This evening at the Dell Partner Central Awards party & ceremony held at “The Belmont” on Austin’s famous 6th Street PC Connection was awarded the Dell Healthcare Partner of the Year Award for 2013.
Picture of Dell Partner Central Executives presenting the award to PC Connection Executives for the Healthcare Partner of the Year.
Wow! I would love to have one of these for a home lab. Too bad it is too expensive for a small/home office system. It looks to be a good solution for small remote branch office solutions.
I wonder how Dell’s new Services system will sit with Partners? While customers may look to Dell as an answer to implementing projects, what do Dell Partners think about selling Dell Services or competing with Dell Services. Is there enough of a margin for Resellers to sell this to their customers?
Also what assurances does Dell Services provide to protect the Reseller-Customer relationship and not take these relationships in house?
Thoughts?
Here are the quick notes from the public releases from this morning’s keynote address.
Dell and Red Hat to Co-Engineer Enterprise-Grade, OpenStack Private Cloud Solutions
· Dell and Red Hat collaboration to enable customers worldwide to build and use highly-scalable, open, private cloud solutions based on OpenStack
· Dell becomes first company to OEM Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform
· Dell joins the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network as an Alliance Partner
· Dell to deliver Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform through a dedicated practice within Dell Cloud Services
Dell and Google to Help Developers and Businesses thrive in a Cloud-Based, Mobile-Driven World
· The collaboration builds on core strengths, making innovative cloud solutions easily accessible for companies of all types and sizes
· Dell and Google’s cloud expertise will help organizations capitalize on the immense business value of cloud computing
Dell Brings CenturyLink into the Dell Cloud Partner Program, Enabling Customers Worldwide to Harness the Power of Public Cloud
· Dell teams with CenturyLink to offer customers more choice and flexibility with an enterprise public cloud offering complete with IaaS, PaaS and cloud management
· The Dell-CenturyLink alliance makes cloud computing easier, giving customers globally the confidence to implement cloud solutions to drive competitive advantage
· The combined cloud expertise of Dell and CenturyLink will help customers tap into the full potential of cloud to transform their business
Dell and Microsoft Strengthen Alliance to Help Customers Take Full Advantage of Public Cloud
· Dell expands Cloud Partner Program to include Microsoft and Windows Azure, building on Dell’s current Windows Application Services capabilities
· The Dell-Microsoft relationship brings added choice and flexibility to customers, giving businesses a competitive advantage when implementing public cloud
· With Windows Azure and Dell Cloud offerings, customers can easily deploy on-demand cloud infrastructure that scales and adapts to evolving business needs
Dell and Dropbox Partner to Help Businesses Embrace the Evolving Workforce
· Dell and Dropbox bring cutting-edge solutions to businesses of all sizes with Dell Data Protection | Cloud Edition and Dropbox for Business
· Dell is bringing Dropbox for Business to its customers via its global sales team
· Thought leaders join forces to define the next frontier in corporate cloud storage use and policy
Dell Expands its Commitment to Entrepreneurship and Innovation with $300 Million Strategic Innovation Venture Fund
· Dell Ventures helps identify, fund and fuel visionary technologies that anticipate and address future IT needs
· New fund expands $60 million Dell Fluid Data Storage Fund to $300 million and re-focuses investment scope to reach to new frontiers of innovation beyond storage
Dell Services Helps Customers in Highly Regulated Industries Adapt to Changes and Innovate for the Future
· Dell helps health plans and healthcare providers improve operations; makes medical images more accessible with record-setting clinical archive growth; and introduces new cloud solution for hospitals in India
· New digital transformation solutions to help banking, financial services, securities and insurance (BFSI) organizations better engage customers and significantly improve operations
· Dell Services continues gaining momentum with customers in healthcare and BFSI in 2013
Sorry for not posting a bit more often. I am more often found on Twitter and or using some SocialCast. Here lately the time has been spent with a new job and working on my Cisco DCUCI exam and getting my Cisco CCNA Data Center.
I still have plans to do my VCDX Data Center Virtualization but it will likely be for VMworld 2014.
I’m in the process of moving which has blown my plans for a defense at PEX 2014.
I’ll have another post later this morning as I am at Dell World this week and have some interesting announcements.
I’m sure this has been said before. But I really want to know WHEN VMware will support VMDK disk sizes larger than 2TB – 512 bytes.
I have found that this is one of the main reasons people go to using Physical and Virtual RDMs in their environments. But these just make things complicated and nasty.
Datastore sizes have increased to 64TB but where is the love for the lowly VMDK that supports all of our Guest OS VMs?
I’d love to know how many people are having to work around this issue by using RDMs or mounting iSCSI LUNs or NFS mountpoints from within thir VMs. While the monster VM is available via Memory and CPU nowadays what about the Monster Data VM. You know you have at least one.
Share your thoughts in the comments section.
Doing some late night Twitter and email follow-ups I was surprised to see an offer by an astounding group of people. TrainSignal has offered VMware 2013 vExperts a one year unlimited access pass to their training. Their training covers VMware products and other vendors such as Cisco and Microsoft. Thanks much TrainSignal and those involved in getting this to happen.
If you are on the list of 2013 vExperts follow this link to get signed up. They will verify you are a vExpert so don’t expect that you can just get free stuff.
Sometimes you come across a VM that thinks it still is installing VMware Tools and you cannot vMotion or Storage vMotion this VM. Yet the option to cancel the installation is greyed out from the GUI menu and you may not even have the option to edit the VM settings.
How do you kill this installation that seems to be in limbo?
On the host that is running the VM you will need to enable RemoteTech Support mode or SSH and then login using a SSH client such as Putty.
From the command line you then run the following command:
vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
This will give you a list of all currently running VMs and their ID
With this information you then execute the following:
vim-cmd vmsvc/tools.cancelinstall vmid where vmid is the number you got from the previous list that matches the VM you are working with.
This kills the VMware Tools installation instance on that VM. This will let you vMotion the VM to another host. Since the installation is cancelled you will need to verify if VMware tools installation had been successful or retry the installation.
I recently was informed that I was being recognized as a 2013 Dell TechCenter Rockstar. This is a wonderful honor to be included in this for a second year. To be grouped with so many others who have a passion for technology and a desire to help others is incredibly inspiring. The list of 2013 TechCenter Rockstars is here.
Yesterday I was informed.of my inclusion in with 580 others who just love the things VMware has done and continues to do. This recognition as a VMware vExpert for 2013 is much appreciated. The full list of the 2013 VMware vExperts is located here.
I just completed an upgrade cycle of our VMware vCenter/SRM environment. This upgrade was a nightmare of unknowns, hidden ice bergs and a tar baby (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar-Baby) or two.
First during my first week I was asked to install a vCenter in one of our Data Centers. This vCenter was to support some new ESXi vSphere 5.1 hosts. So I went ahead and installed this to a VM that had been already provisioned. I found out that this system name had previously been used as part of a vCenter Linked Mode environment for vCenter 5.0.
Ruh-Oh!
Just so you know don’t mix versions of vCenter in Linked Mode.
Secondly as I was unfamiliar with the site/environment I installed this as a Simple vCenter install which uses VMware SSO in basic mode.
Ruh-Oh!
I found out that someone had already installed SSO on another server running vCenter 5.0 and this “new” vCenter should have been installed in multi-site mode. Acutally I found out later that the SSO installation was not completed sucessfully.
As this installation “broke” linked mode and was causing people to upgrade their vSphere clients but then not allowing them to login properly I went ahead and removed/uninstalled linked mode from all of my vCenter installations.
Ruh-Oh!
This did not work properly. I ended up using VMware KB 2005930 to edit my Linked Mode at each location using ADSI Edit. This restored access to all locations but isolated each vCenter and caused additional administative headaches.
During the next week I worked on documenting the Primary and Secondary vCenters that were running with SRM. During this documentation and planning period I was kindly asked/told to go through with the upgrades at both sites. This is where the real night mare began.
At the primary site after downloading the vCenter installer ISO and the SRM installers I ran into issues getting SSO installed and running and then having the Inventory Service and Web Server service recognize the Primary SSO installation. I finally resolved this by completely uninstalling all VMware components and keeping the vCenter 5.0 database.
Once the vCenter was installed and some basic AD groups added for permissions the secondary site was on the spot to be upgraded. This installation was fairly seamless. I was able to connect these two sites in Linked Mode with no SRM functionality.
Management had done their own research and thought that SRM 5.0.x would work with vCenter 5.1.0b. I informed them prior to starting that to have SRM working would require an upgrade to SRM also. So thus began the upgrades to SRM.
There was no documentation within the IT organization as to what was being protected by SRM. Of course… There never is documentation. I attempted an inplace upgrade of SRM 5.0.x to 5.1.0. The SRM DR service would never continue to run on the Primary server. This necessitated opening up an SR with VMware support. After working through this issue with multiple support engineers involved and uploading logs and escallating the case we found that when using our existing SRM Database the service would terminate a few seconds after being started. But when we used a new empty database the service would run properly.
Wow. But I didn’t know what Protection Groups had been created and what VMs were in each protection group or what Protection Plans were in place with possible customized IP addresses. Did you know there is no tool to migrate the data from an existing SRM DB to a new SRM DB except during an installation? Well there isn’t… But VMware SRM Support did have an excellent support engineer who was able to help pull the data from the older SRM 5.0.x database using Microsoft SQL Server Managment Studio. He was able to pull together the data showing our Protection groups -> VMs and that we had no customized protection plans.
This was great! We could install SRM with an empty DB and then “fairly easily” recreate the Protection Groups with VMs and Resource Groups and Storage and Networks and…. to get SRM up and running again. But! I also needed to be able to see the protected storage arrays. This required an upgrade to the SRA for EMC RecoverPoint. To work with VMware SRM 5.1.0 you need to be using SRM for EMC RecoverPoint 2.1. Ok sounds doable. But to have the SRA work you need RecoverPoint to version 3.5 or later. Sounds simple. It’s not. RecoverPoint is not a user upgradable solution at this moment. It normally takes at least 5 business days to work through the EMC Change Control process for a RecoverPoint upgrade. During this process all sorts of things are documented and verified. Since we use SRM to move production workloads this process was shortened to less than 2 days. The upgrade itself is fairly painless in that you upload an ISO from EMC and a special installer uploads this to the applicances and then moves the Protection groups from RPA 1 to RPA 2 and commits an upgrade of RPA 1. At the completion of the upgrade of RPA 1 at each site the installer moves the protection back to RPA 1 from RPA and commences the upgrade of RPA 2 at each location.
At this point I was able to add the RecoverPoint appliance as a protected array pair in SRM. Then I could create the Protection Groups and then I was able to test a Protection group failover.
What I did not know at the time of the RecoverPoint upgrade was that we were using Replication Manager to protect non-vmware Oracle DB workloads running on Solaris m5000 hardware. And that Replication Manager needed an upgrade to version 5.4.2 or 5.4.3 to work with the latest version of RecoverPoint. We did the upgrade on the Replication Manager server and the agents on the various hosts and it refreshed with current version info but the Replication jobs failed when trying to mount a RecoverPoint snapshot image to our Recovery target m5000 server.
After uploading numerous logfiles and support troubleshooting with EMC Replication Manager engineers it was identified that we needed an EMC Engineering hotfix for our source host to allow this to complete. This was a known issue that will likely be resolved in the next release of Replication Manager. To get a Hotfix you need to cool your heels a bit and let EMC Engineering spin up a version specific for your environment. Once we had this and had it installed on our Solaris m5000 host the Replication Manager job completed and the data was available at our secondary site.
The point of this is that while PLAN is a four letter word. If you FAIL to PLAN you are really PLANNING to FAIL.