There are a few modifications to note. The one that stands out the most at first glance is the doubling of LAN capability.  The DS1513+ boasts no fewer than 4 RJ45 ports. That does seem like quite a lot. It does open up some interesting possibilities though…

The full specifications for the DS1513+ can be found here.

$0 – That’s right, free.

The tool is an updated and evolved version of the Community Edition of VMTurbo’s Operations Manager product and comes without restrictions on where and how often you deploy it and what it monitors. Ok, that’s not so clear.

The tool is downloaded as an appliance from VMTurbo’s website in a format optimised for one of the following platforms:

• VMware vSphere
• Microsoft Hyper-V
• RedHat Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEV)
• Citrix XenServer

The format of the appliance is the only difference that you should find between the versions though as it’s capable of monitoring all of them at the same time. You just download the format that matches the virtual infrastructure where you want to host the tool.

The features that VMTurbo offer with the tool include:

• Instant visibility to health and performance;
• Unlimited use across virtual data centers of any size;
• Free monitoring and reporting for any hypervisor;
• Lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) due to innovative product architecture;
• Weekly analysis of utilisation rates and areas to improve efficiency and reduce risk

As I’m waiting for the 428Mb appliance to download over the wet bit of string that is my broadband tonight I can’t speak to the experience of deploying it and what it looks like yet but I hope to have the time to kick the tyres on it tomorrow.

Download Virtual Health Monitor from VMTurbo’s website.

The other day, I finally got to sit it (I didn’t get as far as passing the VCAP4-DCD). Hooray, I passed!

Unfortunately I don’t live very near any exam centres that were offering slots for one of VMware’s 4-hour Advanced exams so I had to drive over to Milton Keynes to QA’s training facility there. If you choose to take an exam there and, like me, have to drive there make sure you leave yourself plenty of time as parking wasn’t straightforward. The facilities, the exam station itself was fairly decent. The screen size was bigger than I’ve seen in some other places and the workstation was pretty nippy. I’m tempted to go back there as and when I do my DCA exam.

The exam itself, as I’m sure you’ll read elsewhere, is 3 hours and 45 minutes long and is comprised of a mixture of multiple choice type questions, drag and drop questions and some Visio-like diagramming tasks. What made it quite a challenge was that, unlike with some other exams, you cannot return to a previously answered question, you can’t flag a question for later review. I found that this made me very conscious of time passing. I was torn between making it through all of the questions by submitting some hasty answers – some of which I know I will have got wrong through not ready the question through carefully – and taking my time thus risking leaving some questions unanswered. In the end, I finished with mere seconds to spare so I either judged it right or just got lucky!

I can understand some of the reasoning behind removing candidates’ ability to review answers but I found some of the questions were curiously worded and, with some questions, I wanted to go back and check it almost as soon as I’d moved on. In a way though, I’m glad I couldn’t because I almost certainly wouldn’t have finished. In the end, it doesn’t matter too much because I’ve passed now but I wouldn’t say that I enjoyed the experience. I’m very happy about the result though!

In this case, I was trying to migrate a powered-off VM to different storage – resulting in the error. I also found that the issue was related to the second disk attached to the VM. Editing the VM showed the size as 0MB, but removing this disk also threw the error in vCenter.

The solution was to follow these steps:

• Remove the VM from the vCenter inventory.
• Update the VM VMX file. There are 2 ways to do this – SSH to the host / datastore using a tool like Putty, or use the datastore browser to download the VMX file, then edit the it in Notepad.
• Inside the VMX file. look for the following entries:

scsi0:1.present = “true”

scsi0:1.fileName = “vmname.vmdk”

Update these entries to the following:

scsi0:1.present = “false”

scsi0:1.fileName = “vmname.vmdk”

• Re-add the VM to the vCenter inventory, either through the GUI or using ‘vmware-cmd -s register \path\to\your\vm.vmdk’.
• Check the VM properties, you should now show the offending drive as missing and it can be re-added from the datastore.

When creating a manual vShield Edge device in vCNS, there is the usual opportunity to create an pair of appliances for running the pair in High Availability mode. Trouble is, the options for deployment are limited and not very clear. (This might be clear / obvious to some, but weren’t to me!)

When creating an HA pair, in the vShield Manager console editing the Edge device in question under Settings – the HA Configuration gives few options. Essentially, ‘Enabled’ or ‘Disabled’, vNIC, Declared Dead Time and Management IPs. Here’s where my confusion was based. Management IPs. So many questions……!

The option for Management IPs is even outlined. 2 IP entry boxes, and note text: ‘You can specify pair of IPs (in DIDR format with /30 subnet. Management IPs must not overlap with any vnic subnets’.

OK, so I need Management IPs to manually create a HA pair. What /30 address range do I need to specify? Can the IP range share an existing vNIC, or does the Edge device need another interface or uplink. Where do I define the /30 addresses. Do they need their own vLANs? Must I create a whole new private address range specifically for HA heartbeat? Like I said – so many questions. Scour the documentation, Google ‘vShield Edge Management IPs’ produces no helpful results. So – to the LAB!

Turns out, you don’t need Management IPs at all. Simply change the HA Status to ‘Enable’, select a vNIC to support HA heartbeat, and add a second Edge appliance via the green plus symbol (it will prompt for the parameters) to deploy the HA pair! When both report as ‘Deployed’, HA is configured and your Edge device is protected.

Sigh. Like I said. This might seem obvious to some, but it wasn’t to me. ‘Edge HA’ is no longer on my to-do list!

For me, the answer to that last question is “no”, but without a doubt there are users out there for whom it won’t be the case. Some of them will be home users, holding on to that creaking PC or laptop that they’ve had for years and that has always worked (except for BSODs, viruses, lost files and the lack of telepathic functionality that some of the less technically savvy wish was available). Others still may work in small businesses or enterprises that don’t have a very heavy reliance on IT. The remainder will be some of the bigger corporates, still using XP maybe because it’s too difficult to upgrade, too expensive or because XP just works. Or, perhaps more worryingly, there has been a woeful lack of strategic planning somewhere.

Unlike its successor, the much lamented Windows Vista, XP is fairly stable and was fairly easy to pick up and use. In an enterprise environment it could be configured and maintained fairly easily. I can understand why companies wouldn’t want to upset the apple cart by upgrading. Even after Windows 7 had been out for some time, I still received brand new corporate laptops with XP builds on them. And, the brief trend in netbooks in 2009 – 2011 kept sales of XP going strong too.

So, is the world going to end when support officially ends in April 2014? Not really. Having worked with and for software and hardware vendors for many years, their stock response when you buy, upgrade or raise a support ticket for their products is to recommend that you use the latest versions of everything. This will already have been going on for some time now. Some vendors have dropped support for XP already and any that still do will be killing it off over the next year. Companies that use XP won’t grind to a halt come next April.

That said though, despite its familiarity, using XP now represents an increasing risk. When the updates have stopped and the support is cut off, who are you going to turn to when things go wrong? When the office laser printers have run off their final pages and have to be replaced, where will the drivers come from to support XP with your new model? If you’re using XP, the time to think about migrating is now (actually, a couple of years ago might have been better).

The cost of migrating will start to take a back seat to the increased risk of inaction as this year passes. The problem that some may face though is what to do about their legacy applications. Cost, complexity and stability may not be keeping some on XP; it may be their applications that do not work on newer operating systems. What then? Some enterprises face very tough choices this year.

Virtual desktop infrastructure may very well be a sensible solution in many cases if enterprises are willing to invest in it. Careful planning is required but, if it’s done well, there are significant benefits that can be realised. So yes, it may well be the year of VDI after all.

Of course, there’s much more to End User Computing (EUC) than just virtual desktops. So much is going on in this space that I could rattle on for hours and it’d be out of date by the time I’m done. Rather than lament the inevitable end of the countdown, I look forward to the changes that its driving.

If you want to read around what’s going on in the EUC space, two of my favourite sites to follow are:

• myvirtualcloud.net
• simonlong.co.uk

The clock is ticking on XP (and Office 2003)…

vOpenData is the brainchild of Ben Thomas and was built with William Lam and assistance from several other VMware community members. Essentially it is a public database of VMware Virtual Infrastructure statistics / configurations. Users download a script that collects some anonymous data about their infrastructure. Once uploaded and added to the database, the data contributes to a plethora of publicly available statistics.

At the time of writing there are over 50,000 VMs in the database. The average VMDK size is just over 70Gb. For me, as a techie / evangelist / consultant, this is useful information and there’s so much more there besides. Here’s a quick grab from the public dashboard:

As a community project, its value is huge and will get even better the more people contribute data to it. Head over to the vOpenData website and find out more.

In this instance, we were playing with using dcpromo to promote and demote the domain controller (DC) into a single domain. At one point, we got out of step with the reboots and got the following message when logging-in to the domain:

The Security database on the server does not have a computer account for this workstation trust relationship.

Interesting. Somehow, we managed to get the domain out of sync with the FQDN of the server. We found 3 ways to resolve this issue, 2 simple (which felt a little like a hack) and 1 that permanently fixed the issue:

1. Login to the DC with local admin credentials, and in Computer / Properties: change the FQDN.local name to just the machine name, then reboot the server.
2. Update the DC FQDN in the domain DNS system, so the current DC FQDN and that in the DNS server match.
3. Update the computer account in the domain to reflect the FQDN of the DC. To do this:
   1. Open your domain Users & Computers console.
   2. Under View, select Advanced Features.
   3. Find the computer account of your DC. (Depending on what your policy is, this might be under <AD Host> / <Domain> / Domain Controllers, or elsewhere in another OU. If in doubt, use the domain search for the machine name, or ask the domain admin!
   4. Open Properties of the computer account, then select “Attributes Editor”. (If you can’t see it, re-check step 2 above).
   5. Look for attributes “dNSHostName” and “servicePrincipleName” (and anywhere else the FQDN of the DC is found).
   6. If incorrect (they should be – to produce the error on the DC), update them to the correct values.
   7. Reboot the DC and try connecting again. If the error persists, re-check the attributes in step 5 again for any missed values that need resetting. Also bear in mind that the DCs may need some time to replicate if your domain has more than one DC.

Also worth pointing out that these errors don’t always require a reboot, so if you are doing this under a change window or are limited for time then it’s possible the fix will be applied fine without a reboot. But then hey – your DCs are all virtual, so will reboot in about 10 secs anyway. Right?

Although they kept their plans under wraps fairly well (at least they did as far as I know), it shouldn’t really have come as a surprise to anyone that they changed their model. You only have to look back another month or so to one of the UK’s big high street names going to the wall to see further evidence that physical media is just not as popular anymore.

I had been planning to purchase one of TrainSignal’s courses just prior to them making the switch. Good job I waited eh? But after giving it a week or so to bed in, I subscribed and I now have access to the whole training catalog.

Logging in, the dashboard (below) gives you the ability to browse and take courses, take practice exams, see what’s new etc.

You can see my progress having a look at David Davis and Jake Robinson’s “VMware vCloud Director Essentials” course. There’s also a link that will let you download the Silverlight based offline player.

The offline player, as it says on the tin, allows you to download courses to view when you don’t have an internet connection handy. It requires you to authenticate using your TrainSignal account and you’ll need to connect the player to the internet every few days or so for it to re-authenticate. Once in, you can browse the course catalog and select courses for download.

The player’s fairly responsive and I’ve had no issues with it… save one. As stated on their website, TrainSignal do not yet offer an offline player for mobile devices (e.g. iPads etc). For me, that’s a bit of a detractor.

Overall, I like what TrainSignal have done. I can pick and choose whichever courses I want and hopefully the catalog will grow nicely. I do want an iPad app for it though!

Note: I didn’t clarify when I first wrote this that TrainSignal have offered their courses online for some time but not as a subscription model. Thanks to Ricky El-Qasem.

Here we are though, nearly 18 months later, and it looks like it’s not going to happen. One of VMTN’s biggest proponents, Mike Laverick, posted on the VMware Communities thread related to VMTN today that it looks unlikely. In his words:

The prevailing view appears to be that other projects will be sufficient… Such as Project Nee…

Project NEE is VMware’s online learning resource that’s currently being put through its paces. If you read around what it does, you can see why VMware would consequently view the resurrection of VMTN as unnecessary. Whilst it’s a disappointment to people who run home lab setups, want to run legitimate workplace labs and prototypes etc., I don’t think that it’s necessarily the end of the world. The level of automation / orchestration possible in VMware’s suite of products means that re-installs don’t have to take an age to complete. In fact, I want to rip and rebuild my lab regularly because it’s exactly those sorts of tasks and skills that I want to hone. I don’t want my lab to sit and age like some legacy infrastructure. I appreciate though that others may not share my views or enthusiasm.

Either way, my advice is not to hold your breath in the hope of a change of heart. If it’s true that VMTN is going to stay dead, VMware have made this decision with their heads and not their hearts. My head says, keep calm and roll with it*.

* (@h0bbel, another one for your collection?)