You all know me – I’m not the kind of person to be swooned by hype and marketing bullshit. But I have to say, the Maritz / Herrod keynote at VMworld this morning was an absolute blinder. Never before have VMware delivered a keynote that was so clear in it’s message and so visionary on so many levels. And once again, VMware are leaping miles ahead of the competition right when it looked like they were in danger of being caught. Sure, there were a few laughable claims regarding open standards (hows that LLDP and LACP support in the networking stack coming along?) but aside from that it was very, very refreshing to hear Paul Maritz saying things like “this is gonna happen with or without VMware” when talking about Cloud. If only all the vendors in this industry could be so mature.
Of course, the big announcement (for me anyway) was around the release of VMware vCloud Director. And while it looks completely awesome, the devil is in the implementation detail and I’ll be putting up some posts next week to talk about some of the not-so-shiny aspects of the product – someone’s gotta talk about the other side of the coin (why is it always me though!). But for now, I’m just gonna enjoy the Kool-Aid 
While I’m here, I have been completely blown away at the number of people I have met, had really, really good conversations with, revealed my identity to, and had them come back with stuff like “NO WAY! You’re vinternals!?!?!” and then punched me in the face given me a big ol’ slap on the back. Seriously people, thank you all very much for the kind words. As a blogger, it’s really hard to tell how engaged your audience is – you can’t really tell that from “number of unique visitors” type metrics. So thanks for reading, and I’m really flattered that you guys appreciate what I have to say – it makes it all worthwhile.
Just a quick one about this issue that has been plaguing me for ages. Like many people in corporate world, the browser on our corporate build is configured to point to an “automatic configuration script”. But perhaps unlike many corporates, the script at the place I work is f_huge_. And for some reason, this has introduced a problem for a particular .NET assembly that is associated with the System.Web namespace… the same namespace that is used by PowerShell when making web connections, such as when you invoke Connect-VIServer in PowerCLI.
The result is that powershell.exe starts chewing up memory like there’s no tomorrow… basically until your entire machine hangs. Lucky for me I don’t need to use PowerShell in anger on a daily basis, but this problem was enough for me to resort to running a vanilla XP VM whenever I needed to do stuff with PowerShell. But thankfully, someone took the initiative and looked into the problem with Microsoft, discovered the root cause, and a workaround. And so let it be known that I don’t get any credit for this post, but the person who should cannot be named for stupid corporate communications policy reasons.
And so here’s the workaround. Basically, you need to add the following to the powershell.exe.config file in the same directory as the powershell executable (both locations if you’re on an x64 machine – just create the file if it’s not there):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
<system.net>
<defaultProxy>
<proxy autoDetect="false"/>
</defaultProxy>
</system.net>
</configuration>
</code>
Et voila! Problem solved. Not sure if any other .NET apps are affected by this, but any PowerShell scripts that directly invoke System.Web.Client (for example) will be - I have a script to grab UUIDs via the iLO interface of HP boxes, and got the same problem whenever I invoked that script. But not anymore, hooray!
Posted in Coding | Tagged PowerCLI, PowerShell |
That’s right folks, this time next week I’ll be en route to San Francisco! I hope to meet many of you in person, and will be at the following social events during the week – if you are at any of these and want to shake hands (or punch me in the face), please seek me out! I’ll be sporting a vinternals t-shirt at the VMunderground and VMworld parties for easy identification (yes, I have 2 of them ).
Saturday 28th
7pm onwards : vBeers San Francisco
Sunday 29th
7pm onwards : VMunderground Party
Monday 30th
4 – 7pm : VMworld Welcome Reception
9pm onwards : VMworld 2010 Tweetup
Tuesday 31st
5:30pm onwards (probably, but not necessarily in this order)
NetApp Virtualisation Community Party
EMC Customer Appreciation Party
Veeam Partay
Wednesday 1st
5:30 – 7:30pm : vExpert Party
7:30pm onwards : VMworld Party
Thursday 2nd
8pm onwards : v0dgeball (go vSquirrels! 
)
Really looking forward to meeting all the vFriends I have made over the years in person!
I’m pretty sure that most people have figured out by now that the Cloud really has fuck all do with technology. Or at the very least, the technical challenges are the least of your concerns – it’s really all about the operating model. The implications of this new operating model stretch to pretty much every part of your IT organisation as it exists today, however I would argue that most of the changes are things worth doing anyway even if you have zero intention of moving to the Cloud. I like to collectively term these things “The Art of Cloud Without Cloud”. In this post, I’ll take a look at the orchestration layer.
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First of all, yes that spelling is correct because it is a Vim keyword – not English 
I’m sure you’ve noticed things have been a bit quiet around here lately… no I didn’t get attacked by sharks on my holiday, but I did decide to take the plunge and turn my attention to learning Python in more depth. Actually, that’s just a small part of where I’m going – I’ve started to wean myself off Windows! That’s right, no more PowerShell, no more C#, no more Visual Studio… in fact if it all works out, the only thing I’ll need Windows for in the future is gaming.
Of course you can learn Python just as easily on Windows as you can any other platform, but I like to develop in the same environment I plan on deploying to. Which means getting familiar with a terminal based development environment, which basically means getting familiar with Vim. But alas, the standard Vim colour schemes just didn’t cut the mustard for me, and after trying a few on it came down to a choice between darkburn, and BusyBee.
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Posted in Linux | Tagged Tweaks, Vim |
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any quieter around here, I go on holidays! I won’t be away for long, unless Great Whites are frequenting the Adriatic these days… in which case I may or may not return in one piece . See y’all when I’m back.
Today’s announcement of an expanded VMware / Novell partnership was interesting in many ways… the licensing aspect, the support aspect …but none moreso (for me at least) than the virtual appliance aspect. In case you missed that part, VMware will be adopting SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, SLES, as the single platform for their virtual appliances. Whether you agree with the platform choice or not (fortunately the company I work for has been a SLES shop from day one), sometimes it’s more important that there actually is a standard, rather than what the standard is. This is one of those times.
I’ve ranted in the past about the problem with virtual appliances. Everything from the lack of a standard Linux platform even within a single vendor (let alone amongst multiple vendors), to the additional overhead such a model of software distribution would place upon software vendors, to the security needs of the Enterprise around patch response times etc. And today, every single one of those arguments has been nullified in one fell swoop. Hallelujah, someone was listening after all!
If you’re a software vendor looking to adopt the virtual appliance model to distribute your wares then I have some advice for you – if you’re not using SLES for the base of your appliance, start doing so. Now. This partnership will mean doors that were previously closed to virtual appliances will now be opened, but not to any old virtual appliance – it will need to be built on an Enterprise grade distro. And SLES is most certainly that.
You all know I’m not one to drink the Kool-Aid, but it’s things like this that really show the leadership VMware has over the rest. My hat is officially tipped to whoever brokered this deal, it’s exactly what was needed.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Cloud, VMware |
