Max's Miscellaneous Musings

My little black dog turns one today!  I'll post some photos over the weekend

This one is priceless, a) because of the level involved in trying to sell their product, and b) the shocking Penglish (that's Polish English, folks).  They almost had my business though, until they declared their use of Windows NT.  That is sooooooooooooo 1999.

Give a leg up
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Server Software
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Deposit
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Bloke Employment
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Reliability
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My new host is pretty good at getting rid of email spam before it ever reaches me.  However, when it comes to comment spam (ie from this blog), it occasionally defeats my antispam tool and reaches me.  Most of the time, the spam in question tries to suck up to me and says things like "Your blog is wonderful!  I've bookmarked it and will definitely return!".  Now, this makes me feel very good about myself, because it means that not only is my blog good, it's so good that it's known within the spamming community!  :lol:

Today's spam was another story.  It's clear they're not being Mr Nice Guy anymore:

"I'll complain that you have copied material from another source".

Yup, you read that right.  The spammers are threatening to dob me in for plagiarism.  Don't these people know you catch more flies with honey than vinegar?

I love the Runglish (Russian English) in this spam.  See the yellow highlights.

Greatings Mister the Best Man!

The reduction of the universe to a single being, the expansion of a single being even to God, this is love.

Hello Honey! I would like to tell you a bit about myself.

I'm tall with a middle figure.

I have long blond, very beautiful hair, small nice nose, perfect lips and big blue eyes.

I am a sociable easy going person, so I like meeting friends, going out, have fun and new something interesting.

I'm looking for a strong relations with a caring and smart man!

I am really tired of all these temporary relations.

I would like to find a man who will be able to estimate not only my beauty, but also my brain and my soul...

I want him to kind and handsome, brave and tender, romantic and honest.

my site: <removed>

my sweetheart, hope to hear soon from you

This would have to be one of the best spams I've received in ages.  Why in the hell would I want to buy charcoal from overseas?  Unless that charcoal miraculously turns into diamonds, I aint buying.

We offer charcoal for BBQ.
We select our charcoal from the best type of Hard Woods.
Origin - Ukraine.
Delivery direct from Ukraine.
We are manufacturer.
We are able to pack in different type and size of bags.We can achieve the best charcoal price with the best quality
We are looking for business co-operation with you.

Holy shit, it's been a while since I've updated this blog.  Months have passed and I didn't even realise it.  Lots has happened between then and now, and I'm a bit busy to write it all just at the moment... meanwhile, see if you enjoy this new site I've been working on.

I just learned about this site called Strava.com.  It's like a lot of other GPS upload/ride mapping sites in that you upload your ride data and it does stuff with it.  But what's different is that it compares your rides a) to each other and b) to other peoples'.  So it creates leaderboards and other cool stuff.

I was so impressed with this that I signed up for a paid account so that I could upload all of my rides.  And lo, it turns out that the ride I wrote about on the 3rd of February was in fact a near-PB!    I knew it had been a good ride home, but didn't realise it was *that* good!!! 

I just CBF studying today.  It's a beautiful day and I'd rather spend it outside in the hammock reading a good book.  Think I might do that after this fly-by posting.

My one or two regular readers will recall that I attended a vSphere 4.1 course last week.  It was pretty full-on, being that I knew close to nothing about the product before attending.  I got a lot out of it.  I've decided this is the way to go, career-wise.  My immediate goal is to get the VCP and to update my MS certs.

With this in mind, I'm setting up a test lab.  My initial plan was to set the whole thing up under VMware Workstation:

• 2 x ESXi 4.1 hosts (ie virtualised under Workstation), hosting their own VMs
• A vCenter server to manage the two hosts
• A Win2k8R2 DC to provide directory/authentication services
• A hardware NAS appliance to provide iSCSI and NFS storage locations for the two virtualised hosts to use

The thing about training courses is that the systems you're provided are pre-installed with everything you need to just get stuck into it.  You don't need to concern yourself with the installation of the host(s), the configuration of the operating system that will host vCenter etc etc etc.... you know where I'm going with this, right?

The installation of the virtualised ESXi host was very straight-forward.  There's really not much to it.  I configured the TCP/IP settings and moved on to setting up the vCenter box.  It all installed fine.  viClient connected fine to the vCenter service.  I was able to connect the host, and lo, I was ready to repeat the labs I'd done during the course.

But within seconds, things started to come unstuck.  There was a great big red X against the host object.  Hmm.  It's disconnected itself.  OK.. I can ping it.. hmm, odd.  Reconnect.  Let's get on with creating some guest VMs (yes, a guest inside a guest).  I got as far as mounting the ISO, then it crapped out again.  Disconnected.  What the?  Fine.. maybe the host's unhappy.. I'll do the obligatory reboot of both host and vCenter.  Predictably, this did nothing except waste some of my time.  Sure enough, once I logged on, the problem recurred.

I tried everything I could think of (ie not much, since I know only just less than fuck-all about vSphere).  I actually resigned myself to the looming reality that I might not be able to do this completely virtualised after all.  EVEN THOUGH OTHERS HAVE DONE IT!!!!!  So I trawled ebay.  I trawled auction houses.  I ummed and ahhed.  Should I go with a whitebox build?  Should I just bite the bullet and get something that's VMware certified - so that in the event that it all goes to shit, at least I know there's no underlying incompatibility?  But, oh, God... the money.  The money.  THE MONEY!  I paid for this vSphere course out of my own pocket (GreenSight's training budget is now non-existent), so I was already out a touch over four grand.  Could I really finance a fully physical test environment?  Finally, I decided no way, no how - if others have done this, I can too.  The problem isn't that this can't be done.  The problem is that I don't know how to do it!

I consulted the all-knowing Google (not for the first time, I might add).  I had to trawl through lots of useless results before finally hitting upon the right combination of search terms, keywords and operators to get the information I needed.  I found a link to a VMware knowledge base article that suggested IP connectivity might be the problem.  See, I'd pinged the host from the vCenter server, but not the other way round.  Because the pings all came back, I'd assumed - incorrectly - that all was good with the network.  I'd forgotten, you see, that Microsoft, in its wisdom, enables a fucking firewall on Windows Server 2003 and up.  Sure enough, when I pinged the vCenter server from the host, they all failed.  MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!

Once I understood that the problem was with the vCenter server itself, I disabled the Windows Firewall and voila!  Perfect connectivity!

Now - there will be some among you who might think that I was a dickhead for not realising this all on my own.  And you're right.  However, this is the sort of learning that pays off over and over and over again.  As a result of this exercise, I now know something I didn't before.  You see, managed ESXi hosts like to say hello to their management servers.  Not every once in a while.  Every ten seconds!  Yes, the instructor did mention this.  Yes, I should've realised its significance.  And it seems I even made a big note of it in the course textbook.  But if it weren't for this incident, I wouldn't have run a network capture afterwards, and I wouldn't have seen just how chatty these systems are.  The instructor did point out that vCenter and the hosts it manages like to be well-connected, but this really highlighted it.  It's something I won't ever forget.

Thankyou, Windows Firewall.  For once, you achieved something useful.

All sorts of things have been happening, work-wise.  It's reminded me that I need to keep my skills up to date.  I've decided it's time to update my MCSE to an MCITP:EA.  I've also decided I need to get some other specialties under my belt.  To this end, I'm learning about VMware vSphere, with a view to doing the VCP certification.  I've also decided that I really ought to round it out with a CCNA (I've only studied the CCNA coursework, oh, about half a dozen times in the last ten years.. funnily enough, for things other than certification).

Now, I've been using VMware products in some form or another even since they started (around 1998, from memory).  I used the VMware products to create test labs so that I could do my NT4 and 2000 MCSE study.  Back then, VMware (which later became a separate product called VMware Workstation) was in its infancy.  It was a handy tool, useful for test labs and such, but was still pretty green.  Much has changed between then and now, with VMware becoming a world leader in virtualisation.

I had an opportunity to learn about VMware's vSphere 4 platform a few years back and turned it down.  I should've realised that it was the Next Big Thing and gone with it.  Instead, I thought "meh" and moved on with my life.  This is completely in line with how I judge things that later turn out to be HUGE.  Here are a few of the things that, over the years, I've looked at and thought "who'd ever use that":

1. Sharepoint
2. NetApp and other SAN and SAN-like products
3. Facebook/Twitter/Myspace/any other variation on social networking
4. iPhones (words my missus will never let me forget I said: "A phone should just be a phone")
5. iPads (I still stand by my judgement that this is an unnecessary thing, but the world disagrees with me)

In my defence, I always did think that Google and Amazon would turn out to be huge.  However, here's a tip for you:  If ever you come up with an idea and want to know if it's a world-changer, just ask me.  If my answer is "meh", GO FOR IT!  You'll make a fortune, and I'll be able to say "I knew that person back when they were nothing!"

Anyhow.  Back to VMware.

I snaffled a workmate's course material from when he did the VMware vSphere course.  Just the first few chapters really opened my eyes about this family of products and what it can do for businesses.  I'm very excited about it now.  So excited that I've signed myself up for the vSphere course.  Lotsa $$$ that work can't afford, so it's come out of my pocket.    However, I think it will do me the world of good professionally and also intellectually.

I've spent the last few days setting up a VMware test lab.  Trying to do this on a budget of zero dollars, my first strategy was to try to set up an ESXi server as a guest inside VMware Workstation.  Believe it or not, this is technically possible, and it does actually seem to work.  However, there are a few challenges with this:

1. RAM.  I've got 8GB in my machine, and ESXi wants 2GB just for itself.  It also needs a vCenter server set up, which means an x64 server-class OS installed in another guest.  Goodbye another 1GB of RAM.  Actually, 2GB, because it will also need an instance of SQL Server Express, and 1GB just aint enough.  Then there's the RAM for my host machine to do what it needs to do (because I have lots of other windows open researching this and that).  And finally, the ESXi guest will eventually need more RAM allocated to it so that I can create some actual guests on it.  8GB just aint cutting it, and the fallback (paging) is just killing the disk with IOPS.
2. Disk space.  100GB free sounds like a lot until you start allocating it to VMs here and there.
3. Performance.  Oy.  With the two points above, it should be no surprise that it runs like a bag of crap.  Also, the ESXi "host" keeps losing its connection to the network.
4. Realism.  I can try and keep it all on the one piece of hardware, but I just don't think that's going to cut it.

As much as I've been trying to avoid it, I think I will have to create a lab of physical machines to properly round out my education.  Fortunately for me, I have plenty of Cisco crap already so it's going to be all about the VMware lab.

I'm going to have to do a bit more learning before I decide on an ideal lab, but I'm thinking one host machine with lots of RAM and a 2TB disk (newsflash: ESX can't cope with larger disks), plus a second machine running something like OpenFiler to act as a quasi-SAN for testing the HA/DRS/vMotion etc capabilities of vSphere.  I suspect this lab will grow as my curiosity grows, but it's a decent start.  And it will, of course, be strung together with all my spare Cisco gear.

Anyway... that's what's going on with me at the moment.  I must go now, I have much VMware-related web browsing to do.