Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Archives for 2009

You don’t need any brains to listen to music

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Luciano Pavarotti once said, “You don’t need any brains to listen to music”, and he’s right… that’s why I love music. Whenever I need to clear my head I pick up my mp3 player and go outside for run.

As you probably already know I’ve got a pretty diverse taste in music and some were really surprised by my previous picks. (1, 2) Not many people expected me to be a hardcore “kid”, and I’m talking about hardcore punk not the rave stuff. Besides hardcore I’ve also got a “weak” for British bands and old thrash metal. It’s a weird combination, I know.

I’ve picked three bands again that helped me clear my head over the last couple of months. I love to explore new bands and would like to ask every single blogger out there to post a top-3 of your favorite bands at the moment. [Read more…] about You don’t need any brains to listen to music

Two new patches for ESX(i) 3.5

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VMware released two patches on the 20th of March. Both patches are related to an issue with the Broadcom bnx2x driver. If you are running on hardware with a Broadcom NetXtreme II 57710, 57711, or 57711E NICs be sure to look into the patches below:

  1. ESX350-200903412-BG – PATCH – KB 1009232 – General
    Updates Kernel Source and VMNIX
  2. ESX350-200903411-BG – PATCH – KB 1009231 – Critical
    Updates the bnx2x Driver for Broadcom

Download them now!

VMware vCenter Mobile Access & Virtual Appliances

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VMware just announced that there’s a new technology preview coming up, vCenter Mobile Access. For a demo/preview go to the VMTN Blog section: vCenter Mobile Access.

Introducing VMware vCenter Mobile Access (vCMA).  vCMA allows you to monitor and manage VMware Infrastructure from your mobile phone with an interface that is optimized for such devices. Specifically, it allows you to:

  • Search for virtual machines in your data center
  • Migrate virtual machines from one host to another using vMotion
  • Execute recovery plans using VMware Site Recovery Manager
  • Access Scheduled Tasks, Alarms and Events
  • And much more…

vCMA will be delivered as a Virtual Appliance which makes installing a matter of minutes. Talking about Virtual Appliances, VMware’s Virtual Appliance Marketplace has been completely overhauled. There’s a complete “what’s new” section to be found here, be sure to look into it and start exploring the endless posibilities of this virtual world. I personally use it to explore new Operating Systems and virtual router / firewall appliances!

Minor Update: RVTools 2.4.1

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Rob de Veij just uploaded a minor update of RVTools, version 2.4.1. Make sure you download it and replace the 2.4 version I blogged about just three days ago.

The new filter throws an exception when there are ESX hosts which do not belong to any cluster. With the help from Mario Vinet this problem is now solved! Thanks again Mario.

Pluggable Storage Architecture, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter

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The next version of ESX has a totally different architecture for storage. The new architecture is called “Pluggable Storage Architecture”. For my own understanding I wanted to write down how this actually works and what all the different abbreviations/acronyms mean:

  • PSA = Pluggable Storage Architecture
  • NMP = Native Multipathing
  • MPP = Multipathing Plugin
  • PSP = Path Selection Plugin
  • SATP = Storage Array Type Plugin

At the top level we have “Pluggable Storage Architecture”. This is just the name of the new concept, but it’s a well chosen name cause that’s what it is… a new storage architecture that uses plugins. Let’s start with the native VMware plugins. [Read more…] about Pluggable Storage Architecture, exploring the next version of ESX/vCenter