http://covmug.org

  No matter what your thought is on the “Cloud” you should at least be getting familiar with the terminology and technology behind it.  It has been gaining momentum and the technology seems to be catching up.  At least that is what I am reading.  Speaking of which if you don’t subscribe to “The Internet Protocol Journal” you might want to read the last couple of articles (Volume 12, Number 3 and Volume 12, Number 4 titled “Cloud Computing” by T. Sridhar.  You can read these at http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac123/ac147/about_cisco_the_internet_protocol_journal.html .  The two part article is a little lengthy but well worth the read.  It pretty much covers the who, what and why of the cloud.  If you haven’t thought about this from the business stand point, think about the hardware replacement cycle that most companies go through.  Think of all the time spent evaluating vendors, testing and evaluating and then implementing new technology.  This doesn’t mean you will necessarily be out of a job or all of your equipment will go away.  By changing over to operating expenses versa capital expenses the business can save a lot of money especially when you have to replace a lot of hardware on the floor every couple of years.  Move to the cloud and some of those worries go away and become some other datacenter manager’s issues.  This may or may not be a fit for your needs but that is why you should investigate it further.           

I would like to thank Platform Labs and Hyper9 for coming out in the snow and making sure we put on another informative VMware Users group.  For those of you that missed out we will be putting the video up shortly and if you would like to contact Hyper9 for more info reach out to Mike Raab at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .  Their presentation is posted in the shared documents folder so you can review it.  Here is an overview of Hyer9:

Hyper9 VEO (virtual environment optimization)

The Hyper9 platform brings a unique data centric approach gives you the visibility into the inter-dependencies and behavior around capacity, performance, configuration, history and state, in all layers of the virtual stack, including the guest, vms, datastores, hosts, custom groupings, etc.  Our out-of-the-box output today can drive reporting, trending, alerting and remediation, saving admins time and companies expensive resources.  Hyper9 installs in minutes and scales to manage 1000s of VMs.

After the meeting we had some questions about how to get started with VMware, how to setup a homelab, and how to get more info.  First thanks for asking and keep asking that is the only way we can help.  For more info on products make sure you check out the http://www.VMware.com web page and look under the products sections.  There are numerous whitepapers and documentation on the products.  The communities section is filled with members that would love to answer your questions or point you in the right direction so sign up and check them out.  As well utilize your local VMUG, if you didn’t know we meet the third Tuesday of every month from 9am to 11:30.  As for getting started well there are all kinds of great bloggers out there check out some of these sites to get started on your own home lab configuration:

http://blogs.virtualizationadmin.com/davis/2010/01/20/video-my-home-vmware-vsphere-lab/

http://virtualisedreality.com/2010/02/14/home-lab/

http://www.techhead.co.uk/vmware-esxi-home-lab-why-what-and-how-considerations-when-building-your-own-home-lab

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/241119

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2008/06/building-a-home.html

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2010/01/white-boxes-and-home-labs-community-podcast-79.html

If you are not familiar with the community podcasts these run every Wednesday and as you can see by the link above they have an entire topic on the subject. 

• Simon Seagrave was our keynote guest, and he compiled a great overview to the discussion. Highly recommended: – VMware ESX(i) Home Lab – Why, What and How? Considerations when building your own home lab
• Duncan Epping – My Homelab
• Gabrie van Zanten – White box ESX home lab
• For the overkill crowd Jason Boche – EMC Celerra NS-120
• and Chad Sakac: Building a Home VMware Infrastructure Lab
• Bouke Groenescheij – v-Water: ESXi overclocked, watercooled
• Simon Gallagher – vT.A.R.D.I.S – 10 ESXi node cluster on a trolley as demonstrated at London VMUG
• Dave Mishchenko – Whitebox HCL. Dave's vm-help.com is highly recommended, as is the Ultimate ESX Whitebox and the VMware Hardware/Software Community.
• Eric Sloof’s articles on whiteboxes
• David Davis -- My Home VMware vSphere Lab
• Eric Siebert's white box picture and
• Maish Saidel-Keesing – Install ESX on your Laptop – I had a Crazy Idea
• Iomega IX4-200D

I hope this helps you get started.  Keep the questions coming, get involved and tell us what you did. 

Those of you upgrading to vSphere 4 should be aware of the default CTRL-ALT-DEL actions.

Out of the box, if you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL on an ESX 4 console, the server will reboot regardless of being in Maintenance Mode or not.

To disable this yourself:

1. Edit /etc/inittab. Any text editors will do- I like nano but vi works just as well.
2. Search for "CTRL-ALT-DELETE" or "ctrlaltdel"
3. Comment out the line "ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now" with a # symbol.

It should look like:

# Trap CTRL-ALT-DELETE

# ca::ctrlaltdel:/sbin/shutdown -t3 -r now


4. Save and exit the file.
5. To make this take effect without a reboot, run the command:

init q