I have been looking to refresh my home lab environment for some time now. Since I moved into a rental townhouse upon my move to NC, I have had power issues when my home lab is 100% powered-on. A couple of times, I have even tripped the breaker entirely. Between my desktop machine, (2) HP Proliant ML110 G5s, a Netgear ReadyNAS NVX, and (2) Netgear ReadyNAS Duos, it's just too much load for a single breaker to handle; let alone the cost of powering the whole thing.

I had my eye on the Apple Mac Mini 2011 w/Lion Server since it was released as this would make the perfect low power and low noise option. This model comes with a quad core CPU that supports up to 16GB of RAM and uses 85W (peak) of power per machine. The current servers I have are dual core, and are all limited at 8GB of RAM. The idea was to replace the (4) 8GB servers that I have with (2) Apple Mac Minis running ESXi 5.0U1. I had some minor concerns about the fact that the Mini has only a single NIC, but I don't really foresee 100% utilization, but if I do, I always have the older servers available for more capacity. Perhaps someone will come up with a Thunderbolt to Ethernet adapter to address this bottleneck.

When the new Mac Mini was released someone tried to get ESXi installed and running but had some issues getting the Gigabit on-board NIC to be recognized in ESXi. Apparently the driver for the Broadcom NIC that Apple uses didn't get included in the release of ESXi 5. As a result, I put my plans on the back burner, thinking that someone would eventually figure it out.

Well, finally it appears as though someone got it working with ESXi, by installing a custom VIB from VMware for the infamous Broadcom NIC (found here). This was posted on the following site back in January (I have been busy; what can I say). The blog post was pointed out to me on Google+ by my blogger friend & fellow Tech Field Day delegate: Shannon Snowden over at Virtualization Information.

Since he was also successful in getting it working, I thought I would take a stab at it. I did have a couple of pre-requisites around what I wanted to accomplish by doing this, however.

I wanted to have the ability to host nested ESXi servers on the machine, so that I could have an all-in-one ESXi lab cluster. In order to realistically accomplish this, I needed to have an SSD in the machine, one with high IOPS performance and high enough capacity to hold all the VMs. I currently use an OCZ Vertex 2 in my desktop machine, and decided that I would do a quick search to see the current deals at Newegg, Amazon, etc. By coincidence, Newegg had a deal (which has since expired) for a 240GB OCZ Vertex 3 with a free 32GB OCZ Onyx for $249.99 (before $20 rebate). They also had the 2x8GB Corsair SODIMMS that others have installed successfully in the Mac Mini for $99. I decided on picking up 2 of each in anticipation of a 2-node build.

The parts arrived 2 days later, so I took a lunch trip over to the Apple store and picked up the Mac Mini w/Lion Server ($939 with my NetApp discount ;) After returning, I spent 30m disassembling the Mini and swapping out the RAM and 2 HDDs. It was a bit tricky getting at the 2nd HDD, but well-documented on iFixIt. After getting the hardware in working order, I performed the install of ESXi on the 32GB drive and reserved the 240GB drive as a local VMFS datastore. In addition, I added the required Broadcom NIC driver. It only ended up taking 1-2hr total, including the hardware upgrade, to get everything working. Once it was proven that everything worked, I picked up another Mini last Fri. and performed the same operation; this time it went much faster. By about 10PM on Fri. night, I had a working, silent, 2-node ESXi cluster.

I did run into one issue that I wanted to point out... Upon powering on the 2nd machine and starting the ESXi installer, I noticed some pretty sluggish performance. The installer was taking longer to got through the motions than it had for the initial build. I thought maybe I had a memory issue or another problem. As I was moving the machine around on my desk, I noticed that there was an unreasonable amount of heat coming off the aluminum casing. I removed the cover/foot from the bottom and realized that the power connector for the fan wasn't fully-seated and thus the fan was not spinning. As this is the last component to get re-installed after replacing the HDDs, it is somewhat difficult to ensure that it is re-seated properly. Also, it's hard to hear whether the fan is spinning as the Mini is so quiet. Please check it carefully before closing the access panel, so you don't make the same mistake. Thankfully, it doesn't appear that any harm was done and the sytem is running much better and much cooler now.

Once I had everything in working physical order, I decided to start working on getting the virtual layer set up to suit my needs. I started by moving my AD, MSSQL and vCenter VMs temporarily to the local SSD storage to get an idea of the performance. It was pretty good, however, I wanted to make sure that I wasn't isolating those important VMs on local storage so I then moved them back to my iSCSI datastore on the ReadyNAS, where they now sit. This allowed me to use Update Manager to update the ESXi installs with all the latest patches, etc.

I can report that the Minis are working quite well and were successful at performing a "burn in" over the weekend. I haven't done any real load testing on them yet, but I do plan on getting the nested ESXi builds started this week. I will update you all with another blog post with the results of that testing.

Finally, I decided that this is such a cool use case of nested ESXi and pefect hardware for a home lab that I submitted an abstract last week for VMworld to talk about how to implement and get the most out of it to learn ESXi and have a very portable VMware lab solution. Please stay tuned as the public voting comes available. I would love to have you vote so that I can expose the importance and usefulness of a home lab to more and potential VMware professionals. Also stay tuned for more on the Mac Mini as I perform additional testing.

Thanks, as always, for reading!

I am again pleased to annouce my renewed induction into the exclusive group that is the vExperts! Many thanks to John Troyer & Alex Maier and all of the VMware staff that helped determine the inductees for 2012.

Now that I am working at a vendor, NetApp, it is all the more difficult to make it into this exclusive group of experts. It just means I need to continue to elevate my game to continue helping those in the field and spread the word about VMware and its growing catalog of offerings.

I am also pleased to annouce that my teammates, Chris Gebhardt and Nick Howell made the list again this year along with me. I can assure you that the three of us, and the rest of our team have very exciting plans in store for VMworld this year. Stay tuned here for more as we slowly reveal our plans!

It has been a transitional year for me thus far, especially with an overseas move for myself and my family as well as the ins and outs of starting a new role with a new company. I am enjoying the transition so far, but still look forward to normalcy as I find my place here.

Thanks as always to my readers, colleagues and friends for you encouragement and guidance!

My experience, which I talked about here, mirrors some of the same things referred to by SoftBank. Imagine not being able to travel to the office due to transportation being completely shut down. Or rolling blackouts meaning that throughout the day, if the trains happened to be running, not knowing whether they would still be running once it was time to return home. Or not having heat or cooling in the office to be able to work comfortably. Or food at the convenience store or any other number of basic necessities being available. Or gas to drive your car...

Even though cloud was not intended for the purpose of "working from home", as with any disruptive and innovative technology, it is interesting to see what technology is capable of in times of need or times of urgency or even new ways to use a technology that were never dreamed of before. Think about the pure energy-saving aspects of virtualization and cloud and expand that to energy savings from working remotely and you can clearly see what's possible.

I do remember hearing stories of how SoftBank was giving away its services and donating money to help in the recovery. I commend them for their efforts. I can say that I am even more proud that they happened to do it using NetApp technologies.

As you may know from reading my blog entry from a year ago... I had the experience, as a customer, of using technologies from NetApp and VMware to failover critical services in our infrastructure during the disaster. This only scratched the service of what transformative technologies can accomplish, as evidenced by SoftBank's success. Look to the past and present and you will see further evidence of how technology saves lives. Look to the future and you can see the potential and the promise of cloud computing. Exciting times indeed!

Links:

Executive Summary (PDF)

Technical Case Study (PDF)

The story behind SoftBank's Epic Story

Dave Hitz's blog

Val Bercovici's blog

I believe is important to be open to competing viewpoints as well, and it is this type of interaction that causes software organizations to sit up and take notice at what they are doing right or wrong and how they can improve to expand their offerings to a wider audience and to improve the customer experience.

That said, I would like to point you to a post here & here co-written by two obvious proponents of Exchange, by the names of Michel de Rooij and Dave Stork. They put forth a rebuttal that can serve as a response (albeit somewhat flawed) to my arguments in favor of Zimbra. The comments on my post, as well as those on their sites, should be reviewed as well, as they provide constructive feedback on the validity of our arguments on both sides of the fence.

I welcome this sort of feedback and look forward to continuing the conversation throughout the Zimbra product life-cycle as well as similar or competing offerings from VMware, Microsoft and their partners.

The fact that I got a response of this magnitude not only shows that there is significant interest in Zimbra, but also that Exchange proponents feel a need to defend their territory proves that Zimbra is on their radar. I think this bodes well for competition in a Microsoft-dominated world! "No publicity is bad publicity", so they say...

Thanks for reading!

As such, the team is growing and we are currently looking for someone in Silicon Valley (or willing to relocate) to help us expand our relationship with VMware in a Technical Marketing capacity. Optimally the candidate should have a strong background in VMware (i.e. VCAP/VCDX) and also a deep understanding of NetApp's value proposition and uniqueness in VMware environments. You will be working on-site at VMware's Palo Alto offices and spending a significant amount of time meeting with PMs and engineers at VMware in addition to conferences, VMUGs, EBCs, and technical content delivery.

I invite you to apply if you fit this description and if this role sounds interesting to you. It will be an exciting role with direct impact on the future of NetApp and VMware's partnership.

See details of the requisition below:

18773BR

Job Description

At NetApp the Technical Marketing team is a critical part of enabling our customers to deploy varying workloads on VMware vSphere hypervisors and in cloud constructs by focusing on performance, scalability and security. NetApp's commitment to deep integrations and extensions enable customers to quickly adopt and broaden their virtualization initiatives, and we have a rare opening for a candidate who is obsessed with making the cloud a better place to be for enterprises of all sizes. As part of this highly elite TME team, you will work extensively with our key partner to drive technical vision, test and identify new use cases, and identify constant improvements in our growing integrations and extensions. Equally important will be your ability to create and mature relationships across corporate and engineering team boundaries within NetApp and our Partner organizations.

As a Technical Marketing Engineer at NetApp you will work with technologies that will shape the industry and our partnership for the foreseeable future, including infrastructure optimization, virtualization, enterprise applications, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), and data center consolidation. Through working with our partner and these technologies you will develop a bird's-eye view of where the IT world is headed, where our partners are focused and provide keen insight back to our engineering organization.

We are seeking an individual who has a deep-level familiarity with deploying, tuning and removing bottlenecks in enterprise applications, especially Microsoft (such as Exchange, SharePoint), virtual desktop environments, and other business applications. Prior experience at a large enterprise in a senior IT role is desirable. An understanding of software design constructs and demonstrable experience translating abstract engineering constructs into concrete marketing collateral is required. In short, we want someone who is comfortable with both engaging and driving engineering initiatives, writing and delivering amazing presentations and working with partners and customers.

Essential Functions: - You will influence technology strategy for current and future virtualization projects. - You will be expected to forge relationships and become a bridge between key teams at NetApp and VMware.
- You will influence and communicate strategic directions to management for adoption.- You will lead projects and be accountable for project deliverables working with cross-functional and business unit teams and lead inter-department cross functional teams. This may include researching, proposing, managing and designing Partner integrations highlighting NetApp technologies.
- You will be a Subject Matter Expert in a few technologies across the industry and customer landscape influencing at the Director and C-executive level. As the breadth of NetApp strategic technology interests broadens, you will continue to build your expertise with continued internal and external education and collaboration with industry experts.- You will identify gaps in product/process and make proactive suggestions for improvement.
- Influence the strategic direction of activities with your Team, Project Stakeholders, Product Management, Partners, Sr Director and VP. This role often interfaces with Technical Directors, other Business Units and industry contacts and thus you will need to build productive relationships and networks.
- You will be responsible for creating and presenting technical and strategic content to customers and partners and gather feedback to influence product and solution offerings. Interpret field feedback to generate strategic direction.
- You will be responsible for identifying and managing the development of collateral in your focused areas of technical expertise to highlight best practices and NetApp's value proposition.- You will collaborate on strategy with senior product management to inspire strategic products, solutions or reference architecture roadmaps and plans. This includes participating in cross-functional teams to develop product and solution roadmaps.Job RequirementsKey Requirements:- Ability to plan, outline and publish professional technical documents on a defined timeline.
- Ability to forge relationships across organizational boundaries (internal and external) with a focus on influencing individuals and teams through clear and effective communications and strong relationships.
- Act as an ambassador for NetApp through the understanding and articulation of our requirements and interests with our partner community.
- Ability to communicate in a clear and concise professional manner, tailored to the appropriate audience; including both verbal and written communications.
- Proven experience leading across business unit teams with strong influencing skills at the Senior and Executive level.
- Previous experience fostering and nurturing a collaborative environment capable of working on complex issues where analysis of situations or data requires an in-depth evaluation and effort across multiple teams (internal and external).
- Previous technical experience with one or more enterprise applications or technologies, such as Microsoft (Exchange, Office, SharePoint, SQL, or others), VMware, NetApp, SAP, Oracle or other business applications.
- Prior experience identifying performance bottlenecks in storage infrastructures.
- Prior experience as a TME is desirable, but as a substitute we will consider other successful technical experience from the enterprise world -- software engineering, IT or QA.
- Powershell scripting experience is a plus.
- Experience with vCloud Director is a big plus.
- Experience using performance analysis tools, such as one or more of the following:◦ Wireshark, tcpdump, ESXTop, etc. ◦ WAN/network simulation tools
- Fluency in PowerPoint, Word and Excel is required.
- Active member of the virtualization social media space (blogging, podcasts, tweeting, etc.)
- Up to 25% travel, such as product launch events, customer visits, and industry events.
- Internal drive and the desire to do what it takes to win!

Key Success Indicators:- You must be willing to consider and apply new perspectives and creative approaches for tasks that are often unstructured and the issues addressed are less defined.
- You must rely on and apply attained experiences and knowledge in solving problems that are complex in scope and scale requiring in-depth evaluation. - You must demonstrate good judgment in solving problems as well as identifying problems in advance, and proposing solutions.
- You must work effectively with software engineers, alliance managers, marketing teams and field engineers to drive awareness of NetApp's initiatives and translate partner roadmaps into tangible integration opportunities within NetApp.
- You must successfully work with limited supervision and direction and accept that you will operate and drive strategic results without boundaries and set priorities independently.- You must be a proactive contributor, influencer, and subject matter expert.
- You must demonstrate favorable results through regular leadership and influencing others.
- You will be expected to act as a mentor to both senior and junior Technical Marketing Engineers.Education and ExperienceEducation & Experience Requirements:- A minimum of 8 years in a technical role, such as Technical Marketing, Software Engineering, QA or IT in the virtualization industry.
- B.S. in Computer Science, Engineering or related field (M.S. and/or MBA highly desirable).
- Industry certifications required:
VCP5 and VCAP (VCDX highly desirable)
- Demonstrated ability to successfully complete multiple and complex technical projects
- Writing, communications, influencing and presentation skills

Apply Here

In this post I would like to propose the idea that VMware Zimbra Collaboration Server can serve as a drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange in Enterprise environments of all sizes. I would also propose that Zimbra is better suited for multi-tenant ISP deployments than Exchange. Let's discuss the pros and cons of Zimbra and give you the background to consider Zimbra for your next e-mail deployment or customer engagement.

Background

Technically, VMware Zimbra is part of VMware's End-user Computing catalog, but I would also consider it as a good example of a Tier-1 application, once deployed. E-mail is becoming so critical to the operations of any size business that it needs to be designed, implemented and maintained with the same level of care as any other Tier-1 app.

Benefits Overview

That said, the ease with which backup and restore can be performed in Zimbra far outweighs the capabilities of Exchange. A good backup/restore strategy is one of the cornerstones of any Tier-1 app deployment worth its salt. Add to that the fact that Zimbra has orders of magnitude better scaling capabilities than Exchange, all at about 50% of the price, on average.

Storage Benefits

Combine Zimbra with NetApp storage platforms and technologies and you will see even more efficiences around the storage required for backup, attachments, etc. (using NetApp's deduplication technology) in addition to ease of management. Snapshot technologies allow quick backups of e-mail and attachment data resulting in quick restoration when you run into issues. Cloning technologies (FlexClone) will allow you to reduce time required for upgrades by allowing staff to test upgrades with a live copy of recent production data. Replication technologies (SnapMirror) will allow you to move data backups to remote locations for disaster recovery or remote backup facilities for compliance purposes.

General Comparisons

Here are some other comparisons that can be drawn between the 2 platforms:

vSamurai's Take

Zimbra has been a passion of mine since I started using it back in 2006-2007. My previous company had evaluated implementing Exchange, Zimbra and a couple of other solutions. Due to our IT management and staff being huge proponents of Open Source, we decided on the Zimbra solution. I am very glad that we did. To be honest, despite the fact that we had users who were used to the Outlook client, we didn't have much pushback when we moved to Zimbra as it has full feature parity with Exchange. I expect that your results may be the similar if Zimbra is given a serious look for new e-mail implementations or during hardware/software upgrade cycles in pre-existing implementations of Exchange.

Expect to hear more soon about the ins and outs of deploying Zimbra in your or your customer's environment. SaaS is here and this is just one part of VMware's End-user computing strategy, so look for more in the future from them as well.

My blogging on virtualization started out slowly in 2010 a few months leading up to VMworld. Last year, especially with the aftermath of the Japanese earthquake, my blogging started to pick up the pace a bit. Now I have lots of ideas for content, but I still have a ways to go.

I realize that the Top 25 virtualization blogs are recognized as the cream of the crop of bloggers in the virtualization community. These blogs are honored during an episode of vChat as well as a special section in the vLaunchPad. I am ecstatic that I made #39 on the list after only about 1.5y as a virtualization, cloud computing and storage blogger. I am looking to work my way up in the list this year as I get more content out that I find to be interesting for myself and others.

Thanks for your support and look out for more exciting content in the future!

VMware Partner Exchange (VMware's annual partner conference) is a bit new for me. The conference takes place in Las Vegas from 2/11 - 2/16 this year. Not only will this be my first time in attendance, I will also be presenting a session during the NetApp "boot camp" on Monday, February 13th. I did a small presentation at VMworld last year, but this will be my 1st experience giving a full-length technical session on VMware and NetApp.

I am both anxious and excited about representing NetApp this year. I'll be speaking about Virtualizing Business Critical (Tier 1) Apps and the technical caveats required while doing so, as well as why you should consider virtualizing those apps on NetApp storage. As this is a topic that is top of mind for both VMware and NetApp, I am sure the entire boot camp will be well attended by System Engineers and Partners alike.

As I am a big believer in social media and crowdsourcing, here is where I ask the question... What do you expect from a boot camp session around Virtualizing Tier 1 Apps?

I always like to involve my readers in the content I produce as much as possible and to be honest, I feel that technical presentations are more useful and the content more applicable to day-to-day interaction when I give you the information you are expecting to hear!

Please comment below with the pain points you are hearing when discussing the virtualizing of Tier 1 apps. Tell me what kind of pushback you are seeing from customers against virtualizing their Tier 1 apps. And of course share your experiences virtualizing Tier 1 apps so that I can learn from your experiences!

Thanks for your feedback! I will see a lot of you at the conference to be sure, so please drop by the session, booth or lab and introduce yourself... looking forward to it.

I am pleased to say that my blog as well as that of my colleague, Vaughn Stewart (The Virtual Storage Guy), are on the list of about 180 nominees for best of the best for this year. I hope that you will consider casting your vote for one or both of our blogs among others who are deserving of the honor to be listed as part of the top 25.

We rely on your feedback and feed off it when we are spending long hours writing and researching the content which helps our customers and partners succeed on VMware and NetApp. Voting for us helps us to up our games and continue or contribution to the community. Thanks for your current and continued support!

Get out there and vote! (Voting ends on Feb. 7th)

By coincidence, VMware is offering the VCP and a couple other certification exams this year at PEX, so I decided to attempt an upgrade to VCP5 during the conference. I am allowing myself just enough time to reschedule the exam before end of February in case the unforeseen happens.

Since I haven't taken a VMware certification since late 2009 (VCP410) I feel as though I am a bit rusty when it comes to certification tests and haven't had as much hands-on product time as I would like. As such I would like to list here the study materials and resources I am using to prepare for the exam.

The first go-to resource (one I have used in the past) to prepare for VMware exams is courtesy of TrainSignal (disclaimer; site sponsor). They have an updated series of vSphere 5 training videos available that I've been viewing to get myself back up-to-speed on the features of the newest vSphere release. David Davis and Elias Khnaser are experts on vSphere and present the material in a concise and easy-to-understand manner. I am going through one lesson every day to get me ready for the exam next month.

The second resource that I have found to be quite valuable is Forbes Guthrie's vSphere 5.0 reference card which you can find here. I plan to use this as a form of quick review whenever I have a few minutes to commit some pertinent information to memory and the information on his reference card is perfect for this type of consumption.

Finally, I was going to prepare a list of links to my fellow bloggers' websites who are offering material to prepare in some way for the VCP. Instead of doing that, I am posting a link to Damian Karlson's blog post as he has an excellent list of links to all the required study material. Thanks Damian! Amazing job...

In the back of my mind, I am always thinking about my studies in the context of the VCP Exam Blueprint, which, for me, serves as an outline to ensure that I am covering all of the exam objectives and making sure that I haven't left anything out that might show up on the exam, so ensure that you read this over and check-off the objectives as you move through the study materials.

Please feel free to share any other links you have found useful here. I think a multi-pronged approach is valuable in preparing for this exam, especially given the limited time before I sit the test and the breadth of the new material that will be covered in this rendition of the exam.

Good luck to everyone else out there that has yet to re-certify. Only just over 30 days left until the upgrade window expires!