Archive for guestblogger
June 28, 2007 at 10:46 pm · Filed under Other things, guestblogger
IBM has devised a new Blue Gene supercomputer — the Blue Gene/P — that will be capable of processing more than 3 quadrillion operations a second, or 3 petaflops, a possible record. Blue Gene/P is designed to continuously operate at more than 1 petaflop in real-world situations.
Blue Gene/P marks a significant milestone in computing. Last November, the Blue Gene/L was ranked as the most powerful computer on the planet: it topped out at 280 teraflops, or 280 trillion operations a second during continuous operation.
Put another way, a Blue Gene/P operating at a petaflop is performing more operations than a 1.5-mile-high (2.4km) stack of laptops.
Very cool and very powerful, it’s always great to see what can be achieved with the technology, and this IBM supercomputer sounds fantastic, the zdnet article talks all about it, and the research.ibm.com site has great pictures of it.
June 28, 2007 at 10:37 pm · Filed under Other things, guestblogger
Got an email from a reader saying, have you read this? I think this would be an interesting post! It was an article about the HP and Microsoft partnership about Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster.
It’s great that people are reading the blog and thinking of articles that fellow readers might find of value. So if you do find anything on your google searches, your web travels and you think it would be of interest, email me and I’ll post it and refer to you if you like, by posting it under guest blogger.
To Ian, and Matt as ever, thank you for your emails, the articles you highlighted, thanks.
June 11, 2007 at 10:42 pm · Filed under How IT works, guestblogger
I had dinner with Chris, and mentioned to him that tonight we the site was being updated to host the DCMI logo, that they’d signed up to sponsor the site, this started a series of highly sensible and reasonable questions from Chris regarding this and I thought in the interests of being open I’d publish them, the questions are in no particular order and were not pre-planned, if you have any comments/queries feel free to email me.
So what’s this DCMI thingy on the top of the bladewatch site?
It’s a simple logo on the front page which links to their site (www.dcmi.co.uk) to advertise them as a consultancy/service provider in the data center migration space field.
Have you sold out?
I don’t think so. DCMI provide me with a set fee each month which I’m going to use to improve the content on the site.
I want to have a bit more structure, more regular content throughout the day, more interviews, more valuable content, to deliver this I needed to invest in the site and the content, DCMI wanted to be a part of this.
Why a banner/logo and not something else?
Well I didn’t want to compromise the user experience, I didn’t want flashing things, big banners or adverts all over the page especially if they aren’t for anything related; or for pop-ups to appear over related content. The DCMI deal lets me achieve this.
So you’re going to mention them every 5 minutes right?
Not necessarily, I have a great working relationship with the DCMI guys, I quiz them regularly whether its to answer my own questions, get an answer for a client, or help with content, the deal is simply for a banner no more, no less.
Does this change the content you offer?
No, everything remains the same, blades, virtualization, grid, everything surrounding the data center and IT in the financial sector. Indeed if there’s something you think should be included, email me: martinmacleod@mac.com
How long is the logo going to be there? Have you signed for years?
Not at all, it’s an initial signing for one calendar month (for a trial period), if I get emails saying we don’t like it, I’ll remove it, but I didn’t think it would cause any harm and as ever, remain open to comments/feedback, email me with your thoughts: martinmacleod@mac.com.
June 6, 2007 at 10:56 am · Filed under Other things, guestblogger
https://secure.logmein.com/products/mac/
If you’re a Mac user and you want to access your computers remotely, then this Preview of LogMeIn Free provides a glimpse of what’s in store. Free and easy remote control that “just works” - combined with the standard LogMeIn bullet-proof security.
LogMeIn enables you to connect to your Mac computers from anywhere in the world; from any other Internet-enabled Mac, Windows PC or hand-held device. The remote control feature in LogMeIn Free means you can view and control your Mac desktop and applications just as if you were sitting at the computer. Just like LogMeIn Free for the PC, Mac users can add an unlimited number of their computers for free.
Thanks to Matt for this link, it looks very cool and useful, a great way of connecting to your mac remotely to send that email you need with the files you want etc. Do check it out.
April 24, 2007 at 8:50 am · Filed under guestblogger, vmware
http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=81191
I’ve been collecting Vmware related links for a while and thought I would post them here for others who might like them. (also Oreeh keeps bugging me to post them), so here they are…Â Â
It’s a post on the vmware site, with links to different web sites with their whitepapers, redbooks etc, check it out.
Thanks to Ian for sending this in to me.
March 26, 2007 at 6:05 pm · Filed under guestblogger, vmware
Some documents I thought you might find useful if you’re using NetApps storage with vmware:
http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3515.pdf
http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3401.pdf
http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3428.pdf?bcsi_scan_67B5BE173D771E18=
WGxsqm27n5lAF0VMgU0WnAIAAABvCQoC&bcsi_scan_filename=3428.pdf
Includes some simplified diagrams of using NetApp SnapShot technology to backup your VM’s to a remote site
March 23, 2007 at 2:11 pm · Filed under guestblogger
A guest blog by Ian, he sent me this by email, thought it might be good content for you if you’re looking vmware:
BLOG Articles
March 20, 2007 at 3:17 pm · Filed under guestblogger, vmware
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_san_design_deploy.pdf
Got sent this by Ian, it’s the SAN Design and deploy document from VMWare in relation to ESX3, check it out, might be worth a read if you’re looking at your SAN set up as part of the your VMWare upgrade/migration path.
March 15, 2007 at 6:29 pm · Filed under How IT works, guestblogger
So I was out with Chris and he asked me about bladewatch.
In return for all those times I’ve asked him questions over dinner (trying to be casual about it), and ended up interviewing him anyway, here’s his turn to interview me.
So why bladewatch
Originally I started the blog just to highlight items I thought were interesting about blades and vmware to keep me up to date, and if anyone else read it, great! As the blog came along I started to note down things I’d discovered at work or playing at home, whether during the blade deployment process, or things I had noticed with vmware, or found out when speaking with people.Â
I had a series of challenges with IBM blade deployment because I was used to the HP bl30/35 blades, and one of the things I remember thinking at the time was wouldn’t it be great if you could google “silent install ibm network card driver” and get the command. IBM provide it, but you need to download the documentation, the driver, read the readme file, with that in mind when I came accross things like that, I’d note it down and post an entry about it.
How many people work for bladewatch?
At the moment, there’s me, my researcher, a PR and business consultant, and one datacenter consultant who’s been CIO at several large multinational organizations.
Who funds Bladewatch and are you sponsored by anyone?
IÂ fund the site myself, all costs are covered by me from my consultancy income, I’m not sponsored by anyone.
Cool, but you mention HP a lot, any reason for this?
Well I know a lot about HP servers, and I use them as a benchmark for this reason.
I try not to be too vendor aligned, the ILO content was simply because I got emails asking for ILO, I know it can take a while to go through the manuals, so I thought I’d post a few entries about how to do things quickly.
 Ever thought about advertising? A banner?
Yes I’m open to discussion, but at the moment, I’m happy continuing and building up the content.
How many visitors do you get?
I subscribe to a couple of sites that give me rough idea, Technoratti and mybloglog, but the content was recently syndicated, so it’s difficult to tell.
Do you get paid for any of your content? You a professional writer?
No to both questions, anyone can use my content if they feel it is of value, and the documents I post and link to are also for anyone to use.
I’m not a professional writer, I write the blog when I have time either during the day on my mobile, at home before or after work. Sometimes oncall can disrupt the number of posts I do in a day which I apologize for.
Alright but if you could live on sponsorship from the blog would you?
Good question, I’d have to say no.
To be honest I love my work, I don’t mind the oncall, or working until 3am, I love support, I love playing with the technology, and I don’t think the content would be as effective if I wasn’t actually deploying it or involved with it.
March 15, 2007 at 3:52 pm · Filed under guestblogger
So what have I been working on lately, well an improvements project to enable non-exec directors access to documents that they are priviledged. Solution Citrix Access Suite, which consists of PS4 ( no not the next playstation but Citrix Presentation Server ), AAC (Advanced Access Controls) and the CAG Appliance (Citrix Access Gateway), oh and WI (Web Interface)
Well wanting to test the improvements before getting my grubby mits on the actual (single server / single CAG solution of which about 10 non-exec directors connect to) I built an identical server with W2K3/PS4/AAC/WI all on the same server - something that is not recommended by Citrix but since they put the solution in before my time here I didn’t have an issue with supporting it
Tip for getting all of these Citrix products on the same server is get your Certificates and Service Dependencies right! When time permits I will try and knock up some install or at least troubleshooting tips.
- Always use the FQDN of the server for the certificate for the Citrix SSL Relay as we are not talking about a redundant solution I won’t discuss Hardware Load Balancers for AAC/WI
- Refer to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/193888Â and set all of the AAC Services to Depend on the IMA Service.
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CtxMsamAgentServer
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ActivationServiceHost
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CtxMsamDeployment
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\CtxMsamResAgg
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EngineMgrService
The next thing was the CAG, which out of the box is really a Super Micro 1U server with Citrix Software on it and no in built redundacy unless you buy 2 of them. CAG software is quite dependent on having a specific brand of NIC installed so early versions of VMware software, I have installed it on VMWare Server (my predecessor used VMware Workstation 5.5) and whilst I have yet to test I think I may be able to get it to work or at least migrate a template to VI3. Full information on virtualising your CAG is littered around the internet, but a quick start is here with my template VMX created and you can obtain
You will need
Further details can be found on this thread on VMware.com
But the easy way is to create a new VM called CAG with a 40GB disk then copy the contents below into the file that is created, and then point the Virtual CD/DVD at the CAG iso. (DO NOT CONNECT AT STARTUP! It will rebuild the PC without prompting - unless you you fancy lableing in Vista Ultimate Edition with a fictitious code and leaving it on JBP’s desk)
====================================
My Template VMX File for you to copy
====================================
config.version = “8″
virtualHW.version = “4″
scsi0.present = “TRUE”
memsize = “392″
MemAllowAutoScaleDown = “FALSE”
ide0:0.present = “TRUE”
ide0:0.fileName = “CAG.vmdk”
ide1:0.present = “TRUE”
ide1:0.fileName = “\\bigburd\ISOImages\CAG\CAG.iso”
ide1:0.deviceType = “cdrom-image”
floppy0.present = “FALSE”
ethernet0.present = “TRUE”
ethernet0.connectionType = “hostonly”
ethernet0.virtualDev = e1000
ethernet0.addressType = “generated”
ethernet0.generatedAddress = “00:0c:29:ca:f0:14″
ethernet0.generatedAddressOffset = “0″
ethernet1.present = “TRUE”
ethernet1.connectionType = “bridged”
ethernet1.virtualDev = e1000
ethernet1.addressType = “generated”
ethernet1.generatedAddress = “00:0c:29:ca:f0:1e”
ethernet1.generatedAddressOffset = “10″
sound.present = “FALSE”
sound.virtualDev = “es1371″
sound.fileName = “-1″
sound.autodetect = “TRUE”
displayName = “CAG”
guestOS = “other”
nvram = “CAG.nvram”
ide1:0.autodetect = “TRUE”
ide0:0.redo = “”
uuid.location = “56 4d a7 ed 3a 5d 53 e3-bf c7 a8 f6 95 ca f0 14″
uuid.bios = “56 4d a7 ed 3a 5d 53 e3-bf c7 a8 f6 95 ca f0 14″
tools.remindInstall = “TRUE”
ide1:0.startConnected = “FALSE”
checkpoint.vmState.readOnly = “FALSE”
checkpoint.vmState = “”
priority.grabbed = “normal”
priority.ungrabbed = “normal”
serial0.present = “TRUE”
serial0.fileType = “pipe”  Â
serial0.fileName = “\\.\pipe\vmwaredebug“Â Â Â
serial0.pipe.endPoint = “client”
====================================
So Citrix, if you are listening, when do you expect to come up with a license model that allows us to Virtualise Our Shiney Metal CAG’s?Â
Additionally
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