Posts tagged SysAdmin Golf
Feature freeze
Jan 24th
Some of us took the time last week to create something new. I chose to challenge myself by designing a system I had not built before and that I am not ready to share… quite yet. :) But I do want to share something about the design process in very general terms.
The lesson I learned: Feature freeze is a good thing. Know when to stop fixing.
Now early in the project, I had a pretty good idea of what pieces needed to go together but I did not have a very good idea of how to get there. I put down a quick design and while I was doing that I started to see problems..
- Pieces did not fit together.
- Some things were missing.
- This was not going to work.
Time to start learning. I love learning.
CloudStack + vSphere: the marriage
Dec 15th
This was for a customer of ours that wanted to move from a pure VMware vSphere environment to a CloudStack managed environment with vSphere as the hypervisor.
I don’t think anyone would disagree that the documentation for CloudStack still needs work. But all the documentation in the world can’t help if you decide to skip important sections.
SysAdmin Golf: Use dd and netcat to clone a Linux machine
Dec 9th
So, we’ve been working real hard here at ipHouse figure out ways to help customers move machines into our vmForge VDC product. VMware Converter works for Windows machines, (allegedly, I’m going test it soon) but isn’t so helpful with Linux machines. After wracking my brain, I thought about the various tools used to clone Linux boxes. I’m familiar with dd, a block level disk copying tool, and tried to find a way to use dd to create a VMDK, that I could then convert into a OVF and upload. More >
SysAdmin Golf: The Hard Way
Dec 9th
This is the hard way to p2v a Linux server into a vmForge VDC. You’ll need the VMware Converter bootable CD, and somewhere to store your disk image. If you have a Windows server and shared disk on your local network, that may be faster than a USB hard drive, which is what I used. This is a cold clone procedure, which means that your server is down while its being copied. And it may be down for a while, depending on how much disk your server has, how quickly it can be cloned to local storage, and finally how quickly it can be uploaded to your VDC.
