As can be seen in some previous posts, I have a strange preference for old hardware. See my Shameless Call for Hardware and The Vintage Hardware Stack. Especially old Storage Devices. The feeling of happiness and sheer joy when an old monster wakes up, boots, and everything goes green, is very nice. Allthough much of the equipment is no longer capable of delivering much-needed performance nowadays, it still has a lot of the functions that are used in (be it monolithic) setups currently being used. A hobby like this has its disadvantages though. Continue reading “OK, I have a hobby. So what.”
Surviving VCAC 6.0 install: Tips & tricks
When installing vCAC 6.0, please do follow This wonderful HowTo by Kendrick Coleman
But, when an install fails, it’s not nice. See it like shooting a musquito with a 17th century musket: it takes 5 minutes reloading to take a new shot after firing at a target you can not see. Some tips that helped me:
Preparing an installation:
– Make the service account member of the local administrators group. Makes life a lot easier when creating files, IIS operations etc
– Make the service account sysadmin on your SQL server, at least while creating the databases. I let the installer do that job of creating the database, btw
– Run the setup.exe file as an administrator
– Run the great powershell script provided by Kendrick as an administrator
When the install did fail however, how to reset your musket:
– Clear the c:\users\<installingaccount>\download folder of the .exe AND .XML file
– Delete the vCAC database on your SQL server
– Delete the Repository, VCAC and WAPI applications in your Default Website through IIS manager
– Delete the RepositoryAppPool, VCACAppPool and WAPIAppPool in the ApplicationPool through IIS manager
– Delete the c:\program files (x86)\vmware folder (don’t foret to close the logfile too, otherwise deletions will fail 🙂 )
And have another go!
VSAN Part 1: My VSAN Lab
As seen in previous posts, I still believe in full hardware based labs, against hypervirtualised lab environments. So, I decided to build one suitable for a lot of things, including VSAN! It may not be completely supported, but it will work for me. And it’s all free. Ah, free .. I’ve paid a good cake for it.
3x HP DL360 G5:
- 2x Xeon 5405’s
- 40GB RAM
- 1x IBM 15GB SSD, placed in a HP 2.5″ bracket
- 1x 73GB 15K 2.5″ SAS disk
- 1x 146GB 10K 2.5″ SAS disk
- Extra PCI-e dualport Gigabit NIC
- ESXI 5.5
So, that’s an SSD and two disks per host. SSD is
1x HP DL320S Storage Server:
- 12 x 500GB Sata disks
- Extra PCI-e dualport Gigabit NIC
- Server 2012 with iSCSI Targets enabled for SHared Storage
HP ProCurve 1810-24G
- 24 x 1gbit copper + 4 dualIdentity SFP ports
All neatly placed in an old 34U NetApp Filer rack.
ESXI is installed, but then moving houses came in between. Once I have my power and network infra in place in my new house, I’ll write on.
Nutanix Partner EMEA Summit, day 1
Nutanix is very disruptive, very cool and very innovative. And I am one of the lucky few to work on a very challenging project, using Nutanix. Nutanix EMEA is growing and growing: they recently opened the EMEA headquartes at Hoofddorp / Amsterdam, NL. And this week, their first EMEA Partner Summit! This edition is held in the Gran Melia Hotel in Marbella, Spain. And I got the great opportunity to visit. Heora 🙂
Starting at day 1, Jan Urssi kicking of with the opening speach. It’s all about new, disruptive, creating your own luck. He makes it very clear from the start: this is going to be totally new. Partners from all the EMEA have joined this event, and they’re all excited.
The future is now! And opportunity is now. There are possibilities, chances are created, and preparations are being made. But, do it now! Invest now, get on the train; it’s already leaving. That’s Jan Ursi.
Next up is VP Howard Ting. Datacenter infrastructure is changing and shifting; from client servers era to virtualisation era to public cloud. A jawdropping and earthshattering feature made this all possible: in 2003 VMware released a feature that’s called ‘vMotion’, the ability to dynamically move VM’s from one host to another.
Datacenters got more and more flexible on commodity hardware. Traditional vendors can’t keep up with the virtualisation era. They are facing headwinds: revenue is declining quarter after quarter. Datacenters need to keep up with public cloud services demands. They need to respond quickly, perform seemless failovers, and that’s a challenge! The Web-scale world! Public cloud is not the absolute answer, private cloud can still be usefull with public cloud elements. The Hybrid Cloud! Shared storage shares are being eaten away by Enterprise Server SAN Storage, but Howard likes it ‘Web-scale’. Even before 2016, shared storage will be a goner. Inflexible, extensive administration, expensive .. and above all; just not scalable! Web-scale architecture should be scalable unlimited! But that’s not easy..
And now, the good news! Nutanix announces the full monty of products: The complete Package up to software-only. Build your own Nutanix cluster on your own hardware. Different licenses will also be available: Starter, pro and Ultimate. Each will have different features to fit anyone’s needs. My friend Joep Piscaer has written an excellent post on the spot, see his blogpost.
Bummer! FAS940 is refusing operation
That’s a real bummer: My FAS940 refues operation: It nags about a device in PCI slot 16 not cooperating: I suspect it is an NVRAM thingie on the card, but not quite sure how or what. Error will be posted when I got over the initial shock ..