Category Archives: DELL

I Was Honored With The Dell Rockstar Recognition

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Yesterday I was informed I have become a Dell Tech Center Rock Star. I’m honored to be recognized as someone who has leveraged DELL technologies (client, server, switches & storage) to provide both excellent and cost effective solutions to my employers & customers whilst sharing my insights with others. Thank you!

I became a DELL customer by chance late in the previous century but it was one of the better experiences with a hardware vendor I have ever had. This has remained till this day. The DELL employees I have worked with in my market segment have always gone the extra mile to serve our needs. So Dirk, Luc, Willy, Wim, Koen, Peter, Florian … thanks for answering all our questions and serving our needs. Without such a dedicated service I would not have been such an avid user of your gear and this Rockstar recognition would not have happened.

On top of that I’ve also had experiences with support & gear of their main competitors and I can tell you that, while perfection is not of this world, they are doing a great job.

I’m fortunate to be able to work with great colleagues, technologists & vendors in a very rapidly changing world. People in this community are independent experts and as such we can discuss both the good, the bad and the ugly. We share the good and help fix the rest Smile

Attending The Converged Infrastructure Think Tank At Dell Technology Camp 2013

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I’m travelling to Amsterdam tomorrow to contribute in a “Think Thank on Converged Infrastructure” during the Dell Technology Camp 2013. The topic of this technology camp is the Evolution of the Data Center, hence the think tank on the converged infrastructure.

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If you have any views on this subject, questions, or perhaps even “angsts” share them via twitter and we’ll see if we can discuss these. Don’t be shy! I’m pretty much a practical guys and for me any technology, no matter how much fun I have with them, is a means to an end. That means I think that a converged infrastructure can work for both the SMB/SME & large Enterprises if you do it right and at a good & affordable price level. Right sizing without getting stuck in that size, whilst not overpaying for future proofing is important. Long term in IT is a crap shoot Smile.

The biggest risks here is that the vendors don’t get what doing it right means & what is affordable. From the Microsoft community we’ve been discussing concepts like a Cluster in Box as a building block and other features that Windows Server 2012 enables for us. So far we’ve seen very low interest from the big vendors. From SMB to SME, we sometimes feel that OEMs look more at each other than at their customers needs and pursue agendas that fit only the bigger environments & pockets. Some partners look way to hard at their bottom line to be considered trusted advisors; They’ve lost the “VA” in Value Added Reseller. Serve your customers needs and you’ll have a business. Ignore us and you’ won’t ever have to deal with or worry about us again Winking smile.

On the other side I see the bigger players struggle with processes, methodologies and separation of roles that only hinder progress and prevent agile and dynamic IT.

We’ll see what the other attendees have to say, as I’m very interested in that. Looking at what other industries & roles think and do – and why – can be very educational. Vendors & Partners have a very different view on the matters than end customers have and the good ones know how to match both worlds to everyone’s benefit & satisfaction.

Follow the action on twitter via  #DellTechCamp, via live streams on http://www.fittotweet.com/events/techcamplive/ or https://www.etouches.com/ehome/index.php?eventid=53104&.

vKernel Adds Tools to Free vOPS Server Explorer 6.3

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When it comes to gaining insight and understanding of your virtual environment vKernel has some nifty products. They just added two new utilities, Storage Explorer and Change Explorer, to their free vOPS™ Server Explorer that give you more management capabilities with SCOM/SCVMM or vCenter. Sure it’s to get you looking into and considering buying the paid stuff with more functionality and remediation but it does provide you with tools to rapidly asses your virtualization environment for free as is. So what did they add?

Storage Explorer

  • Gain insight into storage performance and capacity via views across data stores and VMs
  • Identifies critical storage issues such as over commitment, low capacity, high latency, VMFS version mismatch
  • Alerts you to critical VM issues such as low disk space,  latency and throughput issues
  • There’s sorting and searching support

Change Explorer

  • You get a listing of the changes to resource pools, hosts, data stores and VMs within the past week. They also indicate a risk associated with hat change
  • You can search & filter to find specific changes

    • There is a graphical mapping of changes over a time line for rapid reporting/assessment.

      • So if you need some free tools to help you get a quick insight into your environment or the need to be informed about changes of performance issues you can try these out. The press release is here http://www.vkernel.com/press-kits/vops-server-explorer-6-3. We have smaller environment at work next to our main production infrastructure where we’d like to test this out. So they need to add support for SCVMM 2012 SP1 a.s.a.p. I think Smile

      In a world were complexity reduction is paramount and the TCO/ROI needs to be good from day one competition is heating up between 3rd party vendors active in this arena providing tools to make that happen. This is especially true when they are adding more and more Hyper-V support. It also doesn’t hurt to push Microsoft or VMware to make their solutions better.

    Logging Cluster Aware Updating Hotfix Plug-in Installations To A File Share

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    As an early adopter of Windows Server 2012 it’s not about being the fist it’s about using the great new features. When you leverage the Cluster Aware Updating (CAU) Plug-in to deploy hardware vendor updates like those from DELL which are called DUPs (Dell Update Packages) you have the option to to log the process via parameter /L

    This looks like this in the config XML file for the CAU (I’ll address this XML file in more details later).

    <Folder name="Optiplex980DUPS" alwaysReboot="false"> 
        <Template path="$update$" parameters="/S /L=\zuluCAULoggingCAULog.log"/>

     

    As you can see I use a file share as I don’t want to log locally because this would mean I’d have to collect the logs on all nodes of a cluster.   Now if you log to  file share you need to do two things that we’ll discuss below.

    1. Set up a share where you can write the log or logs to

    Please note that you cannot and should not use the CAU file share for this. First off all only a few accounts are allows to have write permissions to the CAU file share. This is documented in How CAU Plug-ins Work

    Only certain security principals are permitted (but are not required) to have Write or Modify permission. The allowed principals are the local Administrators group, SYSTEM, CREATOR OWNER, and TrustedInstaller. Other accounts or groups are not permitted to have Write or Modify permission on the hotfix root folder.

    This makes sense. SMB Signing and Encryption are used to protect tampering with the files in transit and to make sure you talk to the one an only real CAU file share. To protect the actual content of that share you need to make sure now one but some trusted accounts and a select group of trusted administrators can add installers to the share. If not you might be installing malicious content to your cluster nodes without you ever realizing. Perhaps some auditing on that folder structure might be a good idea?

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    This means that you need a separate file share so you can add modify or at least write permissions to the necessary accounts on the folder. Which brings us to the second thing you need to do.

    2. Set up Write or Modify permissions on the log share

    You’ll need to set up Write or Modify permissions on the log share for all cluster node computer accounts. To make this work more practically with larger clusters please you can add the computer accounts to an AD group, which makes for easier administration).

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    The two nodes here have permissions to write to the location

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    As you can see the first node to create the loge file is the owner:

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    Some extra tips

    The log can grow quite large if used a lot. Keep an eye on it so avoid space issues or so it doesn’t get too big to handle and be useful. And for clarities sake you might get a different log per cluster or even folder type. You can customize to your needs.