One of greatest things about the evolution of the server industry is the (attempt at) engineering out mistakes. You can only go so far to remove the human element in systems administration, but HP's doing a really good job with the latest release of their Gen8 server line. 

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HP and Intel are hosting bloggers today at their Houston campus to do a deep dive on their new Gen8 server platform. You can watch the live stream at http://www.hp.com/go/gen8bloggers and follow along on twitter with the tags #HPTechday and #Gen8.

The blogroll is:

Frank Owen III
http://www.techvirtuoso.com
@fowen

Michael Letschin
http://www.thesolutionsarchitect.net
@mletschin

Bob Stein
http://www.activewin.com
@ActiveWin

Hector Russo
http://www.geeksroom.com
@geeksroom

Phillip Jaenke
http://rootwyrm.us.to
@rootwyrm

Jeffrey Powers
http://www.geekazine.com
@geekazine

Scott Lowe
http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/Scott_D_Lowe
@otherscottlowe

Hans Vredevoort
http://www.hyper-v.nu
@hvredevoort

Brian Knudtson
http://www.knudt.net/vblog
@bknudtson

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Watch the Solid State Symposium and Storage Field Day live streams here:

http://techfieldday.com/2012/ssss12/

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For the past 10 years, I have had the pleasure of working for the great educational institution of Fuller Theological Seminary. I have worked in many roles in the past decade, most recently in Windows Systems Administration, Virtualization and Storage Administration, Project Management, and as the Sr. Systems Administrator. They have given me every opportunity to explore enterprise IT, expand my skill set through training, conferences, workshops and user groups, and have nurtured my love for Social Media and the community surrounding IT by allowing me freedom to participate in various Field Days (thanks Gestalt IT, HP, Dell, SolarWinds, etc.!) as an independent blogger.

My team has been a fantastic source of encouragement and trust. Truly a second family.

However, it's time to move in to what I feel is a natural progression both personally and professionally. I've really enjoyed engaging vendors, VARs, consultants and other IT professionals surrounding architecture and solutions and am very excited to announce that towards the end of May I will be joining the Solutions Team at Nexenta, Inc. as a Solutions Engineer. My role will initially be focused on their vCloud implementation and solutions, white papers, solving hard problems, and expanding from there.

It's a big leap for me going from SysAdmin to working for a vendor, but I'm joining a great team (which includes friends Theron Conrey, Michael Lestchin, and Tom Howarth) for a product I'm really excited about. 

It's definitely bittersweet, but it's the right move at the right time. I look forward to continuing the conversations.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have about 300 prodecures and systems to document before I leave.

Cheers.

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Google just announced a feature that was previously available only in the 'Extras' version of Hangouts: full Google Docs/Google+ hangout integration.

spource: https://plus.google.com/u/0/117272804393056744845/posts/CycRaZE29r9

With this move along with screen sharing, Google is making it harder and harder to ignore Google+ as not just a social media platform, but a full fledged, honest to goodness business productivity tool. But what I think is really happening is that Google+ Hangouts are slowly but surely becoming what they wanted Google Wave to be. I think that Wave came too soon and was too different. Google is letting people get used to an expected feature set, letting it become normal and expanding.

Will this new feature, along with screen sharing draw in more business use? Will it eventually be Wave 2.0?

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This is a repost of a writeup that I orriginally did for DellTechCenter.com

This past Monday (2/27/2012), I had the opportunity to attend Dell’s San Francisco event, led by CEO Michael Dell, VPs Praveen Asanth and Forrest Norrod along with Sr. VP David Johnson, at which they unveiled several new offerings across their enterprise product line. While you can read all about the wonderful sales figures that Dell shared on other financially focused corners of the webosphere, I want to spend a few posts focusing on the event and products themselves and what stood out to me.

Part 1 - 12^th Generation PowerEdge

Dell’s 12G PowerEdge servers will ship with their 2^nd generation lifecycle controller which offers, along with their iDRAC 7, agentless management over the life cycle of the server. Further expanding on a feature that has been available beginning with their 11G servers back in 2009, the LifeCycle controller allows computers to be managed and monitored without taking precious CPU cycles away from the OS. When some installations require an extremely optimized operating environment, management agents, while essential, are essentially performance thieves.

Taking a look at the physical hardware itself, you will see that each server has a QR code printed on it, and when scanned, will take you directly to that specific server’s support page for quick access to warranty information, driver downloads and other critical information. My hope is that this info is migrated from the top of the server, where you’d have to pull the server out of the rack about 6 inches, to the already included ‘luggage’ tag that slides out on its own.

The PE R620, the virtualization workhorse, now has the ability to have up to 10 hard drives (up from 6). Another capability which will be in all R6 series and above servers is the option of front loaded, hot swappable, PCIe Flash Cache hard drives for an added tier of storage to go along with the traditional spinning disks. Dell is saying that it can hold up to 300% more Virtual Machines than the 11G servers. This is primarily due to CPU (upcoming Sandy Bridge), memory, network (10GbE) and hard drive advancements. Speaking of HDD configs, the brand new to the series R720XD comes with a max capacity of not only 24 2.5in drives in the front, but 2 extra 2.5in drives in the rear to separate out OS/App more easily.  One of the cooler configs is the field replaceable LOM (LAN on Motherboard). If you wanted to stick a generic 1Gb Broadcom in there today, but really wanted to upgrade to Intel or a Broadcom with iSCSI offload or all the way up to 10Gb in the future, no problem! Just swap that puppy out. Whereas with previous versions, you were either stuck until you bought a new unit, or went through the terrible pain of swapping out the entire motherboard.

The coolest new hardware was easily the industry’s first quarter height blade, the M420. Forrest Norrod (VP and GM of Server Platforms) seemingly pulled this thing out of nowhere from behind the podium, spoke about it for around 2 minutes and put it back.

I was a little stunned, especially that they didn’t spend more time touting this thing. It’s not going to be counted as microserver as Intel has defined it (single socket, 4 memory slots, etc.), that would be a disservice. This is a 2-socket, full networking fabric and management blade that will fit in to the current M1000e blade chassis. Which means you could cram 32 of these into a single chassis. Imagine, 32 dual socket, 8 core Sandy Bridge (educated guessing on the CPU architecture offer, but the model number doesn’t end in a 5, so I think AMD is out) blades in a 10U enclosure? S-E-X-Y!

A release date wasn’t officially set as Dell, along with HP, IBM and company, are most likely anxiously awaiting Intel to officially announce the availability of their Sandy Bridge CPU.

You can find more info on the new PowerEdge line the DellTechCenter.com wiki.

With at least one server coming up for refresh this year, I look forward to getting these in house to drool over, I mean, put into production.

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Dell announced their acquisition of AppAssure today, a software based enterprise backup solution for physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures. They feature both local (DAS, SAN, remote disk) and cloud based backup, replication and recovery.

This further supplants the idea of Dell as being a hardware company and continues them on their path to a more solutions and services focus. As some colleagues in the field and I were just talking (@plankers, @tscalzott) that hardware (especially storage/server/network) are becoming ubiquitous, the real value will be in features and software innovations.

Here's the press release from Dell:

Dell Acquires AppAssure 

·         AppAssure’s award-winning technology delivers reliable application recovery from customers’ servers to their datacenter and their cloud.

·         AppAssure’s technology enhances Dell’s storage and software portfolios, enabling it to offer backup and recovery software that protects a company’s entire application infrastructure.

·         AppAssure is the first software acquisition by Dell since the formation of its software group.

ROUND ROCK, Texas, Feb. 24, 2012 – Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) today announced it has acquired AppAssure, a global leader in complete application protection for virtual, physical and cloud infrastructures.  The acquisition of AppAssure, the nation’s fastest-growing backup software technology company, further extends Dell’s comprehensive storage and software strategy.

Dell has taken significant steps over the past three years to expand its storage portfolio to offer customers a complete range of world-class storage products and solutions.  AppAssure’s market leading backup solutions enhance Dell’s existing storage capabilities by providing customers confidence that their applications and data are fully protected. 

Dell provides customers with solutions that help manage the growing complexity in IT and the rapid explosion in data.  Today, Dell offers a full portfolio of Storage Area Network and Network Attached Storage solutions, based on its Fluid Data architecture, and is complementing these offerings with security, data compression and backup and restore capabilities. Dell simplifies technology to make storage products more accessible to businesses of all sizes.

AppAssure Leadership

AppAssure recently reported 194 percent revenue growth year-over-year in 2011 and 19 consecutive quarters of growth and Inc. Magazine has ranked AppAssure as the nation’s fastest-growing backup and replication software company. 

AppAssure’s award-winning technology guarantees reliable application recovery from customers’ servers to their datacenter and their cloud.  AppAssure goes beyond simply protecting data, to protecting entire applications enabling service providers and enterprises to adopt a cloud model to deliver fast, reliable and secure data protection.  AppAssure delivers the industry’s fastest backup and recovery of virtual servers, including VMware, Hyper-V and XenServer, as well as physical servers.

AppAssure was founded in 2006 and is headquartered in Reston, Va.  Bain Capital Ventures is the lead institutional investor in AppAssure and the remainder of the company is employee-owned.  Dell plans to keep AppAssure’s approximately 230 employees and will continue to invest in additional engineering and sales capability to grow this business.  Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. 

Quotes

“AppAssure’s unique architecture delivers innovative cloud-enabled backup and replication solutions that meet the challenges of protecting the explosive growth of data in both virtual and physical environments,” said Brad Anderson, president, Enterprise Solutions Group, Dell.  “At a practical level, AppAssure enables Dell customers to seamlessly move and replicate data across our existing platforms -- from an EqualLogic array in a remote office to a Compellent array at a data recovery site.”

“Dell’s acquisition of AppAssure is a strategic industry move given its relentless focus on providing innovative solutions to protect customers’ applications and data in cloud, virtual and physical environments,” said Najaf Husain, president and CEO, AppAssure. “Combining Dell’s global brand, scale, reach and existing storage portfolio with our innovative technology provides customers with world-class data protection and recovery capabilities in their virtual, physical and cloud environments.” 

"AppAssure's speed and ease of use are great, and the continuous backup makes recovery go really smoothly," said Dave Buzzell, CIO of Sedona Group.  "Our IT environment is constantly changing, and only AppAssure has been able to keep up with it. We estimate that we can keep three years of continuous backups just due to AppAssure's true global deduplication and compression technology. That's amazing." 

About AppAssure

AppAssure, the No. 1 backup for VM, physical and cloud environments, is a global leader in complete server, application and data protection. The company provides a unified and integrated backup and replication software that is engineered on innovative and groundbreaking technologies which offer near-zero recovery time, 100% recoverability assurance, and cross-platform virtual and physical server recovery (P2V, V2V, V2P or P2P). Building on a history of innovation and multiple industry firsts, AppAssure continues to set the standard in virtual and physical server data protection.

About Dell

Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers worldwide innovative technology, business solutions and services they trust and value.  For more information, visit www.dell.com.

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Failed sending update file: (NETW_FRMW_WIN_R299290.EXE) to iDRAC - Details: The update package (NETW_FRMW_WIN_R299290.EXE) is not supported via 1x1 update feature. Use the repository method to update this device. This error can also be seen if package is not named according to Dell naming standards.

See the full gallery on Posterous

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I racked my 2 new EqualLogic PS6100E SANs today, furthering my belief that storage is sexy.

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I had the privilege of attending an HP Cloud Tech Day this past week in Houston, organized by Ivy Communications. Tom, Chris and Halley did a great job gathering some pretty cool and smart bloggers and thinkers to hear about and give feedback on HP's cloud offerings and aspirations. The list of attendees were:

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Cleaning up Active Directory is a necessary evil. You need to stay under your CAL count and it can be difficult to figure out which computers (or users) have not logged in to the domain recently.

Windows Server 2003 introduced the lastLogonTimestamp attribute which replicates between all DCs in the domain. Now, this isn’t a real-time data, in fact it can be up to 14 days behind the current date, depending on your domain settings. If you want that, you’re going to have to get yourself a good syslog server, but for general cleanup and auditing purposes it works great. You can read more about this attribute on Microsoft's TechNet Blog.

I’ve written a couple very simple PowerShell scripts that will 1) search the entire domain for all computers with a lastLogonTimestamp before a certain date 2) return a computers lastLogonTimestamp in a human readable local format. It’s not so easy to just go out and get the time stamp, because the format that AD stores it UTC (GMT) format, so it needs some converting to human readable, which my scripts do.

get_lastLogonTimestamp_from_host.ps1

# Gets host and lastLogonTimestamp in UTC of specified host

# get Name

$hostname=Read-host "Enter a hostname" 

#grab the lastLogonTimestamp attribute

Get-ADComputer $hostname -Properties lastlogontimestamp |

#output hostname and timestamp in human readable format

Select-Object Name,@{Name="Stamp"; Expression={[DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.lastLogonTimestamp)}}

-----------------------------------------------------------

get_stale_hosts_lastLogonTimestamp.ps1
 

# Gets time stamps for all computers in the domain that have NOT logged in since after specified date

$time=Read-host "Enter a date in format mm/dd/yyyy"

 

# Get all AD computers

Get-ADComputer -Filter * | 

 

# Make sure to get the lastLogonTimestamp property

Get-ADObject -Properties lastlogontimestamp | 
 

# lastLogonTimestamp - date specified is less than zero, outputs it to a CSV file is working directory

where {(([DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.lastlogontimestamp) - ([system.datetime]$time)).totaldays) -lt 0 } | 

 

# Output hostname and lastLogonTimestamp into CSV

select-object Name,@{Name="Stamp"; Expression={[DateTime]::FromFileTime($_.lastLogonTimestamp)}} | export-csv .\all_old_computers_timestamps.csv

These are two scripts that I use pretty often when I'm trying to determine if I should disable/delete computer accounts in AD. Hope if helps someone else.

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Today, Dell released Update 1 to the 1.0.1 version of their Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter. The biggest highlight among the fixes and changes would be the added support of ESX5 (vCenter 5). If you're currently running the 1.0.1 plugin under a vCenter 5 environment (which 'works', just not in a supported kind of way), you'll need to unregister and re-register the Dell Management Plugin after upgrading (see the Release Notes for all issues/resolutions). 

One of the major changes from the original 1.0 to the 1.0.1 plug-in was the promise that updates to the appliance/software would come as an RPM patch and not tied to re-deploying another OVF. I'm glad to report that this worked wonderfully. You can find full instructions in the Dell Management Plug-in for VMware vCenter User Guide (page 41), but here's the quick and dirty:

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Ok, I've had the plug-in running for a few weeks and have gone through some of the primary functions of it (firmware updates, inventory, monitoring, warranty retrieval, create hardware profile for deployment)

I'm not going to go through the initial setup, that's been covered pretty well on DellTechCenter.com.

Here are the claimed major functionalities with my notes as far as day to day usage as well as some miscellaneous thoughts at the end.

Deep-level detail from Dell servers

The level of detail here is quite good; much deeper information and more clearly laid out than the basic 'Hardware' tab in vCenter. But what stands out to me is the efficiency of not having to rely on another tool, be it OpenManage, iDRAC, IT Assistant, etc. I spend a lot of time in vCenter and it's fantastic to not have to leave that for another program.

The amount of detail for hardware information is ridiculous. All of this information is available if you have the Enterprise iDRAC in your server, but to be able to get the serial number and manufacturing date of your RAM in the same place that you can check your warranty status is just beautiful.

Deploy BIOS and firmware updates within vCenter

This is a wizard based process that requires you to have a CIFS or NFS repository, which the initial setup walks you through for configuring. I've found it pretty straight forward, easy and quick. Well, the wizard is quick. While this feature is fantastic and works very well, the actual upgrade, however, takes quite a while. The server goes through multiple reboots throughout the process. After the updates are downloaded to the repository, the server is automatically put into Maintenance Mode and then reboots into an EFI environment to do the updates. After each update, the server reboots and re-enters the System Update environment to continue with the next update (firmware/bios). If you attempt to perform many updates at once (NIC firmware, BIOS, HD Firmware, etc.), be prepared to wait.

Build hardware and hypervisor profiles and deploy any combination of the two on bare-metal Dell PowerEdge™ servers without a preboot execution environment (PXE)

This is accomplished through the magic of the combination of the LifeCycle Controller and the iDRAC. While I've built the profile which seems very straight forward, I've yet to be able to test this (spare Gen11 PowerEdge servers are hard to come by, though if one were donated, I would not complain). Although I have a new server coming to replace an out of warranty cluster host that I was planing on testing on, I found this little nugget in the Admin Guide

The system needs to have a Virtual Disk for installation of the OS.

The Plug-in will not install the hypervisor to an internal SD card.

Bummer. This is the standard config for my cluster going forward. No Hard Disks. My great hope is that this is resolved in the next version. If not, this is a huge feature and potentially massive time saver that's not available to me.

Automatically perform Dell recommended vCenter actions based on Dell hardware alerts

The Plug-in adds a whole host of new Dell server specific alarms to vCenter. These range from power consumption to OS driver version monitoring. If something critical enough happens, say a single power supply in a dual power supply system dies, the Plug-in will automatically put the host in maintenance mode until the issue is fixed. This can theoretically save you from encountering an HA event, which, while cool, is never fun.

When I first installed the plug-in, I was immediately alerted to the fact that I was running on a quite old RAID controller driver. Handy.

Receive proactive renewal alerts from Dell before your warranty expires and access the Dell hardware warranty page online 

I've always been bad at doing this myself. It seems easy to track on my own, but we're all lazy in some areas, I guess this in one of mine. So, thanks, Dell, for enabling me to not have to come up with a better solution on my own :) I have yet to receive this because the server I'm testing on still has almost 1500 days of warranty left. But I see the link to click to renew it if I like, and its status is in the Overview page in the Dell Server Management tab.

Misc Thoughts and Issues

• Hardware Provisioning and Deployment
  • Unfortunately, v1.0.1 cannot deploy a hypervisor to an internal SD card. This is how we plan to move forward with our ESXi installs (including the R610 I just ordered)
• Pricing
  • Retail pricing is $299.00 for up to 3 hosts, $799.00 for up to 10, $1,799.00 for up to 50 and $2,999.00 for up to 1000 hosts
    • If you have 1000 hosts, you can probably afford this. It might be hard to sell $800 to my management to manage my 5 hosts. Essentially, we'd have to save about 25 hours of work to break even
    • I'm not asking for it to be free. It does too much to be free and is really bordering on what you can define as a plug-in. What I'd like to see is up to 3 for free (throw the SMBs a bone and gain market share in the process), $300 for 5 hosts, etc.

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Dell unveiled an update to 2 of their EqualLogic PS series array platforms today along with their first sub-$10k array. The new PS6100 and PS4100 series arrays are a refresh of their PS6000 and PS4000 units. The new boxes are being touted as having up to a 67% improvement in I/O performance. 

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Speaking of the delegates, I want to thank Stephen Fosket and Matt Simmons for gathering such a great and diverse group of infrastructure professionals. Also, as one of the younger delegates, both in terms of age and experience, I want to thank the delegates for listening and taking the time to explore topics that were new for me.

I'm fortunate to be able to head straight to vacation right after TFD. Rather than head back to the crazy of work, I'll (hopefully) be able to better process what just happened in Austin. As I think back through the presentations and conversations, there's a lot of processing to do.

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With demands growing much faster than our budget (centralized backup, Antivirus, patching, deployment, file and print services, CMS, LMS, better-than-just-pop-email), it was obvious that we could no longer afford physical servers. We had neither the budget nor the physical space, power, cooling, etc and had to come up with a better plan. Virtualization was the answer, and somebody had to do it. I fell in love with the technology and jumped right in. As most of you have probably experienced, it soon became the majority of my daily functions.

We quickly added one more ESX 3.5 host, consolidated 2 of the ESX 2.5 hosts into the 3.5 hosts, added a second shelf to the NetApp (now all of 3.5TB) and added a Dell PowerVault MD1000 attached to a PowerEdge 1950 running Red Hat serving as an NSF store (3TB also).

Sounds great. We should be set, right? Boy was I wrong. I had no idea how fast we could chew through storage and host resources. With our NetApp nearing End of Life (not to mention being well out of warranty), it was time to consider new storage and another host or 2. While we loved the performance of our NetApp, we couldn't afford a system with multiple controllers, couldn't afford death by licensed features and found it difficult to administer. Through a process I won't detail here, and with a price my Dell AE swore me me to protect, we decided to migrate to and standardize on EqualLogic. So we purchased a PS6000XV for primary storage (6.5TB usable) and a PS4000X for replication. 

We're now sitting with a single ESXi 4.1 cluster with 5 hosts and 3 EqualLogic arrays in two groups. We're still using the old NetApp iSCSI and MD1000 NFS SANs as tier 2 storage and now have a grand total of 26TB of storage (96TB more coming).

With the evolution of my workload and focus, as well as a new project building a remote data center in Houston as both a multi site cluster and DR site, I was offered the new position of Sr. Systems Administrator - Virtualization and Storage, which I gladly accepted. While this in part realigns my job title and description with what I actually do and where the Datacenter and IT services field is headed, it also adds more opportunities for growth. I will be taking on the role of Scrum Master (Srum is our internal project management framework), operate as lead/backup technician for the rest of the Sys Admin team and be responsible for server/service patch management oversight.

It's big and a little bit scary, but if im  not a little bit scared of what I'm doing, I get complacent and don't learn nearly as much.

Here's to being scared.

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Connecting with new people and exchanging contacts at VMWorld is a crucial component of the conference (or any other conference, for that matter). I've networked with many people over my admittedly short conference going history, and the value of being able to easily contact colleagues in the field post-conference is only outdone by their willingness to help out.

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Just got word Tuesday that I'll have the honor to be a delegate for Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day 7 focusing on Datacenter IT Infrastructure. The event seeks to bring together some of the industries great thinkers, authors, bloggers, influencers and vendors to engage each other. You can read more about the Tech Field Day at their site to get an idea of what these guys are about. 

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