Charles Pluta – IT Service Integration

Week 4 – Project 52.. (Wow, a month already?)

I’m writing this post at about 36,000 feet in the air using GoGo’s in-flight wireless service on my flight. It was $10 for the duration of the flight (I tried some promo codes but they had all expired). Being that it is a 5 hour flight (Atlanta to Seattle), I’m not complaining. Definately better than the $5/hr that the airport wanted for WiFi service.

My company provided me with a HP 4410t.. A thin client notebook that I am using the built-in VMWare View Client to connect back to my virtual destop running on VMWare ESX 4*. The desktop process is almost smooth as glass.. The only issue I have came across is that loading images is a little slow. Its like DSL, noticable but completely acceptable.

I believe on my return trip I will be attemping some things that should bypass their filters. GoGo currently does not allow VoIP to be used other their service but since VMWare View uses an SSL connection to present you with the desktop, if I had a USB softphone it should passthrough securely and bypass their filter. I believe I will purchase one so I can try this out on my return flight next Saturday. I’m sure there are other services blocked but I’m not crazy enough to try to view those things up here.

VMWare View looks like a very stable product (This is my first time using it externally), and I have enjoyed deploying it in my test lab in the past couple months. I beleive everything is functional the way I want it to be, with my current setup having 4 Server 2003 VMs as well as 5 XP Desktop VMs. I am waiting on View 4.5 in which Windows 7 support should be included. For now, I am just sticking with XP. My View 4 configuration includes the automatic customization to configure all XP options when deploying a new image.. Such as setting it to DHCP, Configuring the computer name to use the pool-name+1 increment on the new desktop.  My image template includes all software preloaded (Office and the like),  full activated and ready to use. A complete desktop can be deployed in less than an hour.

The ESX hardware configuration is an HP DL180 with 20GB of RAM, and (2) 1TB SAS drives mirrored for my data stores. This project has went well and I look forward to deploying it in a production environment soon.

* I work for both an HP and VMWare partner/reseller, so while these statements are without bias, here is my disclaimer.

Project 52 – Week 3

Troubleshooting a problem can be tedious and time consuming. However, with the right process, you can turn a drawn out troubleshooting process into a more concentrated point of observation. As an example, this week I was setting up a single VPN tunnel, however it connected 2 offices to a single 3rd party office. This was done via a point to point connection between the 2 offices of my client.

The equipment being used included 2 TZ170 Sonicwalls for my client, one at each site, and a Cisco PIX firewall for the 3rd party. I had no control over the Cisco device, but full control over the Sonicwall devices. I had the VPN tunnel setup for the 1st hop fairly quickly. We agreed on a preshared key and had the one office setup almost immediately. However, the 2nd office (over the point to point connection) could not get access into their network.

This is where I began my troubleshooting process. The easiest way I troubleshoot something like this is to break it down piece by piece, and in this case, hop by hop (The Sonicwalls are also routers). I enabled logging on both devices and watched as we attempted to ping from both networks. On one network, everything was being sent fine. However, pings from the point to point network were being sent, but nothing ever was being received. At this point I was happy that it seemed both of my devices were working properly. However, their network was not responding to anything I sent.

After several conversations over almost a week-long period, the 3rd party finally admitted to having entered the IP information incorrectly in their PIX device. Once this was resolved everything was operating as needed.

My point is how to break things up so you have an idea where to look at. I could have fired blindly and started making changes that I though could have fixed the issue, but by breaking it down first and peering into what was happening on a step by step basis, I was able to pinpoint where the problem was, and then once realizing where it was, how to fix it.

Project 52 – Week 2

In the past few years, “social media” has gained dominance online as more and more younger people join those who have been plugged in for years. But what is social media, and why have I avoided it so much?

Back in the day I was all over the internet… Before Google was as huge and my homepage was the basic HTML layout of Yahoo. I played on the awesome java applet of Yahoo Games and was on IRC constantly. However as things evolved, somehow I didn’t see all of those new things nessesary. You could call those things the Web 2.0 change, but I don’t want to get that idea mixed in with social media.

The big one at first (that I saw) was Myspace.. and I avoided it like a plague. Why would someone need something this slow to post their thoughts and make friends? I finally succumbed and made an account, as everyone I knew kept asking me for my own myspace page. And then came Facebook. I can’t be found there… Not from any hidden privacy things (Is that possible there?) but because I don’t have an account.. and I refuse to create one.

But then there is Twitter and somehow, all of its magic. Granted, I haven’t even had a twitter account for almost 2 years.. still late to the party. But somehow, its not like the others. Its simple, and easy. It has streamlined what I think Myspace or Facebook could be. Sure, there are plenty of spammers, but I have encountered that everywhere.. Even those Yahoo games applets And from this I see what everyone else got from those other sites.

So in the future I plan on being proactive in social media, or whatever comes next.. Not on the sidelines watching it and wondering how other people benefit from it. I have already started by getting a Gowalla account and the associated iPhone app. And hopefully, the more people I follow on Twitter, the faster I can get into the next big social media site… But whats after social media?

Project 52 – Week 1

First Lesson: Changing the IP address of a VMWare ESX 4 host. I recently had to do this as I was moving my VM box to another network.

First you must disconnect it from vCenter if applicable, and shut down all VMs on this host.. If you have high availability just move them to the other host. Put the host into maintenance mode, easily done from the vSphere client.

Now that all machines are off the host and it is in maintenance mode you can change the IP on the console. You actually have to delete the interface and create a new one.

esxcfg-vswif -d vswif0

-d marks it for deletion, and “vswif0″ is the interface you are changing. This could vary if you have multiple NICs being used. You can list the NICs using esxcfg-vswif -l.

With the interface being deleted now you may create a new one.

esxcfg-vswif -a vswif0 -p “Service Console” -i <IP Address> -n <Subnet Mask> -b <Broadcast IP>

-a Defines the interface name. -p defines the portgroup the interface is assigned to… By default, this is Service Console.

To update the default gateway, use nano to edit the network file.

nano /etc/sysconfig/network file

You can change the Gateway here. If it is not present, add

GATEWAY=<IP Address>

Save the file and reset the interface using

esxcfg-vswif -s vswif0
esxcfg-vswif -e vswif0

You can change the DNS settings on the vSphere client once you have reconnected.

I will continue to write about general network topics as well as VMWare topics as these are my primary during these 52 weeks. I hope to learn alot as well as help others learn during this time. See you next time!

I, like most people apparently, have put my blog off for numerous reasons even though I want to update it more often.. It just seems like it never gets done.

Enter Project 52.

Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year. Because we all know what it‘s like to procrastinate on our content. A website is not just a fresh design that can be uploaded to the web and forgotten about!

I have decided to participate and hope to last the entire year… Its only 52 blog posts and a year to do it is plenty of time. I should be updating every weekend and plan on writing content based on what I’ve encountered and found during the before week. It might be shakey at first, but hopefully with time and practice each week will get better.

See you then. =)