A NetApp Technical Diary

I’m very honoured and grateful to have been asked recently by Lisa Crewe from NetApp to put together a guest blog post on her NetApp blog. The first of these has gone live this afternoon, covering some of the fundamentals to “What is the Cloud”. I was quite keen to not talk specific products or solutions, but more the softer aspects of what you need to consider in order to start planning towards your own Cloud offering.

http://blogs.netapp.com/crewe_oncommand/2011/05/guest-post-what-is-the-cloud.html

General cloud, NetApp, W

We had a very good VMware User Group last month and I met some great guys. After my session on Tier-1 virtualisation, I had a good chat with Microsoft SQL expert, Andrew Fryer. He invited me to do a guest blog post on TechNet covering some of the detail I covered on SQL in my session. I’ve finally had the chance to put this together and he has very kindly posted this as a guest article on his TechNet blog.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/andrew/archive/2011/05/18/virtualising-sql-server-a-second-opinion.aspx

General microsoft, microsoft sql, sql, sql 2005, sql 2008, technet, tier-1, virtualising sql

This year I have boldly put forward for a couple of sessions at VMworld. I’d love the opportunity to share some of my thoughts, knowledge and experience with a wider audience, so please feel free to put a vote forward towards me! I’ll be covering off 3 different topics…

2621 The Secret to a Successful Cloud – People!

This covers a bit more detail in Cloud architectures. Everyone can now give you the dictionary term for what a “Cloud” is, but I still think very few people are helping you translate that into how to actual put together your own Cloud. It isn’t about software, or services, it’s about people and procedures. You can have a fully functional Cloud environment very easily if you sit down and work out what you want to achieve and what processes/procedures need to be put in place. I’ll be talking a little about frameworks and continual service improvement models as well as IT maturity. The key takeaway is that you and your colleagues are the key to you successfully deploying a Cloud infrastructure!

2141 Future vAdmins

This follows on from a successful topic I covered at the last Northern UK VMUG which covered some of the skills required to be a successful vAdmin and where the industry is taking us. It’s been easy to get by in IT over the past 5-10 years with a small subset of skills, but with virtualisation you need a much wider remit. As a VCDX I know this all too well!!! I’ll cover some key industry certifications, how this can benefit your employer, and some key complimentary areas such as soft skills (which I think are hugely important).

2142 Questions to Ask Your Design Authority  Read more... (1018 words, estimated 4:04 mins reading time)

General call for papers, vcdx, VMware, vmworld

As you do, I was reading up on RAID levels while in the bath. The topic of atomicity came up, and it’s something I wanted to share.

Not usually the most reliable source of technical data, but I’ll quote Wikipedia to help explain atomicity to set the stage. Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID under the section of “Problems with RAID”…

This is a little understood and rarely mentioned failure mode for redundant storage systems that do not utilize transactional features. Database researcher Jim Gray wrote “Update in Place is a Poison Apple”^[28] during the early days of relational database commercialization. However, this warning largely went unheeded and fell by the wayside upon the advent of RAID, which many software engineers mistook as solving all data storage integrity and reliability problems. Many software programs update a storage object “in-place”; that is, they write a new version of the object on to the same disk addresses as the old version of the object. While the software may also log some delta information elsewhere, it expects the storage to present “atomic write semantics,” meaning that the write of the data either occurred in its entirety or did not occur at all.

This has come back into light recently but under a different guise with SSD write failure problems. Many SSD manufacturers and enterprise storage vendors are addressing this with new firmware that writes all data sequentially, never over-writing a data block until all of the disk has been written then starting over-writing blocks from the start (that have obviously been freed up first).  Read more... (977 words, 1 image, estimated 3:54 mins reading time)

General atomicity, bit failure, byte failure, NetApp, poison apple, RAID, WAFL

So the Northern England VMUG has been announced and all confirmed, and I’m happy to confirm that I will be attending, and I will be presenting, twice! Very much looking forward to this, last one clashed selfishly with NetApp Insight so I couldn’t make it, but I’m definitely looking forward to this event. It looks like it could be the biggest to date, although these are growing in popularity each time one comes around, so no big surprise there! Here is the email regarding the event, please sign up and come down, I’ll be happy to take questions and conversations outside of the sessions and I’m planning on being around all day for it. Many thanks once again to Brendon Higgins for organising a very comprehensive event that promises to have something for everything. Additionally huge thanks to all the other guys presenting, I just hope there aren’t too many great presentations that clash with my own, not as they’ll steal my audience, but as I won’t be able to watch! Finally a big thanks to all the corporate sponsors, without whom these events would never be as successful or lavishly hosted, including my own employer B2net (unfortunately I think that means I can’t win an iPad ).

 Read more... (709 words, 1 image, estimated 2:50 mins reading time)

General Alan Renouf, Brendon Higgins, Mike Laverick, Northern VMUG, RTFM-Ed, Virtu-Al, VMUG, VMware

Almost seamless! Sort of…

As with most of my thoughts, it started with an innocent customer query. EMC have some very cool inbuilt tools for doing seamless CIFS data migration, but NetApp don’t. It’s something that often causes a fair amount of problems and some careful planning with NetApp as we don’t have this. But I was thinking today, we kinda do, I just don’t think we leverage the tools available properly.

Enter widelinks. Here is an excerpt from a NetApp KB article on the topic (KB 3011420)…

A symbolic link is a special file created by NFS clients that points to another file or directory. Widelink entries are a way to redirect absolute symbolic links on the filer. They allow the symbolic link destination to be a share on the same filer or on another filer. The following examples illustrate how to create a symlink from volume to qtree on the same filer, and from volume to volume on different filers.

What does this mean and why will my life be easier after reading the rest of this article?

So if I have a nice shiny new NetApp filer (or an old one I haven’t got round to migrating my CIFS data onto yet), and I have my old CIFS file server that is rapidly approaching failure or out of support. I can create my new file and share structure on my NetApp, and then use widelinks to redirect the user to the CIFS file server while I worry about all the data copy out of hours without having the ball-ache of copying all my data all at once.  Read more... (1385 words, 3 images, estimated 5:32 mins reading time)

Command Line, General cifs, NetApp, symbolic links, symlinks, widelinks

So I’ve started playing around with ThinApp recently. The main reason is that I have a little NetBook (Samsung N150 running Windows 7 if you are interested) I use for running around the country with and I want this to be light weight, easy to rebuild and little inconvenience if it gets destroyed or lost. So I’m not looking at using this for enterprise deployments, just personal convenience. I’m new to application packaging too, so I’m learning a few lessons as I go! I’ll add a few of my observations here.

I’m building this on my home desktop PC running a clean Windows XP virtual machine. I read up on dependencies of dotNET, so although it’s updated, I put off installing all dotNET patches. I regularly snapshot this at various stages of application builds to allow me to go back, add updates and rebuild applications as appropriate. Hasn’t come to that yet, but I feel it’s a good practice!

Microsoft Office 2010 is a bit of a challenge still. It looks like this is due to the new way Microsoft handle the licensing of the product, even if you want to run a personal edition and authenticate online. This has forced me to still use 2007, which isn’t so bad as it’s less of a resource hog and so lightens the load on my NetBook. It’s a shame there isn’t a single Office package that includes Visio, OneNote and Project, so I have to package it 3 times, no biggie.

I made the mistake (I think) of installing Office, and packaging that up, then installing Visio and packaging that up separately. I think I’ve introduced an odd dependency between the 2 packages now as it runs fine on my vanilla NetBook, but trying to run Visio on my desktop now fails with an error. Something I need to investigate. Apparently “The operation system is not presently configured to run this application”.  Read more... (487 words, 1 image, estimated 1:57 mins reading time)

General office 2007, office 2010, outlook, thinapp, visio, VMware

I’ve been meaning to post something regarding the VCAP-DCD beta since I took it last month, but time has eluded me!

 I am a design architect as my day job, so this exam should be pretty complimentary to what I do. Going through the study material in the blueprint was an experience all by itself. I downloaded around 130 papers, probably over 5000 pages in total. I don’t believe there is any easy way to study for this exam if you are not already doing this role. From the experience of doing the exam, 95% of the questions I answered based on experience (or guessing), and 5% was thanks to studying before the exam. I have to say the VMworld 2010 material has been very useful, and the session by Chad Sakac and Vaughn Stewart helped me through at least 1 question!

If you want to transition into a design role, then the blueprint is essential reading to get you focused and get an idea of what you’ll be doing. I think a lot of people would benefit from the study material of this exam. A course that covers all the topics would be essential (the current Design Workshop course is not quite detailed enough).  Read more... (700 words, estimated 2:48 mins reading time)

General architect, vcap-dcd, vcdx, VMware

I am a little over 12 hours away from sitting down to attempt my VCAP-DCA for the first time. I say ”attempt” and “first time” as I am actually really nervous about sitting this exam! I have relaxed back into an architects role over the past 6-12 months and so I am feeling the pressure of not being as hands on as I once was or as I was when I previously sat the Enterprise Administration exam last year. There is so much study material, and I haven’t really put in enough good lab time.

However I also think this period is one of the more difficult times to take this exam. Why?  When I sat my EA exam last year it was focused around ESX and vCenter. There was no additional software to worry about, no fancy features, you just needed to know the ESX CLI pretty well. Seeing how the ESX Service Console is Linux based, and I have spent a lot of time with Linux, this wasn’t a major challenge (although I did do a lot of studying anyway!).

The VCAP-DCA sits at a frustrating time as we have to know 2 products quite well; we need to know both ESX and ESXi. Sure the differences aren’t much as we focus on doing things the “right” way (that is, vMA, PowerCLI, Orchestrator, etc. etc.), but some stuff is applicable only to ESX (firewalling as a single example), and other stuff is applicable only to ESXi (lockdown mode as a single example). The next release from VMware will be a bonus as it’s back to one core product that we need knowledge of. Additionally a lot of the really good deep-dive documentation and blogs you find out there are from admins and engineers that get down and dirty with the Service Console, and many haven’t yet been updated the details for ESXi (some you simply can’t do in ESXi). So I’m trying to achieve the same things I used to achieve with ESX by learning this almost from scratch again. If I enable tech-support mode and jump into BusyBox, is this an okay practice in the exam? It might not include ESXi hosts at all! Certainly some scenarios would negate the ability to use the BusyBox, but I guess so long as I can get the job done, it shouldn’t matter!  Read more... (730 words, estimated 2:55 mins reading time)

General vcap-dca, VMware

I know this is a blatant abuse of media, so please excuse this post, but please feel free to forward it on to generous people you may know of

In October, a team of 21 very mixed ability runners from B2net will be participating in the Royal Parks Half Marathon, London. I will be one of the “very” mixed ability runners along with my fiancé. I have never run a half marathon before, and despite doing a fair amount of training, a previous slipped disc injury means I will be taking the run fairly easy. I’m not entirely sure what I’ve let myself in for! 

We are raising money for CLEFT, a fairly new charity which is focused on research into the causes of cleft lip and palates and post-operative care and support. 

Cleft lip and palates can cause huge distress to patients and those who care for them and the charity aims to fund projects that improve techniques in alleviating and reducing suffering.  The charity raises money to fund projects at home and abroad, with varied objectives such as research into how and why clefts occur, how it affects speech and growth and purchasing essential medical equipment.

Please support our efforts by making a donation, large or small, at our JustGiving page http://www.justgiving.com/kranz; it’s secure and very easy to use.

To find out more about how your donation will help CLEFT please visit http://www.cleft.org.uk/your_donations.html

Thanks in advance from the B2net Royal Parks Team.

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General cleft, cleft lip, Cleft lip and palate, cleft palate, half marathon, sponsor