Blue Gears

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’ »

So you want to run VMware ESX or ESXi within VMware Workstation but you do not know if your laptop or desktop will support the functionality? It will work but if you do not have the proper hardware, it will run extremely slow, ie. take several hours to boot a VM.  So you will need to run a few tests to determine if you have the proper hardware. However, first a few ground rules:

Continue reading ‘CPU Checks Required for Running Virtualization Hosts within VMware Workstation’ »

I have had several Blue Gears blog sites and now have just this one. I have guest blogged at both ITworld and Cisco Subnet at NetworkWorld. While I would very much like to continue blogging at those locations, maintaining several blogs at the level required is a bit daunting, so I have centralized Blue Gears into just one blog moving forward.

I do not, at this time, plan on moving any of the content from these sites. However, any new material, will be posted to this centralized location and maintained within the Blog Roll Up within the Virtualization Wiki which is a companion to the Blue Gears blog.

I will admit, I am a GNU/Linux developer and proud of it, but my customers run windows systems. So where does that leave me? Generally, either programming in portable C/C++, Perl, Python, or TCL. However, I wanted to give Power Shell a try and outside of a few minor (okay major) issues it works quite well.

I documented some of my issues on my PowerShell for Windows and Linux developers TechTarget blog post, but since this post I have discovered other powershell issues.

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

Virtualization is all about redundancy. Redundant network switches, frabric switches, power supplies, and of course redundant hosts.  Recently, I had to reorganize my entire data center. I was removing equipment and moving equipment. I was trying to reduce everything to either a single rack or a pair of half height racks to save on space, power, and  cooling.

Continue reading ‘VMotion – Redundant Power Supplies Aid in Migration’ »

Blue Gears will be my place for posting reviews of books, blogs, and other articles in the realm of virtualization, secure coding, forensics, and other topics. This is my home for things that do not fit the requirements of my other blogs: either too long, unrelated topic, or too technical.

Thanks to Jason Boche (http://boche.net/blog) for sending me his WordPress plugins as well as blogsecurity.net for showing me how to hopefully secure my blog.

Welcome to Blue Gears, enjoy reading.