The Gizmo(s) factory

July 11, 2011 in , , , , with Comments Off

Got my new home & went on a shopping spree to install my ‘man-cave’ ; a mythical area where ‘wifey‘ is accepted but has little to say on how complicated (or not) starting the TV is – on how stupid it is to have more computers than people or on the pro/con of having one more games.

So, most of it is still the original box – unpacking has slowly started:
– Mikrotik SB1200 router/switch as main network backbone.
– Microsoft Kinect
– Games (Dungeons siege 3, Operation FlashPoint, the new kinect fighting game)
– Logitech Harmony One (one remote to rule them all)
– Air Link (Ubiquity) + 3 nodes scalable wifi solution.
– new computer (8GB Ram, core i7 @ 3.2ghz)
– 2 new 2.5 TB low power SATA-2 HD.

And with that, I’ll need to re-install:
– Hydra (8gb rams, 1TB local HD) as download/cpu off-loading computer.
– MacMini (old ppc version) as pseudo media broadcast system.

Geo-diversity

June 1, 2011 in , , , , , , , , , , , , , , with Comments Off

Along with development for Theatre.IO (server management system) (dev. version available for Les Laboratoires Phoenix enterprise clients), I’ve had to look into geo-diversity for the datacenter where the company got ‘silo’/'reference stack’ (a group of servers & devices which are the same, standardized, everywhere).

After a couple of very funny – they must have been a joke) – quotes from well known providers, look like we’ll be doing a dual deployment (Seattle & Chicago). That should cover north-America quite well. The phase 3, our Europe site, being on hold for another 5 months. This is a major investment for Les LabsPhoenix as our reference stack cost are in the 5 digits realm, but with geo-diversity and our own IPv4 and IPv6 ranges, there is much that can be accomplished.

Stay tuned as I’ll soon be presenting that reference stack (the free software which compose it, and the not-so-free-ones). There is still some things that need to be figured out (constant evolution, redesign), such as if the Mikrotik RB1200 will be powerful enough to hold the main traffic.

VMWARE vCenter operations

May 30, 2011 in , , , , , , , with Comments Off

VMWARE recently quietly released a product called “vCenter Operations“. The product helps system administrator get a better view of the general (and specific) health of their infrastructure.

I’d suggest anyone with a vCenter/vSphere setup to try it out. The results are pretty amazing: the graphs and the analytic engine helped me quite a few time to diagnose issues clients have been reporting. Here is a quick screenshot where you can see the default view of one of my Labs environment, configured for testing purpose – a cluster of 3 ESX hosts and 12 VMs:

Overview of your system health


Ok, this might not be very interesting, but if you click on any items, a datacenter, cluster, esx hosts, vm… you get a screen similar to this one:
Cluster metrics/data

Way more interesting data & metrics. You also have a quick analysis of resources in contention, of your current usage and growth/run-way space.

As the software is available for larger environment (package ‘minimum size’ is 50 licenses), this should produce some pretty interesting metrics/data once deployed. I’ll try to do that soon ;-).

Loyalty: Razer & Arc’teryx

April 30, 2011 in , , , with 2 Comments

[I]n the commercial world, honesty in business is a service, not merely and not mainly to the others who are parties to the single transaction in which at any one time this faithfulness is shown. The single act of business fidelity is an act of confidence of man in man upon which the whole fabric of business rests.

—Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty

There are some products to which I’ve been loyal over the last few years – I want to take a couple minutes here to speak about them.

It might be strange, but for a ‘high-tech’ geek like me, switching brand is easy. I have the financial capacity to ‘take the hit & drop a given maker’ – easily – and the technical ability to do so. I’ve switched DSLR from Sony (Alpha 100 + 50mm f/1.7 & others) to a Nikon (D300s + 18-55 f/2.8), I’ve switched laptop & cellphone more time I care to remember. I have, on my desk, Apple/RIM/Motorola/Sony/DELL/HP devices ; all less than 2 years old. As I said, switching is easy – but sometimes, products stays the best – after a couple of time, I stop evaluating them, and buy – again and again. Every times, they end-up being value for my money. I can be a loyal customer.

Mouse

You might have hundred of makers there, with a market dominated by Logitech and Microsoft. I’m buying Razer devices. They are advertised with the ‘Gaming’ tag – this is only a tricks to explain the higher price compared to a 10$ DELL wired USB mouse. Short of a trackball, those are the best, fastest and most carefully design devices available. As a note: I’ve had a DiamondBack for years, now using the DeathAdder.

Cloth

Again, weird for a tech guy to start speaking about what he wear. Well, lets make it clear: if possible, Arc’teryx is all I would wear. Those designers took their art to the next level. All their technical line of clothing deliver – It deliver so much that I’m seriously thinking about getting more of their ‘Veillance’ line. The price tag is there – but so is the quality.

And for this morning, this is all ;-).

vmware labs

April 28, 2011 in , , , , , , , , , with 1 Comment

I’ve been working intensively with vmWARE products for the last couple of months.

I’ve already wrote about LabsPhoenix’s MYTH cluster entering phase 02 of its development – few months ahead of schedule. It is currently configured as a 3 nodes vSphere Enterprise+ cluster of very modest capacity (Resources: CPU 21GHz, Memory 48GB, Storage 4TB). Next phase is within 60days and will see those resources grow by another 66%. This ‘demo‘ has been so successful that we are already drafting plans for another cluster.

One of LabsPhoenix’s main client also asked me to re-factor its lab environment. Here, we are talking of a 4 nodes vSphere Enterprise cluster, built from scratch, with some very nice capacity (Resources: CPU 95Ghz, Memory 252GB, Storage 2TB).

I’m not throwing those numbers out there to poke anyone, its more of an offer: If anyone got some specific questions about vmWARE deployment, feel free to ping me. I’m often available for a quick chat. My cie, LabsPhoenix, also has some competent sysadmin if the problem get too large / if speed is of the essence.

Sometimes, we get hit by strange errors: Following an upgrade of the Cisco 3750 switches configuration to an higher MTU value (9000bits, to support jumbo frame on the attached iSCSI MSA); The VCENTER process started acting up on the management server. Quick restart of the process worked fined, but nothing in the log shows why the switch’s configuration reload broke that specific service.

Also, changing MTU value in a vmKernel interface is quite easy on vSphere 4.1 – it can even be done through the gui. You might search the option for quite some times though! It is hidden in Home>Inventory>Networking, in the distributed virtual switch configuration (right-click on it, edit setting). If your not using dvSwitch, then, your stuck through CLI commands.

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