Mon 25 Aug 2008
Well as with many companies in this economy we’ve been hit with the layoff parasite. Both myself and our level 1 helpdesk guy were layed off friday under the guise of “Reduction in Force”. In laymen terms, we can’t keep clients and we can’t get new ones to cover the ones we lost. I’ve got a few leads already but if anyone knows any contacts in the Oklahoma City area please feel free to contact me.
Fri 13 Jun 2008
I’m not a fan of using beta software for production purposes. But I decided to try and use Ubuntu 8.04 LTS with the latest beta from VMWare. Installation went fine and most of the virtual machines I installed ran without problems. I then got a request for a 32-bit Vista VM to consolidate some older DUD’s (Dressed Up Desktops) that were being used for automation processes. Installation went smooth as expected. Got it logged in and joined to our AD domain without a hitch. Turned off all pretty effects to speed it up a bit. Installed SNMP and IIS and handed it over to the user. I come back this morning and he’s telling me it’s down. I boot it up and it goes through some type of registery check. It configures some updates and logs in finally. I goto check that snmp is still enabled and it’s complaining about low resources. Reboot and the same thing. Google doesn’t turn up anything usefull so i’m assuming either the developer installed something wacky or the VM got corrupted yet again. I had a similiar thing happen the first time i tried Vista on Server 2.0 Beta on this server.
So I’ve gone back to Server 1.0.6 after fighting through dependency hell. Fingers crossed that I can finally get this user up and running so I can eliminate more of these damned DUD’s.
Thu 29 May 2008
Well as meetings progress and executives sit impatiently, our D.R. plan is slowly coming together. Having to test and choose products is always a great learning experience, though doing this with deadlines takes some of the fun away.
We’ve already sat through the presentations from Lefthand and Equallogic since we’ve narrowed our choices for our production SAN down to these two venders. Just from meeting the reps from both of these companies, I’d have to say that the Lefthand guys seem more down to earth and know what the hell they are talking about. The Equallogic reps we’ve had out are just salesmen who have had minor hardware training and only answer questions with generic answers. The Lefthand guys do this for a living and for fun it seems, the Equallogic guys are just salesmen, period.
One of the biggest downsides for us with Equallogic was that when it comes down to upgrading the firmware on the modules, it will take down network connectivity for 15 seconds while it switchs over to the secondary controller inside the array. I don’t know about other companies and how they would handle their SAN being down for 15 seconds a couple times a year but I’ll pass. With Lefthand, because of their network RAID design, no downtime is required. I’d have to say we’re leaning very heavily towards Lefthand for the SAN purchase.
We’ve settled on VMware 3.5 for our virtualization needs. Virtual Iron will hopefully make it into our plans some day but they just aren’t mature enough for what we need. I’d like to actually use the licenses we’ve purchased for Virtual Iron to create a testing lab for our dept since we just don’t have space for phsyical machines.
And I finally found the time to install and configure Cacti to replace Servers Alive. The newest release from CactiEZ is really the best and easiest solution i’ve found for the price paid, FREE! The features that cacti has and the plugins available really do compare to most enterprise solutions that cost a bucket full of cash. I have almost all of our servers setup and am going through networking equipment to add as needed. In the past if a developer said they needed a new server because a current server just couldn’t handle the load, we would just buy it. Now with performance monitoring and tracking I can ask them to prove the need. In the past month i’ve had to pull statistics on a few servers for this exact reason.
Tue 15 Jan 2008
There is now a big player in the VDI market with this purchase, VMware. Now on the board against companies like Microsoft with their purchase of Softricity and Citrix with their purchase of XenSource.
To those who have doubts about VDI and it’s potential this adds even more fuel to the fire for it. This will better allow VMware to streamline VDI deployments and better support it. Can’t wait!