price points of $99 and $149.

Just like that, their Touchpad became the tablet to get.  It couldn’t move at $400 (16GB)/$500 (32GB) but boy did people overload HPs website and beat each other up in Wal-Marts over it at this price.  It is a bit ironic that the day HP announces the end of the product that it becomes an item that no one can keep in stock.  It’s likely that the active webOS 3.0 userbase grew by an order of magnitude over the weekend, no joke.

They question becomes  – why didn’t HP take a loss to move the hardware in the first place?  Remember at the beginning when we talked about how software makes the world go around anyway… not to mention $40 cases and $70 “touchstone” chargers.  If the Touchpad would have come out at say, $150 and $200 based on capacity it would have been nearly as a big of a hit and would have attracted 1)many buyers and then 2)many app creators and then the classic 3) profit.

Instead, HP thought that for some reason people would buy their tablets at iPad prices despite lack of brand recognition (webOS?  wtf?), lack of apps, and hardware that is not freaking blessed by Steve Jobs.  It was born to be a loser with that plan.

No wonder HP stock dropped 20% on last Friday, the leadership of HP showed everyone just how dumb they really are.

–Nat