SysAdmin

The big day for VMware admins around the world is here with the first day of VMworld 2013. Kicking off the conference (besides the pre-parties) is the keynote given by the CEO of VMware, Pat Gelsinger.

The big announcements from the keynote are:

• VMware vSphere 5.5 As rumored, we didn’t see vSphere 6, but there were several enhancements here that caught my eye. A new VM version which now supports better vGPU and more device support (more disks per VM). vApp HA which checks for the presence of “heartbeats” from VMware Tools™ as well as I/O activity from the virtual machine. If neither of these is detected in the specified amount of time, vSphere HA resets the virtual machine. You will notice that many of the performance features have increased 2x except the vmdk which overshot and now supports 62TB-512b vmdks attached to a VM. I know several of my customers that will like that new feature. You can read more about what’s new in vSphere 5.5 here.

Recently while patching some CentOS boxes in my lab, I noticed the following error.

This was a bit odd as one of the things that I will typically do when I see puppet or facter updates in my update list is to run the agent manually with a

Recently I was spooling up a dedicate cluster of hardware for a customer in our vCloud environment. It’s a smallish cluster of 5 hosts with a dedicated pool of storage. Nothing out of the ordinary here. Created the DRS/HA Host Cluster. The storage guys had already done the various zoning and disk LUN creation so that was added to the cluster and tagged it with a User Defined Storage Capability.

As a user of the free version of the Puppet Dashboard, I’m always looking for little tips and tricks that can make it more useful in my day to day job. Some of the features that you find in the Puppet Enterprise (PE) version are available in the free version, it just takes a bit of time and effort to get working for you.

One of those features was recently brought to my attention by a co-worker. In the Puppet Dashboard, its possible to have the facts of your node presented within the web UI. PE does this by default, but in the open source version you have to do a little wrench turning to get it working. My co-worker had already gotten it working on our production environment, but I wanted to see what it took to get running in my lab.

Earlier in this series I had mentioned the Puppet Dashboard and how we were going to discuss that at a later time. Well guess what kids, its that time.

Server Installation

For those needing a little background on the puppet server in this example, we’re running on a CentOS 6.3 box with both the EPEL and Puppet repositories configured and active. All puppet modules of coarse are coming from the puppet repo itself for the latest and greatest bits.