On April 25, Canonical released Ubuntu Server 13.04, a.k.a. Raring Ringtail. Some of the new features in Ubuntu 13.04 include a rebase to the 3.8 kernel, the latest OpenStack release (“Grizzly”) and full support for OpenvSwitch. For full details, please refer to the Release Notes.

Hardware Certification

Dell has worked with Canonical to test PowerEdge servers with this latest Ubuntu release. However, we recommend that enterprise customers looking to deploy Ubuntu should instead use the latest LTS (Long Term Support) release, currently 12.04. All 11G and 12G Dell PowerEdge servers have been certified with Ubuntu Server 12.04. For a complete list of certified PowerEdge servers, see here.

OpenManage

The Dell Linux Engineering team has released an unsupported build of OpenManage 7.1 for Ubuntu Server. Please note that even though we tested this OpenManage release on a number of PowerEdge servers without any issues, some features may not be fully functional. For installation instructions, please read here.

Where to get support

Ubuntu support contracts from Canonical are available from your Dell sales representative or directly from Canonical through the Ubuntu Advantage program. In addition, best-effort support from Dell is available with your Dell ProSupport contract.

For questions and general discussion, you can write to our popular mailing list Linux-PowerEdge where Dell engineers, support teams and customers discuss Linux on PowerEdge servers. We welcome your participation and feedback.

Useful Links

• Release announcement from Canonical
• OpenManage for Ubuntu Server
• The Dell PowerEdge project in Launchpad

 This is the part 2 of introduction of new Dell support service, "Dell ProSupport Plus" You can refer here for the 1st part of introduction.

This is the advantage of ProSupport Plus, just a reminder.

Today, let me show you little more about “SupportAssist”
SupportAssist is the underlying technology that enables the ProSupport Plus experience. Before we delve into how SupportAssist works let’s look at the traditional methods our customers were using before we introduced it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
The customer will have a fault in their environment
They’ll either monitor or maybe they won’t even find the fault until some end user calls them and says something’s down.
At that point they’ll have to figure out the contact information.
They’ll contact their service provider and navigate the call director or phone menus.
They finally get to a tech support agent, they’ll talk to them and verify entitlement.
And then almost always tech support will say, “Can you send me some Log data>”
The customers will do that. If they haven’t done that, often tech support will ask them to hang up, run the diag, and call back.
At that point, the case will be open and the tech support agent will typically  study the log data and then begin the troubleshooting process.

With SupportAssist that experience is radically different:

We are actively monitoring those assets in the customer’s environment.
If something occurs, we know about it. We automatically begin the process of log collection; we automatically open the case.
Tech support studies the log and case details and puts an outbound Call to the customer.
Think about that, instead of the customer having to find the number and call into Dell reactively, we’re actually able to target and have the right expert call out to that customer. That expert will have already studied the log data, and it can be as simple as, “I noticed you had a hardware failure, this is the address we have on record,
is that where you want us to send the drive?”
Dramatically different support experience that what you have in the traditional break/fix world.
All of this is enabled by SupportAssist.

This is a little deeper on the SupportAssist architure and how it works. 

You’ll see the four lines of business in the enterprise portfolio: servers, storage, networking and the new Converged Infrastructure.

This article was written by Manjunatha Reddy MC, Krishna Kamal Kapa, Wendy Chen

Under Dell’s Enterprise Solutions group, our charter includes to build Pre-validated, efficient and Simplified IT solutions for customers. Today we are publishing new solution – “Oracle Database Backup and Recovery Using Dell Storage Snapshot Technologies”.

Backup and recovery for Oracle databases is always a challenge considering the huge size of databases and to meet the business SLA's. Also an efficient backup and recovery solution should not have any impact on application performance while reducing the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective    (RTO).  Storage-based snapshots are becoming the first line of defense in a growing number of enterprise data protection schemes. Storage snapshot technology allows customers to quickly backup and restore large amount of data without jeopardizing data integrity and performance.

Dell Storage-based snapshot data protection and recovery simplifies the backup and recovery challenges by providing continuous protection, zero impact to database performance and also with zero downtime to the application. The Storage Snapshot technologies available with Dell™ Compellent™, EqualLogic™, and PowerVault™ are discussed in detail.

Key Benefits of Dell storage snapshots are:

• Leverage space-efficient snapshots to continuously protect network data from server failures, viruses, human error and other inevitable circumstances.
• Take snapshots of initial writes and incremental changes only, not full-volume clones that consume excess disk space for near-instant recovery to virtually any point in time.
• Recover most volumes to a server in less than 10 seconds using a simple point-and-click interface.

Most customers use storage snapshots for only backup purpose, our whitepaper covers how best Dell storage snapshots can be utilized in case of a point in time or a complete database recovery.

The key solutions discussed in the whitepaper using Dell storage snapshot technologies are

• Offload Oracle RMAN backup from production server to backup server
• Perform point-in-time database recovery
• Perform complete database recovery with zero data loss

The conclusion of this whitepaper is how the integration of Dell storage snapshots and Oracle RMAN technology significantly cuts down recovery time and shorten backup window with very little performance impact on production application by offloading expensive backup operations from production host.

For detailed configuration, test environment and backup and recovery solutions please go through this whitepaper

For more information write to us @ manjunatha_reddy_mc@dell.com  or krishna_kapa@dell.com or wendy_chen@dell.com any feedback is appreciated.

This article was written by Phani MV

Server consolidation is essential for running a datacenter efficiently. Consolidation enable:

• Reduced server sprawl and physical server requirements
• Better resource utilization and management
• Reduced power consumption
• Increased ROI 

Dell Oracle Solutions Engineering team recently conducted a performance study of the Dell PowerEdge R820 server for virtual environments. Primary focus of study was to:

• Consolidate multiple legacy servers to PowerEdge R820 Servers.
• Consolidate and run multiple oracle databases on a single PowerEdge R820 server using Oracle VM virtualization.

In the context of the performance study we chose Oracle VM as the virtualization technology. Oracle VM server was deployed on PowerEdge R820 and four Oracle virtual machines (VMs) were created. Oracle database software was installed on all four VMs.

In order to find out the performance delivered, all the four VMs were stress tested in parallel. Dell Quest Benchmark factory software was used to test the performance delivered in terms of user load supported, Query Response time. Below are some results of the performance study.

For additional detailed information about the test methodology used in this study and the results, read the whitepaper:

• Consolidating Oracle Databases a Dell PowerEdge R820 Using Oracle VM White Paper 

Also, for more information or any feedback, please write to us at phani_mv@dell.com or Ramamohan_reddy@dell.com

So Say SMEs in Virtualization & Cloud

In Episode 12, Kong Yang and Todd Muirhead discuss more changes in the IT space as well as technical conferences occurring this week and next week. As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback. 

Please click below to view the video.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Learn more about our most recent acquisition: “Dell acquires Enstratius”

DevOps

• Dell: “Update: Project Sputnik Profile Tool and Cloud Launcher” by Barton George - Personal Blog
• Rackspace: “Why Do Devs Like OpenStack?” by Hart Hoover at Rackspace DevOps Blog
• Jedi.be: “The future of devops“ by Patrick Debois

OpenStack

• Dell: “Parable of Lions and Elephants” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Blog
• Dell: “We need better Gold Member criteria to help building OpenStack culture” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Blog
• Dell: “Dell Acquires Enstratius, an Award-Winning Enterprise Cloud-Management Company”
• Dell: “Dell Acquires Enstratius — So what do they do?” by Barton George - Personal Blog
• Dell: “Building a Great Team (Dell buys Enstratius)” by Michael Cote - Personal Blog
• Dell: “OpenStack Austin Meetup 2013-05-09” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Blog
• Inktank: “Ceph  Cuttlefish Release has Arrived!”
• OpenStack Foundation: “Dell in the Demo Theater”
• SUSE: “Mainframes and System z in Today’s IT”

Hadoop

• Cloudera: “Extending the Data Warehouse with Hadoop” by Matt Brandwein
• Cloudera: “Top 5 Reasons to Attend HBaseCon 2013” by Justin Kestelyn
• Cloudera: “Metrics: The New Hotness for Apache HBase Metrics” by Elliott Clark
• Pentaho: “Big Data Integration Webinar Series”
• Pentaho: “Getting Started and Successful with Big Data” webinar 5-15-2013

Contributors

Please find detailed information on all contributors in our Wiki section.

Contact

If you have any feedback, suggestions, ideas, or if you’d like to contribute - I’ll be happy to hear back from you.

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth

Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

This blog is written by Shiva Katta and Krishnaprasad K from Dell Hypervisor Engineering team.

This blog talks about a specific problem and it’s solutions while using gPXE for operating system deployment over the network.

What's gPXE?

Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) provides the ability to boot computers using network interface. gPXE is an open-source Preboot Execution Environment implementation and network boot loader. It replaces proprietary PXE ROMs with many functionalities like retrieving data through protocols like HTTP, iSCSI etc. Some of the latest operating systems and hypervisors like VMware ESXi 5.x need gPXE as a pre-requisite for deploying via network. If you already have a legacy PXE implementation, then you can migrate to gPXE by placing gPXE executable on your TFTP server. The PXE capable machines download gPXE via TFTP and instantly become gPXE capable machines.

This document is intended towards datacenter administrators who would be interested in automating the Operating System deployment on multiple servers in parallel.

Setting up gPXE

Follow the white paper posted in Dell Tech Center to setup gPXE for network deployment of operating systems. Though it talks about setting up gPXE specifically for VMware ESXi 5, it is useful for setting up the gPXE environment and thus meeting pre-requisites for deploying various operating systems over the network.

All set to boot from gPXE... What’s next?

While booting servers to PXE and then gPXE, some NICs may fail with an error as below.

Now there may be a question raised "why again requesting for a DHCP IP since it has already got one at the beginning?”. The reason is when the chain loaded gPXE starts up (PXE capable NICs downloads gPXE via TFTP), it issues a fresh DHCP request because it dont see the previous DHCP IP issued for the legacy PXE. The DHCP connection timeout is due to a timing issue w.r.t the NIC firmware when the chainload of gPXE occurs.

Thinking what to do? ... Here are the workarounds!

There are few workarounds to approach this problem. couple of them are described below:-

1. Modifying the PXE-chainloadable gPXE image
2. Using gPXE shell prompt

Elaborating the workarounds

 1. Modifying the PXE-Chainloadable gPXE image

This workaround is to recreate the gPXE image with a custom script. The custom script is nothing but a sleep before the NIC queries for the DHCP IP again after gPXE chain load. The detailed steps are as below:-

a. Download the latest gPXE source (1.0.1) tar ball.

b. Uncompress the source as below:-

   ~# tar xvfz gpxe-1.0.1.tar.gz #Assuming gpxe-1.0.1.tar.gz is the downloaded filename.

   ~# cd gpxe-1.0.1/

c. Change '#undef TIME_CMD' to '#define TIME_CMD' in src/config/general.h

d. Create a custom script(say sleep.gpxe) in the src directory with the content as below:-

          #!gpxe

          echo "Greetings... Running through the custom script..."

          sleep 10 # For some NICs, a sleep of 5 seconds may be good enough. We tested it on couple of Broadcom NICs which required a 10 sec. delay to get an IP

          echo "Fetching DHCP IP for the network adapter"

          ifopen net0

          dhcp net0

          autoboot

e. Recompile the source to create a custom gPXE image with the script included as below:-

   ~# make clean

   ~# make bin/undionly.kpxe EMBEDDED_IMAGE=sleep.gpxe

    Copy the undionly.kpxe created under bin to the TFTP server.

  2a. Using gPXE shell

This workaround is to pass the commands via the gPXE shell to fetch the DHCP IP and boot into the gPXE Menu. The below screenshot describes the solution. Press CTRL-B when the screen prompts it right after the connection timeout.That brings you the below gPXE> shell.

 2b. Using gPXE Shell prompt - Second Option

This workaround is again based on gPXE shell. If there is no menu.cfg created in your webserver, you may need to manually enter the OS details via the shell as below:-

gPXE>dhcp net0

gPXE>kernel -n mboot.c32 http://< WebserverIP >/mboot.c32

gPXE>imgargs mboot.c32 -c http://< WebserverIP >/boot.cfg

gPXE>boot mboot.c32

Note that the above commands are specific to VMware ESXi 5.x. It may be slightly different for Linux.

Test your gPXE setup 

If you have chosen woraround 1, then you may see the result as below:-

The intent of this article is to provide workarounds for the specific timeout issue that we see while using gPXE.

I’ve blogged before about the PowerEdge R820’s superior industry-standard benchmark results using SPEC and TPC workloads.  We can now add the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark to that list! 

The PowerEdge R820, a 4-socket, 2U rack server, has surpassed similar Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-4600 Product Family based servers from IBM, HP, and Cisco on the SAP SD Two Tier benchmark, as shown below:

The SAP SD benchmark models a sell-from-stock scenario, which includes order creation, delivery of goods, and invoicing.  A better benchmark score means more users, and therefore higher levels of productivity for businesses.  The details of the two-tier benchmark comparison between top Xeon E5-4600 based servers from Dell, IBM, HP, and Cisco is summarized below:

Dell invests heavily in optimizing enterprise solutions around workloads, and SAP is a key workload for customers.  Expect to see continued improvements in Dell’s support of customers using SAP applications, and look for more outstanding SAP Standard Application benchmark results from Dell moving forward!

Hi Community, here is my compilation of the most interesting technical blog posts written by members of the Microsoft MVP Community. The number of MVPs is growing well, I hope you enjoy their posts. @all MVPs If you’d like me to add your blog posts to my weekly compilation, please send me an email (florian_klaffenbach@dell.com) or reach out to me via Twitter (@FloKlaffenbach). Thanks!

Featured Posts of the Week!

The Dilbert Life Series – A Bad Manager’s Priorities by Didier van Hoye

Create Exchange 2010 Server Reports with PowerShell by Jeffery Hicks

Windows 2012 : Hyper-V Network design scenarios and setup – Part 1 by Alessandro Cardoso

Hyper-V Snapshots: What, When, and Why by Aidan Finn

Azure

#Microsoft #WindowsAzure #SQL Database Management Pack for System Center 2012 #sysctr by James van den Berg

Exchange

Create Exchange 2010 Server Reports with PowerShell by Jeffery Hicks

Events

If You Can, You Should Attend TechEd 2013 Europe by Didier van Hoye

The Dilbert Life Series – A Bad Manager’s Priorities by Didier van Hoye

PowerShell Summit 2013 session recordings by Shay Levy

Hyper-V

Windows 2012 : Hyper-V Network design scenarios and setup – Part 1 by Alessandro Cardoso

Hyper-V Replica [test environment] by Romeo Mlinar

Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) Product Line Architecture by Lai Yoong Seng

Choosing Hyper-V Storage: Virtual Hard Disks by Aidan Finn

Hyper-V Snapshots: What, When, and Why by Aidan Finn

KB2698666 – Can’t Open Hyper-V Settings On W2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V by Aidan Finn

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: Configure VM Processor Compatibility for Legacy Operating Systems by Thomas Maurer

Office 365

Office 365 Wave 15 stopped an Outlook 2007 client connecting by Nick Whittome

PowerShell

Why Doesn’t My Pipeline Work? by Jeffery Hicks

PowerShell Messagebox by Jeffery Hicks

Getting Top Level Folder Report in PowerShell by Jeffery Hicks

PowerShell – Is my NIC configured to register in DNS? by Jeff Wouters

Enable and disable MSI logging through PowerShell by Jeff Wouters

PowerShell function to check the property to an item by Jeff Wouters

Using Show-Command to make a simple UI for a non-PowerSheller by Adam Driscoll

Using PowerShell to Analyze Your PC’s Sleep & Wake Behavior by Keith Hill

System Center Core

Microsoft Infrastructure-as-a-Service Product Line Architecture Guidance by Aidan Finn

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Video presentation: How to Design and Configure Networking in #SCVMM and #HyperV by James van den Berg

Test Lab Guides: System Center 2012 SP1 – Virtual Machine Manager #sysctr #SCVMM #Hyperv by James van den Berg

 SQL Server

#PSTip Verify if a SQL database is mirrored or not by Ravikanth Chaganti

Windows Client

Microsoft-Konto sicherer machen in German by Nils Kaczenski

Why Should I Use Windows 8 Client Hyper-V? by Aidan Finn

Tip: Legally Deploying Images Windows To OEM Licensed PCs by Aidan Finn

Windows Server Core

Videocast Scale-Out Fileserver erklärt – Teil 1 – Einrichten des Clusters in German by Carsten Rachfahl

Videocast Scale-Out Filerserver erklärt – Teil 2 – Storage einrichten in German by Carsten Rachfahl

Videocast Scale-Out Fileserver erklärt – Teil 3 – Einrichtung der Scale-Out Fileserver Rolle in German by Carsten Rachfahl

Scale-Out Fileserver erklärt – Teil 4 – Scale-Out Filerserver in Aktion und Ausschalten eines Nodes in German by Carsten Rachfahl

VMware Hypervisor Support Windows Server 2012 by Lai Yoong Seng

Tools

Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions by Thomas Maurer

If you have not registered yet, there is still time.  Registration is still open and you too can register.  Things have changed a bit from last year, as this event was primarily focused around Dell’s storage products and services.  This year we are changing it up just a little, but all for the better.  As you can tell the name has changed, but the event is still going to have the same look and feel and come with the same great content you have come to expect year after year.  However, this year we have added in more of the Dell products and services to give everyone an even better view into the solutions we have to help you meet your goals.

Dell Enterprise Forum is the premier technical learning event for Dell enterprise customers and channel partners. The conference, is held annually in the US and Europe, and offers an intensive, interactive learning experience across the data center from, servers, storage, and networking to software, services, and converged solutions.

You will learn directly from the engineers, architects and other experts who design and develop Dell enterprise solutions. Plus, you get open access to experts and executive thought leaders throughout the event.

There are two different tracks, one for Customers and one for Channel partners.  Customers learn how to optimize their Dell data center technologies, preparing for the future while accelerating business results today. Channel partners discover new ways to grow their business with Dell.

Come join the Dell TechCenter crew at this year’s Dell Enterprise Forum and we will give you a special discount if you register today using our special code DEFUS2013DTC

Microsoft  SC VMM Dynamic Optimization and Power Optimization on Active System 800m

One of the success factors for private cloud management is optimization. In practice, IT administrators need to manage their infrastructure to actively and dynamically distribute the workloads across available infrastructure resources. They also need to reduce the power consumption when the workload demand reduces. In System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 R2, Performance and Resource Optimization (PRO) feature were utilized to balance the increased workload when integrated with System Center Operations Manager. The vendor-provided PRO management pack could also be implemented to monitor hardware and help identify optimization opportunities. When the managed hosts exceed the specific workload thresholds such as CPU or memory utilization, or when hardware failures were detected on a host, a PRO tip was generated in VMM. The remediation script defined in the PRO tip would automatically trigger the virtual machines with high resource usage to migrate to the suitable physical hosts in the same host group.

To better optimize the resources, System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager has introduced a new feature for resource optimization called Dynamic Optimization which can perform load balancing by migrating the virtual machines within a host cluster according to predefined settings. It is worth noting this Dynamic Optimization feature is native in VMM and it no longer requires PRO or the integration with Operations Manager. Additionally, this feature also comes with a power saving capability called Power Optimization.  With Power Optimization, VMM can turn off hosts when they are not needed and turn the hosts back on when the resource need arises. Power optimization requires the host system to have a baseboard management controller (BMC) implemented and out-of-band (OOB) management enabled. Both Dynamic Optimization and Power Optimization can work on all supported hypervisors: Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware ESX and Citrix XenServer. See the related topic on Microsoft TechNet for more details.

Dell Active System 800 is a converged infrastructure solution offered in configurations with either VMWare VSphere (Active System 800v) or Microsoft Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V role enabled (Active System 800m). This wiki focuses on implementing the Dynamic Optimization and Power Optimization on Dell Active System 800m. The same steps can be taken on other similar Hyper-V based virtualization solutions.

Toad® Data Point is a cross-platform query and data provisioning tool that simplifies data access, querying and analysis for data management professionals. This data analysis tool provides nearly limitless data connectivity, visual query building, data cleansing and workflow automation. For more information about Toad business intelligence products go to: http://www.quest.com/business-intelligence-suite/ 

Dell Boomi is a cloud application integration solution that allows you to easily connect Cloud, SaaS and On-Premise applications with no appliances, no software, no coding. For more information about Boomi go to: http://www.boomi.com/

Connecting to a SQL database through Boomi is a straightforward process involving creating connection and operation shapes. For more detail on creating these objects refer to the wiki article Dell Business Intelligence Project Using USPTO Data Episode 7. The reading or writing of data itself depends on a third component, database profile, which allows use of the same connection for multiple purposes without needing to recreate the connector for each use.

The focus of this blog is to show how to quickly modify a database profile in Boomi using Toad Data Point for database investigation and query building.

Assumptions:

• Database connection in Boomi established
• Database connection in Toad Data Point already established
• Database Profile in Boomi already created

In Toad Data Point,

• Open the database connection of interested
• Double click on connection, in this example a SQL server
• Enter credentials

• Data discovery
  • To learn more about the data simply double click on a table to get more information about the fields, format, sample data, etc.
• Create a visual query
  • Right click a desired table
  • Select “Query Builder”
• Select any field of interest
  • At this point tables can be added by dragging and dropping them to the Query Builder window.

• In this example, fields from a single table were selected
• Select the Query tab at the bottom

• Copy query statement

In Boomi you will need to open the folder you intend to run the SQL statement in.

• Open Database Profile
• Under statement Field past query
  • For this example we used an existing profile and queried a subset of parameters
  • Note it is recommended to modify the variables under the “Fields” section to match the query that you perform

• Save and Close

Now the database profile is complete and data can be collected. With the Toad Data Point tool you can discover your data and formulate simple or complex queries to suit your needs. These queries can easily be transported to Dell Boomi to get the most out of your data extraction and transformation.

Join the 1st OpenStack User Group Meetup in Szczecin (Poland) 06-06-2013, Technopark Pomerania, Niemierzynska 17a (3rd Floor, room 301), Szczecin, Poland: with Boris Renski (Mirantis), Tim Bell (CERN), Eric Windisch (Cloudscaling) & Atul Jha (OpenStack India)

We are excited to announce our first OpenStack Meetup in Szczecin (Poland) on June 6th 2013, 5.00 pm CEST (GMT + 2 hrs) at Hackerspace in Technopark Pomerania, an IT hub for local public and private tech ventures. Our meetup will be accompanied by Google Hangout and IRC Chat sessions with some of the most respected members of the OpenStack community: Boris Renski of Mirantis, Tim Bell of CERN, Eric Windisch of Cloudscaling and Atul Jha of the OpenStack User Group India.

OpenStack aims to become the open standard for an ubiquitous cloud

OpenStack was launched jointly by Rackspace and NASA in 2010. It  is managed by the OpenStack Foundation. OpenStack is written in Python and licensed under Apache License 2.0. 

OpenStack is an open source software for building private and public clouds. It’s supported by a vast community of more than 200 vendors such as Cisco, Dell, HP, IBM, Redhat and VMware. More than 800 developers are contributing to the code base and 6,000 individual members are backing the initiative.

"OpenStack aims to be an alternative to proprietary private and public cloud solutions. But the ultimate goal is even bolder, as leading OpenStackers claim: to create an ubiquitous, free and open cloud standard - just as the internet as we know it today.” explains Rafael Knuth, who is co-organizing the OpenStack User Group Meetup jointly with Rafal Malujda and Michal Smereczynski under the patronship of Aegis  Foundation, a Poland based Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Foundation: “The current state of affairs with cloud is being compared to the internet in the 1990s: a collection of gated communities operated by vendors like CompuServe and Prodigy. Tearing down these walls might reshape the entire IT industry and create opportunities for businesses and organizations far beyond anyone’s imagination.” - explains Knuth.

Our meeting shall be the first meeting in the series to support the local community, especially gathered in the regional Cluster of IT companies (ICT Westpomerania Cluster) in understanding OpenStack soultions.

“ICT Cluster is an association of nearly 60 ICT companies in the West Pomerania Region. We cooperate to improve the potential of regional IT companies. And Pomerania Technopark is a place, where we can meet to exchange knowledge and experiences. We hope that the 1^st OpenStack User Group Meetup will begin an effective cooperation between members of the OpenStack community” – says Katarzyna Witkowska, ICT Cluster vice president.

Join our Google Hangout and IRC Chat at 5 pm CEST (GMT + 2 hrs)

Don’t miss the opportunity to chat online with our special guests. We will open our Google Hangout and IRC Chat session on June 6th at 5.00 pm CEST (GMT +2 hrs), and both will remain open until approximately 9 pm CEST (GMT + 2 hrs).

OpenStack Poland - IRC Channel

#openstack-pl

server: freenode

for non-IRC users: http://openstackpoland.aegis.org.pl/irc-channel/

Google Hangout

https://www.youtube.com/user/OpenStackPoland

Boris Renski is member of the OpenStack Board of Directors. He is co-founder and EVP at Mirantis, the world’s largest independent OpenStack system integrator. Mirantis is serving customers such as at&t, NASA, Huawei, Dell, Cisco, HP and GAP. Earlier this year, Mirantis released FUEL, an open-source library packaging the company’s implementation experience into an OpenStack Do-it-Yourself-Kit. Mirantis is headquartered in Mountain View and operates across five additional international locations in Russia, Ukraine and Poland. Follow Boris at Twitter: @zer0tweets

Tim Bell is member of the OpenStack Board of Directors. Tim works as Infrastructure Manager at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research. CERN is an active member of the OpenStack community and openly shares their best practices. Their goal for OpenStack is to ramp to 15,000 hypervisors with 100,000 virtual machines by 2015. Follow Tim at Twitter: @noggin143

Eric Windisch works as a Cloud Architect at Cloudscaling, the company behind the OpenStack distribution Open Cloud System 2.5 designed to meet the requirements of today’s web/mobile applications, SaaS/PaaS deployments and big data implementations. Eric is also contributing to Cloudscaling’s engineering blog Simplicity Scales. Follow Eric at Twitter: @ewindisch

Atul Jha is an active member of the OpenStack community in India. He is engaging with a broad range of enterprises as well as with the higher education sector, the latter seizing opportunities in the OpenStack ecosystem for their students:“Open Source Software Isn’t Just Code. It’s Your Résumé”as recently stated in WIRED.com. Follow Atul at Twitter: @koolhead17

Targeting Central & Eastern Europe

We aim to serve the local IT community as well as the OpenStack ecosystem across the entire CEE region. For that reason we join forces with the OpenStack User Group in Hungary which is organizing the OpenStack CEE Day in Budapest May 29th 2013. Also, we will engage and share experiences with other emerging regions such as India, China and Brazil.

Register for the event at Meetup.com

Please register for the event at Meetup.com. Also, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us. We will happily answer your questions and discuss with you via the global OpenStack Community mailing list, our local OpenStack mailing list (URLs below) as well as via Twitter: Rafael Knuth (@RafaelKnuth) Rafal Malujda (@Raafael6000) Michal Smereczynski (@Smereczynski) - don’t forget to use the #OpenStack hashtag.

OpenStack Poland resources

Webpage:

http://openstackpoland.aegis.org.pl/

Meetup page:
http://www.meetup.com/OpenStack-User-Group-Poland/

Global community mailing list:
http://lists.openstack.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/community

Local community mailing list (in Polish):
http://lists.aegis.org.pl/mailman/listinfo/openstackpoland

Join the 1st OpenStack User Group Meetup in Szczecin (Poland) 06-06-2013, Technopark Pomerania, Niemierzynska 17a (3rd Floor, room 301), Szczecin, Poland: with Boris Renski (Mirantis), Tim Bell (CERN), Eric Windisch (Cloudscaling) & Atul Jha (OpenStack India).

We are excited to announce our first OpenStack Meetup in Szczecin (Poland) on June 6th 2013, 5.00 pm CEST (GMT + 2 hrs) at Hackerspace in Technopark Pomerania, an IT hub for local public and private tech ventures. Our meetup will be accompanied by Google Hangout and IRC Chat sessions with some of the most respected members of the OpenStack community: Boris Renski of Mirantis, Tim Bell of CERN, Eric Windisch of Cloudscaling and Atul Jha of the OpenStack User Group India.

Register for the event at meetup.com

DevOps

• Jedi.be: “Compiling a nodejs projects as a single binary” by Patrick Debois
• OpenStack
• Canonical: “London OpenStack & MySQL Meetups May 23rd” by Mark Baker
• Dell: “Crowbar cuts OpenStack Grizzly (“pebbles”) branch & seeks community testing” Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Blog
• Inktank: “What a Year 1!”
• Mirantis: “OpenStack Grizzly Webinar Preview: Availability Zones vs. Host Aggregates” by Nick Case
• OpenStack Foundation:

• OpenStack Atlanta Meetup May 16, 2013 – Atlanta, USA Details
• OpenStack Dublin Meetup May 22, 2013 – Dublin, Ireland Details
• 3rd London OpenStack Meetup May 23, 2013 – London, UK Details
• OpenStack DACH Day May 24, 2013 – Berlin Fairgrounds Details
• OpenStack India Meetup May 26, 2013 – Bangalore, India at Anuta Network Details
• OpenStack Israel May 27, 2013 – Tel-Aviv, Israel Details
• Australian OpenStack User Group tri-city Meetup May 27, 2013 – Australia Details
• OpenStack at CeBit Australia May 28 – 30, 2013 – Sidney, Australia Booth in Hall 4
• OpenStack CEE Day May 29, 2013 – Budapest, Hungary Details
• Building an OpenStack Cloud May 30, 2013 – Chicago, IL Details
• OpenStack meeting in Munich Jun 11, 2013 – Munich, Germany Details
• GigaOM Structure Jun 19 – 20, 2013 – San Francisco, CA Details
• OpenStack DevCamp Essen Jun 21 – 23, 2013 – Essen, Germany Details
• PyCon Australia – OpenStack Miniconf Jul 05, 2013 – Hobart, Australia Details
• OSCON 2013 Jul 22 – 26, 2013 – Portland, OR Details

• OpenStack Foundation:“[openstack-community] [Ask] Guidelines for answering question on Ask” by Stefano Maffulli
• OpenStack Foundation: “[openstack-announce] OpenStack Grizzly documentation released 4/30/13” by Anne Gentle
• Opscode: “Hosted Chef Upgrades Addendum” by Kevin Smith
• Opscode: “Just Released – Update to Knife Plugin for Google Compute Engine” by Bryan Hale
• Piston Cloud: “The Latest on OpenStack Architecture”
• Piston Cloud: “Comcast, Best Buy, Bloomberg, and More Move to OpenStack-powered Cloud Systems”
• Piston Cloud: “Designing for Piston”
• Pistion Cloud: “Want to Learn More About DevOps? Here’s Some Summer Reading”
• Simplicity Scales: “Stacker Voices: Thierry Carrez, OpenStack Foundation”

Hadoop

• Cloudera: “How-to: Automate Your Hadoop Cluster from Java”
• Cloudera:“Fresh and Hot: HBaseCon 2013 Schedule Finalized!”
• Cloudera: “How-to: Configure Eclipse for Hadoop Contributions”

Contributors

Please find detailed information on all contributors in our Wiki section.

Contact

If you have any feedback, suggestions, ideas, or if you’d like to contribute - I’ll be happy to hear back from you.

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth

Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

Hi Community, here is my compilation of the most interesting technical blog posts written by members of the Microsoft MVP Community. The number of MVPs is growing well, I hope you enjoy their posts. @all MVPs If you’d like me to add your blog posts to my weekly compilation, please send me an email (flo@datacenter-flo.de) or reach out to me via Twitter (@FloKlaffenbach). Thanks!

Featured Posts of the Week!

A Converged Networks Design For Hyper-V On SMB 3.0 Storage With RDMA (SMB Direct) by Aidan Finn

Videointerview with Jose Barreto about SMB 3.0 by Carsten Rachfahl

IP Assignment Strategies For Hyper-V Replica by Aidan Finn

x86 Windows Server 2008 TS Gateway Migration To x64 Windows Server 2012 RD Gateway by Didier van Hoye

Exchange

Exchange 2013 Server Role Requirements Calculator available by Johan Veldhuis 

Hyper-V

Cisco Nexus 1000V für Hyper-V (Beta): Einrichtung in German by Nils Kaczenski

Whitepaper: Datensicherung für virtuelle Maschinen in German by Nils Kaczenski

Microsoft Virtualisierungs Podcast Folge 29: IT-Camp recorded in German by Carsten Rachfahl

IP Assignment Strategies For Hyper-V Replica by Aidan Finn

How Hyper-V Snapshots Work by Aidan Finn

Using Hyper-V Snapshots by Aidan Finn

A Converged Networks Design For Hyper-V On SMB 3.0 Storage With RDMA (SMB Direct) by Aidan Finn

KB2836402 – You Cannot Add VHD/X Files To Hyper-V VMs On WS2012 by Aidan Finn 

Office 365

Fehlermeldung bei einer shared Mailbox/freigegebenen Postfach in German by Kerstin Rachfahl

Himmlische IT-Podcast Folge 27: Office 365 im Unternehmen in German by Kerstin Rachfahl 

PowerShell

#PSTip Detecting if the console is in Interactive mode by Shay Levy

Measuring PowerShell scripts by Shay Levy

Scrub Up PowerShell Content by Jeffery Hicks

PowerShell Version Profiles by Jeffery Hicks

Test 64-Bit Operating System by Jeffery Hicks

Friday Fun: A PowerShell Tickler by Jeffery Hicks

Testing ASP.NET MVC4 Web API Endpoints with PowerShell by Adam Driscoll 

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

Windows Server 2012 #HyperV and SMB 3.0 Best Practices with #SCVMM by James van den Berg 

SQL Server

#PSTip List SQL database mirroring partner using SMO by Ravikanth Chaganti

#PSTip Adding local users to SQL Server Logins using SMO by Ravikanth Chaganti 

Windows Client

New Windows version: “Windows Blue” to be called Windows 8.1 by Alessandro Cardoso 

Windows Server Core

IIS & Windows Authentication – Troubleshooting mit Negotiate & NTLM in German by Robert Mühsig

x86 Windows Server 2008 TS Gateway Migration To x64 Windows Server 2012 RD Gateway by Didier van Hoye

Installing & using the Windows Server Migration Tools To Migrate Local Users & Groups by Didier van Hoye

KB2838669–A Big Hotfix Bundle For WS2012 Failover Clustering by Aidan Finn

KB2836988 – May 2013 Update Rollup For WS2012 and Win8 by Aidan Finn

Videointerview with Jose Barreto about SMB 3.0 by Carsten Rachfahl 

Tools

Real Time Performance Monitoring – VMTurbo Virtual Health Monitor by Lai Yoong Seng

The Dell Cloud Client Computing team will be at Citrix Synergy this week, where the company will announce several offerings including new thin clients, software and VDI solutions built for Citrix. One was announced Monday – the combination of Dell Wyse ThinOS 8 and the dual-core thin client Dell Wyse D10D.

If you plan to be there, please stop by booth 200 or schedule some time to chat to dig into the details. A full overview of the activities is at http://synergy2013.dellmicrosite.com/.

Two breakouts to highlight:

• “Simple, secure & mobile: virtualization at its best with Dell and Citrix,” will take place at 3:30 p.m. PT on May 22^nd, where Jeff McNaught, Dell’s Cloud Client Computing executive director of marketing, along with guest Tony Zhang from Credit Suisse, will discuss how to easily manage Dell and Citrix Virtualization Solutions. They will also premiere Dell Wyse’s newest Xenith zero clients and infrastructure solutions that are specifically geared for Citrix XenDesktop.
• "Improving Patient Care with Desktop Virtualization and SSO," will be held the following day at 3:00 p.m. PT on May 23^rd. For this session, Dan O’Farrell, Dell Cloud Client Computing’s Senior Director of Product Marketing and John Brister, Manager of Infrastructure and Technology for Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health System, will discuss how VDI simplifies healthcare IT management how to protect patient confidentiality.

Booth theater presentations will feature Dell customers: Credit Suisse, Seattle Children’s, Indiana University, Sullivan University System, and Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady Health Systems. Dell partners Citrix, NVIDIA, Imprivata, Liquidware Labs, Trend Micro and Unidesk will feature Dell Cloud Client Computing solutions in their booths, as well.

Keep an eye on the action by following @wyse on Twitter or join the conversation at #CitrixSynergy or #Dell.

Dell: Tell us about yourself and what you are doing?

Anne Gentle: I'm Anne Gentle, I work at Rackspace and I like to think of the title, Content Stacker, which basically means that I work on the documentation for OpenStack  docs.openstack.org, api.openstack.org. I try to maintain that and keep it going with volunteers.

Q: How can someone become a volunteer?

A: We have active technical contributors in Openstack. OpenStack is open source cloud computing, so we are trying to build this massive structure of projects and OpenStack documentation and we invite people to submit a patch just like code. It is an interesting way of doing documentation, I am really interested in collaborative documentation.  I've been a tech-writer for a lot of years now, but I have always been drawn to new methods, new techniques, new processes. The one I am really interested in right now is collaborative authoring and authoring out on the social web where people have expectations for content nowadays that you should be able to interact with it, you should be able to comment on it, and most likely you probably want to edit it, too. That's what we do with OpenStack docs, they are open source all the way down to the fonts that they are published, and anybody can contribute.

Q: You just recently published a book, can you tell us a little bit about that?

A: One of the most interesting techniques that I found in open source documentation is something called a Book Sprint. You gather together a group of collaborators and we run in a Book Sprint facilitator Adam Hyde who has been doing about 55 of these. I have participated with Adam on about three Book Sprints and so I knew that I wanted him to facilitate because I had seen him succeed. I also had a core group of people who are operating OpenStack clouds who could also write; great combo right? We put together a proposal and the OpenStack Foundation funded us to buy plane tickets for guys from Canada, Australia, from across the USA and to come together in Austin, Texas. We wrote the operation guide in five days as a collaborative group. It was amazing. What that really means is that we had an outline going in but that doesn’t mean we stuck to that outline right away but these guys knew each other and we had talked a lot beforehand about what we wanted the book to be, who we wanted to write for, what we expected out of it in the end, so we really wrote for three days, maybe three and a half and edited for a day and a half and had a book.

Q: Where can you get that book?

A: You go to docs.openstack.org/ops, it's the ops guide and you can actually purchase a dead-tree copy from lulu.com.  It should actually ironically also be out on Amazon soon.

Q: Thank you very much, Anne.

A: Thank you!

Resources

Twitter @annegentle

Anne’s Blog JustWriteClick

Anne at OpenStack

Posted on behalf of Mattias Sundling

Virtual machine snapshots preserve the entire state of a running VM at a particular point in time. While the snapshot is active, all changes to the VM are captured in one or more delta disks. If they stay active too long, the delta files become too large and create problems with performance overhead and capacity. Another problem is that vCenter can lose control of snapshots and they can become orphaned and continue to stay active without detection. To help VM administrators better see orphaned snapshots, Dell has added Snapshot Explorer to the collection of free utilities in Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition, 6.5.2. 

Snapshot Explorer provides the following benefits: 

• Helps avoid performance and capacity problems
• Eliminates the time-consuming and tedious need to track snapshots manually
• Detects all snapshots, including orphaned snapshots, and provides all of this information at a glance across multiple hypervisors
• Provides VM administrators with advanced filters and a detailed snapshot list 

http://communities.quest.com/servlet/JiveServlet/downloadImage/38-5681-18178/620-321/Snapshot+Explorer-Default.png

Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition is a freeware suite comprised of multiple utilities that provide different angles of visibility into virtual environments: 

• Snapshot Explorer detects all snapshots, including orphaned shapshots, to avoid problems with performance and capacity
• Environment Explorer provides at-a-glance information about performance, efficiency and capacity
• Change Explorer lists all changes that occur in a virtual environment, and provides associated risk impact
• Storage Explorer assesses storage performance and capacity across datastores and VMs
• vScope Explorer offers immediate identification of VMs, hosts and datastores suffering performance, capacity and efficiency issues
• SearchMyVM Explorer delivers search capabilities, similar to Google, of the virtual environment 

Download Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition 

Webinar Playback: 10 Ways to Drive Efficiency in Virtualized Environments

Learn firsthand about OpenStack, its challenges and opportunities, market adoption and Dell’s engagement in the community. My goal is to interview all 24 members of the OpenStack board, and I will post these talks sequentially at Dell TechCenter.

Dell: Can you please introduce yourself?
Joseph George: My name is Joseph George, also known as @jbgeorge on twitter and on the JBGeorge Tech Blog (www.jbgeorge.net). I live in Austin, TX with my wife and two kids, where we are active with our local church, regulars in Austin’s great culinary scene, and big fans of the NFL (aka American Football).

Q: What are your responsibilities as an OpenStack board member?
A: My objective is to leverage my position at Dell to further the OpenStack initiative, technology, and community, which is something Dell is extremely committed to.  Being the newest member to the OpenStack Foundation Board of Directors, I am just now getting involved with some of the committees that are working on critical issues. Specifically, topics around interoperability, production scale, and community education are of utmost importance to me as an OpenStack Director, and as a community member.   

Q: What makes OpenStack so special?
A: I’ve had the privilege of being a part of the OpenStack movement since its beginning, having been a Dell product manager on the project back in 2010 when OpenStack was first announced.  At that point at Dell, we’d taken a few cloud solutions to market, and the early members of the Revolutionary Solutions Team had a varied background of startup and corporate experience, plus technology experience across cloud, big data, and virtualization.  With that mix of experience and expertise, we had a very strong opinion of what was needed for a cloud technology to be innovative and disruptive.  A number of those characteristics were present when OpenStack launched – a sound foundation for scale, true community orientation, guidelines that were friendly to corporations to build IP around, and more. 

Looking back, we’re seeing that OpenStack is staying true to those expectations.  It is changing how the market views cloud options, a number of big name vendors are supportive of it and building solutions around it, and the community is stronger than ever.  It truly has the potential to change how we all do cloud.

Q: Which are the most exciting and disruptive OpenStack projects?
A: As we’re seeing early projects like Nova and Swift evolve into more mature “OpenStack Compute” and “OpenStack Object Storage” components of core, the next wave of projects are certainly interesting.  Celiometer, which is designed to help with metering and monitoring, and Heat, which is to provide an orchestration service for OpenStack, are certainly two projects that are getting a lot of attention heading into the Havana release, slated for this fall.  I also am very happy to see some of the work going into Tempest, a test suite for the OpenStack project, as I can see that as a way for potential adopters to gain confidence in the source code.  Finally, though Crowbar is not an official project in OpenStack, I view that open source community as serving an important role in helping to harden the manner by which users deploy and provision multi-node OpenStack clouds.

Q: What is your role at Dell?
A: In addition to serving on the Board of Directors of the OpenStack Foundation, I am the Director of Product Strategy of Dell’s Revolutionary Solutions Team.  This is the Dell team responsible for solutions such as the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution, the Dell Apache Hadoop Solution, the Crowbar open source project, and a number of partner solutions around emerging cloud and big data technologies. 

Q: How does Dell engage with OpenStack?
A: Dell has been a part of the OpenStack movement since July 19, 2010, when OpenStack was first announced, and our goal was to participate in the community and to build solutions to enable our customers to leverage this new cloud platform to solve their business needs.

(Little known facts: The first OpenStack “design summit” was actually held here in Austin, TX, and the original announcement press release had quotes from two partners other than Rackspace and NASA – one was Citrix, the other was Dell.) 

Since our Day 1 participation, Dell has been very active in the OpenStack space.  In addition to being the first hardware solutions vendor to support OpenStack, we were also the first to offer a hardware + software + services packaged solution in market (the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution) and the first to solve the OpenStack bare metal deployment by launching the Crowbar open source project.  Since then, we’ve worked with key partners to deliver solutions to meet additional OpenStack needs, specifically with Suse and Morphlabs, and we’ve created the Emerging Solutions Ecosystem Partner Program, where we’ve partnered with key players in the OpenStack and cloud space.  We’ve been sponsors of every OpenStack Design Summit in existence, host the OpenStack meetups in both Austin, TX and Boston, MA, have led numerous world-wide hackdays, and are Gold Members of the OpenStack Foundation, where both Rob Hirschfeld and I serve on the board from Dell.

Dell has also recently announced plans to lead the effort in enabling Hyper-V as a viable hypervisor option for OpenStack.  Our specific customer base is keen to see that project make progress, and we are proud to take point on driving this project to delivery.

Q: Can you explain Dell’s commercial offering around OpenStack?
A: Dell offers a number of options around OpenStack, depending on what specific customers need.

The “Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution” is flexible, packaged solution that leverages open source OpenStack, with a validated reference architecture, Dell-supported Crowbar, a variety of optional software capabilities from both Dell’s software portfolio as well as partners, plus optional deployment / support / consulting services. 

Additionally, Dell offers a few solutions that we deliver with partners, which would include the “Dell Suse Cloud Solution, Powered by OpenStack” and the “Dell mCloud Helix Solution” which is a partnership with Morphlabs.

To be very clear, we are big believers in OpenStack at Dell, and you’ll continue to see Dell work to enable as many of our customers as possible with OpenStack-based cloud solutions, as we have been doing for the last few years.

Q: What is your perspective on all the recent news around Dell’s shift in public cloud strategy, and what that means for OpenStack at Dell?
A: Our goal is to ensure we are servicing our customers in a manner that meets their needs. When it comes to our public cloud approach, we chose to work with our partner ecosystem to enable customers with choices, which allows us to focus on the solution level aspects of cloud enablement, including private cloud solutions, software and services. 

As it pertains to OpenStack, this adjustment to the public cloud strategy does not impact our OpenStack commitment at all. We are as committed as ever to enabling our customers with OpenStack and to furthering the OpenStack movement and community. In fact, the news of Dell’s leadership in Hyper-V enablement in OpenStack is an indication of the investments we are making to drive OpenStack forward.

Q: Where do you see OpenStack five years from now?
A: In these emerging technology spaces, it’s difficult to predict what 12 months from now will look like, much less 5 years.  

But if I were to guess, I believe we will see a number of large-scale, production-level deployments of OpenStack, among top tier solutions providers and hosters, as well as among the large enterprise.  I also think the broader mainstream customer base will be more comfortable with open source in general, with broader adoption of tools like Chef and Puppet, so we will see very innovative use cases and implementations of OpenStack.  We’ll see specific workloads rise to the top that are “best on OpenStack”, and more and more case studies of success with OpenStack.  I expect the ecosystem of OpenStack solution and component vendors will be vibrant, as users provide requirements to their technology providers on OpenStack can be extended further.

I certainly think the future is very bright for OpenStack.  I’ve thought that since the beginning, and I see more and more evidence to back that up each day.

Q: Thank you very much!
A: You’re welcome.

1. Log into the iDRAC GUI

2. Under "iDRAC Settings", go to User Authentication.

3. Click the "User ID" number of the root account.

4. The "Configure User" radio button should already be checked, Click NEXT.

5. Enable the "Change Password" checkbox

6. Enter the new password in the fields for "New Password" and "Confirm New Password". Click "Apply".

7. Logout and login throught the iDRAC GUI to verify the change.

For more information about DRAC5, iDRAC6, or iDRAC7 start at the following link:

http://www.delltechcenter.com/idrac