Planet vSphere-land

In an earlier post, I provided an introduction to policy routing as implemented in recent versions of Ubuntu Linux (and possibly other distributions as well), and I promised that in a future post I would provide a practical application of its usage. This post looks at that practical application: how—and why—you would use Linux policy routing in an environment running OVS and a Linux ...

In this post, I’m going to introduce you to policy routing as implemented in recent versions of Ubuntu Linux (and possibly other Linux distributions as well, but I’ll be using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS). Policy routing actually allows us a great deal of flexibility in how we direct traffic out of a Linux host; I’ll discuss a rather practical application of this configuration in a future...

In other articles, I’ve talked about how to use Open vSwitch (OVS) with VLANs to place guest domains (VMs) into a particular VLAN. In this article, I want to show you how to pass VLAN tags all the way into the guest domain—in other words, how to do VLAN trunking to guest domains using OVS. To do this, we’re going to leverage the OVS-libvirt integration I referenced in this post...

Riding the current software defined data center (SDC) wave being led by the likes of VMware and software defined networking (SDN) also championed by VMware via their acquisition of Nicira last year, Software Defined Marketing (SDM) is in full force. HP being a player in providing the core building blocks for traditional little data and big data, along with physical, virtual, converged, cloud a...

Yesterday, VMware Automation gurus Nick Weaver and Nan Liu just announced the release of four awesome new VMware Puppet modules that can help you manage and configure vCenter Server (including ESXi) and vCloud Networking & Security (vShield). You can read all about the details here and here and if you were lucky enough to have attended PEX (Partner Exchange) you might even have caught the de...

Have 25 Vlans in your lab and Storage, Servers, Switches and other equipment all over the place? Build a good Ubuntu box If you need more help on this leave some comments. It is pretty straight forward. Be sure to select openssh server as a role. After you login: Remember to $sudo apt-get update $sudo apt-get upgrade #If you are adventurous $sudo apt-get dist-upgrade Install VMware Tools (...

Had to do some ISO to USB image making today. Besides being slow going, there was nothing that indicated how much time I had left to get a coffee.Without further adieu:(pv -n ./startfile.iso | dd of=/output.file) 2>&1 | dialog –gauge “Running dd please wait…” 10 70 0That will produce something like this:You’ll want to change the input file in PV and output file o...

If you’ve been reading my site for any length of time, you know that I’ve been working with libvirt, the open source virtualization API, for a while. As part of my testing with libvirt, I’ve needed to stay on the “cutting edge” of libvirt’s development (so to speak), so I’ve been compiling my own version of libvirt from the source packages available from...

In case you hadn’t noticed late last week, the open source virtualization API project libvirt released version 1.0.0—a major milestone, obviously. To celebrate the 1.0.0 release, here are instructions for compiling the libvirt 1.0.0 release on Ubuntu 12.04 and 12.10. (If you need instructions on compiling an earlier release of libvirt on Ubuntu, see this post. It works for libvirt 0....

Welcome to Technology Short Take #26! As you might already know, the Technology Short Takes are my irregularly-published collections of links, articles, thoughts, and (sometimes) rants. I hope you find something useful here! Networking Chris Colotti, as part of a changed focus in his role at VMware, has been working extensively with Nicira NVP. He’s had a couple of good posts; this one is...

I guess I’m a glutton for punishment, because after successfully compiling libvirt 0.10.1 on CentOS 6.3, I came back to try it again on Ubuntu (my first attempt was not successful). Here is the process I followed to get libvirt 0.10.1 compiled and running on Ubuntu 12.04. I started with a clean install of Ubuntu 12.04, then installed KVM and Open vSwitch per these instructions. At the end ...

Having stumbled on the new /etc/resolv.conf methods of Ubuntu 12.04 a number of times, I hope this is useful for you as well.The contents of /etc/resolv.conf in Ubuntu are now controlled by “dns-nameservers #.#.#.#” in your /etc/network/interfaces file, like this:# The primary network interfaceauto eth0iface eth0 inet static    address 10.0.191.100    netmask 25...

As you may already know, my new role at EMC has me spending more time on open source projects like KVM, OpenStack, and others. Over the past few days, I’ve been working with KVM for a bit, and I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned along the way. Readers who are very familiar with KVM won’t likely find anything new here (although I do encourage you to share any additional ...

This is the first of a number of posts in which I’ll be discussing Ubuntu Linux, KVM, and the Open vSwitch (OVS). I hope that you find the posts helpful. Let me start this post by providing this disclaimer: I’m still very early in the learning curve with KVM and OVS, so I can’t promise you that this post will be absolutely perfect. It is, however, a pretty decent starting point...

Sometimes this approach works, with few exceptions everybody understands what is meant by "thin client" and "zero client" even when the details of the implementation are wildly different – a Dell Wyse Xenith 2 zero client and a Pano Logic G2M zero client may have widely diverging approaches to delivering a zero configuration plug and play experience, but their appliance-like nature and operat...

As part of my 2012 projects (see here plus an update here), I’ve been familiarizing myself with the Xen hypervisor. To that end, I’ve been working to get XCP (Xen Cloud Platform, the open source version of XenServer) running on a test system in my home office. It’s been a bit of a struggle, but I think I’ve finally got it, and I wanted to share the information here. Here ...

Blogging has been very difficult for me over the last 4 months. My move to the Office of the CTO within EMC changed much of what I did and left me searching for content I could write about. Most of what I was dealing with on a daily basis was either too early to mention or too secret to reveal. Today, this changes with the release of a project I have spent the majority of my days and nights work...

I have recently published a video of a Ubuntu Linux desktop brokered by VMware View using PCoIP display protocol. This video received a lot of attention and I received in numerous twits, direct messages and emails asking how one would be able to implements the solution. After all the enquires, one thing is clear to me – the demand for Linux hosted desktops is out there and growing by the ...

  Enjoy… in Full HD for better experience.     This article was first published by Andre Leibovici (@andreleibovici) atmyvirtualcloud.net.

I have moved a new vApp I am building to Ubuntu 11.04 this last week. I had been coding via SSH for the most part. But just recently I noticed that I have been getting a blank console on the vApp. Turns out that doing a kernel upgrade early in the process made a setting in grub that gives a slick look to the boot process not work. This is a Ubuntu bug with an easy fix: Get into the VM (using SSH...