Laptop Shipments Exceed Desktops For The First Time

I just read the article from the web and found this interesting news. Had been a while we discuss all the time about laptop, desktop, workstation and thin client. We see the significant grow for the number of laptop in the market VS desktop and the 1st time we see the number of laptop had been overtake the desktop. Personally, here is my opinion. Laptop today is good enough to handle most of the activities require to be performed for personal and work related today thanks to the competion from Intel and AMD, as well as the graphic chip from Intel, ATI & nvidia which is too powerful for most of the users. Desktop, is not mobile type and is not green in my point of view. Therefore, I am not a big fans of desktop, unless for gaming purpose. Of course the desktop will not been dissapear in the market for now, but it will significant reduce as it may not be the favour for major users today.

Wipro Take over the IT services Company from Citigroup

Latest new from informationweek.com that the Citigroup had been agreed with a deal of $ 127 Million. Many of the discussion now had been started to talk about the job availabilities after this deal. As many of us aware, to further reduce operation expenses in IT, offshore the IT support to Asia will be the choices as it is really tough for the current economy. At the same time, the impact of this news will also reduce the job vacancy for US who work for Citigroup. Is really interesting to monitor the followup status of this deal and hopefully will not create another massive lay off in US because of the deal.

VMware ESX 4 New features

According to VMware, the future of the VMware Enterprise Edition Virtualization which name as ESX 4 will be launched earlier next year, will contain some of the features which been show case during the seminar to the public. Below is some of the information which had been shared by VMware for reference

1. 64 bits kernel VS the current 32 bits kernel on ESX server
2. Thin Provisioning
3. Fault Tolerance
4. 8 way virtual SMP
5. 256 GB memory per single VM

There are also more to come in the roadmap of year 2009 which will specify on the vcloud, virtual data center and etc. At lease for today, this had been public demostrate to the end user about some of the technology roadmap and features in the next version. ESX 4 is still under private beta test at this moment, which aim to be launched at 1st quater next year.

VMware Workstation 6.5.1 Release

VMware had just official released the Workstation 6.5.1. There are some new features will be impress with the latest build number of 126130

For more information, please view it over at the link below

VMware Workstation 6.5.1

VMware Server 2.0

VMware Server 2.0 is free and open source version, which is different with enterprise ESX 3i which also a free version from VMware. In term to utilize VMware server 2.0, you will require to have a Windows or Linux install on your machine or server, and install VMware Server 2.0 on top of the operating system to enable the hypervisor to be executed. This is different with ESX 3i which is not require any Operating System to be installed.

We may see this is comparison which compete with VMware workstation 6.5 which recently launched. If you ask my opinion, I will say that both are on different product range. VMware Server 2 can be consider as alternative to the business users, who may not need the advance technology & features to simplify their IT environment with minimal administration require. This product is more suitable for the Small Medium Enterprise users which may not have a Data Center for their working location. I will say that a Junior IT professional will easily able to manage the VMware Server and take the opportunity as a entry level for Enterprise Virtualization with VMware Server 2. Besides that, it does provide opportunity for every users to have virtualization in place for their business to provide better ROI in term of hardware investment and utilization.

If we look VMware workstation, it provide more features and ability to the IT pro users to perform their test and development environment on their laptop, workstation or desktop which reduce the amount of servers require for a corporate to perform their application development. Somehow, ESX is targeting Enterprise level, 3i is provide for free which some cases we may not require VMotion and HA capability.Management wise, Workstation is simple and easy. You may not require to browse through the web console and easily can be launched as a program from your machine, but you will lost the administration features on the network. VMware Workstation has ACE integrated, drag and drop features and etc, which may not require for most of the VMware Server users for hosting purpose. VMware Server 2 will require a web browser for your management, and you able to manage it through LAN network. There is a tomcat installed while you configure you VMware server at the 1st time.

As well, you may compare the VMware Server 2 with XEN hypervisor free version. I believe in term of features, VMware always have better comparison. User freindly & Reliability are always important for a consumer when they consider the investment to a certain software.

Equallogic VS FC SAN

Economy Crisis this year has encouraged users to consider the ISCSI SAN Vs FC SAN today. Data Storage growth will never stop unless the business is stop. In order to keep the environment growth, the IT architect will have to provide a cost effective solution in the finance critical timing like now.

Performance wise, we may know that the Equallogic ISCSI might not beat the huge SAN box which easily cost you double as your TCO on ISCSI. I would like to share my finding relevant on the features it bundle with equallogic. In FC SAN, we are able to achive performance and functionality, which require always additional license cost and expensive infrastrucutre to support it. Today, ISCSI provide more flexibility in term of FC due to the common understanding we all have on the IP technology which we deal with it everyday.

In Equallogic ISCSI, you will entitle every features which bundle together with the storages you purchase.

• Snapshot Volume Manager
• Thin Provisioning
• Raid 5, Raid 50, Raid 10
  
• Auto Load Balancing
• Web Base Console
• DR Replication
• Storage Replication
• Volume Clone

The details of the available features is more than what I am stated here of course. Imagine if you own a FC SAN today, you may end up paying additional charges for every piece of licenses you require of the functionality. Beside this, Virtualization and VMware is become a main player for every Data Center today. Same with Equallogic, it had also become a powerful competitor to compete with the major vendor like Netapps, EMC, HP, HDS, IBM and etc.

Whithout comparing the cost and performance, I am really impress with the simplify management provided by Equallogic. You will not require to be long waiting of the web console, and it is user friendly and easy to be managed. Compare to FC SAN, you will require certain level of skillsets and patient for administration which you may suffer from the slow loading from the console always. Additional to that, FC SAN will become slower when the number of spindle and workload is increase, but equallogic has it advantage with every array will increase the processing power and throughput. Personal experience, I am only require less than 10 minutes to setup and configure my Equallogic Storage array, and able to start provisioning right after the configuration done. Is Really Fast!!

I run the performance test on my ESX server to compare the I/O performance Vs FC SAN, I realize that the performance is acceptable with the amount of money we pay for it. Simply becoz you may not virtualize the servers which require the real I/O intensive performance. I am able to achieve approximately 140MB/s with FC SAN for read/write, with Equallogic, I manage to achieve 115MB/s as maximum throughput in my VM. Again, this may be impacted due to the software ISCSI initiator. ISCSI HBA will able to improve the performance with minimize the overhead on ESX host. For my test, I only manage to run with single array. If we have more array in the future, it will able to increase the disk performance and storage throughput. 10Gb Ethernet are also on the way to the market next year. Equallogic are also design for SRM solution which provide by VMware to simplify the DR solution. With this storage solution, we will no longer require a big pipe for SAN storage replication as we did for the FC SAN previously.

Latest array PS 5500E are providing 48TB in RAW with SATA, which will be a good option for DR solution to provide cheaper hardware cost & better functionality. If I has been asked to reduce my CAPEX for SAN purchase, the only option I can think now is ISCSI as my option. Cisco 3750 is the recommended switches for DELL Equallogic, it is much more cheaper if we compare to the brocade FC SAN swithces.

Never the less, FC SAN are still the best option in term of reliable and performance, but as it is a tough time now for budget spending, I believe Equallogic has provide us an additional option with limited budget.

Storage Thin Provisioning

Most of the software and storage are supporting think provisioning today. As most of us know that this features provide the users to fully utilize the available storage for the business. Previously, we may consume extra storage space which is idle or unused due to the risk of storage grow rapidly always. In order to re size the partition of the production system, it always require a down time of production to minimize the risk of data corruption.

Today, with thin provisioning, we will able to forecast the storage allocation as usual which include the buffer require for storage grow, which even allow the administrator to increase the percentage of buffer for every volume it created. Without putting extra money on the storage system, we will able to achieve by using thin provisioning. Example I may have a LUN with 1TB usable storage, but I will able to assign total of 5TB to five different servers which contain 1TB each. As long as the initial data consume is within 1TB, it will be fine. Beside that, the thin provisioning will have the intelligent to increase the actual allocation automatically on the fly, which is no down time. From OS perspective, it will always recognize as 1TB no matter on Windows or Linux, this has provide a down time saving for our business today. Of course, the storage will provide monitoring features to ensure the capacity warning is alert before it full, therefore, the storage administrator will able to add the storage to the environment on actual consume basis.

Netware 6.5 on VMware

Netware 6.5 on VMware is not new thing. But you will find that is not allowed to have more than 1 Vcpu per VM by default. Actually there is ways to overcome this as you normally can't fo it through virtual center. VMware workstation allow you to change the number of Vcpu as usual. But, on ESX server is different. You may need to log in to the web access to specify host or virtual center, and power off the virtual machine. On the web console, you can edit the number or Virtual CPU from 1 to 2 or 4. Then you power up the VM again, and now you will able to see the extra Vcpu you added just now. Go back to the virtual center, you should able to see the extra cpu too. VMware not recommend to have more than 1 Vcpu per VM for netware as it has some performance impact on host level and is proven during my personal test on it. The CPU utilization on host will be very high consistantly but it only consume 5% from the VM level.

DELL Equallogic PS5500E provide Auto Snapshot Manager for VMware

The latest version of ISCSI SAN Equallogic PS 5500E which launched recently had provide better capacity, performance, extra functionality and more spindles in arrays. It could be support both 500GB and 1TB SATA II spindles up to 48 drives in a single array of 4U. A very impress usable storage space in single array which up to 48TB in Raw. If we compare to the capacity, it is hardly found that a single array would provide a huge capacity at 48TB in Raw today. In additional to that, DELL had provide all the necessary features as for storage management as free which integrated as part of the storage purchase for equallogic ISCSI SAN. The latest features is regarding the Snapshot Manager for VMware. Previous version is only supported on Microsoft environment, but now, it had also supported on VMWare environment.

This features provide more option which will allow the users to snapshot, backup, and restore the files, volume, VM or even a single file that you need. Many of us may think about using the VCB for our VM backup today, the equallogic had provide some interesting package which allow us to avoid of VCB in our environment, and provide better backup and restoration process.

If we talk about disk base backup, which is VTL, it always cost involve in term of disk space and software licenses. With the latest features from Equallogic, we will able to avoid the extra investment require on VTL, but provide the similar functionality on disk base backup, and from disk to tape backup. If I bought the equallogic previously and sign up with the maintenance, I entitle the upgrade of the new features today. It will be a excellent surprise for my investment. As economy crisis, IT budget is been tight and require to work smarter, this should be a great news for the consumers. Personally, I will still say that the 10Gbe will be my option as to get rid of the fiber channel storage that we current use for VMware. As 48 spindles in a single array, we may need the bigger through put from the array to reach the client always.

According to DELL, we should able to see the official launch on 10Gbe but 1st quater of 2009.

VMware Increase Research Development Staff in China

According to the latest news from China, VMware is increasing the number of staff in China for R & D due to the high demand market which is double digits growing every year in China.

For more information, please read the related news here.

VMware China

Intel Moving to Infiniband

Intel had recently acquired the company call Neteffect which is focusing on 10Gbps adapter’s technology. As 10Ge is no longer a new thing in the market, but we still do not see it become the popular solution in the industry due to the expensive switches, NIC and solution that been widely control by the technology leader in networking solution. As we may also see some technology related to Ethernet infiniband which provide 20Gbps by using HCA (host channel adapter), that will be another major competitor to be compared with the 10Ge.

Personally I had been urging the storage and network vendor over and over again regarding the 10Ge products. The reason of it is pretty simple that the Fiber Channel is just too expensive to be deployed and managed VS Ethernet 10Ge. But the concern is the vendors are very slow responding to the 10Ge release roadmap although customers are demanding on that.

With Intel moving to the market now, I will see that is a big opportunity to make this 10Ge become inexpensive in the future with the high volume production provide by Intel in the servers’ market NIC. As virtualization becomes an important piece in the data center, the bandwidth will require being growing as much as possible at the same time VS CPU Cores and Memory. Intel had proven their right track on the servers NIC as many of us can easily found that the servers NICs are produced by Intel. Even in VMware ESX servers, your VM will be provided either AMD or Intel virtual NIC drivers on top of the hypervisor Virtualization.

As a IT Consumers, I am more than happy to see the technology become cheaper and cheaper and of course personally I do believe Intel will able to make the popularization for 10Ge moving forward.

Google Drops Yahoo Ad Deal

It had been a long time discussion, negotiation and application related to Google and Yahoo Ad Deal since the original approach by Microsoft who tried to buy Yahoo Inc to compete themselves over Google in the Ad IT market.

Personal point of view, we should always keep the market competitive to ensure no monopolize happen in every sector, especially in IT. Previously we have Microsoft and Intel both on antitrust cases, and it had been proven by both giant company in how GOOD they were to control and monopolize the market which always sell you high price with low performance goods or software.
Now the deal is off, and yahoo is still yahoo which will not mess up with google strategy. With that, it keep the market open and competitive which is always healthy to provide more choices for the consumer. Most users are google supporter today, but will you still be their die heart fans when the market is only have google as the only player left, which provide no choice for you to adapt everything they enforce? My answer will be NO, what about you?

AMD Layoff 500 workers worldwidwe

Latest news from the IT industry, AMD is going to lay off 500 workers worldwide from theri Manufacturing and Operation. It been common exercise for most of the IT giant player trying to reduce their productivity due to the slower market demand recently happen worldwide thanks to the economy downturn in the US.

This is absolutely bad news for the people which will be lay off. The new president of the US will require to work harder to rescue the financial crisis situation happen over in US.

ESX 4 Beta screen shot

Interesting to have a preview about the ESX 4? I found a link that posted with couple of screen shots for preview purpose which is currently still on beta test.

ESX 4


Have fun

SAP on x86 x64 platform

Most of the SAP users today may still rely their system to be hosted on the expensive IBM AIX, HPUX or SUN system which provide the High availabilities to support the non stop business operation for 24 x7 . It is make sense to do this for the past 5 years when the x86 processing power were not as powerful as today. Imagine that the amount of money that require to be pump in for the expensive solution today to keep the SAP running versus the cheaper x86 platform, you will significant see the amount of money you can save for the business from time to time.

I am here more focus to talk about the small and medium size environment for SAP which may be fit to most of the cases. With the technology today, it is sufficient to split the environment with multiple choices include blade, 2way or 4 way x86 servers or even the powerful Virtualization today. HA clustering of course will be the important thing that require to keep the Database with no interruption. My personal experience, we had run the entire DR for SAP on the virtualization today, which will not be utilize most of the time and the only job is to keep the data in sync from time to time. With this, we save the significant amount of money which allow us to further improve the environment for my company. Beside that, the applicaiton server on SAP should perfectly perform on the VM as proven on most of the huge SAP hosting company today. At the same time, Linux or Windows will be sufficient to handle the environment by reducing the complexity for future production support. Easily compare the support cost for linux/windows VS AIX or Unix, that will show another significant saving in the entire project.

SAP is certify itself to run on SUSE Linux Enterprise 64 bits at any x86 & x64 platform servers today. Our environment had been running with this model with more than 2 years and had not see there is any performance or production issue yet. Economy crisis had hit IT badly recently, should we still spending the money as we did previously? My thought is NO, I will rather to keep the money to expand the storages, DC, Virtualization, Dedupe and etc, which will allow the IT to be survived with the minimal capex and enhance the environment. CAPEX cut is not new thing today, a project which required USD 500k could be deploy with USD 300k on Linux and x86 platform VS Unix, will be more attracted to the investor, CIO or the CEO

More PC are moving to Linux than Windows

There are more and more development currently been done by the major IT vendor example HP, DELL, Asus, ACER and etc which try to move away from Microsoft Windows to Linux due to the slow boot. The next version of notebook or PC are targeting for fast boot with minimum functionaties such as web browsers, email client and etc. In stead of booting like a windows machine today, you will not able to start the entire machine with less than 30 seconds. These group of ppl are targeting to get the entire machine ready with less than 30 seconds and they also trying to switch to the lower cost computer chips which is outsite of Intel and AMD both.

The software to allow this happen is Splashtop which develop by Silicon Valley company DeviceVM. The software would run on a separate ARM processor, instead of the main CPU from Intel and AMD. Thie provide more optional choices for the vendor world instead of a fix and limited choices they could make. With these approach, we should able to see more linux devices from time to time on the netbook, laptops, mobile devices and etc. Stay tune and cheer for Linux

Windows 7 and Vista from Microsoft

Many of us may see the information flying around the web regarding the Windows 7 currently in the BETA test. I am not very sure as the consumer and IT Pro, what will we see the reaction recently been taken by Microsoft approach. The major concern for myself regarding their product is raising from time to time. Microsoft had really push hard for the Windows Vista for the past 2 years, but guess what, I think they need to improve their QC and QA for every products they launch and push to the customers. Microsoft started to admit the failure on Vista approach and push harder to quick launch the windows 7 ASAP now. This is what most of the IT users feel it.

Looking at the strategy by Microsoft, we compare Vista, Windows 2008 and Hyper V, None of it had been real complete and launch with full promise as they publish or public announce. All these 3 products are really heading to the traditional small company mindset with "Launch it 1st, and fix it later ". Guess what, this will screw up the confident of your customer who willing to pay their moneys for new technology. OK, now they admit the failure and rushing for the windows 7, most of us may have the imagination now, and hold back the brave we put on the vista previously. Personal opinion, I will not put myself a big hope on windows 7 as the failure on vista, but again is how Microsoft wanna play with the game to regain the confident of their customers.

100,000 Sony Batteries Recall

There was a big recall announcement by the major notebook vendors from HP, DELL, Fujitsu and etc 2 years back. We thought the battery exploited issues had been fixed now, but yet it does not actually. Recent announcement 2 days back, Sony is recalled another 100,000 batteries again which also due to the similar technology issue with what happened 2 years back.

As a consumer, I sincerely said that this should not happen for 2nd time as most of the brand which is impacted now is consider all the top brand in the market that the consumer had been confident to. With the 2nd round of recall now, I am just sad to see that the cost cutting always screw up the technology reliabilities and safety. Are they supposed to put the consumer on the risk while they would try to archive the costs lower exercise they need? The answer is a balance required in the middle.

I believe the problem batteries should not be settled with only replacement and the manufactured and selling company should require to compensate to the consumer who spend their money on the products which could had been risk to their safety. Again as I said, I hate to see this happen as it does show the lack of professionalism and safety consideration when the producer trying to sell their products to the consumer. Just similar to the poison milk issues recently happen in China. I do not see there is any different in both cases.

Groupwise 7 with Outlook 2007

I had went through a lot of forum and knowledge base from Novell and others open forum, no 1 had really succeed to implement outlook 2007 with groupwise 7 in their experience. Here I would like to share how my success story related to outlook 2007 integration with groupwise 7.

I am currenly installed groupwise 7 sp3 in my windows xp sp3. Additional thing you need to install from there is the grouwise connector which you need to run it separately once the groupwise 7 sp3 client is successful install. Once you had done this, the groupwise is ready to work with outlook 2003. To get it work on outlook 2007, you will not able to get it work on enterprise office version. I had run to the problem to fix that is due to the build version different within office 2007 enterprise and professional. My success story is on Professional edition which run the build number of outlook 2007 (12.0.4518.1014). Although the patch is always important to keep your machine secure, in order to work with groupwise with outlook 2007, you shouldn't patch the security patches to the outlook 2007. You can still patch the rest of your office application.

If you had applied the office sp1 completely, the version number will change to (12.0.6320.5000). This will be the trouble version which you have problem with the calender, attachment and etc.

I had tested with more than 4 xp machines we have and confirm this solution is worked.

Outlook 2007 with groupwise 7 integration no longer a dream.

New strategy for IT on Economy Crisis

Economy Crisis is already happened and impacted to every business around the world. The major impact are really hit to the banking and financial environment. At the same time, I believe that the financial sector are the highest IT spending every year and everywhere around the world to provide service availability to their customer, stock market, and treasury trading.

If we analyze what happen to the IT spending on the financial and banking environment, you will not surprise to see that the amount of storage, servers, solution and Unnecessary equipment been under utilized for every bank around the world. The IT department for financial sector had been comfort live for many years and is time now for them to review and revise their IT spending to ensure higher return from their investment.

Open source or reliable LINUX had not been really high utilize in financial sector are really due to the comfort living of their IT department. Personal point of view, why we have to run something else on the expensive IBM AIX, mainframe, HP UX, Microsoft, Oracle VS the reliable LINUX from x86 or x64 platform to perform the same result? The simple answer is really the Mindset from the person.

If we compare the super computing for research and development, you will find that the top 5 fastest computing in the world are build from the x86 or x64 platform whihc you can common found from the market. If you are telling me that the x86 platform is under power, I will say is depend how you manage and deploy it. Looking at SAP, which is the biggest ERP solution around the world, and they even suggest to run on SUSE Linux with the MaxDB and etc. My experience on that, it really perform as require and even outperform when we compare to the AIX machine that we previously have. We know the MAXDB are still far behind the oracle, but at least from the operating system point of view, the LINUX always provide more reliable compare to Windows or proprited UNIX platform from HP and IBM.

Beside these, you may consider the operation maintenance cost, the open standard will provide more flexible and cost effective. Intel and AMD competition have also promise to increase from 6 cores to 12 cores in 2 years time. The processing power are always increasing from time to time.
I will not believe the x86 will not able to handle the load that require to run for any system in the world today, is really depend how we plan it and manage it. Some of the bank I know, they even run their critical machine on LINUX today, and I do not see the reason of others bank can't.

Moving forward to the current economy environment, to survive and sustain for IT department is challenge. Instead of sticking with old and expensive solution, it may end up the CEO will just fire the entire IT department and look for outsource vendor. I believe the IT department have to be more open and follow up with the open technology which are much more cost effective compare with those expensive solution. The more dollars for IT to save, that increase the percentage for the job security as well as business effective. Do not forget, IT is to assist the business to generate revenue higher and faster, you may not want to make IT as a cost and is not profitable when it show up in the entire financial summary to the boards. If that does happen, human will stop using IT and prefer to work on paper and pen again as traditional.

10 Ideas To Power Up Your Green IT Agenda

Some interesting article to share and I will suggest most of the IT management seriously looking in to this idea as soon as they can. Most of the time it doesn't get through are really due to those traditional mindset, as well as the management which are lack of IT knowledge which dun really fully utilize every dollar been spend into their IT. Green IT is no longer something new, but when we look at the market, how many percent of the users are really looking into that?

those management are only care for their relax, short term solution as well as ignoring the best idea, and it does cost the corporate money that invest to wrong location. Result to that will be high overhead, high power cost, as well as extra spending into data center.

Here is the link that explain in detail and I do very agree with the point they stated.

Green IT

All eyes on HP-EDS services integration plan

As EDS been acquired by HP months back, all the IT folks, All eyes on HP-EDS services integration plan. HP recently announce it will lay off 26,900 staffs worldwide to provide integration of the technology consulting & services group to be run on EDS which is the No 2 ranking in IT outsourcing market.

The integration will be success or not, will still be a long way to go. As the culture and working style is the most important part to make these both giant to be success integrated. Many of you may know the way EDS and HP are dealing in term of products, services as well as customer experience, is really a big gap within each others. EDS are not bias to specify products which serve the customer with flexible products. If HP does push hard on their own products with the outsource service, they might make the thing worst after the emerging. Not very customer will go with HP. IBM and EDS is the best example to show their success in Service market for IT. they provide various of products with different brand to satisfy the customer need. HP should re-think whether they should push hard on their self brand with the outsource and services program.

Outlook 2003 with Groupwise Integration

The reason I wrote this article is to share my experience about the reason and How I get it work together from outlook 2003 to groupwise.

Before you do this, you have to ensure the groupwise client you had installed is run on version 7.1sp3 as minimum. Follow by that, of course you must have your outlook 2003 install and ready locally in you computer. If you had download your groupwise client from Novell website, you may need to unzip the source file. In the source file, you may see a folder call connector. This is an important item which will allow your outlook to integrate correctly with the groupwise. Browse to the connector folder and run the setup. Once you had completed, you can start to use your outlook to open your email, calender, attachment and etc.

In order to have your email cache for offline purpose in outlook, you may 1st configure the cache mailbox in your groupwise client, and configure the same path in your outlook. In that case, your outlook will able to be browse during offline. The reason you will want to have outlook ready, most of the time is because of the PDA, Mobile and gadgets synchronization issues. Not every device will able to synchronize with groupwise client as groupwise is not really the most famous email today.

This article should provide some idea to help those who want to have outlook 2003 integrate with their groupwise mailbox.

New Intel Modular Server

Intel had launched the new Intel Modular Server to capture the server consolidation market.

http://www.intel.com/Products/Server/Modular-Server/Modular-Server/modular-server-overview.htm

here you can have more detail about the product from INTEL. I would like to share couple of my finding with thier product itself. It does work similar as blade server with more flexibility in term on the local SAS storage. Normal Blade server will only allow SAS HDD to be mounted locally to the specify blade and will not able to share across, but INTEL Modular server will able to do so. The Local storage and blade is working separately which you can provision according to your need. This will improve the hardware utilization from storage perspective. If you require bigger storage, INTEL do have their own Storage solution today which connect through the SAS cable. This should be good for those SME or factory usage as you may always consider to simplify the unmanage IT environment.

New Google Open source browser "Chrome"

According to the latest news, the new google open source web browser will be launched in another 15 hours from now. Again is something new and excited that I will sure be try on the new browsers.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/01/first-public-screen-captures-of-google-chrome/

here is more news related to the Open source google browser with some preview details.

Monitoring features from ESX 3.5 update 2

Latest version of ESX 3.5 update 2 had been impressed with the advance monitoring which will ensure if you had your VM hang up from the Operating System perspective, it will force the VM to be restarted due to the heartbeat connection is lost. This has been some good features and effort from VMware I will said.

At the same time, I will say this is not fit to my environment. Maybe you guys had experienced the similar situation with the patches release from ESX always Require VMtools to be upgraded. I am still concerning why it require VMtools to be upgraded for any minor or major update from the ESX release. This actually had caused us a lot of time to negotiate with the down time to ensure the VM are patch with the latest version of VMtools. Again, when the VMtools is not updated, the heartbeat will be inconsistent of not detected.

In this case, you will not able to enable the sweet monitoring features been released recently. Therefore, I am currently urge the VMware, trying to reduce the number of time require to upgrade the VMtools. We can patch the ESX with no down time. But, if you need to upgrade VMtools, that will be down time required.

Something VMWare has to be seriously look at about their software development cycle with the tools they release.

Linux Systems Being Hit By SSH-Key Attacks

Latest news that Linux had been potentially attack by some of the method it use to steal the SSH key to gain root access to the potential system.

According to US-CERT, the attack appears to rely on stolen SSH keys to gain access to a system. It then uses a local kernel exploit to gain root access, whereupon it installs the "phalanx2" rootkit, derived from the older "phalanx" rootkit.

For more information, please refer to this link

http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/linux/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210201115

Efficient Data Center - Virtualize & Consolidation

As many of us may know that there are some article talk about the High Efficiency Data Center. I would like to talk about 1 of the major point here which is Virtualize & Consolidation, since our site is more focus on Virtualization.

High Gas/Petrol price become an global issues, no matter which region or which country are you from, this had become and issue which drive the Operational Cost for a Data Center to keep alive from daily basis. In Malaysia, the government had recently increase the commercial electricity for 26 %. Imagine that if you DC consume RM 30000.00 a mount from power perspective, you had to pay RM 37800.00 a month. that had been significant impact the entire IT budgets plus the operational cost. As IT always be the main driver for most business today, we may need to provide a highly efficient Data center solution which able to recover the ROI within the shortest period as possible. Virtualization & Consolidation had come to the point for this.

As if we compare the power consumption from major chip maker like AMD and Intel, the watts per processor had stack and remain the same for the last 3 generations at least. The only improvement they made was really the performance per watt. 6 cores and 8 cores had been down the road, I will be strongly encourage who had not adapt to virtualization need to start virtualize or prepare to virtualize 80% of thier production environment.

My environment currently had running the entire DR solution with VMware technology. In production, I do have more than 50 production VM which provide web hosting, middleware, file & print servers and etc. Imagine you had a tight budget with only 50k USD, how many of physical servers will you able to buy from there? and wat about the amount of power you need to absorb on monthly basis? That is the real cost as many of you may had not see the electric bill. For my case, my cost center had to paid for the power bill ourselves.

To achieve 15:1 in VMware is no longer a big thing with the high capacity server from DELL, HP and IBM. By doing this, you can avoid the multi million renovation to expand your DC which may had nearly full. Technology is cool, but again as human being, we had to work smart. High efficient Data Center sometimes do equivalent to High Productivity of the support team too.

Centrino Vpro 2

I just went for the official launching from Intel today regarding their 2nd generation of VPro 2 for Mobile and Desktop. They had shown some impressive features and enhancement compare with the version 1 which launch 2 years back. It really does show that the sys admin will have more productivity and easier life to troubleshoot and manage the mobile and desktop environment without travel to the desk or branches office to further investigate for each of the incident reported by the users.

Most of you guys may had already known the benefit of this product, if not, you can go to www.intel.com to check this out. I would like to share my opinion here about the disadvantages about this products. The biggest concern's is privacy and security.

Let's imagine, as today, we had shut down our machine before we left the office most of the time. With Vpro2, the sys admin will able to remote power up your machine when you are not aware off, and perform the patch activity and any type of the administration job require. sys admin point of view of course is life easier, but what about business users cross different organization with data sensitivity? had we really think detail about this? many of the users are store thier document locally on the machine, although they have the share drive to be encrypted or protected. this could be big potential for someone to access to the machine without user notification.
As sysadmin will always have the administration rights on most of the desktop or laptop. Without Vpro, they may not do this without user agree with the remote access, because you will see the screen moving or been log on by someone else.

Again, I will say that the security is something Intel has to think about to enhance their products. Cool solution but it may not cool for everyone or every environment.

How Hyper-V quick migration fails

This article show how the Hyper-V migration failed. Another failure from Microsoft to deliver for their Hyper-V.

http://malaysiavm.com/blog/how-hyper-v-quick-migration-fails/

Please click on this to have a look

VMware ESX 3i licensing details

Here is some explanation from VMware regarding the different module been offered on the ESX 3i from VMware.

SSH on ESXi

This had been disable by default. Alternatively you can enable following the instruction below:

1. Go to the ESXi console and press alt+F1
2. Type: unsupported
3. Enter the root password
4. At the prompt type vi /etc/inetd.conf
5. Look for the line that starts with #ssh
6. Remove the #
7. Save /etc/inetd.conf by typing :wq!
8. Restart the management service /sbin/services.sh restart

Try it!

ESX and VM Guest - Round Robin Storage Setting

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 To improve the I/O performance for ESX Virtual Infrastructure, VMware had come out with the round robin option for both ESX and VM guests. Although is an experimental option in the ESX setting today, but I will encourage you all to try this option which provide fail over and load balancing on the storage path to connect to you SAN storage. For VM guests, you will allow to use this when you have RDM - Raw Device Mapping option to direct read write to the physical LUN from your SAN storage without using VMFS.
ESX Hosts

To enable this on ESX host, you need to browse to the configuration tab of the ESX host, and right click the data store and select properties, and click on manage paths option in the GUI wizard. Click on Change button after that, and choose the Round Robin (Experimental) option and click OK. You will need to go through this process 1 by 1 to ensure you had round robin from each ESX host to each of the VMFS Data store.

VM Guests

Just right click the VM

and choose edit setting, and select to the hard disk which has shown as Mapped Raw LUN on the summary tab. Click on the Manage Paths and follow by the change button, and same you can easily

configure to have the Round Robin enable.

Update Manager - VMware Virtual Center for Patching Activities

After couple of months we had performed the patch activities for our ESX hosts and VM guests by using the Update Manager, here is my review of the Update Manager from VMware.

Update Manager had simplified the life of the system engineers who manage the VM farm with the huge number of VM guests and ESX hosts which may require a frequent patch update. Before the Update Manager released, most of the time we had patched the server by using satellite servers, Altiris, SMS and others patching tools. That will require additional cost required to be implemented on the VM guests or esx host due to the licensing agreement from the vendor.

Update Manager is fully compatible with VMware ESX patches update for ESX 3.0, 3.5 and ESX 3i. From the Host level, you will able to get all the patches downloaded by the update manager schedule task once the VMware had officially release their patch on their official system. Update Manager had also integrated well with Microsoft patches as well as others famous software patches like Red Hat, Adobe and etc. It even allow us to patch the template image which we store for deployment purpose, without manual interaction to convert the template back to virtual machine. If you try to patch a windows 2003 template image, the entire process is fully automated. This is really impressive. I had also patch my DR servers which is 30 miles away from my major Data Center, and we had 30 Mb MPLS across the WAN, it worked perfectly without any issue at all, and of course, the patching timing will be slightly longer due to the location of the DR servers.

To get the update manager deployed in your environment, here is couple of step you may need to configure or enable.

A dedicated DB for update manager in the SQL or Oracle - Depend on the choice of database servers you are using. This Database will store all the information and patches to be used for patching purpose. If you have proxy server in your environment, you need to configure the proxy address and port number in the virtual center configuration for Update Manager. Schedule task to refresh and check the latest patches release from the official site, recommend to run the schedule task at least once in a week. I do schedule it to be run on weekly basis, to ensure you getting the latest patches when you try to patch you VM guest or ESX host.

Baseline - baseline is been use to define the patches required for specify product or platform by the update manager. ESX host baseline is been built in by default and categorize under Critical and Non Critical. You are also require to create you own baseline for specify OS and software you are using.

Please make sure you had update manager plug-in install on your virtual infrastructure client. To attach the baseline to the ESX or VMs you would like to deploy, you need to switch the view mode to Virtual machines and template mode, then select the system you would like to patch, and click on the update manager tab on it, and start attach the suitable baseline on it.

After you attach the baseline, right click the virtual machine or ESX host and select Scan. Scan will not actually apply the patches, this is allow the update manager to compare the current patch level for the ESX hosts and Virtual Machines and preview of the number of patches needed to be applied to be compliance. After the scan result display, right click the machine and select remmediate. This will start to apply the patches automatically.

For ESX hosts, you need to Vmotion all the VM guests to another ESX host. This will provide 0 down time during the maintenance, thanks to the cool technology by vmware on Vmotion. This had worked for me all the time. Once the ESX hosts is ready, is recommend to send the ESX host to maintenance mode, then start the remediation after that. Once the patch is completed, it will show the ESX host at a different patch level or update code by vmware release. You can verify this with the VMware website information easily.

For VM guests patching, down time will be required as usual, due to the reboot require from the operating system perspective. Again, this tools is bundle together with the Virtual Infrastructure by VMware, is really useful for the VMware engineers to patch thier VM guests.

The only disadvantage at this moment, SUSE linux is not supported by update manager. According to the VMware, they will soon release the next version of update manager to support patch activities on SUSE Linux VMs.

Resolution - ESX hosts unexpected disconnect from Virtual Center ( ESX 3.5 update 2 )

When I try to log in to my virtual center to verify my VM farm today, the virtual center show my ESX host had been disconnected from the virtual center by itself. The ESX host itself should be running in critical mode as production and had HA and DRS enable on the cluster. The 1st thing I try to verify is to ensure all my VM and the ESX host is still in production mode, and yes, all the VM is not been down and it still run as normal while it disconnected.

Here is what I did to reconfigure my ESX host and re-join it back to the HA and DRS cluster in my production farm.

Disable the HA and DRS features from the cluster, and totally remove the ESX host from the inventory on Virtual Center server. Follow by that, I SSH in to the ESX host with su -, then I path to the /etc/init.d and look for the services mgmt-vmware status command

It show the services is running. Then I issue the command services mgmt-vmware restart. This will take couple of minutes to get the service fully restarted. At the same time I had actually Remote log on to 1 of the VM to ensure no impact on the VM guest which sit on the ESX host. The result is perfectly work without any downtime on the VM guests, and should credit to the ability from VMware technology.

Once the services restarted, you can easily add host to the virtual center and reconfigure the HA and DRS cluster mode again. The ESX host is back to normal now and work perfectly as usual.

Virtualization - Network, Storage, Data Center

Virtualization become a MUST for every single environment which run a small, medium or huge Data Center today. Even we can see the grow at the level of small medium business as well as some manufacturing plant too. VMware as the technology and market leader, it had provide a lot of new flexibility in term of reducing carbon foot print, green IT initiative, as well as CAPEX saving and etc. It had been huge saving from every single different perspective. Somehow, it had created complexity in term of Data center, Power & Cooling, Storages, and of course the complexity and extra workload on the engineers who support the environment.

Many of the case study happen today, we do see that users or the implementers had not for see some important hidden potential issue during the earlier stages of deployment. The fast grow of the storages, the higher bandwidth required, specify cooling and power needed to be supplied for the Virtual Infrastructure zone in the data center as well as the operation support task needed to be carried on as daily basis.

A success architect for Virtualization had to been specialize is all those area I had stated above to ensure the entire deployment will able to achieve all the goals had been set during the project planning. Some how, we do need to urge the employers to send the system engineers for further training in multiple products, example like VMware training, Linux administration, Microsoft Training as well as Network Training plus Data center training too. That is all the necessary requirement for the engineer to able to support, manage and plan for future extension of the virtualization farm.

As to share here, a bad design on network will have slow performance impact to the network and DC, as well as bad configuration on storage could become corruption risk as well as I/O performance issues. For Data Center perspective, the power and cooling will be really concern as the storage and ESX host will require higher power to be operated, a proper power planning needed to be in place to secure the production environment of course.

Complexity = challenging, and is very depend on the management team to coupe with the technology change as well as the challenge to keep the engineers interesting of their work from time to time.

Simplify IT doesn’t meant the best solution too.