DevOps:
Ansible: Ansible 1.6 adds 30+ new modules
Today we are happy to release Ansible 1.6, which adds over 30+ new core modules to the open source automation system, in addition to incorporating numerous new options, upgrades, fixes, and improvements. Read more.

Chef: Chef Fundamentals Webinar Series
We are launching a free, 6 part, hands-on, weekly webinar training series, May 20th at 10am PDT, guiding you down the learning path for Chef. During our first session, Chef Community Director, Nathen Harvey will provide an overview of Chef and provide insight into nodes, recipes, cookbooks, roles, run lists, and more. Read more.

Docker: Docker 0.11 is the release candidate for 1.0
One of the most-asked questions we’ve been hearing these last couple months is, “When is 1.0 coming?” While not a direct answer, today we’re pleased to announce the immediate availability of Docker 0.11 – the first Release Candidate (RC) for 1.0. From here, we want to continue to get your feedback, focus on quality. Read more.

Vagrant: Vagrant 1.6 released
Vagrant 1.6 is now available! This is a new major release building upon Vagrant 1.5 to add new features to improve workflow, expand Vagrant to support more development environment types, and more. Read more.

OpenStack:
Assaf Muller: Introduction to Neutron
I recently gave an internal Red Hat talk entitled: Introduction to Neutron. It is a high-level, concepts oriented talk. Read more.

Cloudscaling: The 6 Requirements of Enterprise-grade OpenStack, Part 3
In part 1 and part 2 of this series I introduced the core ideas around defining the requirements and then discussed the first four. Today we’ll discuss the final two requirements and tie it all together. Read more.

Dell: Come learn about Open Networking and SDN with Dell Networking at the OpenStack Summit!
Dell Networking will be live in the Dell Booth at the OpenStack Summit May 12-16th in Atlanta and can help you understand OpenStack and Neutron work and how this will impact the future of SDN and networking. We will be showcasing how Dell’s Active Fabric Controller can deliver an automated next generation SDN solution for OpenStack Neutron along with Dell’s Open Networking solutions including Cumulus Linux, Switch Light OS and the Open Compute Project. Read more.

eNovance: Why you should benchmark your Cloud infrastructure before getting into production
When speaking about cloud infrastructures, many think about the amount of servers, storage or number of virtual machines to be used. More than the quantity of hardware you select, the efficiency of your global solution is the key to get a powerful platform. This first article will be about defining why you should understand, check and diagnose the performance of the selected hardware. Read more.

ICCLab: Manage instance startup order in OpenStack Heat Templates
In many applications it is necessary to create virtual resources in a certain order. As an orchestration engine, Heat is able to support such a requirement, but how it is actually done in a template can be tricky. Recently I had to write such a Heat template, which seemed pretty easy as there is a number of examples on the OpenStack/heat-templates github. Read more.

Liz Blanchard: An explosion of User Experience discussions at the OpenStack Juno Summit
Next week OpenStackers will be getting together in person for the Juno Summit in Atlanta to plan out what exactly we think is important to deliver in the Juno release of OpenStack. I’m extremely happy to say that there are a number of sessions that are focused on talking through use cases, users, and User Experience efforts within OpenStack. I wanted to take some time to introduce the sessions that I plan to participate in with respect to UX and I hope to see any of you who are interested join me! Read more.

Loic Dachary: Non profit OpenStack & Ceph cluster distributed over five datacenters
A few non profit organizations (April, FSF France, tetaneutral.net…) and volunteers constantly research how to get compute, storage and bandwidth that are: 100% Free Software, Content neutral, Low maintenance, Reliable and Cheap. The latest setup, in use since ocbober 2013, is based on a Ceph and OpenStack cluster spread over five datacenters. Read more.

Openstack.com: Deploying OpenStack made easy with Puppet
When it comes to managing infrastructure deployments of a certain size, even a ninja sysadmin can't do it all without some help. In fact, one might argue that knowing when and how to use IT automation tools for managing infrastructure is a prerequisite to getting your admin blackbelt. Enter Puppet. Read more.

Rackspace: Icehouse: The Enterprise-Grade OpenStack Release
In April, the OpenStack Foundation released Icehouse, the ninth release of the OpenStack cloud platform. The general consensus seems to be that while Icehouse has some compelling new features, the focus of this version of OpenStack is on enterprise-grade readiness. Vendors like Rackspace and users with strong engineering talent have been very successful in creating enterprise-grade clouds using earlier OpenStack releases, but there has been a concerted focus by the community to stabilize the code and to enhance the operational capabilities of the platform. As a result, more vendors and partners in the ecosystem are now able to deliver OpenStack-powered products and services that can satisfy the stringent infrastructure requirements of enterprise shops. Read more.

Ramon Acedo: Multiple Private Networks with Open vSwitch GRE Tunnels and Libvirt
GRE tunnels are extremely useful for many reasons. One use case is to be able to design and test an infrastructure requiring multiple networks on a typical home lab with limited hardware, such as laptops and desktops with only 1 ethernet card. As an example, to design an OpenStack infrastructure for a production environment with RDO or Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (RHEL OSP) three separate networks are recommended.Read more.

Sean Dague: OpenStack Summit Preview: Elastic Recheck
With OpenStack summit only a few days away, I’ve been preparing materials for my Elastic Recheck talk. Elastic Recheck is a system that we built over the last 7 months to help us data mine failures in test results in the OpenStack test system to find patterns. Read more.

ZeroBanana: OpenStack Orchestration and Configuration Management
At the last OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, I had a chance meeting in the hallway with a prominent Open Source developer, who mentioned that he would only be interested in Heat once it could replace Puppet. I was slightly shocked by that, because it is the stated goal of the Heat team not to compete with configuration management tools—on the principle that a good cloud platform will not dictate which configuration management tool you use, and nor will a good configuration management tool dictate which cloud platform you use. Clearly some better communication of our aims is required. Read more.

In this interview series we will introduce IT Professionals selected for this year’s Dell TechCenter (DTC) Rockstar Program. This program recognizes independent experts, Dell customers and employees for their significant positive impact on Dell TechCenter, blogs and social media when discussing Dell. You can find a list of all our Rockstars here. Our fourth interviewee is Brian Vienneau.

Dell TechCenter: Can you please explain to folks who are not experts in your area: What is your domain of expertise?

Brian Vienneau: I spend most of my time focusing on data center solutions and the majority of that around storage, backup/restore, and virtualization.  If I’m not in the process of designing a new solution, you can find me in the data center implementing them!

Q: What are the most exciting trends in your area?

A: I think there’s going to be shake-up in the storage industry in the next couple years. There are a lot of awesome server-side caching products out there that are moving IO back to the server. Then there are products like Microsoft’s Storage Spaces and VMware’s vSAN that are going to start to interrupt the “traditional array” market as well.

Q: Can you point us to resources you find particularly valuable?

A: The Compellent Knowledge Center is king for all things related to user guides, downloads, CSTA’s, etc.  All of the Best Practice docs and integration guides have been moved over to the Compellent Wiki on Dell TechCenter. I find myself pointing to both of these all the time.  Didier Van Hoye (a fellow Rockstar!) also has a great blog that has a lot of content around using Compellent with Hyper-V (among other things).

Q: How do you engage with the IT community?

A: Day to day on Twitter and in the Dell TechCenter forums. You can also usually find me at Dell User Forum, VMworld, and local VMUGs when I am free. I’m hoping to add Dell World to that list this year!

Q: What are the most cutting edge Dell products – and why?

A: I think many people have been enamored by Dell VRTX. It’s a great box that consolidates server, networking, and storage resources, originally designed for small companies or ROBO, but I’m starting to see it take footholds in areas like point solutions (VDI in a box, etc.) and also isolated development environments to keep work off of a production SAN environment but still have the capabilities of shared storage. 

Q: Brian, thank you so much!

1. What are the key dates for Windows 2003 end of life and what do they mean?
2. Why Windows 2003 migration becomes a security issue
3. Key Win2003 migration issues and challenges

1. All security event IDs change between Win2003 and Win2008. What does this mean for your monitoring and log management? What alternatives should you consider?
2. Got Active Directory domain controllers running on Win2003? Chances are you have too many domains and/or forests. Do you want to live with the legacy/dirty environment you have now? Can you do some house cleaning?
3. Hardware and OS upgrades. No more x86, /3MB switch
4. How do you move resources like file shares?
5. How do you move applications?
6. What about applications like Exchange that require upgrade/replacement for Win2008?

In this interview series we will introduce IT Professionals selected for this year’s Dell TechCenter (DTC) Rockstar Program. This program recognizes independent experts, Dell customers and employees for their significant positive impact on Dell TechCenter, blogs and social media when discussing Dell. You can find a list of all our Rockstars here. Our fifth interviewee is Didier Van Hoye.

Dell TechCenter: Can you please explain to folks who are not experts in your area: What is your domain of expertise?

Didier Van Hoye: My main expertise is virtualization and in the Microsoft ecosystems that means Hyper-V & SCVMM. This means that I also have to be well versed in networking, storage and compute. You need to look at the entire stack so we’ve build up a nice skillset over the years in these subjects as well. Next to that I focus on high availability both on premise and in the cloud.

Q: What are the most exciting trends in your area?

A: I’m very interested in how the private cloud / hybrid cloud will work out in terms of longevity & ROI. The speed at which public cloud is evolving and the economies of scale make it a difficult decision for many. I also see an ever increasing challenge in managing it all and many are struggling there more than ever before. The software defined and converged solutions have still to mature more to help out there.

Q: Can you point us to resources you find particularly valuable?

A: Virtualization is a core expertise of mine and as I try to own the stack when building solutions I need info about storage, networking and compute and I do not rely on just a few sources. Being able to search & filter information is paramount. You also need to build a network of peers and crowd source you information needs. On the Dell TechCenter I really appreciate the reference designs. They help to wrap your mind around what is possible. Needless to say the support forums are very worthwhile to search for solutions.

Q: How do you engage with the IT community?

A: I blog at workinghardinit.wordpress.com, I communicate on twitter via @workinghardinit, I am present at conferences, take part in web casts and think tanks. I’m also a Microsoft MVP and a member of the Microsoft Extended Experts Team in Belgium.

Q: What are the most cutting edge Dell products – and why?

A: Fluid Cache for SAN looks very promising to me. The fact that you can get the benefits of a lot of the newer flash only solutions integrated in your central SAN with all its benefits just seems very attractive. The positioning & pricing will determine where it will be used but I’d love to see this become main stream. Next to that I love the VRTX form factor.

Q: Didier, thank you so much!

OpenStack:
Cloudwatt: New in Horizon Icehouse: Retrieve a password generated by an instance
One mode of authentication for an instance is the use of a password. For example, to log in to a Windows instance, users must begin a session via RDP and provide an administrator login and a password. If this password was not supplied on the command line, it can be generated by the instance itself (for example, if it uses cloudbase-init). How to store and retrieve this password? How has the new version of Horizon Icehouse improved this process? Read more.

Cody Bunch: Getting Started With OpenStack IceHouse – Cookbook Style
With the Juno summit underway, it means that OpenStack IceHouse shipped recently. As you may know, I worked with Mr Kevin Jackson (here) on the second OpenStack Cookbook which was a Grizzly release. Mind, books take a /long/ time to update, so we decided against re-releasing for IceHouse. That said, the examples in the book, concepts, and builds are still relevant. That is, we’ve updated the online code repositories to help you get started. Read more.

eNovance: How to benchmark your cloud infrastructure before getting into production (Part 1)
As for every project hosted by eNovance, Automated Health Check (AHC) project is done under an open source licence and publicly available on github via the edeploy repository. Up to now, I never found a project that satisfy the following requirements which is why I started this project. Read more.

eNovance: Deploying OpenStack the eNovance way
Having an industrialized way to deploy OpenStack for our customers, independant of the OpenStack/Linux distributions our customers may chose to use, is a key element to ensure maintainability and upgradability, and therefore customer satisfaction. As our experience grows, our set of tools is getting better everyday, and while we have often described some of these tools individually, providing a complete overview of the tooling was on our todo list until now… Read more.

Mirantis: Cloud, Drivers and OpenStack DriverLog
OpenStack is about having the freedom to exploit new technology and solutions quickly. You put that in practice by evolving and optimizing your cloud’s performance, features and cost as fast as the cooperative efforts of hundreds of vendors and thousands of contributors can make possible. But doing this with confidence means making decisions about, and investments in hardware, software and systems — and that means having meaningful, detailed and trustworthy information about OpenStack drivers: the logical glue connecting third-party products with OpenStack components. Read more.

Opensource.com: Moving towards an open source cloud with OpenStack
Over the past years, I've played a leading role in helping to bring openness to the storage industry. At Nexenta, we inherited great technology from Sun Microsystems and went to market with an open core business model. This model, and a lot else, worked well and Nexenta has been called "the most disruptive storage company of the last 10 years" in part because of the impact we had on legacy, lock-in based proprietary vendors. Read more.

Rackspace: The Treasure Of OpenStack Trove: Its History And Its Future
For those of you who don’t know, Trove is the newest integrated OpenStack project. We have been working on it for over two years at Rackspace, and it’s been a wild ride. We’ve had a ton of help from our friends at HP, who have been on this roller coaster with us for a long while as well. You’re sure to hear more about Trove at OpenStack Summit Atlanta next week, but today I’d like to take a walk down memory lane with Trove, and talk about how it went from a small project started within Rackspace to the treasure it is today. Read more.

Rackspace: So, You Want To Be An OpenStack Contributor?
As a Racker who works on the communications side of a very technical business, I know just how challenging it can be to contribute to the open source conversation. Sometimes the best way to stay relevant with developers, architects and designers is to dive headfirst into the projects that keep them busy. OpenStack, for example, is a great place to start.Read more.

Red Hat: Sahara: OpenStack Elastic Hadoop on Demand
Anyone who is serious about big data, scale out applications and cloud infrastructure should want to intimately understand the benefits of scale out architecture and the resource elasticity of cloud services. As we continue our evolution into a deeper understanding of data, we see a need agile access to an elastic big data platform. Such a platform can allow us to capture, synthesize and quantify data into business value. Read more.

OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014:
StackSync: A Dropbox-like Personal Cloud for OpenStack Swift
StackSync is a Dropbox-like open source synchronization tool that runs on top of OpenStack Swift. StackSync is specially designed to take care of organizations' real needs with features like scalability, openness, security and the typical ease of use offered by personal clouds. Watch the video.

Performance of Hadoop on OpenStack
With the growing popularity and footprint of IaaS platforms, the question of migration of computational workloads to these virtualized environments becomes more and more relevant. Savanna provides integration and automation for Hadoop deployment on OpenStack, but what about performance in this environment? Watch the video.

Working with Security Groups
OpenStack natively provides isolation between tenants. The default set of rules in place when a new tenant is created allows for any outbound communication, but no inbound. Security groups are the mechanism we can use to modify these rules. This session will cover the basics of creating security groups for both ingress and egress. Watch the video.

OpenStack Scale-out High Availability: Scaling to 1,000+ Servers without Neutron
OpenStack networking can be challenging and many of the biggest deployments such as HP, ANL, and CERN use their own customized network drivers. That's because default OpenStack networking models don't make sense in a modern datacenter. We designed our own layer-3 (L3) nova-network plugins to Open Cloud System (OCS) 3.0 that replaced the default networking model in an extensible and best practices manner Watch the video.

Planning Your OpenStack Cloud Project
Drawing on their experience planning, integrating and operating OpenStack clouds for large enterprises, the speakers will present sample scopes, project plans, budgets and staffing levels to build and operate moderate sized clouds. Along the way, they will share best practice and common pitfalls in the process. Watch the video.

Increasing Read Scalability in Openstack Using Database Replication
A key scalability challenge for almost all OpenStack components is a reliance on a single authoritative store of service related information. While not always the case, generally this comes in the form of a MySQL or PostgreSQL database. As production deployments become larger and Openstack continues to move into the enterprise space we will need to be able to scale this central store. Watch the video.

Deploying OpenStack in a Multi-Hypervisor Enterprise Environment
Deploying OpenStack in a Multi-Hypervisor Enterprise Environment Most OpenStack distributions are centered around a single hypervisor, KVM. Enterprises, on the other hand, have massive investments in a variety of different virtualization platforms. Building a private cloud is a massive change in and of itself, and most large enterprises are reluctant to lose their existing competence with their chosen hypervisor at the same time.Watch the video.

The Battle of the Distros -- Which One is Better for My Cloud?
OpenStack is a powerful open-source cloud management system. Multiple services, databases, configuration files, messaging queues and runtime agents are needed to realize its full potential. This is obviously not easy to deploy in production and, even more important, to monitor and troubleshoot potential issues. OpenStack distributions provide a solution to all the above-mentioned problems. But which one is the best for your cloud? Watch the video.

Multi-Node DevStack with Puppet
One challenge for developing on Neutron right now is that you need to quickly deploy multi-node devstack, and automate testing. In this 90 minute workshop we will walk you through implementing a multi-node devstack environment w/ Puppet on your own development machine. Watch the video.

How Community Can Make OpenStack Customer Centric
One great benefit of implementing OpenStack is the ability - at least in principle - to influence the project's pace, priorities and roadmap. Having a seat at the table helps insure that OpenStack evolves in response to the real operational needs and economics of your business Watch the video.

2014 Spring User Survey Results and Feedback
The OpenStack user committee will present the results of the OpenStack user survey performed during April 2014 along with the recent work with OpenStack operators to establish a requirements gathering process and feedback loop. Watch the video.

Orchestration for Public Cloud: The Experience of Running Heat at Rackspace
One year ago in Portland, the developer community declared intent to create a native, open, and declarative DSL for Heat (the OpenStack Orchestration service), and mature the project to the point of wide adoption across the OpenStack ecosystem. In the past year, the project has significantly matured and is now accessible to customers on one of the largest public clouds in the world. Watch the video.

Focusing on Developer Experience and Announcing developer.openstack.org
This talk will dive into what Developer Experience is and, more importantly, why it's critical for OpenStack's future. Application developers, those developers who create applications that will run on OpenStack powered clouds, have been an underserved community in our ecosystem to date. The domains of User Experience and Developer Experience have not recieved as much focus within OpenStack as they should.Watch the video.

High Availability in Neutron - Getting the L3 Agent Right
To provide public connectivity to virtual machines, you can install the Neutron L3 Agent which aims to connect your VM to external networks (Internet for example) through virtual routers and also connect VM between internal private networks. Watch the video.

Enhancing High Availability in Context of OpenStack
There are 4 layers of HA to consider in a cloud deployment: the application itself, the virtual machine the application runs on, and the control plane of the cloud that allows provisioning and managing resources. The OpenStack development community is largely focused on HA of OpenStack itself (i.e. the control plane). VM-level HA has some limited support in OpenStack, but it is not complete. Watch the video.

Customizing Horizon Without Breaking on Upgrades
In probably most cases, when Horizon, the OpenStack Dashboard is installed, it's desired to change it's look and feel to meet the corporate look and feel". In many installations, software is deployed via software packages. When updating or upgrading software via distribution packages, in almost all cases changes applied to files installed will become overwritten. In this session, we'll show, how to achieve both, changes and not to break due package updates or even upgrades.Watch the video.

Troubleshooting Neutron Virtual Networks
Many folks find they way Neutron builds virtual networks a mystery. For those of us who have set up OpenStack and created a virtual machine that didn't get an IP or couldn't communicate out its network interface, this session will be for you. In this session we will look at many of the tools available in Linux that can be used to troubleshoot problems in Neutron networking. Watch the video.

Hosting Hybrid (Bare-metal + Virtualized) Applications on OpenStack
OpenStack is quickly gaining momentum as a general-purpose IaaS platform to host a variety of applications. However, for some applications, running on shared or general-purpose virtualized hardware may be suboptimal or even unacceptable for a number of reasons, including performance or security. Watch the video.

Learning to Trust the Cloud / Securing OpenStack with Intel Trusted Computing (Combined)
Cloud computing provides obvious economic and manageability benefits. Unused resources in production environments can be used to deploy development instances. Public clouds mean we can avoid buying rooms full of mostly idle hardware just to cater for worst case scenarios. And, thanks to hypervisors imposing isolation between instances, this should all come at no cost to security. Watch the video.

Tempest: Integrated OpenStack Testing
Tempest is OpenStack's integrated test suite which aims to provide validation that OpenStack is working. As such it is run as a gating on job on all proposed commits to OpenStack. It is designed to run against an operational OpenStack cloud, which includes everything from a devstack deployment to a public cloud. Watch the video.

OpenStack Python and the Holy Grail: A New Proposal for Image Portability
We've all heard it: portability, federation, interconnected. The Holy Grail of the open cloud movement is arguably compute instance portability, but it may be possible to port virtual machine images now. While open source tools exist to covert raw VM disk images, image portability may be best achieved by OpenStack providers by adopting some common bootstrapping and data transfer patterns. In this session, John Garbutt and Brian Rosmaita from Rackspace will explore what that may entail. Watch the video.

Using OpenDaylight Within an OpenStack Environment
OpenDaylight is an open platform for network programmability to enable SDN and create a solid foundation for NFV for networks at any size and scale. OpenDaylight is licensed under the Eclipse Public License, and recently had its first release, code-named Hydrogen. The OpenDaylight and OpenStack Neutron teams have collaborated to integrate the two projects such that OpenDaylight can provide virtual tenant networking for OpenStack tenants. Watch the video.

Initial Use Cases for OpenStack & Cinder In Your Enterprise IT Strategy
In this session, John Griffith and Rodney Peck will examine one of the strongest initial use case fits for introducing OpenStack, and specifically OpenStack Block Storage, within your enterprise IT infrastructure; self service test & development. This session will focus on discussing the advantages of providing self-service infrastructure to test and development teams and how it can serve as a gateway to other use cases in your environment. Watch the video.

Security for Private OpenStack Clouds
Private clouds are much more than just a public cloud behind a firewall. Private clouds reach into the enterprise and have deep integration with key shared infrastructure that is external to the cloud such as LDAP, Storage, VLANs, DNS, NTP, etc. Furthermore, private clouds have a different threat profile. Users may be from the same organization, but insider attacks and targeted external attacks motivate unique security solutions. Watch the video.

State of OpenStack Security
This session will bring the attendee up to date on the current state of the art in OpenStack Security. This talk will start with a high level state of the stack" that covers a review of the security enhancements between Havana and IceHouse as well as a review of current vulnerabilities, advisiories, and open issues. They will then discuss the results of an extensive root cause analysis which will discuss findings on how vulnerabilities happen in OpenStack, and how to make OpenStack more secure. Watch the video.

Under the Hood with Nova, Libvirt, and KVM
The Libvirt driver for Nova is one of the most comprehensive implementations across all supported hypervisors. It is quite common for new functionality to be added Libvirt before it hits the others. API calls to manage instances generally translate to a complex set of interactions between Nova, Libvirt and QEMU/KVM. During this talk, we will go under the hood to understand exactly what our KVM hypervisors are doing when various requests are made.JWatch the video.

OpenStack Security Group (OSSG): An Update on Our Progress and Plans
Originally organized in Fall 2012, the OpenStack Security Group (OSSG) now fills many critical security roles within the OpenStack Community. From assisting the Vulnerability Management Team (VMT) to consulting with projects about security best practices and testing technique, the OSSG has kept very busy. This talk will highlight the group's recent work and set the direction for future work. Watch the video.

In this interview series we will introduce IT Professionals selected for this year’s Dell TechCenter (DTC) Rockstar Program. This program recognizes independent experts, Dell customers and employees for their significant positive impact on Dell TechCenter, blogs and social media when discussing Dell. You can find a list of all our Rockstars here. Our sixth interviewee is Roy Mainak.

Dell TechCenter: Can you please explain to folks who are not experts in your area: What is your domain of expertise?

Roy Mainak: I work for Systems Management software products at Dell, my area of proficiency are Open Manage and Change Management products. I’ve contributed for the Client program, for a short stay. Being a technical writer, we go through a firsthand experience of any product. Easily, we are the customer’s advocate to negotiate with the marketing, development, quality and test teams to bring out the best essence of any feature. The WOW factor.

As part of my regular job, I spent a lot of time in social media. I’m working on the Global InfoDev Social media strategy as that is becoming a regular practice of individual authors. SEO is another part of the ongoing initiative, recently, we had interlocks with the internal and external search teams to recognize the gap. The search ability (for Dell published documents) is not the same when customer is searching for a topic through our Dell Support site.

I’ve worked for several Dell product videos and guided different teams to understand the asks and identifying the topics to cover top field issues via simple go through videos. Currently, I’m helping the Dell TechCenter team with the YouTube channel to create, publish and promote product videos via soft channels and other web services/social media platforms.

Q: What are the most exciting trends in your area?

A: I’m excited about the fact, that our customers are using multiple Dell products (Systems Management software) to run their enterprise business. We are seeing more and more Dell tools are being used in the data centers. There is an exponential growth in the client level management software. The typical combinations are producing better results for our customers. There are lots of examples, lethal combination of LC and DRM, awesome placement and update strategy via LC and iDRAC for CMC, OME and LC, and many more.   

Q: Can you point us to resources you find particularly valuable?

A: There are many, however, I would love to take two names from our own Dell TechCenter group. I’ve always enjoyed the videos that Dennis Smith and Lance Boley have created. They are simply superb. The information is easy, simple and very straight forward, a must to watch tutorial for any customers.

Q: How do you engage with the IT community?

A: I do a lot of discussions, but mainly with the product marketing (in bound, technical marketing team and the quality teams). Personally, I love scrubbing the data those are coming from our Contact Center tools. Those are the most recent, raw data you can access without any cover. I’ve learnt a lot by practicing that on a regular basis. I encourage people to adopt the same analysis technique for their respective product to solve real time problems. So, my communication is kind of internal (not much in written/not much over web).

Nevertheless, there are several (more than 12) technical whitepapers and videos (I don’t have a track) are serving customers where I’ve contributed. But, you don’t see my names. I’ve contributed to over 5 wiki, forum pages in DTC. I’ve helped several teams to build their own wiki pages; how do you create a page? How can you tag keywords for better SEO? How can you generate more social signals for the content? Do you need to revamp and re-design the page for better involvement? How do you build the brand for your product wiki page?

Q: What are the most cutting edge Dell products – and why?

A: The world is favoring VRTX. A Majority in Dell will say VRTX. I love VRTX, as they are giving us the business.  For me, I don’t want to point out any particular Dell product. Rather, I like the way we are creating multiple offerings for third party programs, implementing the ways to handle multiple inventory files at a time through a single application, giving more automation options for the customers, inter-accountability across different products. I love the way we are providing end to end solutions for our customers and business partners. The vision has changed and bringing better customer experiences.

Q: Roy, thank you so much!

In this interview series we will introduce IT Professionals selected for this year’s Dell TechCenter (DTC) Rockstar Program. This program recognizes independent experts, Dell customers and employees for their significant positive impact on Dell TechCenter, blogs and social media when discussing Dell. You can find a list of all our Rockstars here. Our seventh interviewee is Sarah Vela.

Dell TechCenter: Can you please explain to folks who are not experts in your area: What is your domain of expertise?

Sarah Vela: What is my domain of expertise? Good grief, I have no idea. I started out as a writer creating content for websites and just sort of fell into technical writing, as it tended to be more lucrative. I’ve always been interested in technology, although I have no formal training, and knew next to nothing about enterprise technology before joining Dell 3 years ago. I’m a fast learner, but not a deeply technical person. In addition to my technical writing side gig, I did social media consulting on my own for many years in Austin, working mostly with local brands (and musicians – that was the most fun!). I also briefly ran a “social media for social good” bootstrap startup start-up. I’ve also been a medical transcriptionist (and ran my own business for a while). I like words. Maybe my domain of expertise is “words.”

Q: What are the most exciting trends in your area?

A: Well I’m most excited now about finding ways to “do” social media in the enterprise technology sphere, and looking for opportunities to educate my peers at Dell about how this community and topic area are NOT THE SAME as consumer. Everything needs to be approached differently in social media in order to maintain credibility and interest in the brand.

Q: Can you point us to [resources you find particularly valuable for your work?

A: I lean really heavily on my peers doing community and social media work in enterprise tech companies, both here at Dell and elsewhere. Those of us on this side of the business are for the most part a friendly, close-knit community who put our competitive business interests aside to share ideas, celebrate accomplishments, and commiserate on the tough stuff. I’m grateful for them.

Q: How do you engage with the IT community?

A: Twitter, twitter, twitter. I also am cohost on the Speaking in Tech podcast which has led to a ton of connections in the IT community. It’s a lot of fun for me and has been really great for building out a network.

Q: What are the most cutting edge Dell products – and why?

A: Well I’m a super huge fan of PowerEdge VRTX. I think that’s an example of a product that came to market explicitly in response to a set of customer problems. I know that the engineers who worked on that project devoted many evenings and weekend hours on it, because they were excited about it and they believed in it. I think anything that gets built out of that kind of passion is pretty cool.

Q: Sarah, thank you so much!

Blog author: Hung Ha, technical training manager, Dell SonicWALL

I miss the olden days when I could feel secure simply with the knowledge that my laptop had an antivirus, or my password used three types of characters, or that I was protected by a firewall. Back then, those felt like sufficient means to be safe. It was like a security blanket that would keep the mean old hackers at bay…

I bet you miss those days too. In the last month, we’ve realized that encryption vulnerabilities can get right to the heart of your data (Heartbleed), and browser exploits can outright compromise your entire machine (Internet Explorer 0-day exploit). The internet should be renamed as the DSwww: Dark and Scary World Wide Web. The most frustrating thing is that no amount of money can make you safe. Zero-day attacks, by definition, strike at an unknown vulnerability, and not even the most advanced security system can truly protect you from something nobody saw coming...

Security is not a destination. You can never get ‘there’. There is no such thing as a 100% secure system.

Security, it turns out, is a journey. It is a continuous process. Your best protection is knowledge and vigilance.

It is with vigilance in mind that Dell continues to develop industry leading network security solutions. But since those solutions require specialized knowledge to use effectively, Dell has also renewed its commitment to education. We have released a new edition of its Network Security Advanced Administration course, which covers all of our Dell next-generation firewall appliances and how to use their newest features. This new course showcases many of SonicOS 5.9 differentiating features: Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection (RFDPI), DPI-SSL, Advanced Routing Suite, and Application Intelligence, and does so using hands-on labs, executed on real physical appliances.

Additionally, Dell has added a new Authorized Training Partner to bolster its SonicWALL curriculum delivery on the West Coast. Unitek College will now be offering classes in the heart of the Silicon Valley. Their classes are open for registration on our class schedule.

Networks secured by Dell’s cutting-edge firewalls and managed by our certified security administrators were made safe from Heartbleed within 24 hours of the vulnerability’s announcement.

While I miss the feeling of security I had in the olden days, I also realize that feeling was an illusion. I now know better: to be safe, I must protect myself with modern defenses, and educate myself sufficiently to understand the risks in our dark and scary world.

For more information, visit: http://training.sonicwall.com

In this interview series we will introduce IT Professionals selected for this year’s Dell TechCenter (DTC) Rockstar Program. This program recognizes independent experts, Dell customers and employees for their significant positive impact on Dell TechCenter, blogs and social media when discussing Dell. You can find a list of all our Rockstars here. Our eighth interviewee is Joey Ware.

Dell TechCenter: Can you please explain to folks who are not experts in your area: What is your domain of expertise?

Joey Ware: My main focus has been virtualization, mainly with our private cloud which is a stretched cluster between two campuses at the University of Oklahoma in OKC and Norman which is 20+ miles between sites. I am also currently working on getting our VMware Horizon View projects going in our Shared Services data centers.

Q: What are the most exciting trends in your area?

A: Right now what VMware is doing with the Horizon Suite version 6 is really exciting as it’s finally going to be the competitor that Citrix needs in the application virtualization market.  Also I am excited to see what VMware does with vSAN and how Dell’s VMware vSAN Ready Nodes play in the Server SAN market.

Q: Can you point us to resources you find particularly valuable for your work?

A: One of the biggest resources I follow is the #vBrownBag podcast. A lot of the presenters are people in the field like us that are working with customers on projects that they can demo live, even at times they will do a step-by-step install so it’s great to go back and watch to see what mistakes you have made. They started doing an OpenStack night as well as the weekly VMware night. But it doesn’t just have to be VMware, it could be anything to hardware (like the VRTX) to backup software and how it works in the environments.

Q: How do you engage with the IT community?

A: I presented last year on the #vBrownBag podcast over my presentation for VMworld.  I am also the OKC VMUG leader and I try to a meeting every other month because not everyone in Oklahoma can get a VMware resource on-site. I am also on my 2^nd year as a vExpert which is based upon things you do in the virtualization community. I highly recommend anyone to apply as it gives you some great rewards to try out in your home lab, or in my case my work lab. I am trying to keep my blog posts going but with 4 kids I have put it on the side burner for when I get a chance to put something up.

Q: What are the most cutting edge Dell products – and why?

A: I am really exciting to play with the Dell VRTX as we were lucky to get one in our lab. We have some projects that include our virtualized camera environment to maybe a VDI pod using vSAN to ease off needing to hammer our Dell/Compellent SAN with the IOPS that VDI needs. But I am really liking Compellent. My first SAN was a CX340 and trying to learn how to create the RAID GROUPS and all that was a headache. Compellent really makes it easy. My next future project is going to be working with the Dell VMware vSAN Ready Nodes, can’t wait to see how those play out in the market. The last thing I’d like to see grow is the Project Ophelia/Dell Wyse Cloud Connects. We ordered some test units to play with and maybe find projects for, so we will see how that goes down the road. They make a cheap thin client but I heard the next version won’t need the Cloud Client Manager subscription and there’s an App that can be used for the keyboard and mouse which would play against using an iPad/iPhone connected to an Apple TV. 

Q: Joey, thank you so much!

Big Data:
Datadog: Correlate metrics and logs with Datadog and Splunk
Splunk is a tool that lets you search, analyze, and create custom reports on your log data to help identify abnormal behavior in your infrastructure. With the new Datadog and Splunk integration, you can view the log alerts and reports that Splunk creates in the context of the infrastructure metrics and events that Datadog captures. Using Datadog and Splunk together, further increases your visibility into your infrastructure and helps identify the root cause of problems faster and with greater accuracy. Read more.

Datadog: Instrument Memcached performance metrics with DogStatsD
This post is the second of a two-part series on Memcached. In my first Memcached post, I showed you a typical web application request that can be optimized using Memcached and detailed how to collect general metrics from Memcached using the Datadog Agent. This week, I’m going to show you how to dive a bit deeper into your cache’s performance. Read more.

Datameer: How-to: Use PMML Plug-in for Predictive Modeling in Datameer
The other day I was discussing extreme global weather patterns with some of my colleagues, El Niño in particular. I started thinking that, with the help of a predictive model and our PMML Plug-in, we could use Datameer to predict the temperature of ocean currents, which is responsible for this type of climate phenomena. Read more.

OpenStack:
eNovance: Vulnerability Management in Juno
During the summit in Atlanta, the Vulnerability Management Team gathered in a design session for the upcoming Juno cycle. Read more.

Lars Kellogg-Stedman: Firewalld, NetworkManager, and OpenStack
These are my notes on making OpenStack play well with firewalld and NetworkManager. Read more.

Mirantis: Supporting OpenStack Competitors: If Microsoft is doing it, Red Hat must too. The recent slew of articles from the Wall Street Journal and ReadWriteWeb stating that Red Hat won’t support customers who choose rival OpenStack distribution caused a wave of controversy. Since Mirantis was in the center of many of these discussions, I wanted to shed my perspective on the matter. Read more.

Opensource.com: Key insights from the OpenStack user survey
The best software prioritizes the needs of its users. Listening to the user and more closely involving them in all aspects of design, development, and documentation has been a key focus of this year's OpenStack Summit, which is wrapping up here in Atlanta today. Read more.

Opensource.com: OpenStack launches new marketplace of vendors
The OpenStack Juno Summit last week in Atlanta was a source of many new and exciting announcements, from both vendors and the OpenStack Foundation itself. One of the more interesting of such announcements was of a new OpenStack Marketplace. For those looking to explore their options in commercial offerings of OpenStack, from training to distributions to public clouds and more, the Marketplace is designed to help users better understand what resources are available. Read more.

Rackspace: Three Key Observations From OpenStack Summit Atlanta
At the OpenStack “Juno” Summit in Atlanta this week, more than 4,500 people packed the convention center to learn, share and experience the awesome that is the OpenStack community. Read more.

Sean Dague: Processing OpenStack GPG keys in Thunderbird
If you were part of the OpenStack keysigning party from the summit, you are currently probably getting a bunch of emails sent by caff. This is an easy way to let a key signer send you your signed key. Read more.

OpenStack Summit Atlanta 2014:
Getting started with OpenStack
OpenStack continues to grow exponentially as the de facto standard for open source Cloud platforms. But how can someone quickly get started with learning this exciting new technology? This workshop will walk participants through an overview of the OpenStack components and offer practical suggestions and resources for learning OpenStack. To demonstrate one way to get started, we will assist workshop attendees to set up a multi-node OpenStack cloud, on their laptops, using Red Hat's RDO and the Packstack utility. Watch the video.

Alice In Wonderland - DevOps and OpenStack Networking
Around 6 years ago I started working with some tools that focused on software engineering collaboration and automation for operations. At the time products like CFEngine and Puppet were the two main tools promoting this new way of doing operations and sharing within operations and software development. A year later Chef was born and I was fortunate enough to join Opscode as the 9th employee as an evangelist preaching this disruptive form of collaboration and automation. At the time a majority of IT infrastructure was managed by what I called the "Bob's" of the world. Bob's scripts, Bob's directories and Bob to death do us part. Trying to explain to Bob the benefits of collaboration and software engineering principles was a hard fought battle over the years. One of the compelling events that helped propel these ideas (what we now call Devops) was cloud computing in the form of IaaS for compute resources. Fast forward to 2014 and these infrastructure automation and collaboration battles still exist but the battles are far less bloody. Now a new war is emerging in the network operations and engineering space. Watch the video.

WhatTheStack? A Tool Based on Tempest to Verify your Deployments
OpenStack service interoperability is becoming a major requirement for developers and users of public clouds. With more and more OpenStack-based deployments available to the public it is getting harder and harder to choose a vendor that ensures API interoperability. To make things worse, you might want to have some external testing for verification. Watch the video.

Introduction to OpenStack Orchestration
In this session you will learn how the Orchestration capabilities of OpenStack, provided by the Heat project, can help make the deployment and management of your cloud workloads simpler and more robust by allowing you to represent infrastructure as code. Watch the video.

Hacking OpenStack for Padawans
This is where you'll learn how to hack OpenStack itself. You'll start by firing up your own OpenStack development environment, go on to modify OpenStack itself, and end the session learning how to contribute your modification back to the project. Sounds like a lot? That's because it is! Watch the video.

OpenStack from Zero to Nova: An Activity-Driven Workshop
Curious about OpenStack, but don't know where to start? In this hands-on tutorial, we will walk you through the basics of using OpenStack. No prior OpenStack knowledge is necessary. We will take you from zero to creating instances, both in the web client (Horizon) and on the command line. Watch the video.

Elastic Recheck - Tools for Finding Race Conditions in OpenStack
During the Havana release cycle we discovered Tempest was getting comprehensive enough that it would expose interesting timing problems in OpenStack in the OpenStack gate. Developers were used to calling these "flakey tests" and ignoring the negative results, however we saw a pattern emerge where the same pattern for a fail could be seen multiple times.Watch the video.

OpenStack Swift as a Backend for Git
Openstack Swift is an efficient way to store data and let you enjoy its data safety, high availability and horizontal scalability capabilities. Git is designed to store its objects using traditional block storage systems but they generally does not provided the same capabilities as Swift offers. Why not using Swift for storing Git repositories ? Watch the video.

Practical Docker for OpenStack
In this talk, we'll introduce you to Docker, provide examples for using Heat, and explain what changes are necessary when you deploy Nova with Docker. Finally, we'll explain some best practices to ensure you deploy Docker integrated OpenStack in a secure and scalable fashion. Watch the video.

OpenStack: Where Continuous Delivery and Distros Collide
Like many open-source projects, OpenStack uses a time-based release model. Feature development happens in a flurry of activity in the first part of each release cycle and then we taper, allowing enough time for many eyes to make shallow bugs" and for us to gain enough confidence in the quality of our release candidates. Even after a release, we continue to maintain a stable branch for issues found and fixed post-release. Watch the video.

Making Test-Driven Development [Somewhat] Bearable on OpenStack
While some developers may find it silly to create tests they know will immediately fail, this is actually the first step of test-driven development. Test-driven development not only results in better code, it also reduces those late night surprises when it comes to deploying the software. All developers know that they should adopt test-driven development practices, so why are so few actually doing it? The short answer is that it sucks writing tests. The goal of this talk is to demonstrate some of the tools that make test-driven development [somewhat] bearable on OpenStack environments. Watch the video.

Hitchhiker's Guide to DevOps Tools on OpenStack
Application deployment is hard work. Private cloud builders have in common enough scale and complexity to justify the need for API abstraction of their compute, storage and network needs. The applications deployed on these clouds are normally extremely complex. Building a cloud without rehosting application assets to it yeilds an unrealized investment. In this presentation, Lee Thompson will sample freely available open source tools which dramatically improve you ability to deploy applications onto Open Stack. Come hear the latest from tools like Barclamp, Chef, Forman, Juju, Puppet, Rundeck and others and start realizing your cloud investment. Watch the video.

Automation, Orchestration, Confusion? Taking the Discussion Up the Stack
Once you've got your OpenStack infrastructure in place, automating and managing application deployment is your next challenge to tackle. In this panel, we'll discuss the tools, approaches and frameworks available for OpenStack based application deployment today. Watch the video.

In this interview series we will introduce IT Professionals selected for this year’s Dell TechCenter (DTC) Rockstar Program. This program recognizes independent experts, Dell customers and employees for their significant positive impact on Dell TechCenter, blogs and social media when discussing Dell. You can find a list of all our Rockstars here. Our ninth interviewee is Jerry Gamblin.

Dell TechCenter: Can you please explain to folks who are not experts in your area: What is your domain of expertise?

Jerry Gamblin: I hate to use the word expert but I am a passionate security professional who loves to learn as much about security as possible.

Q: What are the most exciting trends in security?

A: The Cloud. With more people storing information in the cloud, making sure that information is secure is very important.

Q: Can you point us to security resources you find particularly valuable?

A: For the last couple of years Twitter has been the main source for security news and information.  Security is a decentralized industry so you may one day be reading a great story from the Wall Street Journal and the next day be reading a blog post from a guy in Germany with just as much importance.

Q: How do you engage with the IT community?

A: I spend a lot of time of Twitter. My username there is @Jgamblin.  I also write on my personal blog.

Q: What are the most cutting edge Dell products – and why?

A: I am a big fan of the new chrome book and ultrabooks Dell has been producing. They are some of the best in the industry. The SonicWALL product line is becoming a force in the NGFW (Next Generation Firewall) market. Secureworks is doing amazing things on the consulting and security research front.

Q: Jerry, thank you so much!

Awards season is upon us, and our Direct2Dell blog lately has heralded the numerous accolades earned by Dell’s products and people.  Well, I’m about to add to it — again. That’s because we recently learned that four of our Windows Migration and Management solutions have been named finalists for the 2014 (12th annual) American Business Awards, the “Stevies.”  This is no small achievement even for one product, and to have four of our Dell solutions chosen as finalists makes us extremely proud. The American Business Awards recognize the achievements and positive contributions of business organizations and individuals across the country, and is the leading business awards program in the United States. 

We are thrilled that, after more than five weeks of preliminary judging, a group of independent judges has agreed that these products are worthy of national recognition as gold, silver or bronze Stevie Award winners. Final judging will start next week and winners will be announced in September.

Three of our finalists — On Demand Migration for Email, Migration Manager for PSTs, and Recovery Manager for Active Directory Forest Edition— are in the category of New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Systems Management Solution. The fourth, our Change Auditor compliance solution, is in the New Product or Service of the Year - Software - Governance, Risk & Compliance Solution category. While ChangeAuditor is competing against solutions from several other companies, the other three are competing with another one of our own: the fourth finalist in the Systems Management category is Dell KACE Endpoint Systems Management Appliances.

Although we’re effectively competing against ourselves in that category, it is tremendously gratifying to know that, overall, not just one — but four — of our Windows Migration and Management solutions were determined by ABA judges to be finalist-worthy. That is significant affirmation of our commitment to listening to the needs of our customers, and offering Windows Migration and Management solutions that help them reduce the challenges, cost and complexity of managing Windows migrations, either on-premises or in the cloud, and ensuring that compliance is easily maintained and proven. 

We have every confidence that in September, we will have even more reason to be proud.

Drop me a line at Tom_Kendra@Dell.comto talk more about how we can help you with your Windows migration and management projects. 

In this interview series we will introduce IT Professionals selected for this year’s Dell TechCenter (DTC) Rockstar Program. This program recognizes independent experts, Dell customers and employees for their significant positive impact on Dell TechCenter, blogs and social media when discussing Dell. You can find a list of all our Rockstars here. Our tenth interviewee is Margaret Boeneke.

Dell TechCenter: Can you please explain to folks who are not experts in your area: What is your domain of expertise?

Margaret Boeneke: I am a technical writer and editor for Dell Storage technical solutions. I work with three teams of engineers to produce Reference Architectures, Deployment and Configuration guides, and Best Practices. I also spend a lot of time organizing our pages in Dell TechCenter so that our content is easy to find.

Q: What are the most exciting trends in your area?

A: People don’t usually think of white papers as exciting, but we do have some changes that I think are expanding the accessibility for our content. Dell Compellent content is moving into Dell TechCenter and onto Dell.com. This puts all of the Dell Storage content in the same place.

Q: Can you point us to Storage Technical Solutions resources you find particularly valuable?

A: Sure, but I might be a little biased towards the content we produce. We post 10+ new papers each month, so there’s always something new available.

Compellent Technical Content  

EqualLogic Technical Content

Rapid EqualLogic Configuration Portal

Switch Configuration Guides for EqualLogic SANs

Q: How do you engage with the IT community?

A: Whenever we have new papers available, I post a tweet to let people know @MargaretatDell. I also look for feedback on current papers or suggestions for future paper topics at the email address SISfeedback@dell.com. I am usually behind the scenes working to get useful content in the hands of people who can use it! 

Q: What are the most cutting edge Dell products – and why?

A: Dell Storage is producing a lot of great solution-focused documentation that addresses the latest technical opportunities for storage. Here are a couple of the latest docs:

Citrix XenDesktop with Provisioning Server for VDI (3,000 desktops) on Dell Compellent All Flash Array

Automation and Integration with MS Systems Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and Dell EqualLogic Storage

Sizing and Best Practices for Deploying Oracle VM using Dell EqualLogic Hybrid Arrays

Q: Margaret, thank you so much!

Secure Mobile Access with Windows Phone 8.1

By Dave Telehowski, Director of Software Engineering at Dell

With the release of the Windows Phone 8.1 Preview for Developers last month, Windows Phone developers can now test-drive the upcoming version of Microsoft’s mobile operating system. Windows Phone 8.1 includes major features such as the personal assistant Cortana, the new Action Center, a mobile version of Internet Explorer 11, and support for virtual private networks (VPNs). Let’s take a closer look at how you can get secure mobile access using a VPN connection in Windows Phone 8.1.

VPN Tunneling

Windows Phone 8.1 introduces support for VPN tunneling protocols including native support for IKEv2 connections and proprietary SSL VPN protocol support via third-party VPN plug-ins that can be downloaded from the Windows Phone Store. Several third-party VPN plug-ins are already available, including SonicWALL Mobile Connect from Dell. Once a VPN plug-in is installed on the phone, use the Settings app to manually configure a VPN profile. When creating a profile, an installed VPN plug-in’s name will appear in the profile Type list, e.g., SonicWALL Mobile Connect. SonicWALL Mobile Connect™ provides users full network-level access to corporate and academic resources over encrypted SSL VPN connections. The client provides anytime, anywhere access to critical applications such as email, virtual desktop sessions and other Windows Phone applications.

Securely Connected

After connecting the VPN and successfully authenticating, a full layer-3 VPN tunnel is established and your Windows Phone can securely access private network resources through the VPN connection. For mobile workers, that means they can now securely access the same web sites and network resources from their Windows Phone the same way they can on their PC in the office.

Windows Phone 8.1 is expected to be available as a general release later this summer. If you want to try it out before then, register as a Windows Phone developer and download the Preview for Developers app today. Please note that installing the Preview version of Windows Phone 8.1 may void any warranty from your mobile operator and/or device manufacturer, so be sure to read and understand the important requirements and notes before upgrading.

Windows Phone 8.1 Preview Screenshots

Adding a VPN Connection– Note: if a custom port is required, then a URL must be entered in the “Server name” field.

Connecting the VPN

DevOps:
Ross Tuck: Multistage environments with Ansible
Ansible has excellent documentation but one thing I was confused about was the best way to store the configuration for multistage projects: say, different passwords for dev, staging, production. This isn’t really covered in the ansible-examples repo because it’s specific to your project and while the documentation has recommendations, it doesn’t spell it out completely. Read more.

OpenStack:
Aaron Rosen: Testing cross project related patches in gate before merging!
A few months back I was working on a blueprint with Dan Smith which required changes to be made to three different projects (neutron, nova, and python-novaclient). One of the tricks that we came up with was modifying devstack in order to run all of our patches through the gate to test the cross project integration before the patches merged. We found this to be super helpful and allowed us to shake out several bugs pretty quickly that we wouldn’t have found until we started merging some of the patches. Read more.

Ben Nemec: Juno Summit Thoughts
I attended my first OpenStack Summit in Atlanta last week, and now that I'm (mostly) recovered I wanted to write down some of my thoughts about the experience. Read more.

eNovance: Keep OpenStack Weird
Last week in Atlanta during the OpenStack Summit, I gave a talk on “Are enterprises ready for the OpenStack transformation” [slides|video]. In this talk, I suggest that OpenStack is a game changer, both by definition and because of how it’s following the AWS model, in the way enterprises should develop applications. Read more.

ICCLab: Authenticating the python ceilometer client against the Openstack APIs – bloody lambda functions!
We were doing some work with Ceilometer – it appears in a few of our activities – and I was trying to get up to speed with it. Playing with the python Ceilometer client proved a little more difficult then envisaged – mostly due to deficiencies in documentation. Here’s a small note on an issue I faced with authentication. Read more.

John Dickinson: Thoughts after the OpenStack Juno Summit
A week out of the OpenStack Juno summit, it’s time to reflect, focus, and move forward in the community. I’ve been involved in OpenStack since it began—I was on the Cloud Files team at Rackspace that originally wrote Swift—and I’ve seen the community and ecosystem grow dramatically over the last four years. What began as a group of about 20 has now become thousands. Read more.

Mirantis: Nobody’s Using OpenStack, Huh? Guess Again.
Now that the dust from the OpenStack summit in Atlanta has settled, it’s probably a good time to take a look at the other semi-annual OpenStack tradition, the OpenStack user survey. This cycle’s survey, known as the Juno survey because this was technically the Juno design summit, gave us the following interesting statistics: Read more.

Mirantis: Rally: OpenStack Tempest Testing Made Simple(r)
Cloud users today often also need to be cloud innovators: upgrading components, integrating new hardware, scaling up, and making lots of configuration changes. But how can you be sure the changes you make don’t break anything? Read more.

Opensource.com: What is an OpenStack superuser?
What is an OpenStack superuser? Or perhaps more aptly, who is an OpenStack superuser? As OpenStack continues to mature and slowly make its way into production environments, the focus on the user is continuing to grow. And so, to better meet the needs of users, the community is working hard to get users to meet the next step of engagement by highlighing those users who are change agents both in their organization and within the OpenStack community at large: the superusers. Read more.

Opensource.com: Define your network in software with OpenDaylight
For years, the traditional model in networking was for much of the work to be done in hardware. But with the rise of cloud computing and virtualization, and the need for networks to become more agile and flexible than ever, a trend is beginning to take hold to take networking in the same direction that computing has gone. We are seeing more and more that the networking functions traditionally done in the datacenter by dedicated, almost exclusively proprietary hardware and software combinations, are now being defined through software. Read more.

Rob Hirschfeld: How DefCore is going to change your world: three advisory cases
The first release of the DefCore Core Capabilities Matrix (DCCM) was revealed at the Atlanta summit. At the Summit, Joshua and I had a session which examined what this means for the various members of the OpenStack community. This rather lengthy post reviews the same advisory material. Read more.

SwiftStack: OpenStack Juno Summit From a Swift Perspective
Last week Anders wrote about the growth in the OpenStack community and the huge shift in people asking about the project to people talking about running it. This transition is fantastic to see. Read more.

Tesora: OpenStack Should Be FIne, Even if Rackspace Gets Sold
A couple of weeks ago, OpenStack had a big party in Atlanta and celebrated with 4500 strong coming together to talk about all things OpenStack. There were vendors and developers and signs of a vibrant community, but underneath were also some signals that perhaps OpenStack is at a crossroads. Read more.

Tesora: Join the fastest growing open-source movement: OpenStack
Training—and gaining OpenStack skills and expertise—will benefit IT pros, according to the OpenStack Foundation. The organization says that OpenStack jobs consistently pay higher wages and employers have doubled the number of job postings over the past year. Read more.

A look at different Solid State Drives technologies

Blog Author - Quentin Esterhuizen

Flash or Solid State Drives are becoming more and more popular within the data center. With all the more attention it gets, many people still don't really understand that there are a wide variety of types of flash drives out there.  It's really important to appreciate the differences in technology because they have drastically different characteristics. If used incorrectly you could either be spending far too much or even in some cases not be getting the lifetime or performance that you were expecting. In addition there have been many start-ups and existing companies bringing out a wide variety of solutions focused on increasing performance using flash drives.  

SSD Basics Overview  

Before we begin lets dive into some basics in regards to flash drives.  

Speed

The biggest difference between flash drives and normal spinning disk is that they use memory cell's to store the data instead of a magnetic platter which is used in a conventional spinning disk. Because it uses a memory cell there are no moving parts, which means it can access the data significantly faster than a spinning disk (in fact you will typically run out of bandwidth in terms of interface such as FC/SAS or NL-SAS before you will ever max out the raw throughput of the memory). One thing to note is that different techniques of writing to the cells can yield different performance and we will dive into that a little bit deeper soon.  

Endurance

A very interesting point to note with cells is that they can only be written to a certain amount of times before they lose their ability to hold data. This is very much how SSD endurance is calculated, and a common measurement is the number of full writes it can support per day for the duration of 5 years. What is also interesting is that there different techniques to how much data you store per cell, and this will impact the expected lifetime of that drive  

So let's look at some different drive types and how the speed and endurance vary on them.  

You can read more about the solution combining both SLC and MLC drives here:

http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/dell-compellent-flash-optimized/pd 

One of the interesting market trends at the moment is showing that SLC drives are slowly starting to decline. This can be due to a few different factors but some of the predominant ones are that the cost is still quite high, and different drive varieties are proving to find quite a bit of attention in the market. Specifically eMLC is starting to be looked into a lot more seriously and we will quickly take a look at that and also TLC drives.    

If you would like to try and get a better understanding of the performance requirements of some of your own applications you can run the Dell DPACK tool, for more information you can check it out here:

http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/04/campaigns/dell-performance-analysis-collection-kit-dpack  

Final thoughts

So hopefully that gives you a little bit of a better understanding of some of the different drive types when it comes to flash drives and that not all of them are the same. What you will most likely see is a lot of changes over the next few years when it comes to the performance and endurance characteristics of these drives. Due to a lot of significant work being done of the software aspect of the drive some of the technologies will get more blurred. We are already seeing this somewhat with SLC vs eMLC. This will only continue, and because of this a new convention is starting to come up where instead of calling the drives by their technology name (SLC/MLC/eMLC) it is more being defined by the characteristic such as Write Intensive or Read Intensive.  

These terms makes it much easier to define the drive and gives a much clearer understanding of what the optimal use for the drive is from an application stand point. I am really excited by flash drives, it's something new and revolutionary especially in terms of storage arrays and appliances. It will be interesting to see how this technology develops over the next few years as I personally believe it is only in its infancy and we haven't seen many of its potential uses yet.  

If you want to read more in regards to not only how flash is used with drives but other form factors you can view this whitepaper:

http://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/Busting-Solid-State-Storage-Myths.pdf

In this interview series we will introduce IT Professionals selected for this year’s Dell TechCenter (DTC) Rockstar Program. This program recognizes independent experts, Dell customers and employees for their significant positive impact on Dell TechCenter, blogs and social media when discussing Dell. You can find a list of all our Rockstars here. Our eleventh interviewee is Gobind Vijayakumar.

Dell TechCenter: Can you please explain to folks who are not experts in your area: What is your domain of expertise?

Gobind Vijayakumar: I come from a Windows Server/OS X background and I am currently working in Dell OS Engineering group. I specialize in platform enablement and certification for Dell PowerEdge Servers. Other than this my main focus areas are operating systems (mainly Windows Server), datacenter solutions and security aspects.

Q: What are the most exciting trends in your domain of expertise?

A: Microsoft Storage Spaces is an interesting solution which allows the complete virtualization of the storage stack and which has advanced storage management features like storage tiering, thin provisioning etc. In addition to that there are many similar software defined storage technologies like VMware vSAN which will create a major shift in the storage industry in the coming years. 

Q: Can you point us to resources you find particularly valuable for your work?

A: Dell OS and Applications wiki is one of the resources where you can get all the details on the new technologies in operating system space, including blogs/whitepapers. For VMWare related blogs I always refer this link.  Other than that I usually follow the Microsoft MSDN blog and Channel9 RSS feeds which provides an insight into the upcoming Microsoft technologies and market trends.

Q: How do you engage with the IT community?

A: Social media - who doesn’t leverage its power these days? It has clearly changed the way how the IT community does engage and collaborate. I usually prefer interacting using my Twitter and LinkedIn account and participating in forum discussions related to server solutions. In addition it I publish blogs in Dell Techcenter and participate in social media activities via Dell SMAC.

Q: What are the most cutting edge Dell products – and why?

A: Almost all Dell products are cutting edge! But if you want me to choose one I would certainly go for Dell PowerEdge VRTX since it is one of the most innovative products I have seen. VRTX is an interesting package encompassing server, storage and networking into one. Being a gamer, I always prefer the Dell Alienware lineup and I personally like the Alienware X51 model which fits into every gamers needs.

Q: Gobind, thank you so much!

This article is mainly for users who are monitoring their Dell Hardware by using Dell Server Management Pack Suite in System Center Operations Manager. It describes how to troubleshoot the events like 4511 and 1103 in Operations manager log seen with Dell Unit Monitors.

Events 4511 and 1103 may be seen in the Operations Manager Event Log after installing Dell Server Management pack suite 5.x, importing the Dell CMC/ DRAC management packs and discovering Dell Chassis/ DRAC devices. In case these errors show up in the operations manager log, the Dell devices do not reflect the actual healthand remain in the healthy state.

Excerpt of an error from Operations Manager Log:

Initialization of a module of type "SnmpAsyncProbe" (CLSID "{2B72C326-CDBB-421A-ACC3-A1994DBD52BB}") failed with error code Unspecified error causing the rule "<Dell.UnitMonitor.Id>" running for instance "<IP Address>" with id :"{ 1995D62F-4483-9E9B-3F26-F5B651C81B0C}" in management group "<SCOMGROUPNAME>".      

The 4511 and 1103 Events in Operations Manager Event Log could point to some of the following unit monitors:

“Dell.ModularChassis.CMCAvailability.TrapBased”,

”Dell.ModularChassis.DRACMCAvailability.TrapBased”,

“Dell.ModularChassis.CMCAvailability.Periodic”,

“Dell.ModularChassis.DRACMCAvailability.Periodic”,

”Dell.iDRAC7Modular.GlobalStatus.Availability.Periodic”,

”Dell.iDRAC7Monolithic.GlobalStatus.Availability.Periodic”,

”Dell.iDRAC7Modular.GlobalStatus.Availability.TrapBased”,

”Dell.iDRAC7Monolithic.GlobalStatus.Availability.TrapBased”,

”Dell.iDRAC7Modular.GlobalStorageStatus.Availability.TrapBased”,

”Dell.iDRAC7Monolithic.GlobalStorageStatus.Availability.TrapBased”,

”Dell.iDRAC7Modular.GlobalStorageStatus.Availability.Periodic”,

”Dell.iDRAC7Monolithic.GlobalStorageStatus.Availability.Periodic”,

”Dell.RAC.Availability.TrapBased”,

”Dell.RAC.Availability.Periodic”

 These Unit monitors are periodic and trap based which look for a specific OID to query/ update the Health of the Dell Device. This query uses SNMP modules which require the community string of the Dell Device to fetch the value of the OID. In Operations Manager 2012 and above, the SNMP Modules require the community string to be defined as a Run as Account - "SNMP Monitoring Account". If the user has not associated the community string Run as Account for the Dell Device, the Unit Monitors/SNMP Modules fail to fetch the information from the Dell Device and 4511 errors may show up in the Operations Manager Event log.

To query the OIDs from the Dell device, we need to associate the community Run As account with the related Dell device class (Dell CMC or Dell DRAC).

Creating Run As Account for SNMP Monitoring :

1.  Launch System Center 2012 Operations Manager and click Administration. In the Administration Pane, browse to Run As Configurationà Profiles. From the list of available profiles, right click SNMP Monitoring Account and click Properties. The Introduction screen is displayed. Click Next.

2. The General Properties Screen is displayed. Click Next.

3. The Add Run as Accounts screen is displayed. Click Add. Then Add Run as Account screen is displayed.

4. Then Create Run as Account Wizard screen will be displayed. Click Next.

5. Select the Community String from the Run as Account drop-down list. Provide a name in the Display Name: text box and click Next. 

6. Provide the appropriate string in the Community String text box and click next.

7. The Distribution security screen is displayed. Select the Less Secure and click create.

8. After the Wizard is complete click close.

9. On the Add a Run as Account screen, select the A selected class, group or object option. Click select ->Class.

10. In the Filter text box enter the class of the object. Depending on the type of device, enter Dell Server, Dell Modular Chassis, and Dell DRAC/MC or Dell RAC classes.

11. Click Ok and then click Save. After the Wizard is complete. Click Close.

After this, the health of the Dell devices will reflect correctly and the 4511, 1103 events related to Dell unit monitors will not be generated in the Operations Manager event log.

Big Data:
Cloudera: New SQL Choices in the Apache Hadoop Ecosystem: Why Impala Continues to Lead
In our previous post from January 2014, we reported that Impala had achieved query performance over Apache Hadoop equivalent to that of an analytic DBMS over its own proprietary storage system. We believed this was an important milestone because Impala’s objective has been to support a high-quality BI experience on Hadoop data, not to produce a “faster Apache Hive.” An enterprise-quality BI experience requires low latency and high concurrency (among other things), so surpassing a well-known proprietary MPP DBMS in these areas was important evidence of progress. Read more.

Cloudera: Apache Spark 1.0 is Released
Congratulations to the Apache Spark community for today’s release of Spark 1.0, which includes contributions from more than 100 people (including Cloudera’s own Diana Carroll, Mark Grover, Ted Malaska, Sean Owen, Sandy Ryza, and Marcelo Vanzin). We think this release is an important milestone in the continuing rapid uptake of Spark by enterprises — which is supported by Cloudera via Cloudera Enterprise 5 — as a modern, general-purpose processing engine for Apache Hadoop. Read more.

Datadog: Filter your Datadog Events Stream to pinpoint issues in your infrastructure
Do you run a large or busy service that you monitor with Datadog or do you find yourself struggling to keep track of everything going on in your infrastructure? In my last role at a large software as a service company providing ratings and reviews functionality to brand and retail Web sites, we had a dozen teams all using the same Datadog account to monitor many different services, with thousands of servers and tens of thousands custom metrics. This resulted in hundreds of events each day within our infrastructure, such as hotfixes, configuration changes and servers being powered on or off. Any one person only cared about a small number of these events, and our teams were finding it challenging to pull those few key events to track from hundreds each day. Read more.

OpenStack:
Aaron Rosen: Implementing High Availability Instances with Neutron using VRRP
In the Havana release we added a new extension called “Allowed-Address-Pairs” that allows one to add additional ips (or cidrs) with their mac-address to a port to allow traffic that matches those values to pass through. This was needed because by default neutron ports only allow traffic through that match the mac-address and fixed-ips fields on a port (which is done to enforce anti-spoofing). Because of this, there was no way to support protocols such as VRRP which require mapping the same ip-address to multiple ports which neutron does not allow by design. Read more.

Adam Young: Kerberos, Keystone Client, and S4U2Proxy
Since my eventual goal is to Kerberize Horizon, my next step after getting a CGI solution working was to make use of the Keystone client. Since the Kerberos auth plugin is still a work-in-progress, it required a little tweaking, but not all that much. Read more.

Adam Young: Kerberos, Federation, and Horizon
I’ve been looking in to enabling Kerberos for Horizon. Since Horizon passes the Users credentials on to Keystone to get a token, Kerberos requires an additional delegation mechanism. This leads to some questions about how to handle delegation in the case of Federated Identity. Read more.

Elasticsearch: OpenStack Elastic-Recheck: powered by The Elk Stack
Every day, the OpenStack project runs hundreds of patches through its continuous integration system to assure code consistency, functionality and smooth integration with other projects in the OpenStack ecosystem. This process works exceptionally well for a majority of patches, but as with any system pushing so much data through development infrastructure, there are times when there are failures unrelated to the patches being tested. It may be that a VM goes down unexpectedly during a test, an external resource is unavailable (nameserver, package repository, etc), a service unrelated to the test locks up or one of many race conditions or other transient bugs pops up.Read more.

ICCLab: Ceilometer Performance issues
There have been some criticisms of the implementation of Ceilometer (or Telemetry as of Icehouse) – however, it’s still the main show in town for understanding what’s going on inside your Openstack. We’ve been doing a bit of work with it in multiple projects. In one of our efforts – pulling in energy info via kwapi – we noticed that Ceilometer really crawls to a halt with the API giving a response in 20s when trying to enter just a single energy consumption data point. (Yes, it might make more sense to batch these up…). For our simple scenario, this performance was completely unworkable. Read more.

Julien Danjou: OpenStack Design Summit Juno, from a Ceilometer point of view
Last week was the OpenStack Design Summit in Atlanta, GA where we, developers, discussed and designed the new OpenStack release (Juno) coming up. I've been there mainly to discuss Ceilometer upcoming developments. Read more.

Mark Shuttleworth: Canonical’s cloud-init saves you from image soup, on every cloud
We run an extensive program to identify issues and features that make a difference to cloud users. One result of that program is that we pioneered dynamic image customisation and wrote cloud-init. I’ll tell the story of cloud-init as an illustration of the focus the Ubuntu team has on making your devops experience fantastic on any given cloud.Read more.

Mirantis: OpenStack Database (Trove): Native Replication, Part 1
Let’s talk about replication a bit. How much do you know about it? Why is it so important? As for me, I can think of plenty of questions about replication, and they generally fall into these three categories: What is it? Why do we need it? (Justification and benefits) How it can be applied? In this two-part article series, we’re going to look at those questions in the context of a proposal to add replication capabilities to Trove, the OpenStack Database project.Read more.

Sean Roberts: My take on OpenStack projects, training, part 2 of 10
This is the second of a ten part series on OpenStack projects. There are critical OpenStack projects that get a bit lost in the noise. I aim to highlight why these projects are important and how you can get involved. Read more.

Sean Roberts; OpenStack community developer training, part 2 of 3
Teaching the OpenStack architecture and services is a good place to begin. That means no installing software until the student is ready to understand what they are installing. The best place to start is going through the basics in the Associates Training Guide and the intermediate topics in the Operators Training Guide first. These Guides are mostly combined from the existing OpenStack documentation. The Training project aims to reuse the existing materials as much as possible. Read more.

SiliconANGLE: Why OpenStack doesn’t need a vendor to lead it
The young-but-growing OpenStack ecosystem consists in part of vendors who seem content to work together forever as one big happy, code-sharing family. But the reality is, they’re all lined up at the proverbial starting line, secretly jockeying for position in a race they hope will ultimately prove lucrative. Which vendor will emerge the leader? More importantly, does OpenStack, a series of community-based, open-source projects, even need a leader? Read more.

One of the most exciting developments happening on the internet is the explosive growth of devices talking to each other and the rise of the Internet of Things. The number of internet enabled devices, such as phones, sensors and cameras, already exceed the number of people on earth. By 2020, Cisco has said that there may be as many as 50 Billion devices talking to each other. With this excitement comes caution. We are creating new avenues into our homes, businesses, cars and plants. With this comes malware, hacking and new kinds of botnets resulting in privacy and security challenges, and a need to consider Security of Things.

There will be advances to make your life easier, such as intelligent traffic routing or more nimble factories. But can you also imagine your car unlocking itself and starting the engine for anyone who walks by? Consider how efficient farming will be when you know where crops need water and can move irrigation systems to deliver just the right amount. What if you go to your office to find that your data center has turned itself off because someone hacked into the power control system in the building? The same technology that helps locate inventory in a warehouse can tell someone where to find valuables to steal.

There are several trends coming together to bring you the Internet of Things. I mentioned devices, lots of them, but also, we now have an infrastructure where they can interact. IPv6 will give us enough IP addresses to accommodate this growth. We also have robust communications to support all this interaction: you know about LANs and WANs but what about Personal Area Networks using Zigbee? We are now seeing the rise of Big Data software designed to organize data into useful information. And then there is you, the human element, that will make decisions based-on all that information.

The good news is that we already have technology in place that can help protect you and your organization from attacks from the Internet of Things. There are things you can do now to prepare for the next iteration of the internet:

1. Keep software, applications and operating systems updated to protect from known vulnerabilities.
2. Use a next-generation firewall with current security services to block attacks
3. Harden your storage capabilities to prevent intrusion
4. Use secure, encrypted communications
5. Control access to assets with strong authentication
6. Protect yourself from disruption of service
7. Validate the legitimacy of connections

Remember, the Internet of Things, in any guise, is still a network and security best practices today are the foundation to protect the Internet of Things tomorrow. As you plan your network, anticipate growth. Become more knowledgeable; ask questions to be better informed.

The Security of Things can make the Internet of Things bad news for hackers. Working with the innovators who are leading the Internet of Things, Dell is helping build the foundation to enable the magic and help each person and organization grasp the future. Listen to the Internet of Things webinar: here.