Category Archives: IT

Frustrations with Hyper V

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From the title, you might think I would be griping about Hyper V, Microsoft’s server virtulization technology.  The truth is, I am only frustrated by the prerequisites of Hyper V, one of which is particularly troublesome.  Mainly, that you need to have a Virtualization Technology (VT) enabled processor from either Intel or AMD to run Hyper V.

This effectively makes it impossible to have a virtualized Hyper V test/development environment by ensuring that all of your Hyper V hosts are indeed physical.  With vSphere, it is very possible to run an entire cluster on a machine that has enough enough memory through using a product like VMware workstation.   In that scenario, you are limited to 32 bit guest operating systems on that cluster because vSphere requires the VT bit for 64 bit virtual machines.  In the end, that is A-OK because what you are truly learning about is how to setup and configure the hosts along with vCenter.  Hyper V is a fairly complicated beast, so it would be nice to be able to completely go through its configuration (not too mention testing configuration changes) in a virtual environment.

It’s been a frustrating day at work because of this requirement.  Supposedly, Sun’s Virtualbox could pass along this VT bit capability to the VMs you were running, theoretically enabling the the running of a Hyper V host in a VM.  I am here to tell you that doesn’t work, at least in the latest 3.1 release of Virtualbox.  Other than that, I have no beef with Virtualbox, its actually pretty speedy and simple.

–Nat

Nifty Little Dell

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I am really interested in the new Dell Zino HD.   First, I’d like to point out that it starts at under $250 delivered.  It is like the Mac Mini in form factor, but features better hard drive, memory and graphics card expansion and capacity while also featuring slower processors.  With its combination of outputs, its seems to be the perfect little  box for a media center PC that is mainly used to stream media.  Given its lack of expansion slots, one would be limited to USB TV tuners which is less than optimal.  This is not a huge deal if you’re mainly playing back recorded TV as you would be well served to use your bigger main PC in this case to install your tuners and capture drives.  For Hulu, YouTube and Netflix this guy would be awesome.  A front IR port would have been nice for the use of Media Center remotes and the option for blue tooth for nice wireless accessories.

From the front.

From the front.

From the back.

From the back.

Pretty robust expansion with the eSata ports – this thing would be an *awesome* base for a home server with 65W consumption maximum and the ability to attach eSata drives or multi disk enclosures for just mind boggling expansion along with the prerequisite and surprising at this price point gigabit ethernet.   Note you could would need an HDMI to DVI adapter for most digital panels and that you would need a mini stereo to RCA converter to get the 5.1 digital sound (just like the older Audigy cards) which is a bit of a pain, but at least the options are there.

Options go up to 8GB of ram and a 4330 discrete/separate video card.  These are both luxuries as the integrated graphics are fine and you really don’t need more than 2GB of ram in most user scenarios.  Especially as the CPU choices are pretty slow – the dual core upgrade would be a great one at the current price of $65.  For me that would be the only change I would make as I have easy access to more Windows 7 licenses.  If you are looking to make this into a real media box hooked to a TV, I would go for the 7 upgrade.

Bottom line, if you are looking for a little media box or home server, this is a great option.  Even as an inexpensive desktop, the package is pretty compelling.  Maybe I’ll buy one to check it out 🙂

–Nat

Interesting Insights in Linux Swap Configuration

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I was listening to my team discuss the configuration of new virtual appliance, based on Suse Enterprise, that would be created and delivered to the customers in .ovf format.   The software engineers had requested that the size be as small as possible for delivery reasons.  One of the heated discussion items became how much swap space should be created.  There are a lot of opinions on this and much of the “knowledge” the team had pointed to about 1.5x the amount of ram allocated to the VM.  In this case, the appliance is preconfigured to use 4GB of ram so 6GB to 8GB seemed to be the answer, a disappointment because the engineers had hoped the entire appliance would be 10GB.

This interested me, because I really didn’t know the answer.  Obviously, it is very important in a consolodated server environment to size these things right because your swap space is actually very expensive SAN space.  This article and its comments was very interesting on the topic. It boiled down to this formula as the easy standard:

  1. Swap space == Equal RAM size (if RAM < 2GB)
  2. Swap space == 2GB size (if RAM > 2GB)

The later comments were pretty good though, and they pointed out that Linux may be a bit dangerous in that when you run out of swap, processes start to be killed off to free up memory.  Also, that there are use case scenarios where using swap space is OK or at the very least preferable to random processes being killed.  Another thing to worry about is if you need to collect a kernel dump and where that might be going. It gets interesting when you treat disk as an expensive resource.  At home or in dedicated server environment, disk space is pretty cheap but in enterprise virtualization, where you might spin up tens or hundreds of the same image for testing etc., disk space is really expensive!

Windows appears to be down to about 1x memory size for swap now, which is good.  I still go for 1.5x there, myself.

If you happened to be curious about what they settled on for swap space with 4GB of ram, the answer is 5GB.

–Nat

Converting a 2008 R2 Server to Virtual

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Get this – that doesn’t work yet!  I had the same error as popped up in this thread and evidently the work arounds are not too pretty.  Word to wise is to create an R2 VM on the virtualization platform you want to be using.

It appears, reading through the release notes for vSphere 4U1 that 7 and R2 are at least officially supported operating systems now.   So get right on that vCenter update, then your vSphere server updates.  You know the drill!  At least these should be the last significant OS releases from Redmond for a couple years 🙂

–Nat

Frustration with Lab Manager

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A large part of my new job has been helping with architect a large VMware Lab Manager 4 implementation.  This has proven to be fairly annoying when deploying Lab Manager in a big way.  It is important to keep in mind that the main design challenge and constraint of nearly all virtualization solutions is the back end disk, configured in VMware as “Datastores.” Some of the main frustrations we are currently facing:

  • Lab Manager blatantly disregards VMwares own best practices when it comes to disk allocation – we are talking about 2TB LUNS as a minimum and facing the issue of using VMFS extents.  Horrible!  You are almost forced to use NFS, which brings more support complications to the table as you can no longer rely on calling VMware as the primary support vendor.   How this can be when VMware sells and and supports it?  You would think VMFS would be the recommended file system for any VMware solution until they provide the ability to create and maintain NFS Datastores from within vCenter.
  • You can’t use thin provisioning in Lab Manager. Arguably, this would be more useful than Linked Clones, which just create more management headaches than they are worth in a bigger deployment.  I am not alone here in thinking this.  We are deploying unique VM’s with ~200-500GB of auxiliary disk.  Having this all thick provisioned upfront is harmful, especially as users have the ability to make clones of these – or even worse, check them into the library where they would take up that space again and be *required* to be on the same Datastore.
  • Even though Lab Manager devs are well aware of how they are bound by datastore limitations and know full well the way that vSphere overcomes many of those challenges, they don’t provide a way to seamlessly use storage vMotion either within Lab Manager or external to it.
  • Lab Manager could provide for automatic load balancing for Datastores and Networks, but it doesn’t.  Instead we have to trust users to do this for themselves.  That’s just silly, the users don’t care about these things and therefore no amount of training will get them to do this on a consistent basis.  I’ve already mentioned that we can’t fix overloaded Datastores without user impact, and Lab Manager doesn’t even help us preempt it.
  • It would be great if we could take actions on flags, for example once a datastore reaches 70% full we disable to the ability to create VM’s on it.  That would help keep us away from the situation where a LUN drops offline because it is packed to the gills.
  • Disable Linked Clones all together.  They make it more complicated than its worth with 100′ s of self provisioning users and tens of Datastores.  It also incredibly inhibits VM mobility.
  • A way to have a centralized template store that admins can put VM’s on but no one else can.

The items above are really inhibiting our ability to make good use of Lab Manager.  It is clear that this piece of software was not built with large scale deployment in mind.  It also features too many design compromises that hamper the overall value of running vSphere as a whole.  This is epitomized in a conversation I just had with my boss.  When talking about Lab Manager, we are constantly talking about the problems it is causing us.  With vSphere, we are talking about how the technology allows us to over come challenges.

We need a solution not a constraint, dammit.

–Nat

SMTP & Comment Goodnes

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This blog is slowly growing up and getting more complex.  Today I have fixed the SMTP issue that meant I didn’t know when I had comments to approve and added a change that should send you an email when your comment has “cleared” moderation and then will send you an auto-reply when someone else comments on that blog post.  Two plugins and one email address was created to make this functional.

First, I installed and activated a plugin called Configure SMTP that moved the mail function out of PHP and onto the SMTP protocol that I know a bit more about.  This also allowed for much more granular mail settings, including using gmail as an SMTP relay.   In order to do this, a functional gmail account needs to be setup.  If you get an email from teamjuchems@gmail.com in the future, now you will know why 🙂

Second, the WP Comment Auto Responder plugin was downloaded and activated.  This should, theoretically, do a better job of keeping you in the loop as far as comments go and also email me when comments are posted.  Previously, I would only get emails when a comment was awaiting moderation.

Remember to add teamjuchems@gmail.com to your address book!  Getting these emails will be worth it, I promise 😀

–Nat

Wall Mounting the Dell 23″

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I finally got around to mounting the LCD in the workout area to the wall.  This meant that I could move the center channel speaker back onto the shelf where it belonged, starting the transition away from the current layout that includes the glorious old 21″ Sony Trinitron that I bought in 2003 for the princely sum of ~$562.  Free shipping, of course.  Which was important, give its packaged weight rating of 80lbs.

Anyway, this is my first attempt at a gallery like this WordPress.  I think it turned out pretty good, actually.

–Nat

I’ve been Zuned!

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With the big trip to Manila looming and the lack of a smart phone seriously reducing the level of technology I have been carrying around, I decided to take a peek at Craigslist for either the smaller flash Zunes or an even older 30GB hard drive based model.  I found an ugly yet functional brown 30GB Zune right in downtown St. Paul, I met the guy over lunch and I now have a Zune of my own.  Why a Zune?  Here is my top ten list:

1. It’s not an iPod – no iTunes required.

2. Even the oldest Zunes are feature complete – they keep getting new firmware.  Try that with your iPod.

3.  The Zune Pass.  $15 a month, you get unlimited music from the Zune store PLUS you get to *buy/keep* 10 tracks a month.  You can have this used by up to three Zunes and three PCs simultaneously.

4. Seriously cheap accessories.

5.  It is not an iPod.  I can hook it up to a bunch of different PC’s to sync music to it and evidently from it.  I’ll be testing this out more later.

6. FM + FM tune tagging.  I like listening to the 93x morning show and *if* I get the Zune pass, I like the idea of just snagging a song title on the way into work and having it automatically pull the song down when I get to work.  I’ll be taking the bus to work soon and this should work out nicely.

7.  Pretty big screen for video and a solid amount of storage.

8.  Wireless syncing for leaving it in the car yet having new music put on it.

9.  It was cheap.

10. It comes in Brown.  Best. Idea. Ever.

Do you see how well it coordinates with our fall placemats? Priceless!

Do you see how well it coordinates with our fall placemats? Priceless!

–Nat

PS:  Not an iPod.  This me showing my nonconformity.   That’s right, by choosing Microsoft.

Quiet down your PC

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This is a topic of conversation that Sean and I have been discussing lately.   What makes this so frustrating is that even if you buy really nice components, when you assemble them the PC tends to be noisy when compared to some $400 Dell or HP PC.  I’d even go so far to say that some of my cheaper builds have been quieter than my more expensive ones.  That and all the PCs I build for Jeff Lemaire seem to be whisper quiet, frustratingly so compared to the rigs I build for Kristin and myself.

To that end, I have set out to quiet the PCs in the Juchems home (thanks to Sean for bringing this up in his own quest to cut down on PC noise pollution.)  Some things to keep in mind when building your own quiet PCs:

  • Buy a video card with a three or four pin fan.  Two pin fans are not speed controlled and therefore will spin at one (typically annoyingly loud) speed.  This prevents control of fan speed via software as well.
  • Enable automated fan speed management in the BIOS, sometimes referred to as “Smart Fan.”  This will spin down your CPU fan and possibly any other fans plugged into the motherboard headers for power when system temps are cool.
  • Pay attention to the Db (decibel) rating of the fans you are buying.  Try to stick to fans that are ~28Db or lower.
  • Spin your fans slower.  This is a example of how to do this from Silent PC, a site dedicated to making your PC run as quietly as possible.  As for myself, I just modify a three pin to four pin adapter buying switching the yellow and red cables in the female end.

I recently purchased an inexpensive video card from the online forums as part of package of inexpensive computer parts.  I didn’t pay close enough attention – the fan on the little x1650 card was two pin and spun incredibly fast and loud.  As this card is likely to go into my moms computer (hey, I might want to fire up a game on it for some easy LAN action back at the farm) it needs to be much quieter – this little $20 card was filling a room with sound and that made it pretty worthless.  This card doesn’t consume much power so only a little airflow is really needed and the fan was really pushing at 12v.  So I performed the mod linked to above.

See how the yellow matches up the red and vice versa? By default, they would match up.

See how the yellow matches up with the red and vice versa? Prior to the mod, it was red to red and yellow to yellow.

The tools I used to complete this modification were a paper clip and a box cutter.  I used the paper clip to push in the “fingers” that held in the pins on the female end and then used the box cutter blade to push those fingers back out before reinserting the pins.  If you are attempting this, you’ll get what I mean by looking at it 🙂  I was able to carefully push the two pin female connector from the video card onto the three pin adapter without any other modification.

Since I performed the mod, the fan can no longer be heard.  It should be spinning with 5v rather than 12v now, meaning just under half as fast.  Now it will serve its purpose perfectly.

One word of warning – using this adapter as a pass through now will likely roast something like a hard drive.  Make sure there are only fans downstream of your connector.  You can daisy chain these four pin fan adapters to accommodate all of your case fans and you should only need to modify the first connector.

–Nat

VMware Workstation 7 Released

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Workstation 7 went live last night and it looks like it brings plenty of interesting things to the table.

  • Windows 7 Support w/aero, OpenGl1.4 and SM3 hardware acceleration
  • OpenGL2 support for Windows XP
  • ESX Server Support

With a beefy enough workstation, you could setup a complete ESX cluster with shared storage and actual running 32 bit VM’s (it appears that VMware is still not making VT and AMD-V available to guest operating systems, which would prevent you from testing out Hyper-V.  Virtual Box purportedly supplies this functionality, but I have not tried it.)  That is pretty darn cool and a great resource given that a bunch of expensive hardware isn’t required to run through training labs, etc.

Windows 7 support is cool and I am sure it will continue to improve over the next couple minor releases.  It is also good to see that XP is still getting some love in the form of increased 3D support.  I wonder if that includes 64 bit XP guests?  Guess I’ll have to find out 🙂

This also means a new version of ACE, the image management tool, was released which I will be checking out…

–Nat