Tech Blast #02

Chris Wahl · Posted on

tech BLAST2-01

Has it really been two weeks already? According to my flux-capacitor powered watch, it’s time for another volume of Wahl Network’s Tech Blast! I’ve skipped pretty much anything to do with 2014 predictions because we all know those posts are “holiday fodder” to fill up space and keep advertisers happy. And boy-oh-boy there sure were a lot of them.

Without further ado, let’s serve up some tasty brain food.

Brain Food

  • Satyam Vaghani and Frank Denneman, both part of the PernixData crew (disclosure: they sponsor this blog, and I’m part of their PernixPro program), put together a rather humorous cloud parody video that is also a little bit educational. Always a pleasure to see a bit of humor sprinkled into the world of storage – especially the balloons part (I won’t spoil it). They have several other cool videos floating out on the Interwebs, too.
  • Use Gmail and want a simple system for recording tasks that syncs with other devices? I ran into Remember the Milk several months back and have really enjoyed the integration with Gmail (it appears on the right side bar) and my Android devices. Especially since I have multiple Gmail accounts and it works across all of them. I use it for reoccurring tasks like “submit your expense report on the first Saturday of each month” and ad-hoc tasks like “make sure to post that funny cat photo tomorrow.”
  • Blogger Gabrie van Zanten hit a snag when upgrading from vSphere 4.1 to 5.5 involving vMotion and High Availability. I still see enough folks running 4.1 that I’d say this is worth a look, especially if you’re doing a network change during the upgrade process.
  • Monitoring is typically not the fun adventure in IT that most folks merrily embrace, but is required if you want to transition from being reactive to proactive. Bernd Harzog, a writer for The Virtualization Practice, does a great job at diving into the process of examining your monitoring requirements and matching them to a set of tools that provide value add. Furthermore, I felt that this A Hammer for Every Nail post, written by Michael Stump at TheEagerZero, also goes over some great pitfalls regarding monitoring for the enterprise.
  • Good friend and fellow blogger Bob Plankers, infamous for his planking adventures at VMworld (such as the Veeam lab planking), has been building a collection of Linux VM Performance Tuning posts. In his latest release, he covers the use of a RAM (memory) disk. This is simply marvelous content that I have been following since the series began.
  • While salary is an important consideration when thinking of your career – after all, you gotta pay those bills! – Josh Atwell goes into a series of posts exploring The Perfect Job for You. Josh has held a variety of titles and has a wealth of experience in IT, and I enjoyed reading his perspective on happiness at work.
  • Have a use case that requires putting a load balancer in front of vCenter SSO? Fellow VCDX Mike Brown shares three videos walking you through the process with VMware vCNS (vCloud Network and Security, formerly vShield), F5’s BIG-IP, and Citrix NetScaler. He’s also been quite active in the comments with answers to questions, which is awesome! Also, if you want to play with an F5 in your lab, check out Ethan Bank’s post on acquiring the lab edition licensing.
  • Christian Hammond plays Macgyver while out of town, using his Synology NAS to effectively break back into his home network via enabling VPN access. While I assume he had the password, it further highlights how awesome it is to have a Synology device at home. 🙂
  • If you’re a VMware partner, you’ve most likely had to deal with VMware Capacity Planner. It’s a bit … clunky, and the “help” videos are extremely dated. You learn this tool through trial and error, co-worker assistance, and luck. Ather Beg tackles the challenge of sharing how to deploy Capacity Planner, which is one of the first publicly available guides I’ve seen.
  • The king of scripting, Luc Dekens, has another gem of a post out that covers using PowerCLI with VMware View. His reason? He “never found a complete overview of all the available methods” – great reason, Luc, and definitely a post to keep bookmarked if you ever have to deal with VMware (Horizon) View.
  • Virsto is dead, all hail Virsto. Looks like VMware gobbled up the IP from the Virsto and has discarded the corpse. I wonder where the tech will show up?
  • And last, but certainly not least, is a look at the VCDX ecosystem from a friend a co-worker, Brian Suhr. He has painstakingly plotted out a wealth of details on all the VCDX certification holders and shared the data in a Google Spreadsheet.

Chris’ Thinking Cap

If you listen to the upcoming episode of the Virtualization User Podcast as a Service (VUPaas) you’ll get a taste of some of my angst over the user experience managing a vSphere environment ever since 5.1 released. I’ve long been publicly sour on the shenanigans surrounding what is / isn’t available on the Web Client versus the legacy C# client. Components like Update Manager (VUM), Site Recovery Manager (SRM), a vast number of 3rd party plugins, and even the Auto Deploy fling are only available on the deprecated C# client. While VMware has no control over the 3rd party stuff, they absolutely should have made the other VMware components play within the Web Client from version 5.1. But to let it slide again in 5.5?

Let’s stop kidding ourselves here. Yes, the 5.5 Web Client has a ton of amazingly awesome bells and whistles that make complex tasks easier (such as “pinning” a task in mid stream). But that doesn’t mean that existing functionality should suffer!

[symple_highlight color=”blue”]Has the fragmentation of the vSphere management interfaces (C# client and Web Client) been frustrating for you in any way? If so – how?[/symple_highlight]