Blue Gears

I actually have two home labs in use for Virtualization testing. The first is the traditional hardware lab, and the second is a lab built using one system. One stays at home and the other travels with me every where I go.

Traditional Lab

The traditional lab consists of the following:

• 2 DL380G5s with 2 ES5450s and 16GBs of memory each <- 3rd on its way soon
• IBM DS3400 SAN w/3TBs of Disk
• 2 Brocade 240E 4 GB Fibre Switches
• Several HP and Cisco GigE Switches
• 2 APC SmartUPS 2200RM
• DISC BluSafe as Backup Device
• 3 IOGear MasterView switches in a layered approach so that I have 2 monitors and 1 keyboard and mouse.

Within this more traditional lab I run 90% Linux systems with 10% Windows systems to support VMware vCenter, HPSIM, and a few windows and Linux desktops.

DataCenter within a Laptop

My other test lab, the one that travels, uses VMware Workstation 7. I run within it 2 teams, one for VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3, and one for VMware vSphere 4.  The HP 8510w Mobile Workstation has the fastest Duo Core processor for this type of machine as well as 8GBs of memory. In essence, I can run only 1 team of VMs at a time. The VI3 Team consists of:

• Smoothwall Firewall VM
• OpenFiler VM
• W2K3 for vCenter VM
• 2 ESX 3.5.3 VMs

The vSphere 4 Team consists of:

• Linked Clone from the Smoothwall Firewall VM
• Linked Clone from the OpenFiler VM
• Linked Clone from the W2K3 VM
• ESX 4.0 VM
• ESXi 4.0 VM

While the laptop is not the fastest available, it runs my second test lab with some performance issues, but still usable.

Now to upgrade the laptop to something with 16GBs and a Quad Core…. Maybe a MacBook Pro.

In my continuing story on upgrading to VMware vSphere it is possible to use Host Profiles even without an Enterprise Plus license, at least for a short period of time. Check out my Blue Gears blog on Network World for the complete story.

Read the ongoing saga of the next phase of the upgrade on the Network World Blue Gears site.

I have been trying to upgrade from VMware VI3 to VMware vSphere 4, but it is not as simple as that. First you have to upgrade VMware vCenter then upgrade ESX 3 to ESX 4. That all sounds wonderful, but I have one little issue. I am running VMware vCenter with MS SQL 2000, which is no longer supported.

So first I need to upgrade to MS SQL 2005 or 2008, but since I have to perform a pretty major SQL upgrade, I might as well go for the whole 9 yards and move my VMware vCenter server to Microsoft Windows 2008 R2. This decision however causes many other items to need an upgrade. Mainly some infrastructure items like my Samba Domain Controller so that it can accept Windows 2008 R2 domain members.

My first thought was to upgrade my Linux DC from Fedora 6 to CentOS 5.3 using the CentOS/Fedora Directory Server (DS) and the latest version of Samba, unfortunately, the latest version of Samba would not install without a recompile as it does not come pre-built for CentOS 5.3. Alas this led to a frustrating day or so, as I tried to get Samba to work with the DS which may have worked if I had known about the Samba option:

ldap ssl = Off

This option would have let me hook to LDAP without using SSL, which may be insecure but since they were running on the same host, it would be sufficient for my needs and allow me to add SSL later on. My lack of knowledge of this option lead me down a frustrating path.

Several weeks later, I once more had time, but also had to reinstall my laptop, choosing to go to Windows 7 led me to the same problems of joining the Samba DC. I spent a few moments installing Samba 3.4.2 on Fedora 11 x86_64 which lead to a major failure in Samba (unless you were running the x86 version). Since Samba 3.4.2 x86 works and I could compile this on Fedora 6, I went that route instead of upgrading the OS and everything. My Samba DC was thereby upgraded from 3.0.x to 3.4.2 running within a x86 (non-64 bit) VM. However, I also had to make two changes to Windows 7 to get the laptop part of the domain. Reference the samba site for those necessary changes.

These two finds (upgrade my Fedora 6 Samba DC from 3.0.x to 3.4.2 and the changes to make to Windows 7) allowed me to join my new VMware vCenter VM running Microsoft 2008 R2 to the same domain.

One decision to upgrade to MS SQL 2008 on Microsoft Windows 2008 R2 lead me to a search for the solution to how to join the new virtual machine to my Samba Domain Controller. Why not run a Windows DC? Because I have been running a Samba DC for over 10 years now and wished to keep my infrastructure from a radical change.

Now I believe I am ready to install VMware vCenter 4, migrate my databases from MS SQL 2000, and complete my migration to VMware vSphere 4. Much later I will consider moving my Samba DC from Fedora 6 to CentOS or more likely the latest version of Fedora but first they need to solve the x86_64 bug within Samba.

I was not able to get to my yard for 3 weeks so the grass was once more 4-5″ high and a bit damp from all the rain we had. My Neuton Power 6.3 mowed this down with no issues. The old Black & Decker CMM1000 in its heyday still would have taken 3 days to complete. While I took 2 days to finish everything with the Neuton Power it was not the lack of charge that slowed me down. But my own abilities to do everything in one day. Next time I fully expect to use just one battery charge for the entire yard. 1 charge got 3/4s of the field and the second battery wiped out the rest of the upper deck brush and the other half of the yard.  This included using the weed whacker attachment. I know it is hard to picture my yard but let me tell you this is a vast improvement and the yard looks much better now. Continue reading ‘Neuton Power — Still Positive’ »

I have documented my steps to go green within my small data center. But I have been going green with yard work for years as I have been using a battery powered mower for over 15 years.  But now I have found something much better and it will save me in charging costs moving forward. What is this? Neuton Power CE6.3 Lawn Mower.

Over 15 years ago, when I lived in Austin TX, Austin had a trade in program: Bring your gas mower in and we will give you a voucher to buy a brand new electric corded or battery mower. I took advantage of this and purchased a Black and Decker CMM1000 24 Volt lawn mower. It did yeoman work while it lasted even with all its problems. Continue reading ‘Neuton Power — Going Green with Yard Work’ »

In my desire to limit the amount of power my Virtual Environment draws, I am in the midst of decommissioning my DLT4 Tape Libraries in favor of a DISC Blu-Safe which holds 15 50GB Read/Erasable (RE) Blu-Ray disks. This unit draws less power than my larger Dell PowerVault 128T or the Breecehill Q7 I used previously while also much smaller in size so it can fit better within my reduced rack space design. Lastly, this device is USB 2.0 based and not SCSI based. So attaching it directly to a VM like I could with my SCSI device is not an option. Continue reading ‘DISC Blu-Safe to the Rescue’ »

In my previous post I explained how SVMotion saved the day, this blog post is about the need for storage fabric redundancy. Storage fabric/network redundancy makes simple upgrades work without the need to power off any VMs or virtualization hosts. My recent upgrade to a Brocade 240E went smoothly once I could access the device. Continue reading ‘VMware ESX, upgrade to 4GB Switch – Redundancy is what it is about!’ »

The last major modification to my datacenter occured on friday. I physically relocated my SAN and its UPS. I have been reducing the size of my datacenter, as I documented in VMotion – Redundant Power Supplies Aid in Migration, and started to document in Upgrading My SAN.  I was waiting on this move until the new, much shorter, fibre cables arrived. Which they did earlier in the week.

Continue reading ‘SVMotion Saves the Day on SAN Move’ »

I have been merrily going along my way developing a fairly massive XML file to be used by the PowerShell script I am crafting. After making several changes I have more comments on PowerShell to make.

Continue reading ‘Power Shell-isms continued: Tales from a Linux Developer Part II’ »