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MAP-1.1 Mathematica Platform in 3BX

Posted by focaccio Nov 21, 2009

Notations: A-Action, R-Result, Q-Question, C-Cognition/Commentary, X-Exploration research

A MAP-1.1.1 Completed the Mathematica installation.

R MAP-1.1.2 Mathematica installation completed successfully. As far as I can tell at this point Mathematica 7 for Students runs well on an Ubuntu Server 9.10 virtual machine in the ESX Server 3i 3.5 Build 153875 environment.

Mathematica on MAP1.jpg

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We last saw our intrepid Web 2.0 adventurer about to delve back into the depths of LinkedIn. LinkedIn is old school, one of the oldest business social networks, and it's not about virtual martinis or superwalls or how many movies you have in common -- it's all about the networking.

I will admit it's been a while since I've been there -- probably since the last time I was looking for a job, which seems to be one of the major use cases for LinkedIn. The principle activity of LinkedIn, aside from the meta-activity of increasing the size of your personal network, is the Introduction -- asking your network to hand your referral from person to person until you reach the object of your affections -- Bill Clinton, a hiring manager, a prospect. I've never sent or received one of these invitations, but I do know folks that have gotten plenty of job inquiries from the site. My profile on LinkedIn is here, and no, I'm not looking for a job.

Spurred on by the current social networking frenzy, they are adding features like a Q&A section and beefier profiles. Here's Bernard Lunn of Read/Write Web on how he recently used LinkedIn and his perception of its business value vs Facebook's.

Vanguards-761533.png linkedin-720690.gif
After logging in and taking care of some pending connection requests, I joined Alessandro Perilli's virtualization.info Vanguards Group (not to be confused with VMware's Virtual Vanguard Awards).

After only a month and with a single announcement, Alessandro has assembled 383 virtualization professionals from across the globe. Not bad! So why do you want to be there, even if you're not looking for a job?

A wide cross-section of the virtualization industry. There are vendors (from VMware and Microsoft on out), consultants of all stripes, very experienced sysadmins and IT experts, and quite a few names you may recognize from communities.vmware.com.

You can see and contact everybody in the Group. The contact piece is configurable on a per-group and per-person basis, but Vanguards is set up by default so that we can all contact each other. Interested in finding a virtualization consultant in Norway? Looking for a contact at a vendor -- either the executive or the engineering kind? Want to compare notes with someone else in your industry? You can probably make that happen here with a quick search.

You won't be spammed. Now, since this is a business network, many people have something to pitch, so LinkedIn groups are not built for spam. In a LinkedIn Group you can contact individuals, but nobody in the Group can globally spam everybody in the group with a pitch for their latest virtualization management appliance.

LinkedIn is still very much a business-to-business network, and so what a Group can do there is still very buttoned-down and oriented at making business contacts -- LinkedIn doesn't actually offer much more to do with Groups yet. I suspect that we'll see other functionality soon: for instance, you can ask a Question to your network and the LinkedIn community at large, but I'd love to see questions just from the virtualization.info Vanguards Group. Although the Groups feature on LinkedIn is at least two years old, they've only recently opened up and become easier to create.

So you can't go wrong adding the virtualization.info Vanguards Group on LinkedIn to your professional online presence. I think since we have such a vibrant community here, I'm not going to start up a LinkedIn group specifically for VMware, but let me know if you have other good ideas.

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There are many social media sites out there. Most of them can be interesting if you have something in common with the crowd that hangs out there. Digg often gets most of the press, but I've always been more partial to reddit.

Reddit works in a similar way to Digg -- people submit items, and everybody votes them up or down. In theory, the most interesting items bubble to the top. Also in theory, as you rate items up or down, the system learns about your interest and starts to show you recommended items.

The reddit crowd has always been a little geekier and a little more interesting -- a bit of lisp, a bit of web culture, and sometimes a funny picture. A quick dip into the programming reddit now and then will help you carry on the conversation at your next party when Erlang or closures come up. (Hmm, I may be going to the wrong parties.)

Reddit just opened up a beta feature to create new topic-specific reddits and I'm very pleased to announce:

virtualization reddit

reddit.PNG

Virtualization reddit is the place to read news and commentary about virtualization, all chosen by the virtualization community. VMware, Microsoft, Virtuozzo, Xen, whatever. Go ahead, create an account, submit your favorite news article or blog post on virtualization, and rate the others.

I've submitted a few articles, but one man does not a social media site make. Come on in, add your two cents, vote up the most interesting articles, and have fun. Then check back every day to discover today's must-read articles about virtualization technology and the virtualization industry.

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Did you know that VMware is now offering email patch notifications for all of its products? From that page:

With this service, you will immediately be sent an email alert as soon as a patch or maintenance release becomes available on the VMware products you’ve purchased.
How does this work? You can initiate this activity by selecting the Receive Patch/Maintenance Alerts link from our Support home page, providing your email address, and then, after verifying that we’ve got the right contact, you can select the product/s you would like notification on by selecting “Confirm Subscription” from within the email confirmation we will send you.

So click on the Receive Patch/Maintenance Alerts link. From there, you put in your email address. You'll soon get an email from vmwareteam@connect.vmware.com sent to your email where you click through to a form. There you can select different VMware products like so:
patchsubscriptions.JPG

Note that you won't get announcements about major releases, only about patch releases and maintenance releases. (We send out major release announcements to large swaths of our ecosystem. Let me know if it would be convenient to get major release announcements coming out through these patch mailing lists as well.)

Anyway, when there is a patch release, you'll get another nice email from vmwareteam like this:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Subject: ESX Server 2.5.4/ 2.5.5 New Patches Available Release Date: 01/31/08 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

New patches are available for ESX Server 2.5.4 and 2.5.5. Please follow the instructions on the appropriate patch download page.

VMware ESX Server 2.5.4 Patch Download Page [http://www.vmware.com/download/esx/esx2_patches.html?elq=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Upgrade Patch 15 (Security): fixes an issue with Samba, Python and the aacraid SCSI Driver. Fixes an issue with the reporting of the sysObjectId value by SNMP agents

VMware ESX Server 2.5.5 Patch Download Page [http://www.vmware.com/download/esx/esx2_patches.html?elq=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

Upgrade Patch 4 (Security): fixes an issue with Samba, Python and the aacraid SCSI Driver. Fixes an issue with the reporting of the sysObjectId value by SNMP agents

We expect the next patch release in late February 2008. If you have any questions, please contact support at 877-4-VMWARE.

Regards,
The VMware Team



More later on Communities Email Notifications and VMware marketing email subscription management.

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Are you connected? in VMware Connected

Posted by JohnTroyer VMware Moderator Nov 19, 2009

Welcome! On this new blog, VMware Connected, I'm going to be talking about the greater community of virtualization users -- that includes you -- and how we connect, both here at our home base of communities.vmware.com and elsewhere on that series of pipes we call the internets.

How do you connect with other virtualization users? How will these connections help you learn more and be more successful in your own projects? How do you investigate the various technologies and solutions out there? How do you keep up with new tools, products, and resources here at VMware? And I always keep in mind what I've taken as my personal goal -- how can VMware help you save the day at work and get you fat raises and promotions?

I'll cover blogs, "Web 2.0" sites (like del.icio.us, Digg, reddit, and StumbleUpon), social networks (like Facebook and LinkedIn), and other communities of interest to virtualization users (say, Stickyminds and SQAforums for you software testing types). I will try to avoid talking about stupid web 2.0 sites, but one man's stupid is another man's cool tool.

I won't be talking about virtualization per se, but about where to get virtualization news and hook into networks of virtualization expertise and socialize with other virtualization practitioners.

I'm John Troyer, and I've been working on the communities team at VMware for about two years. I've been working with our internal and external bloggers, keeping the VMTN Blog on a slow steady drip, and am the de facto RSS guy here on the web team. I've also been involved with projects like the Virtual Appliance Marketplace, and I take full responsbility for anything you don't like about it. I can say "Enterprise 2.0" with a straight face and believe that RSS feeds and other lightweight standards and RESTifarian architecture will end up transforming our application architectures (and online lives) more than CORBA or WS-* ever have or will.

VMware Notification Blogs and Feeds

Here are a few notes to start us off. Did you know that we provide the following blogs and RSS feeds to keep up to date with VMware activities?

  • VMware News announces product releases, patch releases, betas, and other resources that VMware makes available. In addition to the web version and the syndication feeds in RSS and Atom, we also provide the ability to subscribe to this feed via email.
  • Hardware Compatbility Guides posts an entry every time any of our HCL documents are updated.
  • Guest OS Install Guide posts an entry every time the Guest OS Install Guide updated, which includes any changes in guest operating systems support.
  • To get an RSS feed with all new knowledge base entries as they come out, go to the main feed subscription page and select the "Knowledge Base" category.

Now, there are even more feeds that I didn't tell you about, and the fact that you probably didn't even know about all of these means that we need to rationalize how you find and subscribe to them, and we also need to publicize them better. (Caveat: as we do that, I may move some of these URLs around, but we'll always leave a forwarding address.)

Social Networks

If you're on Facebook (and a lot of us old farts are starting to show up there), feel free to stop by and say hi to me, but more importantly, we now have a VMware Page, where you can sign up to be a "fan" of VMware. There will be much more coming on this front. If you hang out on Facebook all day, I want to help you stay connected with everything that's going on.

Alessandro Perilli, the proprietor of the well-known virtualization.info, has also started a the virtualization.info Vanguards group on LinkedIn. I have to dig up my password, so I haven't dropped by yet, but expect more reporting about that.

Thanks for stopping by!

John
ilovevmware_jmt.JPG

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Work is currently underway to make some improvements and fixes to the user experience on VMware Communities following the recently launched new site design. Most of these improvements are in response to requests made at Communities Website Feedback, and based on those requests, we've prioritized the following list (highest priority first):

  1. Errors when editing documents: Can no longer edit documents?
  2. Display avatars on threads:
    1. Avatars (status level, vExpert, moderator, VMware employee) will display in threads; currently they display only on community pages
  3. Display helpful / correct answers in threads: Cannot tell what replies are marked correct or helpful.
    1. Answers marked helpful / correct will display in the threads; currently they only display on community pages
  4. IE6 errors on "All Communities" dropdowns: in IE 6 "all communities" dropdown is not clickable
  5. Make new private messages easier to find: Notification of PMs
    1. The username menu title will be bold when the user has unread private messages.
  6. Wider view area for threads: Please make the thread posting area wider!
    1. We are working on some JavaScript so that you can expand the thread view to cover the right column. This gives 30% more area to view threads while allowing us to keep the fixed width, which allows us to provide more consistency for the site across browsers and display sizes.
  7. Truncated names: Shortened logins on forum
    1. Names will still be truncated on community pages, but they will not be truncated in places where there's plenty of space to show the whole name, e.g. on user profile pages.

In addition to this, we are also working on bringing back the "My Communities" dropdown. This requires a bit more work than the other improvements above, so we will work on it after we have completed the bulk of the above list.

I'll update here as we deploy the fixes.

Thanks, Robert

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テスト in virtual hive-jp

Posted by sungho Nov 18, 2009

書き込みテスト。

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My ESXi system is running a W2K8 server that acts as fileserver. As I found the datatransfer speed to this server too slow (approx 40MB/sec) I decided to blame ESXi for capping transferspeed to and from my Dell Perc 5/i card. I thereforce decided to get myself a new motherboard with Intel vt-d so I could do a passthrough of the raid controller to the VM. So I got myself a nice Intel DQ45CB motherboard. One sunday, I swapped all hardware and fired it up with good hopes. Configured VmDirectPath, rebooted and tried to use the raid card. Windows detected the card correctly. I started restoring my backup but noticed the data written by the VM was corrupted. No matter what I tried it would not work. I then reverted to my previous setting, using the raid card in ESXi directly. This led to another problem: after creating a VMFS volume, the storage adapter was randomly removed from ESXi and could only be recovered by rescanning the storage adapters. So this was not workable either.

In the end, I found out that disabling vt-d in the bios solved things. The raid card is now correctly detected by ESXi, the VMFS volumes stay up all the time. I also re-installed the w2k8 fileserver. There must have been something wrong in the previous VM, as datatransfer speeds now get up to 100MB/sec read and 80MB/sec write :-)

I also added some disks to the raid setup. The current setup now is: 5 x 1TB WD Green, resulting in 4TB of storage. As ESXi cannot handle LUN's or disks larger than 2TB, I split the storage into two 2TB volumes.

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Quem assiste a futebol americano (aquele mais sem graça que o nosso, mas ainda assim divertido), conhece os Dallas Cowboys, um dos maiores times da NFL, a liga americada de futebol. Este vídeo mostra o depoimento do pessoal de TI dos Cowboys, que rodam tudo no estádio deles em VMware e blades HP:

{youtube}http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5WKvYcBuC8{youtube}

E olha que esses caras movimentam uma baita grana!


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Just starting.. come back soon

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This issue may occur if the IP address of an ESX host is changed while being managed by vCenter.

Symptoms

VirtualCenter cannot connect to host when performing operations such as:

Storage vMotion
Cold Migration
Cloning a Virtual Machine
Deploying from Template

Resolution

Verifying the cause
To verify the cause of the issue:

1. Log in as root to the ESX host using an SSH client.
2. In the /etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg file, locate the Host IP address. The entry looks similar to:

<vpxa>
<hostIp>10.21.48.121</hostIp>
</vpxa>

If the IP address is incorrect, perform the following steps in order. If step 1 does not solve the issue, proceed to step 2. If step 2 does not solve the issue, proceed to step 3. Do not skip a step.


Step 1

1. Right-click the ESX host in VirtualCenter and click Disconnect.
2. Reconnect the ESX host in VirtualCenter.

Step 2

1. Stop the vpxa service with the command:

# service vmware-vpxa stop

2. Open the /etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg file in a text editor and correct the IP address of the ESX host.
3. Start the vpxa service with the command:

# service vmware-vpxa start

Step 3

Note: This step removes all host and virtual machine historical statistics counters.

1. Right-click the ESX host in VirtualCenter and click Disconnect.
2. Remove the disconnected ESX host from VirtualCenter.
3. Backup thevpxa.cfg file with the command:

# mv /etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg /etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.oldcfg

4. Add the disconnected ESX host to the VirtualCenter inventory.
5. Run the following command to examine the contents of /etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg and confirm that the host IP address is correct:

# cat /etc/opt/vmware/vpxa/vpxa.cfg

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Overview

The concept of server based computing is nothing new to businesses. Beginning with the days of green screen terminals and massive IBM mainframes the benefits of server based computing have been well understood. Traditionally those benefits have been defined as: Management, Access, Performance and Security. It wasn’t until 1997 with the release of “Hydra”, Microsoft’s codename for the Terminal Server Edition of Windows NT 4.0, that server based computing was readily available in a Windows environments. Hydra of course has been superseded by the built in Terminal Services functionality of more recent Windows operating systems.

Terminal Services, or the ability to have multiple users simultaneously logged in to a single operating system, has been the De facto standard for windows server based computing to date. Although the advantages of server based computing have been well understood by businesses around the globe, resulting in nearly eighty million users utilizing some form of Terminal Services, server based computing is not without its challenges. The terminal services concept has done little in the last decade to overcome some of the inherent challenges we face as an industry with server based computing. Although the Windows Terminal Server has been refined over the last decade, the basic concept and framework has changed very little.

It wasn’t until the mass adoption of virtualization technology that a feasible alternative began to present itself, ergo VDI or Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. VDI is a relative new comer to SBC (Server Based Computing) but has made tremendous strides to solve some of the inherent technological issues with SBC. Many companies are developing their own flavors of VDI which has resulted in tremendous competitive innovation, where as terminal server solutions have been relatively stagnant the last few years.

Although each solution (VDI / Terminal Server), being unique, is not without its own advantages and disadvantages. I believe the industry as a whole has accepted VDI as the natural progression of SBC. This fact being reflected by the number of manufactures that are developing, or have already developed, solutions around the concept of VDI. Not to mention the industry leaders in Terminal Services, Citrix and Microsoft, focusing a great deal of resources on producing competitive VDI solutions (Citrix’s XenDesktop and Microsoft's App-V).

Advantages / Disadvantages:

Primary Terminal Server Advantages Compared To VDI
1) Increased User Density (20 - 40 users per core vs 10 – 20 per core))
2) Stable / Proven Track Record
3) Administration and Supporting resources are more readily available.

Primary VDI Advantages Compared to Terminal Services
1) Isolated User Environments
2) Increased Software Compatibility
3) Better User Device Support (USB Redirection, etc.)
4) Ability to allow users administrator rights per vm (if required)
5) Industry R&D Focus on VDI
6) Doesn't require dramatic changes to software and management practices (still just a desktop)

In general, if a business isn't already a terminal server shop they should avoid the trials and tribulations of what can be a rocky transition when moving from desktop based computing to server based computing by using a VDI solution. A VDI solution will allow all the benefits of SBC by changing where data and processing is physically done without changing the logical framework of an organization. Including software standards and support practices.

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