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

Tagaytay Taal Volcano excursion

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Kristin and I were not too adventuresome while I was visiting her in the Manila and for the most part this is because the Philippines is not very tourist friendly.  The island was fairly devastated during World War 2, given how heavily the Japanese defended it, and that seems to have created a vacuum of things and places worth seeing.  Furthermore, the transportation infrastructure is very lacking, it takes about two hours to get out of the city to anywhere and the places Filipinos recommend seeing are typically over ten hours away by car as there isn’t a real highway system.  Or it could be that what you want to see is on another island, in which case your best bet is to go by plane which is fairly expensive.  Even our little trip out to a volcano was pretty expensive due to the fact we had to get a car and driver for seven hours to complete the journey at 1,200 Pesos (roughly $25) per hour.

Anyway, we made a trip out to the Taal Volcano which you can read some more information on here.

On to the pictures!  🙂

That was our big trip.  With sun shining down on us, it was actually still fairly pleasant but warm and we drank a lot of the water we had packed along.  Seeing people from all around the world going up and down the mountain was interesting as we saw folks from Europe, the middle East, Asia and of course the U.S.

It took about 40 minutes and 200o Pesos ($40) to get the horses and 3000 Pesos ($60) for the 20 minute each way boat ride.  On the way back out boat driver was a jerk and we got pretty wet.  I don’t know if we missed a point where we were supposed to tip him or what exactly happened.  A vendor tried to ding us for 50 pesos each at the top of the mountain for “a refreshing drink for our guides.”  Surprised by this, we declined which seemed to upset our non-english speaking guides, but I think we over tipped them with 100 pesos each when we got to the end. It is hard to know when and how much to tip when everyone has their hand out.

We went for lunch at a place a coworker had recommended, Mushroom Burger.  It was OK, but I think we prefer our burgers to only be beef or pork 🙂

On the way out and back we observed the slums, new developments, crazy traffic, pineapple fields and over all congestion that is typical of the area around Manila.  On the way back, we must have looked quite the sight to our cab driver, falling asleep and tipping all over the back seat.  Who knew it would take so much out of us to ride up a hill on horses?  I think it was mainly the heat.  I managed to burn my forehead pretty convincingly.

It was cool to go out of our comfort zone a bit, it would have been nice if more activities like this one had been within reach of the city.

–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

Not your typical Texas Roadhouse

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Kristin and I were looking for a place to eat and this place caught our eye.  I mean, it’s awesome in the U.S. right?  Maybe a Manila franchise?

Not quite authentic.

Not quite authentic.

So, not really.  At least they had $1 beer!

There we are, eating outside in November!

There we are, eating outside in November!

I was hoping for real deal Chicken Strips...

I was hoping for real deal Chicken Strips...

Ultimately it was tasty, but we should have known it wasn’t going to be as good.  There was no line and no tasty buns.  They did have some pretty tiny peanuts that were free, though…

–Nat

Huge malls in Manila

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It is intersting that here in Manila, one of the recreational acitivities is “malling.”   The malls are epic in size (think Mall of America, but almost twice the size) and connected to other malls and shopping areas.  I was looking for a movie theater in one of these labyrinthine structures and ended up in the wrong mall by going up the wrong escalator.  Like the MOA, many of the stores are in the mall multiple times.  They don’t seem to have the multiplexes like the U.S. has, but if you are willing to walk to a different mall, the big movies are still playing every twenty  minutes or so.

These malls are seething with people and every mall boundary is defined by a security checkpoint?  Its a little unsettling, but being a big white guy the don’t even check me.

–Nat

Paranormal Activity – don’t watch it at home!

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Kristin and I have been enjoying the big malls here in Manila, but I was really wanting to go to a movie.  That’s something that we both really enjoy but don’t make the time to do much back in the states and since we are supposedly on vacation here we looked up the listings and found a movie we would *both* enjoy.  Twilight is evidently huge over here and has overtaken many of the screens, leaving few choices.  I had read a good red box blog about Paranormal Activity, and since Kristin had been gone for Halloween when I typically try to watch a horror movie, this seemed like a good choice.  Paranormal Activity was a fantastic choice as it wound the audience tight and was a well shot and written horror movie.

The movie is about a couple who deal with a demonic haunting following Katie, the female protagonist.  Micah, the male protaganist and boyfriend who can handle whatever is going wrong in his home, decides to film and communicate with the demon.  There are only two other people in the movie and they have only bit parts.  Realistically, the best part of the movie is when the camera is set still and covers the entrance to the bedroom and the bed.  The movie is completely shot with a handheld (albeit professional grade) camera, so be prepared for some wobbly camera shots.

I get really immersed in horror movies and know that they are especially awesome when the entire theater audience gets into them.  My previous best experience at a horror movie was at a showing of The Ring, when the whole theater was gasping and nervously chuckling altogether – someones phone rang in the theater about half way through, which resulted in a short scream.  Well folks, that happened again with Paranormal Activity and it was fantastic. 

The audience was really into it and by the end of the movie, everytime we cut to a night shot the audience would start to chatter nervously and and that enourmously dialed up the tension.  When the good stuff happened, the screams filled the theater.  Speaking of the good stuff, the effects are great and I was really impressed to see that the director and editor refrained from cheap “jumps” by  not doing stuff everytime they panned the handheld camera around.  That added to the tension rather than diminishing it.

Kristin and I were creeped out all night by this movie and even into this morning, talking about what some of the things meant and how it was supposed to be interpreted.   We were very glad we didn’t watch this by ourselves, in our home.  Any couple that chooses to do that and genuinely gets into the movie is setting themselves up for a bad night!

Everything is OK after the last night.

Trust me.

A solid A for this one.

–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