It is the shady side that hurts the legitimacy of all bloggers.  With traditional journalists, there is a code of ethics and standards and anyone who does not abide by those standards is black-balled and fired.  In the blogging world, the journalistic standards are not enforced and the sensational, tabloid world, where dirt and all-out lies sell issues, has made it over into the blogosphere.  Even worse, people pose as someone they are not in order to persuade and influence decisions of readers.

As most readers may know, I come from a journalism background – all through my school years but not professionally.  I take the standards of the print world very seriously when I write.  I try my very best to be upfront and divulge any conflict of interest that may exist or any sponsorship for my blogging activities.   I try also to stay impartial and independent in my views — even as my About page says, my views are my views and not even those of my employer.  I write about the things I know and while those perspectives may not be as well-rounded as other analysts who blog, I write based on my experiences and don’t speculate about competitors if I have no experience with their products.

As of today, you see a new Blog with Integrity logo in my sidebar as a visible commitment to disclose and represent integrity when I write.  Blog with Integrity is a program to bring the same standards that apply to the journalistic world to the blogosphere.   To find out more, to join, or to see the code of conduct that I and many others have agreed to, visit www.blogwithintegrity.com.

Up until January, we had scripted everything for VMware in VI-Perl.  I don’t begin to call myself a Perl programmer, but I can crawl in and modify a canned Perl script and I am able to make it do what I want.  That said, it was always a pain to do it.

For our VMware environment, we have monitoring scripts that report low disk space for our guests, a daily snapshot report and what VM’s have been provisioned or deleted from the system.  All of these were things I had to find scripts that had already been written in VI-Perl, and so we relegated scripting to simply monitoring in our environment. After we added the VMware Management Appliance to our network, we used it occasionally for Storage VMotion in the ESX 3.5 days, before it was added to the GUI.

With PowerCLI, however, we have moved into doing more actual configuration and changes — real work — using it.  Because PowerShell support piping the objects between commands, we have quickly realized gains in efficiency by retrieving a list of targets and issuing a command against the group.  Some things we have done manually in the past make much more sense in PowerShell.  Performing a VMotion or Storage VMotion is a good example of this.  Storage VMotion involves a number of steps (click, click, click, click, click) to perform in the GUI.  In Powershell, its a simple, one-line and easy to understand command.

PowerCLI is much more user friendly to me than writing Perl.  Soon, I plan on rewriting my management scripts using PowerCLI. There are some security related things I must figure out (haven’t even looked into them yet) – like signing PowerShell scripts with a certificate, which will be required for executing scripts on a schedule.  (In our environment, we plan on making all of our PowerShell instances run in remote-signed execution policy to maintain security.

Another great reason to move to PowerCLI for VMware management in our environment is that current and future version of Microsoft products, which my group also administers, will be largely manageable from PowerShell.

Some examples that I have found useful so far:

Storage VMotion a VM

Connect to vCenter or an ESX server using connect-viserver.

Get-VM "VMNAME" | Move-VM -datastore (Get-datastore "DATASTORENAME") -runasync

Show VMs that have Raw Disk Mappings

Connect to vCenter (its most useful in an entire datacenter, but works against an ESX hosts also).

Get-VM | Get-HardDisk | Where-Object { $_.DiskType -like "Raw*"} |
   `Select-Object -property @{N="VM";E={$_.Parent}},DiskType,
   Name,ScsiCanonicalName,DeviceName,CapacityKB

Another big reason I’m glad we were exposed to PowerCLI at this time is we all know the future roadmap of vSphere.  The next major release will remove the ESX version of the hypervisor and only include the ESXi (console-less) hypervisor.  Once we make that migration, things we have done in the past will no longer be possible.  By moving to remote command-line administration today, we are curbing some of our pain of moving there when we also move to the new vSphere release.

PowerCLI for HP EVA best practices of VMware settings

But, as I wrote about when we found the EVA best practices, we still need to modify some other settings on the hypervisor — specifically chaning the IOPS value for LUNs is recommended in HP’s best practices.  So, in the past week, I have been looking at how to do this from PowerCLI.

I have not written about this, but our EVA’s have been having a large amount of issues in the recent months.  One reason I have not written anything is that we still have not gotten a root cause for our problems.    But, we have been working extensively with HP’s senior level support team for a few months now.  One of the things we looked at was our ESX configuration and once again, we were sent to their best practices document for VMware.  Fortunately, we already had their recommendations in place, so there was little to worry about.

But, going back and looking at these settings again, we were able to find ways to set these settings (without reboot to boot) using PowerCLI instead of using command line from the ESX console.  So, I certainly wanted to share these, along with the sources where I found them,  for anyone using HP EVA in their environments.

Set the Multipath Policies of a Host to Round Robin from PowerCLI (for HP EVA best practices)

Connect to vCenter

Get-VMHost <hostname> | Get-ScsiLun -CanonicalName "naa.600*" |
   Set-ScsiLun -MultipathPolicy "roundrobin"

Remember, that for the hostname, you can use wildcards to get all the hosts in a cluster or simply a * for all hosts!

>> Source

Set IOPS values of disks to 1 from PowerCLI (for HP EVA best practices)

Connect to an individual ESX host for this.  Its cumbersome, but provides the functionality.

$esxcli = Get-EsxCli
$esxcli.nmp.device.list() | where {$_.device -like "naa.600*"} | %{
    $configBefore = $esxcli.nmp.roundrobin.getconfig($_.device)
    $esxcli.nmp.roundrobin.setconfig(0,$_.device,[long]1,"iops",$false)
    $configAfter = $esxcli.nmp.roundrobin.getconfig($_.device)

# Uncomment the following lines if you want to report the settings
#   $configBefore
#   $configAfter
}

>> Source

On a personal note, my wife and I are in the final stages of planning our new home, which we hope to begin building in the coming months.  Any free time that I would have had to blog about my experiences has been consumed with house plans, builder meetings and other items to prepare for this major undertaking.  My wife is attempting to chronicle our build on her blog, My Green Glasses.  The house will be a certified green home, Energy Star certified and *possibly* LEED certified.  We know that we will be close to meeting requirements for a LEED certification and we are looking at what additional things need to be done to make it happen and whether it is worth it or not.

In addition to the build, the organizers have started a canned food drive with the hopes of collecting 10 tons of food – yes, literal TONS of food.  Given the state of the economy and the fact that food pantries are in need of food to distribute to families in the area, its great to see the builder using this opportunity to raise awareness and help the entire community, in addition to a family.

There is also a pep rally this morning at Coastal Carolina’s Wall Auditorium to kick off the project.

I still seem to be finding my voice – finding my topic – and I guess that’s part of the journey.  I have always enjoyed writing, though I’m not sure my prose is particularly interesting to read, its something I will continue to try and refine.  My first year has been marked with posts about the work I’m currently doing and new projects I’m undertaking.   I started with a focus on two core topics – VMware and Apple stuff – and I’ve kinda stuck to those.  I expanded with my personal experiences with Mac finance software and some other topics, but early on, I got a lot of hits from my VMworld posts.  I hope to do this again this year at the conference.

Anyways, bear with me as I continue to figure out how to effectively do this – as I found out what people find useful or interesting – and as I continue to share my experiences from a sys admin’s world.

I guess I should back up.  When I came across Moblin, it initially looks really promising from the screenshots.  The interface was intuitive and looked more like a large mobile phone type interface than anything I’d seen on a miniature desktop.  To me, it looked pretty well suited for the tween size of a laptop.

On first boot, the interface was much better than I had initially expected.  The 3D transitions and effects were pretty well integrated and someone has spent a lot of time working out the intricacies of this Linux desktop.

You can’t do alot from the live USB – its mostly an installer method, but you do get a good sense of what this software can do, and it looks good.  You have to change your thinking a bit (not hard for a thinking different Mac person to do) and understand that there is no desktop and that your applications live in zones.  Beyond that, the launcher bar (for lack of a better term) is your central location for switching contexts and zones to move between your applications and settings.  Its pretty efficient and has an autohide feature (a la OS X’s Dock) which saves the screen real estate.  Jamie wasn’t interested in installing, so some features weren’t easy to test.

Moblin features a status channel – with integrated Twitter and Last.fm support.  It also includes instant messaging for Jabber clients and a couple options I didn’t recognize.  The Jabber support has a dedicated Google Talk option, but didn’t see AIM, Yahoo or Microsoft chat – which would be nice additions.   The browsing experience is nice and nicely skinned to match the rest of the experience.

Beyond Internet, Moblin includes the ability to play media files – something good for road trips for movies and tv shows (too bad its not iTunes) as well as music.  These features aren’t fully integrated, but you can see that the interface will be nice once completed.

There is also a “pinning” mechanism integrated throughout the OS.  Think favorites for the whole OS.  You can pin things that like – whether its a website, media file, etc. for easy retrieval later.  That is a pretty nice feature.

We tried to update the OS using the integrated update and it ran through the motions (although it didn’t update anything – the Live USB stick must be a read-only image).  That feature makes for a full featured and always patched experience.

This is still an early beta, but it shows a lot of promise.  Its something I hope to test again in a later form… it might even convince me to plunk down the dollars for a netbook in the future – just won’t be a Windows netbook… {big grin}

Its finally happened.  I missed  a day in Google Reader… I didn’t read any of my news today.  I never got caught up enough at work to actually have time to take in the news.  I also didn’t have time to read much of my personal email during the day.   The day flew past and it was 4:22 (see my twitter feed) before I knew what happened, and I was no where near where I wanted to be as far as my task list was concerned.  So, tomorrow is a day to play catch up.

I guess that’s the problem – is problem the right word?  I guess that’s the delimma.  By virtue of the iPhone, I’m pretty much connected except when I’m sleeping.  I can get my news, I can get my email, I can get to the Internet from just about anywhere.  And for me to have 600 things waiting to be read in Google Reader – that’s saying something.

I guess its also like the wireless commercials that were airing in the south (maybe nationwide) last year – all the things you can think about when you don’t have to think about minutes…  I’m waiting for some mindless reboots after upgrading VMware Tools tonight and this is what I’m thinking about.  I guess, I could be reading all those things in Google Reader instead of posting this, but oh well.  I have one major reboot that needs to happen tonight – 2 am – <sarcasm> Yay! </sarcasm>.

Obviously, someone out there thinks there is a real business opportunity for services that will allow you to pass along access to your virtual properties…  See the original article at cnn.com.

Thanks to Glen for this link…