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.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Thursday, August 28, 2008
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
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
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
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.
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.
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.
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