Dell Certs.

My employer needed me to tag some certs from Dell so that we can get better discounts ... etc. Not a problem you know anything that I can do. Fine ... Fine.

I was going through the VMware and PS series storage information and the test that they had posted is WRONG.

They have the answers for HA and DRS flipped.

Dell please inform your training people that VMware HA is NOT a global resource scheduler.

Also please let them know that VMware DRS does not provide automatic rehosting of VM's from a failed server.

Had to guess what Dell thought the answer was through trial and error. Goodness.

Please feel free to contact me for the links to the VMware documentation.

K' thanks.

Desktop Virtualization.

OK. So I know that we should avoid being protocol passionistas, but DEAR GOD. I loaded Sun's Virtual Box to provide an XP vm instead of my stand-by of many years VMware Workstation. I have configured everything per the instructions and made multipe tweaks but the VM just hogs every resoure and it shouldn't ... this never happened with Virtual Server 1.0, 2.0 or even workstation 6.0-7.0. Going to head back to my old stand-by as I bid adieu to an obviously inferior product.

I can only imagine how bad Sun's enterprise hypervisor would be if their desktop porduct is this poor.

Craiggo out.

VCP 4.

So I had Pneumonia for the last 2 weeks or so. UGH NOT FUN!

On Saturday the 19th, I had a fever of 102 and had to go in and take my VCP 4 Exam. Thinking that I TOTALLY flubbed it, I was pleasantly suprised when I got a score high enough to be a VCI.

Just in case you didn't know the upgrade period for VI3 VCPs has been extended until Jan. 31st.

Now before you get all flamey on me check the certification portion of VMware's web site as this was updated to reflect the change recently.

Where did all my SPARK posts go? I'll try to find those talk to you soon.

The SPARKs, types and abilities.

It's been a long time since I have talked about "SPARK"s and their impact on IT and the lack of HR professionals to realize what they might have, all BEFORE they interview with the hiring manager. It's been almost a year in fact. Please feel free to read my multipart posting frenzy on this topic HERE. In this next series of articles I wanted to address the different types of "SPARK"s and how they will impact any environment that they are dropped into.

The different "SPARK"s that I can think of are listed below:

SPARK

IGNITION SPECIALIST

DEMOLITION SPECIALIST

CONFLAGRATION EXPERT

M.O.F. - MASTER OF FIRE

There may be more in the coming days or weeks as I add content specific to these categories. But this is a good starting point.

Talk to you all soon.

Piece :P

Already Been Said ... BUT ..

So many of you who follow the VMware and virtualization industry closely, know that VMware Workstation 7.0 was released a couple of days ago. If you haven't used it or it's been a while ... pop over to www.vmware.com to pick up a copy. If you use it all the time, update your copy nice new features listed here it's now supported to run vSphere4 in a VM ... NICE :).

Exchange 2010 RTM.

W00T!

Exchange 2010 is RTM.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/10/08/452775.aspx

Time to tighten up your understanding since much was changed.

Also if you plan to do co-existence with 2007 and 2010 you need to make sure that 2007 is at SP2.

Vacation.

Over the last couple of weeks the wife and I went down and visited the capital of heat and humidity .... OK it's possible it's not the capital, but it's gotta be an honorable mention.

Florida. We hit Magic kingdom, EPCOT, Animal Kingdom, and Hollywood Studios.

Animal Kingdom Safari Ride = CRAP! Good Lord. I had the WORST experience on this thing. The ride never stopped or slowed down ... we went about 20-25mph through this whole thing ... insane hurt my back and threw out my wife's.

One of the best rides was the Tower of Terror. AWESOME!

Quick Update. UCS Oversubscription? Not a big deal ....if considered?

Hello All,

I am compiling content for UCS and vSphere. Some interesting things that I am trying to reconcile in my own understanding. In all my reading and looking at the system it seems that there might be a possible oversubscription issue right at the chassis. I know that we all love oversubscription from a datacenter perspective since most links rarely stick at 100% usage for long periods of time. But shouldn't that be designed in from the core level? But UCS has a 2:1 over sub rate before it leaves the chassis. So as Technologists we need to keep that in mind. Since the usual ratio is 4:1 or 6:1 then it's possible to get that rate and hit the golden ratio as long as you consider that UCS hits 2:1 as soon as you plug it in.

Not a bad deal.

See you guys soon.

SO my bad. :)

All,

I know that updates have been totally non-existent. I am working on that ... massive upheaval in my job life has caused this. Stay tuned.

You’ll eventually be promoted to your highest level of incompetency.

Tom Peters, a leader in IT vision, strategy, statistical analysis, and management, is quoted saying “In a Hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his highest level of incompetence.” This is also more commonly known as one of the Peters Principles, which most IT professionals are familiar with today. This saying comes from a famous case study performed by Mr. Tom Peters in the 1970s and is based on a majority of the fortune 500 company IT shops of that time. What his analysis revealed was a tendency for our field to promote technically competent employees to positions of management. So what’s the problem you ask? Very simple; just because you are technically inclined does not mean you have leadership skills. Management skills can be easily taught, but leadership skills are much more difficult to teach. Some would argue that people are born a leader or a follower. I personally think both genetics and upbringing have a great deal to do with one’s leadership ability.

What happens is an IT manager (we’ll say John Doe) will notice Billy Bob who has been a great programmer for the last 3 years. John figures, he is technically capable, and everyone likes him, so he must be management material. We’ll after all, this is how John Doe got noticed, so John Doe thinks to himself, I’ll just promote Billy Bob, after all that‘s how I got my job…now we are starting to shed some light on the origin of the problem. What John Doe has just done is promote an employee that may have no management experience, no vision, and limited or no leadership skill set and promoted him to a position that requires these skills. The reason this continues is because it is part of a historic and subconscious mentality that has been taking place since the late 1960s. Let’s face it; if you have been told all your life that you should hold your nose when jumping into a pool and everyone else around you holds their nose when jumping in, what are you going to do? I bet you’ll hold your nose. Ok, bad analogy but you get the picture. If you don’t think this is true ask yourself how many IT Managers, deputy directors, CTOs, or CIOs have you worked for that you would consider being truly competent leaders. Notice, I did not ask about competent managers, as managers are simply individuals that assign and track staff work flow and activities. I asked about competent leaders, which every manager should be, unless an organization is simply looking for a person to track and measure, and never to improve a team’s performance, vision, or strategy.

So how do we break this pattern of creating managers with no, or limited leadership skills? It has to start at the top of the organizational hierarchy. Once organizational leaders (or high level employees…grin) understand the importance of leadership over management and have insight into the time honored, yet flawed, IT promotional path that typically takes place, the cycle can be broken.

So where should one look to find a competent leader within IT? My first suggestion is to look outside of your organization. You can certainly consider internal staff, but don’t close the door on a nation or global search, as I have found the answer to seldom sitting in a cubical outside my office door. The search may take some time, but in the end you’ll be glad you did it.
What should one look for in a leader? How would you define a leader? As an IT professional with over 20 years of experience in IT and over 15 years of experience in IT management and leadership, I have always done my best to follow the following practices:

1. Model the way. Your talk, actions, and reactions should model both your personal and professional beliefs as well as the organizational belief structure. If you find the two conflicts, look for another job. After all you found this job when you were looking…right?
2. Inspire a shared vision. This is a quality that is much less common in leaders. In the IT world, it combines an understanding of technical concepts, business deliverables, presentation, delivery/execution, and embracing change. And let’s be honest, any leader that can do this, will probably need to meet most of the leadership attributes in this list. If you find a leader with this one quality, grab him. He is one in a million!
3. Challenge the process. This starts with two questions: ‘Why do we do it this way?’ and ‘What can I do to make it better?’ Don’t be satisfied with status quo. After all, do you think productive advancement comes from leaving all processes as they are? Not at all, this is certain job suicide. Embrace change, and don’t be afraid to be a catalyst for change.
   
4. Empower others to act. Simply put, if you are in a leadership position one of your primary roles is to provide staff with resources, authority and to remove road blocks that will ultimately make them successful at performing their job responsibilities.
5. Encourage the heart. This can be done by awarding staff with supportive words, recognition awards, time off, assignment of the new cool technology project for a job well done, etc. You don’t have to be a bleeding heart, but you must maintain a balance between the harmony of your employees and the tasks at hand. Also, treat your staff as professionals. I have often said; if you treat employees like they are professionals, they will act like professionals. Treat your staff like children, and you will soon find yourself managing a daycare center.

If you ever find a job candidate with 3 or more of these skills, hire him/her as fast as possible, for they are most certainly a rare commodity.

-EDIT: His name is Mr. Tom Peters :) -

STO (S.T.O.). |-Status Online-|

Evening All,

STO members please report. :)

You know who you are. Please send your contact information to my home email addy.

Thanks!

Hola Mexico!

So some of you that know me personally might already know that my mother and father moved to Mexico.

I have gotten the news that all is well.

I have volunteered with the fam. to bring down my biggest pup to protect their house :).

We'll see what happens and I'll keep updates out here just in case.

I plan on posting a TON of content ... even though HTML doesn't have any mass. Looking forward to this month you should see a ton of vsphere4 stuff up here as I have permission to begin installing it in the lab.

-OUT

SAN Haiku.

In speaking with some of my co-workers I said something that has been turned into a storage Haiku. It is below.

Just like a forest
Storage is an Eco-system
having many parts!

This helped us to concentrate on the full "holistic" design of a project and not focus on a speeds and feeds discussion. To have a fully functional Eco-system is tough. Everything has to be working properly or things get all mucked up. In storage design this includes Disk, Frame, Connection method, Connection topology, Host configuration, Frame configuration, and many more.

In essence don't just take it a face value that this one component or "TREE" performs well. It might be good but if all the other "TREES" are Douglas Firs that Giant Sequoia is going to be so out of place. It will also topple due to the differences in it's root system, because nothing will be there to support it. Tap Roots vs Interlocking Roots.

vSphere 4 ... ESX4 is tight.

So I finally got a copy of vSphere 4 loaded into my test environment. It's nice stuff.

If only I knew some Cisco contacts that could get me a nexus1000v jey or a 5000 to play with....

More coming up soon on this exciting and recent release by VMware. This is sure going to shake things up.

CC

TEAM AWESOME ... Re-united and it feels so good!

In my geographical area there are a few network and IT professionals that make up "TEAM AWESOME". In my complete oddness I thought that I had invited the last outstanding member. I found out recently that I had not invited her to post on the blog.

Please welcome Nicole Johnson!

Have fun Njo and we look forward to hearing from you.

Generational Differences Thought.

So I was discussing the generational differences in regards to technological advancement.

While we were talking the following statement was uttered.

"Generation Y doesn't create anything, they only modify." (TM)

Though it's possible you could argue creation of a modified item is still creation ... it gets metaphysical.

Import-Mailbox ... Still no love.

So as any of you who read this blog know a client of ours has been having Import-Mailbox cmdlet issues. We opened a case with Microsoft only to find out we knew more about the error than the tech assigned to us. Below are the steps that we went through.

PSS Call.

Checked permissions and verified error.

Installed support tools on S6 and added "transition" account to have send-as and receive-as.

replicated information and logged off.

Logged back on and tried again. Same error.

Created new account and granted most of the same rights except for Exchange View only Admin.

Proceeded to test Import-Mailbox cmdlet with the same parameters.

Ran BOTH Import and Export cmdlets and got the same error. PSS asked for more time to research the issue.

Attempted to re-run process with a different user. Result was the same.

Opened ADSIEDIT and manually forced permissions on the config,services,exchange, ORG container.

Logged off and then back on.

Tried an import and then an export GUESS WHAT....SAME Error DUH!

PSS then asked Technician to run Export-Mailbox on the exchange server itself. This again did not work.

Create Test user and try export SAME error.

Mail-Enable new user and try to open OWA.

This process repeated itself a number of times ...all of them resulted in the SAME MAPI error.

But the below manual process works fine. It's just manual and takes forever.

****Able to successfully move mail via profile migration steps:

Add transition user to full access on the mailbox.

Create a new profile for transition that uses migrating user's mailbox.

Open PST and manually DRAG in the old messages.

Contact User and verify that old content has been properly migrated into the Mailbox.

This is a manual process and will take SOME time to complete.

Manual Process is as follows:

For the manual migration process exmerge must take place first. 

To perform this EXmerge.

Use powershell to grant access with Add-MailboxPermission -Identity -User -AccessRights Fullaccess

Create a new outlook profile while logged into your machine with the migration account.

Copy PST file to your local drive.

Open outlook.

Open the PST drag and drop all items from the PST into the Mailbox according to where they go.

Verify with user that process is successful.

Move on to the next mailbox in the list.

Going to speak with the client tomorrow to see if they got resolution.

Talk to you next time,

C-SQD

Import-Mailbox cmdlet Error.

So in working for a client they had a need to import Exchange 2003 mailboxes cross-forest. This seemed pretty straight-forward according to Microsoft's articles on TechNet and so forth. However as we are all aware things rarely go as planned.

According to MS the process is as follows:
1) Exmerge out the mailbox to a PST.
2) Copy the PST over to a client machine since you cannot Import on an Exchange Server.
3) Open the Exchange Management Shell and run Import-Mailbox ...
4) Be happy since it worked.

Well steps 3 and 4 are kind of a no go for me.

I have verified that the account that I am using has Full Access to the mailbox. Also the account is an Exchange Org Admin and an Exchange Server Admin. This account is a local admin on the client and server as well.

According to all the documentation this should be relatively easy and work once all these are set. But alas I have now had to call PSS. Let's see what they can come up with and where we go from here.

The error that I continuously get is here:
because: Error occurred in the step: Moving messages. Failed to copy messages to the destination mailbox store with error:MAPI or an unspecified service provider.ID no: 00000000-0000-00000000, error code: -1056749164


C-SQD

Question?

Do you think that cloud computing and distributed computing resource solutions that are federated are new thoughts?

Haven't these ideas been kicking around for decades?

Post a comment.

SQL Cluster configuration and moving the MSDTC.

So over the last 5 or 6 days we have been dealing with a mess of a SQL cluster here at the office. After speaking at length with MS on the issue we needed to perform the following actions.



Move the entire SQL Cluster group along with the MSDTC resource to the cluster group.

Fix the dependencies on the MSDTC resource.

Add a new clustered instance of SQL that can fail-over between all 3 nodes.



According to MS having the MSDTC resource depending on the SQL drive is NOT a supported configuration. MS SQL Team and the MS Windows Cluster Team both had to be involved in case things went bad during the move. MS wouldn't allow me to perform these cluster changes myself due to some possibility of the whole thing going south.



So we moved the MSDTC and SQL group. Then deleted the MSDTC and created a new one. Then we deleted the folder on the SQL data drive that had been there. We made the MSDTC dependent on the Quorum drive. So at this point MSDTC was all set. From there we moved all the SQL stuff to the right place in the SQL cluster first instance.

Then we installed the second instance and then upgraded it to fail over between all 3 nodes of the cluster.

Now that all the cluster stuff was fixed we had to move TEMPDB and the SQL DB and Tlogs and Backups. From there we were good. Since we were on an EMC array PowerPath FULL was then installed on all 3 nodes to ensure that connectivity via fibre-channel was as reliable as it could be.

Since it was 5am at this point and I had been working all night I calmed down and wrapped everything up. Then as quickly as it started it was all over and I could get some sleep :). LOL

Be BOLD!

In my employment history I have run into a number of situations that I wanted to discuss with other professionals. Mainly because true SPARKs or TALENTs understand and appreciate being in similiar types of situations.

I started asking myself the following questions:

• If I could go back in time and speak to myself 10 years ago, what would I tell myself?
• Would I discuss world-views and big picture corporate understanding?
• What tidbits that I know now would I tell myself?

These are all good questions. If you are a young person or really ANY person that wants a deeper understanding on how to circumvent the "Old Garde" then keep your eyes peeled.

Go to : The Corporate Bold Homepage.

There you will read about a book that could help many people. I have been selected as a co-author. The book is slated to come out this summer. It is a collection of 100 short experiences. I can't give you anymore information, but realize that it's 100 experiences and pieces of truth from 100 Top Performers.

If you have questions visit the site and ask them.

More SQL Cluster stuff to come soon. :)

SQL Cluster Storage Changes.

This past weekend we had a client environment that needed to move from Microsoft iSCSI to Fibre for SAN connectivity. The reasons for this are numerous.

• Fibre connectivity has greater throughput.
• The Microsoft iSCSI initiator is junk for a clustered environment. ( when installing 2.07 the cluster nodes would intermittently lock up and lose resources, this is a known issue with 2.07. We updated to 2.08 and still had issues.)
• PowerPath on Fiber has proven to be solid numerous times.
• Less complexity.
• Greater reliability.

We ran into some issues though and since I didn't see any direct posts on the web or on TechNet. So I will detail the issue and the solution here.

Specs:

Servers HP DL380G5; Windows 2003 R2 Enterprise 32-bit, SQL Enterprise 32-bit. Current cluster configuration is Active/Passive. Initial storage configuration is iSCSI. Moving to Fibre HBAs.

Issue:

After installing a Fibre HBA Dual port card and zoning it to the storage. We uninstalled the MS iSCSI initiator and disabled the iSCSI NIC ports on the server. Upon rebooting we attempted a full failover. The cluster group would fail over with the Quorum but the SQL instance would fail over the IP resources and the T log drive then hang. The result is a full failover is not possible, which in an environment that HAS to be online is not a good thing. The event ID would reference not being able to flush the transaction log.

Solution:

After reboots and trying to see if we missed anything these are the steps that we followed to resolve the issue:

• Uninstall from windows the NICs used for iSCSI.
• Remove the physical adaptor used for iSCSI from the server.
• Reboot.

Once these steps were completed a full failover was again possible.

If you have any questions/concerns or if you are having this issue yourself please feel free to comment. We will do our best to assist you.

CC

1TB 2.5" SSDs and 4TB 3.5" SSDs? SWEET Here we go!

http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Puresilicon-936099.html

In the link above Pure Silicon has announced something TRULY usable in an SSD. Size and Speed. Size and Speed larger then the current drives. As prices come down the death of the rotating magnetic plate is inbound.

2 of these in a blade server running ESX has enough storage and performance to go up against small SAN installs.

-OUT