After 96 hours of downtime, kendrickcoleman.com is alive once again. This is my post-mortem of the experience and a little piece of my mind.

I woke up around 8am EST Saturday May 5th to see a tweet from @BasRaayman that said "Kenny, you might want to check with your hoster, your blog is stating "This Account Has Been Suspended"?". Great, what a fantastic way to start my Derby day. I look at my email and I see "WEB HOSTING ACCOUNT DEACTIVATED" in all caps.

Here are some snippets from the email:

Dear Kendrick:

It has come to our attention that your site is using an extreme amount of resources on our servers and network; consequently, your site has outgrown the Just Host shared hosting package.  It has become increasingly more difficult to keep your site online, and doing so now degrades the experience for the other users on our servers. Others who have experienced such growth with their site(s) and hosting needs have chosen to move their site(s) to a Dedicated Server or Virtual Private Server (VPS). Just Host does not currently offer Dedicated or VPS hosting. These alternative hosting services will include more resources and site stability, as well as better backup and server redundancy.

I got an email today that talks about some of the Partner News going on in the VCE Community. The big part was that there is a new series on the Vblock 700LX which uses the VMAXe as part of the platform. VCE is continuing to expand its options for customers using everything we can out of VMware, Cisco, and EMC to build the best solutions possible. I navigated to the homepage where the courses are listed and saw some really cool stuff.

So if you are a VCE Certified Partner, EMC Employee, or VCE Employee, go ahead and login to EMC's Powerlink site and go to https://education.emc.com/part/campaign/vce.aspx.

Last week I was sitting at the Louisville VMUG listening to some vendors speak. Even when he was gauging the crowd, he asked the question "what type of cloud is everyone running today?" Everyone responded with the same answer "Private Cloud". That got me fired up enough to send out this tweet that read "I want to express this very important point. Server Virtualization != Private Cloud"

Of course, everyone is going to have their own opinions on this topic because the term "cloud" is always open for debate. Let me give you a take on what I think. I've had this conversation with Chris Colotti and some other folks a few times so I would consider myself somewhat educated on the topic.

Server virtualization (or a virtualized datacenter) is what we have been doing for years now. Get a couple of servers, some switches, a storage array, make it all talk, then use VMware Converter or PlateSpin to do some P2Vs. Consolidation, simplifying DR efforts, simplifying administration, and achieving a lower TCO are the main goals of server virtualization. At the heart of all this was running a multitude of virtualized operatiing systems on a hypervisor that virtualized the underlying hardware. Pretty fascinating stuff. Is that cloud? Of course not. It's just a cool technology.

This weekend I figured I would give PHD Virtual's product called PHD Monitor version 10.1.3.1 a shot.

When I downloaded the trial, it's downloaded as a windows executable. I really wish it was a virtual appliance so I didn't have to have another 2008 R2 server in my environment to eventually patch. So I spun up a new 2008 R2 VM and figured I would give the installer a go without reading any documentation. The installation was very simple and straightforward. The installer includes a version of SQL Express 2005 as a database for the product. After the installation, the icon below is displayed on the desktop. I opened it up and began the configuration process.

I'm fairly new to vCenter Operations, I had a post a while back talking about vCOps being a hype, but the software is proving itself to be a market catalyst and a differentiator. My goal was to get the vCloud Director Adapter for vCOps integrated so I could see what my vCloud environment looks like.

I'll admit it, I took the hard route. This wasn't the easiest portion to get working, but I'm glad I was finally able to figure it out. When reading through the documentation technote-vCloud-Adapter.pdf it says nothing about installing the adapter on the OVA version of vCOps. Every piece of documentation talks about installing the adapters on the Windows or Linux versions when you build the OS yourself and install the software. If you didn't know, the OVA version is the model VMware wants you to use because it helps correctly align the proper RAM and vCPU requirements. I ended up giving the Windows route a shot and the installation of the plug-in is pretty simple, but the setup of vCenter Operations isn't. So let the mission begin...

This past week I spent a few days at the VCE Marlboro offices doing some lab validation. One of the topics that comes up on a regular basis is the integration of the Nexus 1000v in the Vblock Platform with the constraints of VMware's vCloud Director integration. VMware has released a patch known as vCloud Director 1.5.1 that doesn't allude to any new features of the 1000v product. My goal for the week was to see if VCD-NI and VLAN backed network pools could be automatically provisioned by vCloud Director.

The first test was to try and validate vCloud Director 1.5.1 with vShield Manager 5.0.1 and the current Vblock Certification Matrix 2.5.3 that uses Cisco Nexus 1000v 4.2(1)SV1(5.1), which is the supported version of Nexus 1000v that can do VXLAN among other things. The VCE 2.5.3 certification matrix also uses VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESXi 5.0 Builds 474610, 504890, 515841 and VMware vCenter Server 5.0 build 455964. The Certification Matrix is a very valuable piece to customers because it validates the software and firmware levels of all the components in a Vblock to guarantee integration and compatibility so the customer doesn't have to assume the risk of testing upgrades and releases, which can be a time consuming task for many environments.

Our test used ESXi build 515841 and vCenter 455964. These builds are normal vSphere 5.0 and NOT Update 1. After getting vCloud Director setup, we need to follow the directions lined out in Configuring Network Segmentation Manager. Of course, nothing is as spoon fed as I would like, so here is a step by step tutorial.

VCE, along with Cisco, EMC, and VMware, are doing a 13 City US tour they are calling next generation data center.

I will actually be participating in the Cincinnati, OH and Nashville, TN sessions and perhaps one or two more surprise appearances. These sessions will kick off with a very brief high level overview and be followed by a round table or panel discussion. You will get to hear where VCE was, where we are today, and what's being planned for 2012, 2013 and beyond. This is a great way for you to not be bored by powerpoint and actually get to ask any question that has been on your mind. At the end of the session, you will hopefully get a better understanding of the impact of converged infrastructure and how your organization may need to change its current IT procurement process.

The list of cities is below and you can register here at http://www.nextgenerationdatacenter.com/ . I hope to see you there.

Check the latest release:

How To Install vCloud Director on RHEL 6.2 - No GUI

I check my website statistics to see why people visit my website. Often times, there is a google search for "how to install vCloud Director" and it points to my SQL installation. There isn't a good spoon feeding step-by-step guide so I figured it was about time. I'm all about some good help and I love detailed instructions. So I'm trying to build the complete guide.

This is going to be a semi-long post because the process of doing most of these tasks are pretty well documented, but not screen capped. I'm also giving credit to the authors of many of these steps because it's what I use personally to do installs. I am not going to cover design considerations or anything the pertains to the operations of vCloud Director.

I would suggest downloading this document now because it's key to have and know parts of this. VMware vCloud Installation and Configuration Guide 1.5

Step 1. (Optional) Create a vApp for your vCloud Director Management VMs. I say this is optional because some people would prefer not to worry about the resource being a factor. I like to put all my vCloud Management VMs in a vApp because I can then control the startup and shutdown policy to make sure everything is brought up in a consistent manner. I only use this in my home lab, do not use for production use.