Nova is the Compute engine of the OpenStack project. Based on the currently available code ( commit 114109dbf4094ae6b6333d41c84bebf6f85c4e48 - 2012-09-13) This is a deep dive into what happens (and where in the code) during a resize up (e.g., flavor 2 to flavor 4) with a Nova configuration that is backed by XenServer/XenAPI. Hopefully the methods used in Nova’s code will not change over time, and this guide will remain good starting point....

Just some observations over time about the difference between applications in the Cloud and apps which run on Virtual Infrastructure. There seems to be some understanding gaps between the two. Cloud Apps: Load Balancers a must Segmented application data a must via persistent object store for pure storage and CDN for distribution Green field data Agile development cycle Continuous/Push Button Deployment with small incremental changes Virtual Infrastructure Apps: Waterfall development lifecycle (Off the shelf or behemoth internal app) Maintenance windows with long downtime Move to Virt Consolidation/savings driven Brown field data Large changes in releases, resulting in My-Mom-Cleaned-My-Room syndrome also found in Cloud/SaaS Both:...

What is Vagrant? From the Vagrant website: Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments. Why would a sysadmin care about building a development environment? Vagrant is a good way to get started with Puppet/Chef without a ton of overhead in setting up a server. How does using Vagrant mean I can do more with less? Imagine being able to provide developers with a virtual environment to do testing on their first day....

In 2009 on version 1 of this site I made a post entitled " VMware Knowledge Resources" outlining some of the strategies I used to find knowledge for becoming a successful VMware Administrator. It’s only appropriate to roll a similar post for version 2. DevOps and Cloud Computing can be very overwhelming for the uninitiated. Where do you go for help? How do you get help? How do you even begin to phrase questions appropriately?...

About a month ago I moved to Texas to take on a new exciting opportunity and work on cloud computing with Rackspace. While I will no longer be working on VMware products as a part of my day to day, the virtualization concepts are largely the same. With such a large personal and professional change, a rebooting of Virtual Andy is necessary. Virtual Andy’s new direction can be summarized with a paraphrased interview with Paul Maritz:...

Over the past few years our organization has been tried to adopt a pricing model for providing virtual machines. We are a small college with several semi-independent units to support. We need to be able to quickly quote, chargeback, and fulfill our incoming requests. This is a very big update to the post I made in December 2009 entitled VMware Expert System with PowerCLI and Excel. Problem 1: Solved. Problem 2: In progress…...

I’ve run into the issue lately where P2Ving a Windows 2000 machine will result in a blue screen when the new virtual machine boots. [A google search shows many others with this problem](communities.vmware.com windows 2000 blue screen p2v). The root cause of the issue is related to Update 1 of Service Pack 4. Luckily, with vCenter Converter, not VMware Converter Standalone, VMware delivers a nice fix for this issue. Follow normal steps in vCenter Converter - import a machine, setup your source, and as the Converter Agent is installed you’ll be prompted for a location to the VMware SCSI Disk Driver (scsiport....

Banner Unified Digital Campus (Banner UDC) is the most used administrative suite of applications specific to higher education. A specially crafted Google search shows almost 30,000 different universities running Banner UDC! If you are wondering if Banner UDC can be virtualized the answer is YES. VMware’s website has very little information about virtualizing Banner UDC… there’ just info about virtualizing Banner Xtender, the integrated document imaging solution. Many sysadmins will have difficulty finding a definitive answer to the “Are we supported on VMware?...

First post in months. Hopefully I’ll have more to post on in the next few weeks. Onto more pressing issues… “The N Series VMware ESX Host Utilities” have a couple of ISOs that have scripts for tweaking the guest OS disk timeouts. From the IBM Redbook IBM System Storage N series and VMware vSphere Storage Best Practices: This is a job for PowerCLI. Inspired from Jase’s script. Considerations for Linux: Use an account that can do passwordless sudo (or root- you don’t have to have root SSH enabled for Invoke-VMscript)....

It’s been a while since I’ve had time to post, but I couldn’t keep this to myself: From the VMware vCenter Converter 4.2 for vCenter Server 4.1 Release Notes: What’s New The VMware vCenter Converter 4.2 is a substantial upgrade from vCenter Converter 4.1 and includes the following new functionality (previously found only in vCenter Converter Standalone 4.0.x): Physical to virtual machine conversion support for Linux sources including: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2....