VMware is distributing a limited usage vCloud Director virtual appliance to facilitate and support evaluation of the product. I wanted to stand it up in my lab as a test-bed and to get to know the product better, but after checking into it, it’s not just the eval licenses that will expire. The http certificates will also expire within 60 days of the certificates being generated since it uses the Java ‘keytool’ utility and it’s configured to. As a VMware partner and I have access to licenses to extend the life of the appliance but due to my environment, I cannot work with expired certificates.
vSphere 5 box shot
With the release of VMware vSphere 5, I decided to upgrade my lab from 4.1. The process was pretty painless for the most part, but I thought I would right a few notes about the experience and a couple of things I did to help my scenario along.
I upgraded 3 vSphere 4 (ESXi) hosts and a virtual vCenter Server.
In the compatibility war, I’ve come across my first real casualty after my OSX Lion upgrade. What’s strange is this didn’t appear until today, and I’ve been running Lion and Communicator for more than a few weeks now.
The symptom appears to be that when Microsoft Communicator, which is part of the Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 package, attempts to reach out to one of your contacts, by any means from my basic testing (chat, audio, video), Communicator crashes even though it starts up and lets you get that far.
Continue reading Microsoft Office Communicator for Mac 2011 Crashes in OSX Lion – PATCHED! →
This is just a quick note on how to redownload OSX Lion. I had a hard time finding this, maybe it’s common knowledge for everyone else, but…
There are tons of articles out there on how to create a bootable disk, or USB stick, etc., but all of them require you to have the original installer downloaded from the Mac App Store, which dissappears after you install it. Don’t even bother looking, I at least haven’t been able to find it.
Continue reading Download OSX Lion Again After It Has Been Installed →
I’ve been running OSX Lion for a few weeks now and wanted to do a quick review since I’m really enjoying it.
I’ve installed it on a 2010 iMac and a 1st Gen Macbook Air. My experience with the latest rendition of the Mac OS has been 99% joy, which I honestly can’t say about any other OS that I’ve started off with right off the bat. For starters, the OS has been solid on both of the machines that I’m using it on. To be specific, I’ve had to force quit twice, between both machines, since the GM release, one time Safari was the application and the second time it was Steam, and in each case I was pushing the box hard at the time. Lots of applications running and lots of processing. Steam restarted no problem… it’s just Steam. Safari, when I restarted it, remembered every last window I had open, including tabs, sites, and window positions… as is mentioned in the features. Force quit cost me about 30 seconds of time, and I had it all back. Hiccup… no problem.
So before ranting about what I like about the software, I’ll jump right to something that seems to be missing…
I love it when companies use technology to increase efficiency, and Apple has at least one part of customer service ‘down to a science’.
This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this with an Apple Store, but it’s the third time which tells me the prior two times were not flukes. The latest time, I happened to have an iPod Touch that bricked on me. No good reason either, I hadn’t jailbroken it, or done anything actually except for activate it, sync it, play music on it, and test some in-house iOS apps. The only other app I had installed on it was Pandora. One afternoon, I plug it in to play some music and it won’t do anything, no power on, no reset, no nothing.
Continue reading Now That’s Customer Service! Good Job Apple. →
I’ve been using a few Iomega StorCenter IX4-200D’s as storage targets for vSphere 4 ESXi and have been a little disappointed at the performance. This disappointment really only comes when VMs are booting, I’m using Storage VMotion, or consolidating snapshots. For the price point, it’s still a great piece of equipment and I can honestly say that I’ve had 17+ active VMs running off the unit with no problem once the VMs are up and running. Keep in mind this is a lab implementation and those VMs weren’t under heavy utilization.
I’ll keep this post updated with anything else I come up with or that is submitted in comments.
Edited 10/23/2011 - No longer recommending use of NFS as a vSphere target on this unit.
I’ve been using an Iomega IX4-200D as a storage target for vSphere and have to say that for the most part it works well. I’ve used it both as an iSCSI target and as NFS storage.
You can and should expect it to suffer typical storage performance issues. It runs on 4 hard drives, mine in a RAID 5 array which is not the most performant, but best in case of disk failure and who wants to lose VMs. It’s still a limited set of spindles to work with and keeping that in mind will save you troubles down the road.
At one point, I had 17 VMs running on a single IX4-200D.
Still interested? Keep reading…
Is your Iomega NAS iSCSI drive locked by vSphere and you don’t want to reboot? This works with vSphere 4.1 (using ESXi but should be the same for ESX versions), and an Iomega StorCenter ix4-200d (firmware 2.1.38.22294). If you encounter issues with another version, please let me know.
I’ve had some trouble off and on with iSCSI on my Iomega IX4 series NAS. The trouble exists around removing the iSCSI target from vSphere but not releasing the hold on the NAS typically requiring a reboot of both the NAS and the host to remove the lock. As I don’t like taking my host(s) or NAS down, through a little experimentation, I’ve come up with the steps necessary to remove the target allowing for the editing or deleting of the iSCSI drive on the NAS. While something is connected to it, the IX4 will not allow editing or deletion. This also works for removing a single target drive while vSphere is still pointing to other targets on the NAS.
Let’s get to it!
I check my site logs pretty often to find out how people are arriving at this blog and have seen an increase in traffic that points to an exchange I had with a visitor about Vyatta blocking email attachment downloads. I wanted to post this quick entry so that people looking for a quick fix could get to this without running through the complete conversation on the other post: http://d3planet.com/rtfb/2009/11/02/vyatta-firewall-basics-and-configuration/
Here’s the quick and dirty solution:
Problem: Vyatta is blocking download of email attachments. This solution only applies if your implementation is using the web proxy and squidguard URL filtering.
Solution: Use the following command to get Vyatta to allow IP addresses to be called directly.
set service webproxy url-filtering squidguard allow-ipaddr-url
or
set service webproxy url-filtering squidguard rule XX allow-ipaddr-url
Keep reading for more info on the issue…
Continue reading Vyatta Blocking Email Download of Attachments →