Hello everyone. We are holding a series of TechChat based on PowerEdge M100E Chassis Management Controller.

The 2nd one is 1:00AM – 2:00AM (US Central) on 4/2. and good thing is that the time is very convinient for Audience in Asia Pacific region.

• Australia(Sydney)  5:00PM-6:00PM
• Japan: 3:00PM –  4:00PM
• China/Singapore/Malaysia 2:00PM – 3:00PM
• India   11:30AM to 12:30PM

The Agenda is

(i)           Single click all server update from CIFS/NFS directory built by Dell Repository Manager
(ii)          Support for next generation fans and Enhanced Cooling Mode option for increased airflow

We are welcome to have everyone to join this Chat (TechChart)

PowerEdgeM1000e Chassis Management Controller firmware version 4.5

You don’t have to provide your detailed information Just have your name (or Nickname) and Enter as a Guest!

Click below to join!

For more info on CMC: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/systems-management/w/wiki/1987.dell-chassis-management-controller.aspx

Big Data:
Cloudera: How-to: Use Parquet with Impala, Hive, Pig, and MapReduce
An open source project co-founded by Twitter and Cloudera, Parquet was designed from the ground up as a state-of-the-art, general-purpose, columnar file format for the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. In particular, Parquet has several features that make it highly suited to use with Cloudera Impala for data warehouse-style operations. Read more.

Cloudera: Letting It Flow with Spark Streaming
Apache Spark is a fast and general framework for large-scale data processing, with a programming model that supports building applications that would be more complex or less feasible using conventional MapReduce. (Spark ships inside Cloudera Enterprise 5, and is already supported for use with CDH 4.4 and later.) With an in-memory persistent storage abstraction, Spark supports complete MapReduce functionality without the long execution times required by things like data replication, disk I/O, and serialization. Read more.

Datameer: Introducing Datameer 4.0: The Flip Side to Big Data
Some people look at data and see integers, booleans and strings. When I look at data, I always wonder what story is behind it. In the past few years, we have worked hard to implement our vision of shrinking the gap between the technical experts who are able to work with the data and the subject-matter experts who actually need to use it. Read more.

DevOps:
Apprenda: On Switching from Dev to Testing 
I’ve been a .NET developer here at Apprenda for about two and a half years now. In that time, I have had the pleasure of working with our phenomenal dev team, learned new technologies, and built / improved upon our remarkable product. However, for this next release cycle, I have (willingly) put on a different hat and moved to the other side of the R&D wall to become a Senior Test Engineer. I will now pause so any developers reading this can catch their breath and process that information. Read more.

Inktank: New 10-Minute Ceph Webinar Series
We know time is at a premium, and we also know there’s a thirst for Ceph knowledge. That’s why we’ve put together a series of 10-minute, on-demand webinars designed both to fit into hectic schedules and to deliver the targeted Ceph information you’re looking for. Read more.

Ravello: The Modern Test Lab, Part 3 – Build the Lab Team
The R&D team has undergone major changes in recent years. Flexibility, agility and speed are crucial for software delivery. These changes impact on the individual test lab member. The test or QA engineer position has become more influential and dominant within the R&D team. Read more.

OpenStack:
Anne Gentle: How to Build OpenStack Docs and Contributors through Community
I’m well past the three year mark, working on a new open source project that grows and grows every six months. I’ve been working closely with Diane Fleming at Rackspace to focus completely on upstream OpenStack. Upstream means that all of our documentation work goes to the open source project itself. So while Rackspace runs OpenStack in production and for our customers private clouds, Diane and I focus on documentation that helps any organization run and use OpenStack. We have put together an outline of what we do to make upstream OpenStack documentation better all the time. Read more.

Ben Nemec: OpenStack Development System Setup
I've been meaning to write something up about how I set up my OpenStack development environment because there are some handy things you can do before you even get started that will likely save you some hassle down the line. I've recently discovered that there are rather varied ways other people are doing this sort of thing, so keep in mind that this isn't the "right" way, it isn't the best way, but it's what works for me. Read more.

Ben Nemec: Using pypi-mirror with devtest
A full run of TripleO's devtest takes a long time - around an hour or more on my i7/16GB box even with a hot squid cache. Quite a bit of the time is spent building images, and there are a few ways to speed that up, some of which are easier than others. Read more.

Boden Russell: OpenStack nova boot server call diagram
The OpenStack architecture consists of multiple distributed services which often work together to carry out a single logical operation. Given the nature of this architecture, getting up to speed on the call flows and interactions can be a daunting task for developers and operational admins alike. Read more.

Canonical: An insight into supporting OpenStack
It is pretty well known that most of the OpenStack clouds running in production today are based on Ubuntu. Companies like Comcast, NTT, Deutsch Telekom, Bloomberg and HP all trust Ubuntu Server as the right platform to run OpenStack. A fair proportion of the Ubuntu OpenStack users out there also engage Canonical to provide them with technical support, not only for Ubuntu Server but OpenStack itself. Canonical provides full Enterprise class support for both Ubuntu and OpenStack and has been supporting some of the largest, most demanding customers and their OpenStack clouds since early 2011. This gives us a unique insight into what it takes to support a production OpenStack environment. Read more.

Liz Blanchard: Running a Baseline Usability Test on Horizon
Over the last few months, I’ve been working with a group of folks from multiple companies on doing research around building a set of Personas to present at the Atlanta Summit. In one of our first meetings, we talked about the need to do some usability testing as a separate effort from the Persona research. Earlier this month, a few of the folks from HP mentioned that they were hoping to run a usability test on the most recent (Icehouse) version of Horizon. This would be the first usability test within the community that I’m aware of and I was super excited that they were willing to let those of us interested to be a part of this testing effort. Read more.

Mat Fischer: Keystone: User Enabled Emulation can lead to bad performance
An update on my previous post about User Enabled Emulation, tl;dr, don’t use it. It’s slow. Here’s what I found. Read more.

Opensource.com: A sneak peek of OpenStack Icehouse
It seems like it was only yesterday that the OpenStack community found itself gathering in Hong Kong to set the design goals for the Icehouse release. As we entered March development was still progressing at a fever pitch in the lead up to the feature freeze for the release but now the dust has started to settle and we are able to start getting a real feel for what OpenStack users and operators can look forward to in the Icehouse release. Read more.

The OpenStack Blog: Open Mic Spotlight: Sascha Peilicke
An interview with Sascha Peilicke, a cloud software engineer for SUSE, where he works on the company’s OpenStack, Crowbar and SUSE Cloud business areas. He is also an open SUSE community member, core contributor and package/maintenance update reviewer. Read more.

The OpenStack Blog: Open Mic Spotlight: Charles Beadnall
An interview with Charles Beadnall, VP of Engineering at GoDaddy, previously responsible for the ad and personalization platform at Yahoo!, and before that was in charge of infrastructure at Metaweb, and systems architecture at VeriSign. Read more.

The TechChat scedule is changed to 4/8 The time is convinient for the participant in Asia Pacific Rigion.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello everyone. We will holding a series of TechChat based on PowerEdge M100E Chassis Management Controller.

The 1st one is 1:00AM – 2:00AM (US Central) on 4/8 and agenda is

(i)           Single click all server update from CIFS/NFS directory built by Dell Repository Manager
(ii)          Support for next generation fans and Enhanced Cooling Mode option for increased airflow

We are welcome to have everyone to join this Chat (TechChart)

PowerEdgeM1000e Chassis Management Controller firmware version 4.5

You don’t have to provide your detailed information Just have your name (or Nickname) and Enter as a Guest!

The time is

• Australia(Sydney)              5:00PM-6:00PM
• Japan:                              3:00PM –  4:00PM
• China/Singapore/Malaysia   2:00PM – 3:00PM
• India                              11:30AM to 12:30PM

For more info on CMC: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/systems-management/w/wiki/1987.dell-chassis-management-controller.aspx

Everyone knows that situation, your contacting the technical support and the agent asks you:

"Sir, can you please send me the RAID Controller Log of the faulty server?".

Yes, sure - But how?

I show you a nice and easy way to export the log via the OpenManage Server Administrator (also called OMSA).
You will see that you're done with just a few steps and without any effort.

For further assistance please check out my wiki here.

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.

The new Dell SPI v4.0 continues to provide a relatively easy way for current or prospective Dell enterprise customers who use HPOM to monitor Dell server, storage and networking equipment. The Dell SPI protects and leverages an IT organization’s existing investment in HP Operations Manager and helps ease the integration and monitoring of Dell devices. 

This product equips IT administrators with the information necessary to make rapid, informed decisions regarding their data center resources and helps to increase staff productivity and reduce unplanned downtime.  By monitoring Dell servers, storage and networking devices in environments managed by HP Operations Manager, customers can:

• Utilize their existing investment in HP Operations Manager by easily integrating and monitoring Dell equipment
• Improve operational efficiency and flexibility by managing their heterogeneous data center environment
• Increase productivity and reduce time to maintain, monitor and troubleshoot any Dell-related issue in their IT infrastructure
• Make informed and rapid decisions regarding data center resources

Customers can choose to use the plug-in in either agent-free, out-of-band mode or the more conventional mode which requires the installation of the OpenManage Server Administrator agent on each server.   Customers who want to optimize for increased availability, efficiency and process automation will need to buy a license from Dell, while the in-band mode remains free of charge.

We’re excited to bring this latest release to you; for more information, download links, and product documentation please visit the Dell OpenManage Connection for HP Operations Manager Wikipage. We also have some new Technical Articles detailing various ways to use the Dell SPI to manage Dell switches, servers, and storage devises. We encourage you to continue this conversation in the OpenManage Connections for 3rd Party Console Integration Forum if you have any comments or other feedback.

Big Data:
Apigee: The Business Value of Reducing Medicare Complaints with Big Data Predictive Analytics
In a previous post, “Big Data Predictive Analytics in Healthcare / Medicare,” we discussed the role of big data in helping insurers address members' issues before they boiled over into complaints to Medicare (CTM). Star ratings were set up as a way to help members make data-driven and informed decisions when enrolling in Medicare Advantage plans. The idea is that a plan with a higher overall star rating, which is composed of a weighted average of star ratings for several measures, would be a better-performing plan. Read more.

Cloudera: How Impala Brings Real-Time, Big Data Analytics to Digital Reasoning’s Users
At the beginning of each release cycle, engineers at Digital Reasoning are given time to explore the latest in Big Data technologies, examining how the frequently changing landscape might be best adapted to serve our mission. As we sat down in the early stages of planning for Synthesys 3.8 one of the biggest issues we faced involved reconciling the tradeoff between flexibility and performance. How can users quickly and easily retrieve knowledge from Synthesys without being tied to one strict data model? Read more.

Cloudera: How-to: Use the HBase Thrift Interface, Part 3 – Using Scans
In this series of how-tos, you have learned how to use Apache HBase’s Thrift interface. Part 1 covered the basics of the API, working with Thrift, and some boilerplate code for connecting to Thrift. Part 2 showed how to insert and to get multiple rows at a time. In this third and final post, you will learn how to use scans and some considerations when choosing between REST and Thrift. Read more.

Cloudera: Cloudera Enterprise 5 is Now Generally Available!
When it became generally available 18 months ago, Cloudera Enterprise 4 was widely recognized to be more flexible, more scalable, and less expensive than traditional data management platforms; with Cloudera Enterprise 5, we can also say it is faster (HDFS caching FTW!), more functional (includes new components such as Apache Spark and Parquet), and better integrated (for example, Cloudera Impala and Cloudera Search are now both inside CDH). Furthermore, in an impressive demonstration of ecosystem growth, 100 Cloudera partners invested technical resources to certify on Cloudera Enterprise 5 before its release. Read more.

Datameer: How-to: Last.fm Data Analytics in Datameer
I am a music buff at heart and so my favorite feature is one of more than 55+ built-in connectors to different structured and unstructured data sources — the last.fm connector. The easiest way for me to show this off to you without building a custom analysis based on my last.fm data is to head to our Analytics App Market and download the Last.fm neighbours application. The app was initially created to show what you could potentially do with the last.fm connector, so you can start there and then can edit it to fit your needs. Read more.

DevOps:
Chef: DevOps for developers w/Chef [Part IV]
There are some common misunderstandings about DevOps. Some people think DevOps strives for new organizational units or teams (“another silo will solve it”). That’s not true. As the name DevOps already suggests, it’s all about improving the “how”, that is how devs and ops work together with each other, on a daily base. Others claim with DevOps all parties are collectively responsible for the outcome. That’s not true either. Although shared incentives are important, clear responsibilities are still important too. Thus sharpening the process, the roles and responsibilities is crucial. With other words, traditional IT governance remains important. IT governance includes defining roles and responsibilities, measuring and reporting, and taking actions to resolve identified issues. Read more.

Chef: DevOps for developers w/Chef [Part V]
Setup and maintenance of infrastructure were automated even before the rise of Agile software development and the DevOps movement. But there have often been handcrafted, scripted solutions, barely readable by someone other than the original author. In recent years, a few tools in the field of configuration management started to gain popularity to address these challenges. Read more.

OpenStack:
Boden Russell: Managing OpenStack & SoftLayer Resources From A Single Pane of Glass With Jumpgate
The folks over at the SoftLayer innovation team recently released a new open source project called Jumpgate. With Jumpgate you can use a number of your favorite OpenStack tools and APIs to bridge directly into SoftLayer. For example you can use the OpenStack nova CLI and APIs to boot SoftLayer virtual compute servers, or the OpenStack glance CLI to manage SoftLayer based images. You can even use the OpenStack Horizon dashboard to graphically manage a number of your SoftLayer resources including virtual servers and images. Read more.

Florent Flament: Windows Images for OpenStack
This note summarizes articles from other places about Microsoft Windows images for OpenStack creation, along with some first hand experience. The whole process of creating Windows 2008 and Windows 2012 images fully usable on OpenStack instances is described there. Read more.

James Page: OpenStack Icehouse RC1 for Ubuntu 14.04 and 12.04
OpenStack Icehouse RC1 packages for Cinder, Glance, Keystone, Neutron, Heat, Ceilometer, Horizon and Nova are now available in the current Ubuntu development release and the Ubuntu Cloud Archive for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Read more.

Kyle Mestery: Workaround for ODL in Neutron
With the Icehouse release of Neutron impending, we’ve unfortunately uncovered a bug which is affecting ODL integration with Neutron. This bug was introduced by this commit, and the reality is better CI for the ODL plugin would have caught this. Read more.

Mark Shuttleworth: #10 Ubuntu is built on IAAS for IAAS users
Every detail matters, and building great software means taking time to remove the papercuts. Ubuntu has over the past 5 years been refined in many ways to feel amazingly comfortable on the cloud. In the very early days of EC2 growth the Ubuntu team recognised how many developers were enjoying fast access to infrastructure on demand, and we set about polishing up Ubuntu to be amazing on the cloud. Read more.

Opensource.com: Ten sessions you don't want to miss at OpenStack Summit
The OpenStack Summit is coming up in Atlanta, May 12-16, and after much anticipation the agenda for the conference finally became available last week. As we covered previously, the agenda was crowdsourced to the user and developer community who gave input that helped individual track leaders arrange their schedules. Read more.

Opensource.com: Storing data in the cloud with GlusterFS and OpenStack Swift
Udo Seidel is no stranger to dealing with enormous file stores. Udo is Section Manager for Linux Strategy and Server Automation at Amadeus Data Processing GmbH and will be giving a talk with Vijay Bellur at DevNation in San Francisco, California later this month on developing applications with GlusterFS and OpenStack Swift. We sent Udo a few questions in advance of his talk to give us a little bit of a preview of what we might hear Read more.

Phymata: DevStack Havana on the Rackspace Cloud
Here’s how to deploy DevStack for OpenStack Havana including Neutron (Network) and Swift (Object Storage) on the Rackspace Cloud. You can use DevStack for testing/development of OpenStack or just learning a bit more about OpenStack and how all of the pieces fit together. Read more.

Rackspace: Developing With Cloud Images for Fun and Profit
Rackspace has just launched Cloud Images, a public OpenStack Images API v2 endpoint in the Rackspace open cloud. Why should you care? Well, this product creates several opportunities for developers. Read more.

RafStack: Google+ Hangout: UForge Application Automation & Marketplace Platform and OpenStack
OpenStack meetup with Paul Laskin, a technical product manager at UShareSoft, company that created UForge, a tool to automate application delivery and management for any virtual data center and public, private or hybrid clouds. Read more.

RafStack: Google+ Hangout: OpenStack Meetup on Meetups
This is going to be our first OpenStack Online Meetup ... on Meetups. If you run an OpenStack Meetup (or contemplate to start your own local group) and if you want to talk to folks who bootstrapped groups from zero up to a couple thousand members: Join us! Read more.

Sebastien Han: Don't Burn Down Your OpenStack Cloud
Managing an OpenStack public cloud can be tough and building it properly is even harder. You can not predict the workload of your platform, customers do what they want (yes they pay for this!). So yes, cloud performance are often unpredictable! Recent studies showed that while running a long-standing benchmark on several cloud platforms, they experienced a performance drop-down of 40% (crazy isn’t it?). However, there are some simple facilities in OpenStack that allow you to have a better control of the resources that you offer to your customers/users. This is what I am going to briefly explore in this article. Read more.

The OpenStack Blog: Participate in the OpenStack User Survey by April 11!
We’re kicking off the third round of the OpenStack User Survey this month! You may remember before last November’s Summit in Hong Kong, we helped the User Committee run a survey to aggregate OpenStack deployments and share the results. Read more.

The OpenStack Foundation: Savanna Elastic Hadoop on OpenStack
The talk is about provisioning and managing Hadoop clusters on OpenStack using Savanna project. Savanna supports two key use cases: on-demand cluster provisioning and on-demand Hadoop tasks execution (Elastic Data Processing). This presentation will be focused around EDP functionality. Wel give an introduction to Savanna project, review features implemented on 0.3 version and talk about further plans, cover key architectural aspects and make the live demo. Watch the video.

As the most important annual Oracle technology conference hosted by the Oracle user community, this year’s Collaborate 14 Conference will be held in Las Vegas from April 7, 2014 to April 11^th , 2014.  Every year since 2008, the Dell Oracle Solutions Engineering team has spoken at this conference. This year Kai Yu, Senior Principal Engineer of Dell’s Enterprise Solutions Engineering joining with Satheesh Iyer, Senior Product Manager of Dell’s Enterprise Solutions Engineering will share their technology experience and views at the conference. The technical topics include Oracle 12c RAC (Real Applications Cluster) new features, High Availability, Cloud and Virtualization with focus on Dell Oracle solutions offerings and best practices in these areas. The following are the presentation sessions and panel sessions at the conference in which the Dell team will participate:

Presentation Sessions:

1. Delivering Self-Service Cloud Application Services Based Using Enterprise Manager 12c, session # 393 (Kai and Satheesh), April 4/8, 5:30pm-6:30pm,  Level 3, Lido 3101B
2. Ensure HA in Database Cloud with Oracle Database 12c: What to Do and How to Do It, session #398 (Kai), 4/9, 2:00pm-3:00pm,. Level 3, Lido 3101B

Expert Panel sessions that Kai will participate:

1. Planning your Oracle Cloud Computing Roadmap - Database, Middleware, Applications, session #849, 4/8, 10:15 AM-11:15Am, Level 3, Lido 3101B
2. Open discussion: Best ways to learn Oracle RAC 12c, Session # 512, 4/8, 06:30 PM - 07:15 PM, Level 3, Toscana 3701
3. Cloud SIG:  Cloud SIG: Understanding Cloud and DBaaS Strategies, Best Practices and Skill Sets , session #713 , 4/10, 11:00AM-12:00PM, Level 3, Lido 3101B
4. You Bet your Data Center, Architect Your Infrastructure from Scratch, Session #507,  4/10, 3:00 PM-5:00PM,  Level 3, Lido 3015

Kai Yu is a Senior Principal Engineer in Dell’s Enterprise Solutions Engineering with 19 years experiences on Oracle technology focusing on Oracle RAC, Virtualization and Cloud solutions. Kai is an Oracle ACE Director and has given more than 90 presentations around the world . He was awarded the 2011 OAUG Innovator of Year and 2012 Oracle Excellence Award: Technologist of the Year for Cloud Architect  and Co-authored the Apress book Expert Oracle RAC 12c.

Satheesh Iyer is a Senior Product Manager in Dell’s Enterprise Solutions Group and focuses on product management for data warehouse and database workload solutions. Satheesh is with Dell for about 10 years with varied backgrounds in enterprise systems and solutions, IT, database administration, solution architecture and data security. Satheesh has over 20 years of experience in the technology industry.

"The Elway Gazette"

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!

Updated Raiders of the lost Cluster VM´s PowerShell function by Niklas Akerlund

Copy Cluster Roles Hyper-V Cluster Migration Fails at Final Step with error Virtual Machine Configuration ‘VM01′ failed to register the virtual machine with the virtual machine service by Didier van Hoye

Mapping The Microsoft Hybrid Cloud – Work In Progress by Aidan Finn

HYPER-V NETWORK VIRTUALIZATION NVGRE: NO CONNECTION BETWEEN VMS ON DIFFERENT HYPER-V HOSTS by Thomas Maurer

Azure 

Mit dem lokalen IIS Manager auf eine Azure Website zugreifen in German by Robert Mühsig

Mapping The Microsoft Hybrid Cloud – Work In Progress by Aidan Finn

Clean Up Unwanted Disk on Windows Azure After Virtual Machine Has Deleted by Lai Yoong Seng

Azure Pack

Windows Azure Pack – You must first register Service Management Automation on Resource Provider VM Clouds by Marc van Eijk

Windows Azure – Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment Tool in German by Daniel Neumann

WINDOWS AZURE PACK – VIRTUAL MACHINE CLOUD by Thomas Maurer

Setup Identity Access Infrastructure Using Windows Azure Active Directory by Lai Yoong Seng

Exchange

Events

Hyper-V

Updated Raiders of the lost Cluster VM´s PowerShell function by Niklas Akerlund

Hyper-V Recovery Manager – Teil 3: Vaults und Zertifikate in German by Benedict Berger

Copy Cluster Roles Hyper-V Cluster Migration Fails at Final Step with error Virtual Machine Configuration ‘VM01′ failed to register the virtual machine with the virtual machine service by Didier van Hoye

HYPER-V NETWORK VIRTUALIZATION NVGRE: NO CONNECTION BETWEEN VMS ON DIFFERENT HYPER-V HOSTS by Thomas Maurer

Configuring Hyper-V Virtual Machine NUMA Topology by Aidan Finn

Lync Server

Using a Kemp Load Balancer for Reverse Proxy with Lync 2013 by Jaap Wesselius

Using an F5 LTM Load Balancer for Reverse Proxy with Lync 2013 by Jaap Wesselius

Office 

Visio Stencils for Hyper-V and Vmware by Lai Yoong Seng

Microsoft OneNote ab sofort gratis in German by Toni Pohl

Microsoft OneNote für Entwickler in German by Toni Pohl

Office 365 

Office 365–Neuerungen bei SharePoint Online in German by Martina Grom

PowerShell

Announcing PowerShell module for managing Kemp LoadMaster appliances by Ravikanth Chaganti

#PSTip Get requests that are currently executing in a worker process by Shay Levy

Deploying Azure Virtual Machines from VM Depot using PowerShell by Ravikanth Chaganti

Writing help for custom DSC resources by Ravikanth Chaganti

CSV Overcommitment PowerShell Script – Version 3.0 in German by Daniel Neumann

Sharepoint 

System Center Core

Enabling System Center Service Manager for Asset Management by Damian Flynn

System Center App Controller

System Center Avisor

System Center Configuration Manager 

System Center Dataprotection Manager

System Center Operations Manager

Azure services monitoring with SCOM 2012 R2 by Susantha Silva

System Center Orchestrator 

System Center Service Manager

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

SCVMM – Setup Says The Domain Account Specified For The Service Account Could Not Be Verified by Aidan Finn

SCVMM – Setting Up Remote SQL Database Is Hanging Or Failing by Aidan Finn

Enabling Data Deduplication For SCVMM Library by Aidan Finn

USER ROLES DISAPPEARING FROM VM NETWORK PROPERTIES ACCESS TAB IN SCVMM 2012 R2 UPDATE ROLLUP 1 by Stanislav Zhelyazkov

SQL Server

Microsoft #SQL 2014 Platform for Hybrid Cloud with #WindowsAzure by James van den Berg

Windows Intune

Windows Client

Windows Server

UPDATED MP: WINDOWS LICENSING CHECK by Stanislav Zhelyazkov

Tools

Dateien kopieren und nummerieren per Batch in German by Nils Kaczenski

What Is Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA)? by Damian Flynn

"The Elway Gazette"

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!

Windows NLB Nodes Misconfigured after Simultaneous Live Migration on Windows Server 2012 (R2) by Didier van Hoye

Using Hyper-V Virtual Machine Processor Resource Control by Aidan Finn

Azure Iaas VM not activated on my virtual network by Niklas Akerlund

Forget Amazon Workspaces – Build a DaaS in Microsoft Azure (or any Other Cloud) by Aidan Finn

Azure 

Set A Static IP Address For An Azure VM by Aidan Finn

Azure Iaas VM not activated on my virtual network by Niklas Akerlund

Windows Azure Virtual Machine Readiness Assessment #azure #winserv #hyperv by Robert Smit

Forget Amazon Workspaces – Build a DaaS in Microsoft Azure (or any Other Cloud) by Aidan Finn

Azure Pack

VConnect – A Windows Azure Pack Extension for VMware Hosts by Hans Vredevoort

ERROR 500 ON WINDOWS AZURE PACK (WAPACK) ADMIN PORTAL by Stanislav Zhelyazkov

Microsoft #CloudOS : Make Hybrid Cloud with Virtual S2S VPN Gateway with #WindowsAzure #SCVMM #Hyperv by James van den Berg

Microsoft Virtualisierungs Podcast Folge 36: Windows Azure Pack in German by Carsten Rachfahl

Exchange

AutodiscoverRedirect in Exchange 2013 SP1 on Windows 2012 R2 by Jaap Wesselius

Events

Hyper-V

Windows NLB Nodes Misconfigured after Simultaneous Live Migration on Windows Server 2012 (R2) by Didier van Hoye

Cannot Create External Virtual Switch (Grayed out) Network ObjectNotFound New-VMSwitch : Cannot find a physical network adapter #hyperv #winserv by Robert Smit

Using Hyper-V Virtual Machine Processor Resource Control by Aidan Finn

How to Enable Hyper-V Virtual Machine Processor Compatibility Mode by Aidan Finn

Secure Your Virtual Machine Using BitLocker by Lai Yoong Seng

Lync Server

A call to a PSTN number failed due to non availability of gateways in Lync 2013 by Jaap Wesselius

Office 

Office 365

Office 365, SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2013 On-Prem Feature Matrix Updated by Andrew Connell

PowerShell

PowerShell Script – VHD Rename in German by Daniel Neumann 

CONVERT A STRING TO A POWERSHELL PROPERTY NAME by Jeffery Hicks

SAVE POWERSHELL OBJECT TO FILE FOR REMOTE TROUBLESHOOTING by Thomas Maurer

MORE FUN WITH STRING PROPERTIES by Jeffery Hicks

FRIDAY FUN: CREATE ALL POWERSHELL PROFILE SCRIPTS by Jeffery Hicks

Recordings and code from SMA and Powershell webinar with Veeam by Niklas Akerlund

Sharepoint 

System Center Core

System Center App Controller

System Center Avisor

System Center Configuration Manager

ConfigMgr 2012 R2 CU 1 available – walkthrough by David O'Brien

How to Install SCCM agent on Workgroup Computers and Manage Them by Hasitha Willarachchi

System Center Dataprotection Manager

Unable to Backup VM Using DPM–VSS issue by Lai Yoong Seng

System Center Operations Manager

System Center Orchestrator

Use System Center 2012 – Orchestrator to Update Service Manager Action Logs by Damian Flynn

System Center Service Manager

How to Connect Service Manager 2012 to Configuration Manager 2012 by Damian Flynn

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

SQL Server

Microsoft #OData Source for Microsoft #SQL Server 2012 #Cloud by James van den Berg

Windows Intune

Windows Client

#PSTip How to remove the “Folders” group from my computer in Windows 8 by Shay Levy

Windows Server

Windows NLB On Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V: A Personal Preferred Configuration Using IGMP With Multicast by Didier van Hoye

Tools

With Microsoft support for Windows XP ending today, many organizations are yet to complete their migration. Thinking about the days needed to move applications, the risks of human error, and fears about data being lost are enough to keep IT managers up at night.

Dell Software and VMware® are working together to take the pain out of the migration process. Now you can use Dell™ ChangeBASE, and VMware Horizon Mirage™ in an automated approach to simplify the process and reduce the risks of migration.

Join us for a live webinar on 8th April to see these tools in action and learn more from Sachin Sharma, Product Marketing Manager at VMWare and Mike Gray, ChangeBASE Sales Manager at Dell Software.

During this webinar, you’ll learn how you can:

         Reduce risk and avoid devastating, irrecoverable data loss.

•          Increase productivity and optimize performance with less down time.
•          Reduce costs and decrease the need for manual-migration labor and licensing fees.
•          Save up to 40–50% of your time by utilizing Dell and VMware migration tools.
•          Simplify your migration by automating up to 95% of the process and receiving step-by-step instructions for any applications requiring manual migration.

Skip the headaches. Leave the pain relievers in the medicine cabinet. Register for the webinar today!

https://software.dell.com/event/taking-the-migraines-out-of-migration862498/

This blog post was originally written by Michael Schroeder and Thomas Cantwell.

Microsoft recently announced the release of a new update for Windows 8.1 and Windows Server® 2012 R2. While the majority of the enhancements included are Windows 8.1 focused, there are a few details to be aware of on Windows Server. The update to Windows Server 2012 R2 includes minor UI enhancements and bug fixes, as well as previously-released monthly update rollups and security fixes.

While not considered a traditional service pack, the new update reestablishes the servicing baseline for the OS. This update will be required in order to receive future Microsoft updates so it is an important update to carefully plan for and quickly deploy.

What changes are included for Server?

• Internet Explorer now includes an ‘Enterprise Mode’ which provides better compatibility for legacy sites designed for IE8.
• The user interface includes buttons for Search and Power on the Start page.

• The update includes all other updates released since Windows Server 2012 R2 was released.

Where can I find the required update?

• It’s available through Windows Update and on the Microsoft Download Center.
• On MSDN & TechNet

How do I identify it’s installed?

• Msinfo32.exe should report Hardware Abstraction Layer‘6.3.9600.17031’

Resources:

Windows RT 8.1, Windows 8.1, and Windows Server 2012 R2 Update April, 2014

What's New in Windows 8.1 Update

Windows Server 2012 R2 Update

This article details about command line management of PCIe SSD devices in VMware ESXi using VMware PowerCLI

Introduction to PCIe SSD

            The Dell PowerEdge Express Flash PCIe SSD provides high IOPs and sequential read/write speeds. The Express Flash device is designed to deliver sequential throughput on reads and writes of up to 1.8-1.2 GB/s speed. Refer to data sheet of Dell_PowerEdge_Express_Flash_PCIe_SSD for more details.

            At the end of this article there is a link provided to a white paper which focuses on command line methods of managing PCIe SSD devices in VMware ESXi environment. This document is useful for administrators to automate the configuration of PCIe SSD device(s) in an efficient manner.

Audience and Scope

            The scope of this article is limited to management of PCIe SSD devices in ESXi using PowerCLI cmdlets. This is intended towards IT administrators and normal ESXi users working on the virtualized infrastructure using PCIe SSD. The document provides insight into the usage of PCIe SSD in VMware ESXi. The below mentioned document is categorized into three major sections out of which the first section focuses on configuring the PCIe SSD as a VMFS datastore followed by command line options to configure PCIe SSD as a Host Swap Cache. The last section of the document details about automating the creation of a vFlash resource out of the PCIe SSD.

The white paper can be downloaded from here.

Dell OpenManage System Administrator 7.4 for Ubuntu and Debian

Dell OpenManage System Administrator (OMSA) 7.4 for Ubuntu and Debian is now published. OMSA 7.4 continues to be built on both Ubuntu 12.04 and Debian Wheezy to increase compatibility with Debian. All package dependencies that are in the Ubuntu distribution but are not in Debian are rebuilt for Debian and included in the OMSA Wheezy repository for convenience. One must use the Debian Wheezy packages and not the Ubuntu 12.04 packages because of libc differences between the two distribution releases.

(Please note that OMSA 7.2 and above are not built for Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian Squeeze. The last OMSA release tested with Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian Squeeze is OMSA 7.1, which is also provided in the new apt repository for convenience.)

Here is a list of the major changes made specifically for Ubuntu/Debian with this release:

• Updated the debhelper version used for building to version 9.
• This community-supported repository no longer bundles the Oracle Java runtime but instead utilizes the OpenJDK 7 JRE available in-distribution. This helps those running the OMSA web interface to get JRE security updates faster. (If you require OpenJDK 6 JRE on your server, I recommend that you run the OMSA web server in a chroot or other type of container.)
• Fixed a buffer overflow in vmcli.
• We're now providing debug packages for the Ubuntu build (not Debian for now).
• Because of the limited use cases for srvadmin-itunnelprovider, srvadmin-standardagent's dependency on it has been changed from "Depends" to "Suggests".
• Provided basic packaging of srvadmin-cm, though this one package has not been thoroughly tested as in-band DUPs are yet supported on Ubuntu or Debian.

Additionally, we have a new process in place for validating on Ubuntu with the help of Canonical. Our on-site engineers from Canonical tested this release on both Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and beta builds of Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. My thanks go especially to Kent Baxley of Canonical for his continued help in testing OMSA. :-)

Dell Deployment Toolkit 4.4 for Ubuntu and Debian

Also included in this release is version 4.4 of the Dell Deployment Toolkit (DTK) for Ubuntu and Debian. DTK is lighter-weight than OMSA and is meant to assist with system deployment. The packages are named syscfg, raidcfg, and dtk-scripts. syscfg is a tool to configure server BIOS, BMC/iDRAC settings, DTK state settings, and to do PCI device detection. raidcfg, as the name suggests, is a tool to configure RAID on Dell PowerEdge servers. dtk-scripts contains sample DTK scripts and tools to build a bootable Dell utility partition for DOS-based firmware updates. Here are some changes specifically made for this release:

• Fixed a bug affecting the functionality of raidcfg missed during previous releases.
• Bundled an Ubuntu-specific DTK script made and tested by our on-site engineer from Canonical.

Note that DTK is not meant to be used on a system with OMSA installed. In particular, raidcfg will not work properly when OMSA is installed.

Dell iDRAC Service Module (iSM) for Ubuntu and Debian

This release includes the iDRAC Service Module (iSM). More information about iSM can be found at: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/dell-idrac-service-module-1.0/manuals?c=us

Where to get it

More information on where to download these packages is at http://linux.dell.com/repo/community/ubuntu/.

Getting help

Please join us on the linux-poweredge@lists.us.dell.com mailing list for support and feedback. You can sign up at <https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge>.

This post was originally written by Abhijit Sune.  Send your suggestions or comments to WinServerBlogs@dell.com.

Dell™ OpenManage™ Cluster Configurator (OMCC) for Windows Server® 2012 R2 version 2.0 is successor of OMCC v1.0 released for Windows Server 2012. The Dell OpenManage Cluster Configurator is a free OEM factory installed utility based on Microsoft cluster configurator framework. This tool greatly simplifies your Windows Server 2012 & Windows Server 2012 R2 based fail-over cluster deployment on Dell PowerEdge VRTX shared infrastructure platform. It significantly reduces 2 node or 4 node cluster configuration time from approximately four hours to less than an hour.

The Dell PowerEdge VRTX includes all the necessary elements to meet remote and small-to-mid-size office IT infrastructure performance needs in a single, power-efficient unit. The VRTX solution combines servers, shared storage, IO in the form of PCIe slots, and networking into a 5U tower (rackable) chassis. The Chassis Management Controller (CMC) is embedded within the platform which allows the user to perform remote management or local operations on all the hardware resources (e.g., servers, storage, networking, etc.) from a single Web interface. 

The Dell PowerEdge VRTX now includes Fault Tolerant Shared PERC8 which isdesigned to provide high availability at storage controller and expander level failure.When combined with the Dell OpenManage Cluster Configurator, this platform delivers a reliable, easy-to-deploy, high availability cluster configuration solution.

Windows clustering can take many hours to configure manually and has many steps which need to be performed on each cluster node. OMCC is easy, fast and automated way to simplify Hyper-V cluster creation process from single cluster node. With this release of OMCC, we have included Multilingual support for all Dell shipping languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Korean, Japanese, TCHI, SCHI). This release has more robust features to support failover clustering. And Windows Server 2012 R2 adds additional functionality to Failover Clustering by adding support for shared virtual hard disks (for guest clusters), improved handling of virtual machines in a Hyper-V cluster, Cluster Shared Volume (CSV) improvements, and new and improved cluster quorum handling. 

OMCC v2.0 also supports VRTX high availability "Fault Tolerant Shared PERC8" feature. To provide high availability, we have pre-configured Multi-Path IO (MPIO) feature of Windows Server which provides the logical path for routing I/O over redundant hardware paths connecting servers to storage. Hence, MPIO solution helps to reroute I/O requests in case of failure.

OMCC is provided as a customer-orderable option combined with OEM factory-installed Windows Server 2012 R2. Once you power on the entire nodes of chassis, the language setting page will appear as below (Figure - A).

Figure - A

Access ANY ONE server to start the configuration process. After selecting your preferred language and accepting license, windows boots into desktop and OMCC wizard will appear. Refer Figure - B. 

Figure - B

The configuration changes reflects on other nodes automatically.

For next set of actions please refer the “Getting started Guide” from OMCC wizard. Each section in the OMCC has customized information on the tasks and basic troubleshooting. This can be accessed by clicking the Help button.

Additional Documentation:

- For more information on PowerEdge VRTX please refer http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-vrtx/pd

- OMCC user guide is available below for your download.

Preserving network performance is one of many key challenges for enterprises who also seek the highest threat and intrusion protection for their networks. This is because many next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) or standalone Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPSs) available today are often poor at providing both capabilities at the required level of effectiveness while simultaneously meeting the high throughput and high connection rate enterprises require. As a result, enterprises often settle with fine tuning their security policies to reach a tolerable rather than ideal balance. In most cases, the results are short of being optimal.   

To achieve the best possible security effectiveness with minimal impact on bandwidth and latency requires a security appliance with the capacity and scale to scan every port and protocol, decompress and decrypt every packet, and examine every bit of every packet of every flow at multi-gigabit speeds. Not only that, the device must also be able to find and block sophisticated malware while passing “good” traffic at high speed through the network. This may sound rather basic and simple to do, but in reality it’s not. NSS Labs, a third-party information security research and advisory company, confirms that implementation of an IPS can be a highly complex process involving multiple factors that affect the performance of the IPS solution. Factors include the security policy applied to analyze the broad mix of real-world traffic and hundreds of thousands of TCP/HTTP connection rate the system has to consume and inspect. For the second year in a row, Dell SonicWALL NGFW SuperMassive E10800, equipped with a patented, single-pass, low latency, Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection® (RFDPI) technology and tightly integrated IPS engine, was submitted to compete head-to-head with industry-leading dedicated IPS solutions in NSS Labs’ IPS testing, which includes tests and analysis of performance, security effectiveness, TCO and management capabilities of leading IPS vendors. Dell is extremely proud with the result – earning the highly coveted “Recommended” rating in the IPS product test category for the second year in a row. The SuperMassive E10800 delivered the right balance of security effectiveness and performance for enterprise deployments while meeting the high throughput and high connection rate requirements.

1. The E10800 blocked 97.6 percent of attacks against server applications, 92.5 percent of attacks against client applications, and 94.8 percent overall.
2. The E10800 scored 100 percent effective against all evasion techniques tested.
3. The E10800 is rated by NSS at 18,044 Mbps, which is higher than the vendor-claimed performance (Dell rates this product at 12 Gbps).

By earning NSS Lab’s “Recommended” rating for both NGFW and IPS, the SuperMassive E10800 has shown it is well suited to help enterprises eliminate the high costs associated with implementing and managing dedicated NGFW and IPS devices. To read the complete IPS performance analysis report, download the Network IPS Comparative Analysis Report today. 

Want to learn more about Dell SonicWALL next-generation firewall with integrated IPS? Click here.  

Want to stay updated on the latest threats research by Dell SonicWALL?  Visit the Dell Security Center for up-to-the-minute information about viruses, vulnerabilities and spyware. Download the full Dell SonicWALL 2013 Threat Report today for a complete threat statistics for 2013 and what you should expect to see for 2014.

Big Data:
Apprenda: Enterprise Integration of Big Data and PaaS
It would be difficult to find two areas of enterprise IT that have been more disruptive in recent years than Big Data and cloud computing. One could argue that the emergence of cloud computing, specifically IaaS, has led to the rise in enterprise adoption of Big Data solutions. It’s no secret that IaaS and Big Data are tied closely together; PaaS and Big Data should be equally integrated. Read more.

Cloudera: How-to: Process Data using Morphlines (in Kite SDK)
SequenceIQ has an Apache Hadoop-based platform and API that consume and ingest various types of data from different sources to offer predictive analytics and actionable insights. Our datasets are structured, unstructured, log files, and communication records, and they require constant refining, cleaning, and transformation. Read more.

Datameer: Use Datameer Spreadsheet Analytics on Hadoop
I am a big fan of Datameer’s simple spreadsheet UI for Hadoop data analysis, which offers more than 240+ point-and-click functions for creating different “views” of any data. The entire paradigm makes extracting information that might normally take hours to pull, fast and straightforward. Read more.

DevOps:
Docker: Docker 0.10: quality and ops tooling
Today we are happy to introduce Docker 0.10. We hope you will like it! This release is the next step on the road to Docker 1.0. The changelog is particularly large, with a dominant focus on quality and improving ops tooling. Read more.

Draios: Announcing sysdig: a system-level exploration tool
Here we are again. Launch day. Having spent a good part of the past decade working with my team on Wireshark and WinPcap, I know how satisfying it is to pour your heart into a piece of free software and watch a community grow up around it. But there’s something uniquely exciting about the day you put something new out there. Today we are launching our third ambitious Open Source project, and this time, we’re focusing on system-level monitoring and troubleshooting. We are delighted to present to you: sysdig. Read more.

OpenStack:
Adam Young: Teaching Horizon to Share
Horizon is The OpenStack Dashboard. It is a DJango (Python) Web app. During a default installation, Horizon has resources at one level under the main Hostname in the URL scheme. For example, authentication is under http://hostname/auth. Devstack performs single system deployments. Packstack has an “all-in-one” option that does the same thing. If these deployment tools are going to deploy other services via HTTPD, Horizon needs to be taught how to share the URL space. Fortunately, this is not hard to do. A naive approach might just say “why not reserve suburls for known applications, like Keystone or Glance?” Read more.

Christian Berendt: An other Vagrant box with Devstack and Ubuntu 14.04
Like Sean Dague I really like Vagrant and created a box with Ubuntu 14.04 and Devstack a few days ago. The box is available for use with VirtualBox on the Vagrant Cloud. The used Vagrantfile and Puppet manifest is available on Github in the repository berendt/vagrant-devstack. Hava a look in the used local.conf for enabled services and available images. Read more.

Cody Bunch: Autoscaling with Heat on Devstack
Autoscaling is one of the more interesting (and outstanding) features of OpenStack Heat. In this post, you’ll build a Devstack environment in a VM with Heat, Neutron, and Ceilometer. This will enable you to run the Autoscaling examples. Read more.

Kamesh Pemmaraju: Enterprise Expectations with OpenStack
Let us look at what typical enterprises expect from their vendors when they begin on a journey building an OpenStack-based private cloud environments. Read more.

Kenneth Hui: Coming To A VMUG Near You: vSphere With OpenStack
One of the most rewarding things I got to do last year was to help educate the VMware community on the value and the workings of the OpenStack cloud platform. As well, I had the opportunity to educate the OpenStack community on how VMware has been integrating their technologies into the OpenStack platform. Along the way, I’ve been privileged to be named both an OpenStack Ambassador and a VMware vExpert. As I’ve interacted with folks in both communities, I’ve been asked numerous times how the two technologies stack up and where do they differ in their design and approach to delivering infrastructure services. My response has been to differentiate between the platforms in terms of the differing workloads that are best suited for the VMware vSphere technology and those that are best suited for OpenStack. Read more.

Matt Farina: Introducing the OpenStack SDK for PHP
OpenStack has become the go to way to build open source public or private clouds. PHP is one of the most popular programming languages on the planet and the dominating server side language of the web. What if you want to marry PHP and OpenStack? To have PHP work with OpenStack APIs using services or managing them? Read more.

Nathan Kinder: SSL/TLS Everywhere – visions of a secure OpenStack
As most people familiar with OpenStack are already aware, it is made up of many software components that are typically deployed in a distributed manner. The more scalable an OpenStack deployment is, the more distributed the underlying components are as the infrastructure is usually scaled out horizontally on commodity hardware. As a consequence of this distributed architecture, there are many communication channels used between all of the software components. What communication channels need to be secured, and how can it be done? Read more.

Nathan Kinder: Security auditing of OpenStack releases
I was recently asked some high-level security related questions about OpenStack. This included questions such as what cryptographic algorithms are used, and are the algorithms user configurable? What implementations are used for cryptographic functions? How is sensitive data handled? These are common questions for those evaluating and deploying OpenStack, as they want to see if it meets their security requirements and know what security related areas they need to watch out for when configuring everything. Read more.

Sean Dague: DevStack Vagrant
Devstack is tooling for OpenStack to make it easy to bring up an OpenStack environment based on the latest git trees. It’s used extensively in upstream testing, and by many OpenStack developers to set up dev/test environments. One of my personal challenges in working on Devstack was testing devstack itself. Read more.

Steve Hardy: Heat auth model updates - part 1 Trusts
Over the last few months I've spent a lot of my time looking at ways to rework the heat auth model, in an attempt to solve two long-standing issues: requirement to pass a password when creating a stack which may perform deferred orchestration actions (for example AutoScaling adjustments) and requirement for users to have administrative roles when creating certain types of resource. Read more.

Hello IT professional in APAC (Asia Pacific). We will have a 2nd TechChat on 4/22. This time  the Topic is WSMAN and M1000e Chassis Power Management. As you might know WSMAN is a industry standard for system management. And with our PowerEdge M1000e, you can have ideal Power Management solution. So please join us this tech chat on 4/22.

We are welcome to have everyone to join this Chat

The time is

• Australia(Sydney)              5:00PM-6:00PM
• Japan:                              3:00PM –  4:00PM
• China/Singapore/Malaysia   2:00PM – 3:00PM
• India                              11:30AM to 12:30PM

Here is the place to join the chat.

For more info about this topic:

http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2014/04/11/techchat-for-apac-hour-m1000e-chassis-power-management-by-wsman.aspx

Dell is hosting its premier technical learning event in Frankfurt these days (May 14-17 to be precise): Dell Enterprise forum EMEA. Over the next few days, I will compile the most exciting announcements & observations from colleagues and customers attending the venue.

OpenManage Essentials 1.3 with OpenManage Mobile

Today Dell is announcing OpenManage Essentials 1.3, an award-winning data monitoring tool for data center hardware. Customers can now make use of added data center protection through integration with Dell AppAssure for scheduled system backups of server data, operating systems, applications, files and databases, as well as discovery and monitoring of Dell SonicWALL security appliances. read more

PowerEdge VRTX

Last year at the Dell Enterprise Forum in San Jose Dell unveiled PowerEdge VRTX an integrated IT solution designed specifically for office environments. Enhancements to the latest iteration of VRTX include next-level data protection inside the chassis, more server node choices, enhanced system management and expanded support for virtual desktops. read more

Introducing Dell Fluid Cache for SAN for Scale-Out Environments

Today, Dell announced its new Dell Fluid Cache for SAN, previously demoed at Dell World, a fully integrated server and storage solution which caches data at the compute layer for data-hungry applications. This solution permits faster application response time while enabling unprecedented I/O performance and energizing applications such as OLTP and VDI in a scalable, low-latency environment. read more

Enable efficient data protection and simplify management with Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools

Dell announced the next generation of Dell EqualLogic Host Integration Tools, enterprise-class software that tightly integrates storage management with popular applications and operating platforms from VMware, Microsoft and Linux to enable efficient data protection and simplified management as well as provide support for the latest EqualLogic Array Software 7.0. read more

Extending the boundaries of intelligent data placement: Storage Center 6.5

Dell announced a number of new enhancements to our Dell Storage portfolio, rolling out the next phase of our continuing strategy to make enterprise storage more powerful, practical, and cost-effective.

Dell Compellent Storage Center 6.5 builds on key performance and automation advancements of previous releases to extend the benefits of Dell’s “intelligent data placement” technology to address even more customer deployment requirements– eliminating traditional tradeoffs between server performance and advanced SAN capabilities. read more

Last but not least, please find some reflections on Dell Enterprise Forum EMEA from a network perspective - by Dell’s Rod Mercado. read more

Watch out for Recap #2 tomorrow and follow @DellEntForum on Twitter. The venue’s hashtag is #DellEF.

The table below summarizes both the past and current generational nomenclature for iDRAC with Lifecycle Controller Technology.

NOTE: Data within table is for illustration purposes only.

Changes in the firmware versions abide by the following definition:

[major change] . [minor change] . [errata]

• Increments in the major change field indicate that the profile is not backward compatible.
• Increments in the minor change field indicate that one or more new methods have been added.

Increments in the errata field indicate that one more defects have been fixed.

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

• http://www.delltechcenter.com/idrac

For more information about Lifecycle Controller Profiles start at the following link:

• http://www.delltechcenter.com/LC