Bladewatch.com

Chris emailed me this an agent had phoned him asking if he was interested and thought it might be relevant to the postings I’ve been making over the last week of how as a result of the infrastructure getting more complicated, more layered, the requirements of the team are increasing. As an example, the role below is for a permanent Windows server person:

Required Skills:

• MS Server 2000/2003 in a multi domain forest (Management and Maintenance)
• Naming and Directory Services – Active Directory, Group Policy, DCHP, DNS, WINS
• MS Exchange Server 2003 (Design, Management and Maintenance)
• Enterprise Level Backups (Design, Management and Maintenance)
• High availability, clustered server environments (Management and Maintenance)
• Linux & Unix (Preferably RedHat) (Management and Maintenance)
• Fundamental understanding of network, TCP/IP, Subnets etc.
• Virtualisation (VMWARE ESX 3+)
• HP Server Hardware
• DFS & FSR
• HP Management Tools (HP SIM, ILO etc)
• Blackberry
• OS Deployment using imaging or RIS
• Citrix Presentation Server 4 +/XenApp administration.
• VOIP Administration (Preferably Avaya)

Desired Skills:

• Exchange 2007
• SQL Server Administration
• SAN Administration
• Scripting (Preferably Perl)
• RIS
• Software Deployment
• Software Packaging Tools
• Cisco Router and Switch configuration.
• Citrix Presentation Server 4 +/XenApp (Design, Management and Maintenance)
• VOIP management (Preferably Avaya)

Is this not a role that’s moving towards next generation infrastructure support? Remember in any given enterprise, one team would be responsible for maintenance of a technology, another the design, backups might be run by an individual team, Linux/Unix or VMware might have their own operational team or even business line. Do our expectations/requirements need to change or the way we use technology within our business?

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Finextra also BBC

Banks and exchanges among DDoS attack victims

The New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq and US Bank Web sites are among the victims of a sustained computer attack targeted at American and South Korean organisations.

According to reports, South Korean intelligence officials believe North Korean or pro-Pyongyang forces are behind the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that have hit dozens of Web sites over the last few days.

The perpetrators are understood to have used a virus to create a botnet made up of tens of thousands of infected computers, which then overloaded targeted Web sites with millions of requests.

Check that your anti virus definitions are up to date, and that the relevant updates have been applied as a first step, the next thing is to watch the server estate/web applications you have to check that they are operating ok and as expected.

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I’ve updated the firmware versions and dates for the HP servers, the Dell/IBM ones will be done in the next few days, in the meantime, everything’s here with a downloadable pdf/excel spreadsheet for reference.  I’ve added on a select number of Smart Array controllers as well.

Remember updating your system firmware and operating system fixes is often the first thing you will be asked when logging a call, and on some systems can fix known issues.

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Eweek

CA is looking to make it easier for enterprises to manage their virtualized datacenters and cloud computing environments by enhancing the capabilities of several software solutions to support VMware’s vSphere 4 virtualization platform and virtualized network switches from Cisco Systems.

CA announced July 6 that is expanding the reach of its Spectrum Infrastructure Manager, eHealth Performance Manager and Spectrum Automation Manager to create a single, fully integrated management offering for physical and virtualserver and network environments. In addition, the solution will managedatabases, voice and UC (unified communications) systems, and other networked applications.

Key to the enhanced offering is support for vSphere 4 and Cisco’s Nexus 1000V virtual software switch, which can be integrated as an option into vSphere 4.

Anything the vendors can do to aid monitoring of the virtual infrastructure, and the applications that run on it has to be a good thing, I wonder if we’ll ever get to the point where my infrastructure can establish that the overnight batch is running slow, and migrate the workload to my New York data center, when it’s just stopped trading and has spare capacity?

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Information Week

Cloud computing may still be emerging as an IT delivery model, but U.S. government agencies are forging ahead with plans to adopt cloud services or build their own. The attitude among government technology decision makers seems to be that the benefits outweigh the risks and that the risks can be mitigated with planning and careful implementation.

With a nudge from federal CIO Vivek Kundra — Kundra was an early adopter ofGoogle Apps when he was CTO for the District of Columbia — a growing number of federal agencies are plugging into the cloud. The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), for example, is well along in building an internal cloud in its data centers. And NASA’s Ames Research Center recently launched a cloud computing environment called Nebula.

It’s great to see how cloud computing is being used as a platform for delivery in US government agencies, I’m off to read up more, do check it out.

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One of my favourite conversations was had yesterday with a colleague. He’s a small consultancy 2/3 guys that go around small businesses and help them out with virtualization. Anyway, they’d turned up at this medium sized business, they had 300 servers they wanted to virtualize using VMware. They knew why they were going to do it but didn’t know how to and were committed to spending money on tools, to getting a guy in that could do everything in about 7 minutes with a vmware cd and couldn’t understand why it service providers were asking them questions.

With this conversation in mind, I thought I’d write my quick guide, (please note it was written on the train to London), so I haven’t covered everything.  Related to this are the articles (one and two) that were written in the past – note the process and operations are just as important if not more so than the technical aspect of server virtualization.

• Identify business/technical drivers – what is it you want to achieve – what platforms/server models/applications do you wish to virtualize – not everything is best suited to virtualization just because you can.
• Perform an inventory of what you have, applications, servers, platforms. With this we can then define applications/servers and platforms in scope. For this we’ll take your Windows.
• Define the in scope parameters – THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT – Are we doing the virtualization per application, one application end to end, or are we simply using it as a box replacement project, anything older than DL380G3 becomes a virtual machine?
• Perform a per application, per server inventory of the systems in scope, what downstream and upstream feeds do we have to migrate/be aware of if we virtualize the machine, related to this if there is an ip address change is it world ending?
• Using the in scope parameters, establish usage patterns and combine with system requirements
  • Do we want to go for maximum virtualization, virtualize as many small servers to a few larger servers, or are we working on the basis of abstracting applications from the underlying hardware?
  • MANAGE THE SALES PITCH – sort out IT first, make sure we’re all playing nicely, happy with the platforms before we speak to ‘customer’s end users about virtualizing their servers.
• Identify the process bits – who owns what, what are the standards for virtualizing? The rollback?
  • Standards – if a server has a 8GB C drive when we virtualize it, do we increase it to make life easier in future? If it’s Windows NT/2000, do we give the application team a new Windows 2003 virtual machine or is it just virtualize and tidy it later?
  • The rollback, firstly can we rollback operationally, and secondly do we support it so to speak, or do we work with the end users to work through the issue and fix it?
  • What virtual features do we support and how does that work in real life – so I want rollback enabled to make changes and then undo them if I don’t like them, who manages it?  If I want an extra GB of RAM what processes are in place, do they pay more for support?
  • Billing – if we’ve got an existing billing metrics how does this work going forward?
  • Lifecycle – how do we define the lifespan of the hypervisor server?
  • Multiple farms – do we want an ESX farm per business? If so what happens when it’s full? What’s the time to live in deploying a new ESX server, if it’s month can a per business line farm work?
• Define how we begin – do we start on development/staging systems first, or back office IT, what benchmarks for success have been set?

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Infoworld

From 2001 to 2003, I worked as the local IT admin and jack-of-all-trades for a branch of a collection services company in California. It was fun in that I got to do a lot of stuff that a larger organization would have compartmentalized, but it was also difficult in that I had no one to back me up when I needed to make an argument. The boss happened to not only behave like the “pointy-haired boss” in Dilbert, but he actually had pointy hair — a coincidence that often manifested itself when he showed both his lack of IT knowledge and his poor management decisions.

When I first took the job, the network consisted of a hodgepodge of equipment run on cat3 and coax. By “hodgepodge,” I mean we had ancient reel-to-reel tape drives and an old mainframe running data “platters” that I had never heard of until then, and the user environment was old orange-screen terminals.

An interesting read, do check it out, it shows how even simple things like inventory can easily result in the difference between having a solution that works, and one that doesn’t. This kind of thing happens all the time, last week I was having a chat with an IT Manager who’d got involved in an argument between application teams over a £1500 server, one team having ‘borrowed it’ for about two years, when suddenly the purchaser said “Where’s my server?????”.

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Reuters

BOSTON (Reuters) – Virtualization software VMware Inc is slashing prices to ward off increasing competition from billionaire Larry Ellison’s aggressive technology giant Oracle Corp.

VMware said on Tuesday it will give 40-percent discounts to existing users of Virtual Iron, a software product that Oracle recently acquired. The three-month promotion includes 10-percent discounts on support contracts.

The company, which is majority-owned by EMC Corp, is offering the promotion as competition heats up in the multibillion-dollar business of selling virtualization programs, which boost the efficiency of computer servers.

While VMware controls an estimated 80 to 85 percent of that market, analysts say that No. 2 player Microsoft Corp could gain share when it upgrades its rival product within the next three weeks.

Oracle spokeswoman Deborah Hellinger declined to comment on VMware’s discount program.

Virtualization software allows businesses to run multiple “virtual” machines on a single server, saving money on hardware, electricity, maintenance and real estate. Sales of such software have outperformed other types of computer programs over the past several years.

I’m hesitant to say that virtualization is a commodity, but we’re kind of moving to the next stage. There are more vendors bringing their version of virtualization online, as we do this, vendors in the space need to innovate, improve their offering in line with business needs and address pricing, the concept of never standing still.

That said in terms of system management, accountability and reporting as well as reliability/disaster recovery/failover might be areas of interest.

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PC World

Cloud-based services are being rolled out without enough attention being paid to securing these services and the information they handle. That was the finding of a recent study commissioned by RSA Security.

While the report’s findings are alarming, there is still time for providers of these services to address the problem, said Art Coviello, executive vice president at EMC and president of RSA Security. The key is to look at security as an integral part of the service and not as an add-on feature, he said.

Coviello recently sat down with IDG News Service to discuss the security of cloud-based services. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation:

The debate over security is set to continue, before it gets emotional, consider the two basic premises, we select cloud for applications or services that are suited to it in line with our business, related is that the issue over data security, over legislation could be argued is a vendor/service provider issue. I’m buying the service, you do the rest, of course there is due diligence, there is responsibility, but we need to not detract ourselves with difficulties and establish, how we can utilize a form of cloud in our business. It might not be that I take my internal email system and place it online to a service provider, but rather I have London host and power the email system, that there might be distribution nodes, but the core platform is run, paid for and billable to London IT, with a pay on use, pay on user account fee, rather than a regional email system team.

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Businesswire

Virtualization has become an integral part of data center deployments. This trend is driven by the need to reduce both capital and operating expenses in the current economic climate. The virtualization of the infrastructure is allowing IT administrators to consolidate server infrastructure and reduce costs while enhancing service levels. The next step in this paradigm shift is to couple storage virtualization with server virtualization. This allows for the next-generation data center to have a tightly integrated virtualization platform across servers and storage which enable a highly available, scalable, and manageable environment.

Neterion’s multifunction and Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) compliant 10GbE products enable virtual guest environments to run iSCSI at or near 10 GbE line rates. Neterion’s network adapters work both in legacy hypervisors and are future proofed to work in up coming SR-IOV compliant hypervisors.

Neterion partnered with RisingTide to bring this capability to the market, which enables Red Hat’s Kernel Based Virtual Machine (KVM) to deliver measured >8 Gb/s throughput from KVM guests running RisingTide’s iSCSI Initiator and Target.

“This represents the best performing IP Storage connectivity for KVM guests in the industry,” said Marc Fleischmann, CEO of RisingTide Systems. “It compellingly demonstrates that Neterion’s 10GbE adapters and Rising Tide’s iSCSI software can now deliver a level of IP Storage performance that was previously only available in non-virtualized environments.”

Anything the vendors can do to aid in performance of the storage, and in provisioning times has to be a good thing, it will be interesting to check out this solution, I’m off to read up more.

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