With Dell World 2012 in full swing, I wanted to highlight the value add of the Dell | Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 solution stack. Dell has built solutions and reference architectures around Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0 that highlight the value of integration between Hyper-V 3.0 features and Dell solution stacks. For instance, in the area of converged networks and data center bridging (DCB), Dell has provided tools used for validation along with example of configurations to deliver converged fabric. Please see the TechCenter wiki page for the full write-up on Hyper-V 3.0 and converged networks on 12th Generation Dell PowerEdge Servers.

But don't take my word for it, see what a few Dell TechCenter RockStars have to say about Dell | Microsoft Hyper-V 3.0.

From Tom Hesketad, Senior IT Consultant - msitpros.com (@hypervfan):

With todays servers and many NIC’s you always have to watch out which cable is connected to which port and match that to the correct NIC shown in Windows. And that is even more important when running virtualization. Consistent Network Port Naming is a new feature requested by Dell that works with Windows Server 2012 and Dell PowerEdge 12th generation servers. With this feature you will always be able to match up the physical port to what you see in Windows. This article from Dell will give you more info about this and other improvements.

From Andreas Erson, IT Engineer - (@ersontech):

Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V 3.0 comes with a truckload of features that will enable everyone from to the SMB to the largest corporation to significantly improve their ROI in virtualization. Using Dell EqualLogic and Compellent storage, you can make use of ODX (Offload Data Transfer) to enable your SAN to handle intensive data transfers inside the SAN with a significant performance advantages and lowered utilization of the server/client network and CPU load on hosts. Dell also has widespread support for network features like SR-IOV and dVMQs that increase network flexibility and performance. Couple that with Dell Force10 and PowerConnect networking and you can improve performance and reliability with a converged network infrastructure for both FCoE and iSCSI. Another improvement that Dell was instrumental for bringing to market is CDN (Consistent Device Naming), which makes network interface naming deterministic and consistent thus simplifying automatic deployments and the speed of which you can map a network interface to a physical port. These are just some examples of why Hyper-V 3.0 should be given serious consideration in any virtualization project.

With Dell World 2012 in full swing, I wanted to highlight the value add of the Dell | VMware vSphere 5.1 solution stack. Dell has built solutions and reference architectures around VMware vSphere 5.1 that highlight the value of integration between vSphere ESXi 5.1 features and Dell solution stacks. For example, Dell has customized bits for VMware vSphere 5.1. Please visit the Dell Customized Bits for VMware vSphere 5.1 for the download links.

But don't take my word for it, see what a Dell TechCenter RockStar has to say about Dell | VMware vSphere 5.1.

From Todd Muirhead, Performance Engineer at VMware focusing on database and storage while thinking about clouds and virtualization - virtualTodd's Big Blog (@virtualTodd):

VMware on Dell servers has always been a great solution that is rooted in enabling customers choice and flexibility in how they decide to implement and run their datacenters. Dell always has a very strong line up of VMware certified servers that fully support the latest versions of VMware vSphere. Additionally, Dell has a broad range of storage options, including EqualLogic and Compellant, that are also easy to use with vSphere and support the VAAI api for offloading some functions to the storage array. On top of this platform vSphere can run just about any application or service in the datacenter from domain controllers to Oracle RAC database clusters. Because every customer has different needs and requirements to run a broad range of apps the combination of vSphere on Dell is great.

Resolving “Server Error in Application “LicenseUI” when accessing the Dell Connections License Manager Web UI

This post was written by Raghavendran N of the Dell OpenManage Integrations team.

Symptom: HTTP error 500.19 shows up (captured in the screenshot below) while accessing the Dell Connections License Manager Web UI (http://<ipaddress>:8544/DellLicenseManagement).

Reason: WSUS (Windows Server Update Services - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_Update_Services) is installed on the server that is running the Dell Connections License Manager.

Steps to resolve the error:

Please use the options below depending on your system configuration:

1. Disable the XPress decompression scheme using the command:

%windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd.exe set config -section:system.webServer/httpCompression /-[name='xpress']

1. Add an attribute of "precondition= "64bitness" for the “DynamicCompressionModule” entry so that it loads only in 64bit application pools.
2. Use 32 bit version of suscomp.dll.

Additional information:

1. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webtopics/archive/2010/03/08/troubleshooting-http-500-19-errors-in-iis-7.aspx (Look for Scenario 6)
2. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2735783/classic-net-app-pool-iis-7-5-compression-modules

Learn firsthand about OpenStack, its challenges and opportunities, market adoption and Mirantis’s engagement in the community. My goal is to interview all 24 members of the OpenStack board, and I will post these talks sequentially at Dell TechCenter. In order to make these interviews easier to read, I structured them into my (subjectively) most important takeaways. Enjoy reading!

#1 Takeaway: Cloud is a child of the open source culture and OpenStack as the largest open enterprise project might turn the entire cloud industry upside down

Rafael: Boris, how do you envision OpenStack two or three years from now?

Boris: There is a common vision out there of OpenStack as the Android of cloud computing. If you think of Amazon as the iOS of the cloud, OpenStack ultimately is the Android.  Cloud in general is a baby of the open source culture: Large consumer internet companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google had to build out an extremely scalable infrastructure to run their application logic on top. They built that infrastructure either out of components that they invented and then later open sourced or open source components they pulled from the outside. The bottom line is: These companies understood that if they took the traditional enterprise route, the price for licenses ultimately would be greater than the revenues they could ever achieve. So they built the superefficient infrastructure stack completely leveraging open components and paying licenses to nobody.

Ultimately companies like Amazon decided to open up part of their infrastructure to customers and that’s how infrastructure cloud in its current form has been born: Amazon pioneered the world with the Elastic Compute Cloud EC2 offering in 2006.

Cloud is inherently about open, and OpenStack today is by far the largest infrastructure cloud open community. If you look at number of companies participating, the amount of code commits and the nature of the project itself: From day one it was not positioned central to any particular vendor but as a conglomerate of different independent organizations. Because cloud is about open, and OpenStack is THE thing in the open cloud, it is effectively going to be one of the most disruptive movements in infrastructure computing during the next 5 to 10 years. OpenStack is going to change the entire industry upside down.

#2 Takeaway: OpenStack is vendor independent, it’s not owned by one particular company or institution, and that makes it attractive for anyone to join

Rafael: What are the key accomplishments in the OpenStack project so far?

Boris: The key accomplishments are strategic in nature. OpenStack is the true incarnation of open source. It was originally designed to create a large, diverse ecosystem where nobody is a dominant player which ultimately attracted everybody. It started out with Rackspace, NASA, Dell, Cisco and a few others, and it was not vendor centric like for instance Eucalyptus or cloud.com. This is a key strategic component that OpenStack got right from the very beginning, and it has been largely the formula to its success.

From the tactical standpoint, people oftentimes criticize OpenStack for the lack of certain features … unlike in vendor-centric projects … but I think OpenStack’s openness is its strength, which will become evident as the project matures. OpenStack is not an out of the box product, but rather a fabric aimed to ultimately glue together in an eloquent way a very diverse set of application infrastructure components.  If you want NetApp storage …you can potentially do it with OpenStack. If you want Nicira networking … OpenStack will work.  The whole idea behind the OpenStack design is a consistent set of APIs on the front end, where tenants can interface with.  Effectively anyone can write drivers to plug their particular hardware component in the backend and make it work with OpenStack.

Rafael: Are there any gaps or missing links in OpenStack?

Boris: OpenStack is a new project, but I don’t think there are any clear gaps. Some functionalities are missing compared to Amazon or VMware solutions and the community needs to put them in place. But at Mirantis we always looked at OpenStack long term. OpenStack is the only project that is doing open cloud infrastructure right and that is the winning strategy long term. The features and functions will be there over time.

#3 Takeaway: Mirantis is the largest OpenStack systems integrator monetizing through service

Rafael: How is Mirantis positioned in the OpenStack ecosystem?   

Boris: We are the largest systems integrator in entire OpenStack ecosystem with over 70 consultants exclusively dedicated to delivering OpenStack solutions. Mirantis is monetizing OpenStack through service. We figured out that there’s definitely going to be a lot of need for doing OpenStack implementation, providing professional services around it. Besides, it’s a great path to get exposed to a lot of use cases and to learn on the way. We very consciously decided to deliver OpenStack services, helping organizations extract value from the trunk version of OpenStack rather than pushing out our own distro.

#4 Takeaway: There are two sorts of contributions to OpenStack: writing code and evangelizing the project, with the latter being even the more important one

Rafael: How does Mirantis contribute to OpenStack?

Boris: OpenStack contributions can be bucketed into two general categories, which is true for any company in the OpenStack ecosystem, not only for Mirantis. The first category is evangelism, which is about creating awareness momentum. When it comes to open source, this component is just as important if not more important than code contribute: that’s what defines the project and gets people excited to come in and contribute and push forward.

At Mirantis, we were one of the original organizers of the OpenStack meet up in the Bay Area, which is by far the largest user group that OpenStack has in the world with close to 1,800 members. We do similar meet ups in Russia and Ukraine where a lot of our back office and engineering is located. Many of our people at Mirantis including myself blog about OpenStack, we do webinars, we write articles, we participate in different speaking engagements. All these are our contributions to evangelize OpenStack.

The other category besides evangelizing, are code contributions. At Mirantis, we have contributed with a bunch of small and a couple of big code contributions. As for the small things, we have helped build many drivers for different components. We lobby our clients to open source these components, and we did so with drivers for Nexenta, NetApp and Dell Equallogic for example. In addition to that, we contributed with a bunch of bug fixes in OpenStack.

As far as big contributions are concerned, we have spearheaded the elastic load balancer initiative. OpenStack had a project called Atlas, which was an early attempted to build a load balancer in demand for that functionality. Many customers asked for it and we decided to a take it upon ourselves to revive Atlas in a new incarnation. Right now we have three developers and one manager fully dedicated to the elastic load balancer project. It’s most likely going into core in OpenStack Grizzly release … and we are still deciding if it’s going to be a separate standalone project or an extension of Quantum. But it’s a significant part of functionality that allows you to dynamically spin up instances of load balancers through an OpenStack API. You can actually use different load balancers … software load balancers like HAProxy or physical load balancers like F5 as the backend for it.

#5 Takeaway: Adoption of OpenStack happens in three waves: 1) Hardware vendors, 2) SaaS and infrastructure providers (current wave) and 3) Enterprise customers (2-3 years from now)

Rafael:  Who are the early adopters and do you see OpenStack going mainstream?

Boris: We see adoption happening in three distinct stages. One of the early work being spent on OpenStack was not among customers but vendors building up the ecosystem. Companies such as Cisco, Dell, HP and NetApp bought into the long term vision, they understood that this is a disruptive movement and they wanted to early on figure out a way to intelligently integrate their solutions into the OpenStack mix. Being a services company we naturally benefited from that. We’ve interfaced with all the big guys in the industry that have an OpenStack strategy in some shape and form.

The second wave which we are in the middle of today, involves adoption by SaaS vendors and service providers. These companies understood that they have to build the Amazon like cloud in order to compete in the emerging cloud ecosystem, and OpenStack is the de facto standard platform at this point. So we are seeing a lot of use cases to build a standard based application infrastructure that’s based on OpenStack, to replace some of the components that they have haphazardly developed in house over a period of many years as they grew. Because nobody was as smart as Amazon or Google in building the underlying application infrastructure for their SaaS service, a lot of them have spaghetti like diverse structure that is very hard and expensive to maintain. OpenStack provided an opportunity to replace all of that with something that is fairly standard based. We see a lot of projects like that.

Finally the third wave of adoption is the enterprise customers. The use case there is displacing VMware … basically building an Amazon like cloud inside the firewall for the enterprise customers. I think we are at a tip here … it doesn’t just have to do with OpenStack but with cloud adoption by enterprise in general. We’re just starting to see little bit of happening now. We have a number of customers in that space, building an Amazon like cloud infrastructure using OpenStack and displacing VMware with it. But we won’t really see any real mass option of cloud in general or OpenStack specifically by the enterprise sector until maybe 2 years away from now.

#6 Takeaway: Dell is facing challenges in its core business, but it might become a leader in the OpenStack infrastructure cloud market

Rafael: How do you view Dell in OpenStack game?

Boris: We work with Dell hand in hand on multiple projects. Dell is definitely a company that has a lot of opportunity to benefit from what’s happening with OpenStack. Like many other vendors such as Cisco for instance and probably HP in some sense, Dell is facing the problem that the core company business of Dell is effectively getting commoditized … largely by this new cloud mentality where everything is becoming commodity. The value added hardware is no longer is hot thing on the block … Google and Amazon just by cheap ODM hardware, and it’s the software that has all the logic in it.

Dell, naturally being in the hardware business, as well as CISCO, as well as HP and many others are facing effectively the same problem that their core business is soon turning to be very low margin on interest, which ultimately could be very devastating for all those vendors.

OpenStack is an opportunity for Dell to transform the company from being largely a hardware vendor to a cloud solution vendor, and I think for that exact reason Dell has been extremely proactive in taking some concrete and interesting steps to make that happen. Dell is in an extremely good position to become one of the leaders, if not THE leader in the OpenStack solutions industry that is emerging.

Rafael: Thank you so much, Boris. It was a pleasure to talk with you!

Resources

Mirantis

Company website: http://www.mirantis.com/

Company blog: http://www.mirantis.com/blog/

Github: https://github.com/Mirantis

Github (Atlas – load balancer): https://github.com/Mirantis/openstack-lbaas

Twitter (Boris Renski): https://twitter.com/zer0tweets

Feedback

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth
Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

This post was originally published on the Ceph Community blog.

We have seen users deploying Ceph in a number of different ways, which is just plain awesome! I have spoken with people deploying with makecephfs, ceph-deploy, Juju, Chef, and even the beginnings of some Puppet work. However, thanks to collaboration between Inktank and Dell there is a really solid deployment pathway using Dell’s Crowbar tool and a Ceph “barclamp.”

For those not familiar with Dell Crowbar, it is an Open Source cloud deployment framework that originated as a way for Dell to support their OpenStack and Hadoop powered solutions. Since its inception, and eventual open source-ing at OSCON 2011, it has come a long way, growing into the full-featured solution that we see today. Crowbar uses packages called “barclamps” that allow individuals to create ready-made ways to deploy the tools they want (like Chef’s “recipes” or Juju’s “charms”). These barclamps include custom UI for config, dependency graphs, and even localization support. Using it as one of the powerful devops vehicles to deploy Ceph seemed like the next logical step.

NOTE: If you are looking to actually follow a step-by-step guide for installing Ceph and OpenStack via Crowbar, please take a look at our full install guide on the Inktank site.

HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

There are a few prerequisites before you charge off wildly and start installing Crowbar nodes all over your datacenter. First, while Crowbar is hardware agnostic, you need to make sure that your nodes have an IPMI (intelligent platform management interface) accessible w/ a BMC (baseboard management controller). A BMC is the smarts behind the whole IPMI mojo and allows you to control the hardware from the Crowbar admin node.

While the network settings are configurable, Dell also recommends that you have VLAN-capable NICs and switches. Crowbar uses five different networks via 802.1Q which makes network setup much easier, although slightly more expensive for those components. Given the amount of network traffic between OpenStack and Ceph, having 10G ethernet is usually never a bad idea either.

GETTING SET UP

Crowbar uses a number of tools, starting with a full OS install of Ubuntu. Below is a quick list of what you can expect to be installed with the Crowbar ISO:

1. Ubuntu: Ubuntu Server. We recommend version 12.04 LTS or later.
2. Opscode® Chef™: Opscode Chef and its dependencies (e.g. Ruby, nginx, RabbitMQ, etc.)
3. Nagios: Nagios infrastructure monitoring software.
4. Ganglia: Ganglia distributed monitoring system.
5. Dell Crowbar: Crowbar software and additional scripts for Admin nodes, etc.

Thankfully, Dell makes all of this quite painless by providing a Crowbar ISO (start here) that you can burn and boot from to get your admin node set up (you can also use a bootstrat node and PXE boot the admin node). There is a small bit of config once you have things installed, but then you are able to jump right into a browser-based Crowbar admin interface that helps you configure the rest.

DEPLOYING BARCLAMPS

In Crowbar, the language you use to deploy the contents of a barclamp to a node is called a “proposal.” This allows you to point a barclamp one or more nodes, and install it in true fire-and-forget fashion. The mechanics for doing this are just as easy as they sound:

1. Click on a barclamp and click “create.” A dialogue box will open.
2. Drag-and-drop an available node from the left-hand side list to a role on the right-hand side list.
3. Click “apply.”
4. Wait for Crowbar to apply the proposal successfully.

That’s it! That’s all it takes. You just need to replicate this for each piece that you wish to install. For an OpenStack install you should install the following Barclamps:

1. Mysql
2. Keystone
3. Swift
4. Glance
5. Nova dashboard
6. Nova

INSTALLING CEPH

While future versions of the Crowbar ISO will have the ability to install Ceph by default, currently you have to deploy it by hand. The best way to do this is grab the two Barclamps from Inktank’s site. This will allow you to deploy Ceph, and allow OpenStack’s Nova to work with Ceph.

VERIFYING YOUR SETUP

Now that you have both OpenStack and Ceph deployed on your Crowbar nodes it’s probably a good idea to verify that OpenStack can actually create Ceph block devices. In order to do this you can head on over to the Nova dashboard interface and under “manage compute” click on “instances and volumes.” Here you can just select the “create volume” button and pick a name and size.

Once that completes you can drop down into Ceph and take a look at the volume that was just created for you with a simple “sudo rbd ls” command on your Ceph monitor node. That’s it, you now have the power of Ceph to go with your OpenStack install, all courtesy of Crowbar! Enjoy your delicious cloud deployment and all of the associated goodness.

CONCLUSION

As you can see, the process is quite painless and allows for a large amount of flexibility for both deployment and usability. Once you have this install you can even drop a raw image into Ceph and then import it into Glance. This makes for simple deployment of pre-configured machines, and easier is (almost) always better!

It’s great to see Ceph being deployed in such a number of different ways and under an amazing number of circumstances. The Crowbar deployment is definitely a solid option if you are evaluating enterprise deployment architectures like Chef, Puppet, or Juju. And, no matter what your deployment strategy, if you would like help with your Ceph cluster Inktank is always more than happy to help!

This week’s highlight: “Announcing OpenStack Day 15 December, Bangalore India” - register here. We will keep you posted on further upcoming OpenStack events in India, and we will also provide you some more insights into what’s cooking in that region including China and Japan.

Enjoy reading the sixth issue of the Dell Open Source Ecosystem Digest, a collection of relevant technical content around OpenStack and Hadoop authored by Dell as well our partners and friends. Your feedback is appreciated greatly!

PS. I also invite you to read the second episode of OpenStack Board of Directors Talks Series with Boris Renski, Co-Founder & EVP at Mirantis (for those who don’t know yet: these guys are the largest and most experienced OpenStack systems integrator globally).

OpenStack

Ceph: “Deploying Ceph with a Crowbar”
http://ceph.com/community/deploying-ceph-with-a-crowbar/

Inktank: “Launch of our new Pre-Production Subscribtion”
http://www.inktank.com/inktank-2/pre-production-subscription/

Inktank: “Why you Need Ceph, Part1: Block Storage for the Cloud” by Roger Weeks
http://www.inktank.com/ceph-2/block-storage-for-the-cloud/

Mirantis: “What people talk about when they talk about OpenStack Cloud” by David Fishman
http://www.mirantis.com/blog/what-people-talk-about-when-they-talk-about-openstack-cloud/

Mirantis: “Mirantis Offers Do-it-Yourself OpenStack” by David Fishman
http://www.mirantis.com/blog/mirantis-offers-do-it-yourself-openstack/

Morphlabs: "Powering the Cloud" (Please visit the site to view this file)

"OpenStack Foundation : “Announcing OpenStack Day 15 December, Bangalore India” http://www.openstack.org/blog/2012/12/announcing-openstack-day-15-december-bangalore-india/

OpenStack Foundation: “OpenStack in action 3! The Open Revolution / Paris, November 29th, 2012” http://www.openstack.org/blog/2012/12/openstack-in-action-3-the-open-revolution-paris-november-29th-2012/

Piston Cloud: “Gartner DC 2012: How Simplicity Will Transform IT” by Gretchen Curtis
http://www.pistoncloud.com/2012/12/gartner-dc-2012-simplicity/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=gartner-dc-2012-simplicity

Piston Cloud: “Null-Tier Architecture”
http://www.pistoncloud.com/cloud-technology/cloud-architecture/

Piston Cloud: “Intel Cloud Builders Guide to Cloud Design and Deployment on Intel Platforms”
http://www.pistoncloud.com/doc/Intel_Cloud_Builders_Piston_Cloud.pdf

SUSE: “Get your head in the private cloud with Dell and SUSE” by Nathan Barney
https://www.suse.com/blogs/get-your-head-in-the-private-cloud-with-dell-and-suse/

Hadoop

Cloudera: “Apache Hadoop Training and Certification”
http://university.cloudera.com/

Cloudera: “How to Contribute to Apache Hadoop Projects, in 24 Minutes”
http://blog.cloudera.com/blog/2012/12/how-to-contribute-to-apache-hadoop-projects-in-24-minutes/

Cloudera: “Hadoop World 2012 Videos”
http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/resources/library.html?category=cloudera-resources%3Aconferences-and-events%2Fhadoop-world&q=hadoop+world+2012

Dell

“double Block Head with OpenStack+Equallogic & Crowbar+Ceph” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Blog
http://robhirschfeld.com/2012/12/14/openstack-equalogics-ceph-crowbar/

"Dell takes its OpenStack Commitment to the Next Level" - by Kamesh Pemmaraju - Personal Blog
http://www.cloudel.com/dell-takes-its-openstack-commitment-to-the-next-level/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=dell-takes-its-openstack-commitment-to-the-next-level

“Introducing Project Fast PaaS and Dell Cloud Labs” - Dell Services Youtube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSPKVhy3250&feature=youtube_gdata

“Dell Services Helps Customers Transform IT with New and Expanded Offerings Across Security, Cloud, Application Modernization and Support” http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/secure/2012-12-12-dell-world-services.aspx?ref=rss

“OpenStack Austin Meeting 12-6” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Youtube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oh8QFKeIF0&feature=youtube_gdata+#

“OpenStack Board of Directors Talks: Episode 2 with Boris Renski, Co-Founder & EVP at Mirantis” by Rafael Knuth at Dell TechCenter
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2012/12/13/openstack-board-of-directors-talks-episode-2-with-boris-renski-co-founder-amp-evp-at-mirantis.aspx

Contributors

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

Contact

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth
Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

Posted on behalf of Gireesha US from Dell Linux Engineering team.

OSI (Open Source India) Days - The Asia's Mega Open Source Convention ( www.osidays.com) was being organized for the 9^th time in India during October 12 to 14 at the NIMHANS Convention Center, Bangalore. It was targeted at nurturing and promoting the open source ecosystem.

This year, the conference was segmented with different domain-specific events to include more topics encompassing open source tools, technology and beyond.

Day - 1 (Academia, Mobile App Dev Day & Cloud Day); A entire day dedicated for Cloud Computing.

Day - 2 (Managing IT Infra, Web Dev Day & Kernel Day)

Day - 3 (FOSS For Everyone, Database Day)

Please visit  http://osidays.com/osidays_schedule.html to browse the scheduled programs in the conference.

Apart from technology sessions, there were hands-on workshops on HTML5, MySQL, MySQL Cluster, OpenLDAP, Managing PostgreSQL Databases, JBoss etc. from the industry experts. An interesting workshop on App Development, talked about why should developers choose Android, basics of Android platform, development environment set-up, Android building blocks, Android user interface, resources framework, storage options, accessing Phone Components and publishing an application.

OSI days attracted professionals from industry, community and students who came to have a closer look and feel of the FOSS (Free Open Source Software) ecosystem.

Dell R&D center team contributes to different open source programs through code contribution. Dell has contributed to open source in various areas like IPMI, Systems Management and network subsystems and contribution has been recognized by the community. Also, Dell has contributed to many community conferences.

Dell R&D center has been participating in the OSI days conference by providing presentation on different topic to share the knowledge and expertise. Apart from this Dell also being one of the advisory committee member to help them strategize the entire conference.

These are list of topic, on which Dell India R&D center Bangalore has shared the knowledge and expertise.

- Keynote talk on Combination of cloud and high performance computing clusters

Presenter: Ramesh Rajagopalan, Engineering Director

- Talk on “Simplifying The Build Procedure Using Yocto Framework” - An introduction to Yocto project which helps create custom linux distributions

Presenter: Surya Prabhakar, Software Dev Engineer and Prasad Neti, Platform software Engineer

- Talk on “Deploying Openstack Using Crowbar” - An introduction to Crowbar software framework with automates and accelerates the deployment, configuration and ongoing operation of the cloud.

Presenter: Surya Prabhakar, Software Dev Engineer and Srinivas Gowda G, Software Dev Engineer

- Talk on “I/O Subsystem Enhancements To Harness Solid State Storage” - Quantifying the Linux IO subsystem bottlenecks for High Performance SSDs

Presenter: Ashokan Vellimalai, Storage Dev Engineer and Harikrishnan R, Platform software Engineer

- Talk on “Openstack-Quantum” - Introduced Quantum -Network as service module in Openstack.

Presenter: Surya Prabhakar, Software Dev Engineer

- Talk on “Exploring Devstack”  - Setting up and running OpenStack inside a VM. Introduction on basic components of OpenStack and its development environment

Presenter: Srinivas Gowda G, Software Dev Engineer

- Talk on “Network Monitoring with Nagios” - Introduce Nagios and how we can use it for smaller to larger networks data centers to simplify the management of network resources.

Presenter: Gireesha US, Software Dev Engineer

Please visit   http://osidays.com/speakers.html to browse list of speakers that were part of the conference.

Open Source India 2012 concluded with positive note, promising to come back next year with much more power and increased involvement of the open source community.

OSI days 2013 will be conducted during November 13 to 15 at the NIMHANS Convention Center, Bangalore (http://osidays.com/osidays/)

Hi Community, here is my compilation of the most interesting technical blog posts written by members of the Microsoft MVP Community. Currently, there are only a few MVPs contributing to this compilation, but more will follow soon. @all MVPs If you’d like me to add your blog posts to my weekly compilation, please send me an email (florian_klaffenbach@dell.com) or reach out to me via Twitter (@FloKlaffenbach). Thanks!

Featured Posts of the Week!

Monitoring Startup,Shutdown and restart of a Virtual machine With PowerShell 3.0 by Didier van Hoye

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: VM Resource Metering via PowerShell by Thomas Maurer

Deploying RedHat Enterprise Linux (And Probably CentOS) On Hyper-V Is About To Get Easier by Aidan Finn

How to Add a Native-Boot Virtual Hard Disk to the Boot Menu #Hyperv by James van den Berg

Hyper-V

Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V: VM Resource Metering via PowerShell by Thomas Maurer

Deploying RedHat Enterprise Linux (And Probably CentOS) On Hyper-V Is About To Get Easier by Aidan Finn

My Interview About Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Changing The Market On SearchServerVirtualization by Aidan Finn

Network Based Monitoring Solution By ExtraHop Appears To Be Using Virtual Switch Extension by Aidan Finn

Monitoring Startup,Shutdown and restart of a Virtual machine With PowerShell 3.0 by Didier van Hoye

How to Add a Native-Boot Virtual Hard Disk to the Boot Menu #Hyperv by James van den Berg

Windows Server Core

You Got To Love Windows Server 2012 Deduplication for Backups by Didier van Hoye

System Center Core

System Center 2012 Service Pack 1 Has RTMd … Allegedly by Aidan Finn

PowerShell

New PowerShell 3.0 Video Training Course by Jeffery Hicks

How is my WinRM service configured? by Jeff Wouters (no MVP)

A PowerShell oneliner that exponentially consumes all memory by Jeff Wouters (no MVP)

Remove the saved state of a VM with PowerShell by Jeff Wouters (no MVP)

PowerShell 3.0 Workflows @ PowerShell Bangalore User Group meeting by Ravikanth Chaganti

Windows 8

Tablets Are The Entry Point For Windows 8 In Business – Pay Attention Partners! by Aidan Finn

Azure

Moving Applications to the #Cloud, 3rd Edition – Free Book Download #WindowsAzure by James van den Berg

Hardware

Himmlische IT Podcast Folge 23: Kerstins Surface in German by Kerstin Rachfahl

Microsoft Core

2012: A Year of Microsoft Milestones by Thomas Maurer

Other MVPs I follow

James van den Berg - MVP for SCCDM System Center Cloud and DataCenter Management
Kristian Nese - MVP for System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management
Ravikanth Chaganti - MVP for PowerShell
Jan Egil Ring - MVP for PowerShell
Jeffery Hicks - MVP for PowerShell
Marcelo Vighi - MVP for Exchange
Lai Yoong Seng - MVP for Virtual Machine
Rob McShinsky - MVP for Virtual Machine
Hans Vredevoort - MVP for Virtual Machine
Leandro Carvalho - MVP for Virtual Machine
Didier van Hoye - MVP for Virtual Machine
Aidan Finn - MVP for Virtual Machine
Carsten Rachfahl - MVP for Virtual Machine
Thomas Maurer - MVP for Virtual Machine
Alessandro Cardoso - MVP for Virtual Machine
Ramazan Can - MVP for Cluster
Marcelo Sinic - MVP Windows Expert-IT Pro
Ulf B. Simon-Weidner - MVP for Windows Server – Directory Services
Meinolf Weber - MVP for Windows Server – Directory Services
Nils Kaczenski - MVP for Windows Server – Directory Services
Kerstin Rachfahl - MVP for Office 365

No MVP but he should be one

Jeff Wouters - PowerShell

Welcome to the new episode of tech talks with outstanding Microsoft community members from all over the world. Most interviews are with Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), and if you are not familiar with that program yet, I recommend you reading my recent introductory interview. In this episode I talk with Thomas Maurer, a Switzerland based MVP, expert for System Center and private Cloud. Enjoy reading!

Readable Interview:

Flo: Thomas, you were just nominated as MVP for Virtual Machine. Congratulations! Tell us about you and your company and also how it feels to be a Microsoft MVP.

Thomas: My name is Thomas Maurer. I work as a Private Cloud Architect for ITNETX, a consulting and engineering company in Switzerland. We are focused on Microsoft technology, especially Windows Server Hyper-V and SystemCenter ... systems management and Microsoft virtualization. My focus area is Hyper-V and VMM (Virtual Machine Manager). I'm working on a lot of projects for customers where we built the base for private cloud. Since this year I’m MVP for Virtual Machine and it’s a big honor for me.

Flo: How does your role as MVP relate to your work at ITNETX?

Thomas: I became a MVP because of my work at ITNETX. In Switzerland we don’t have so many Hyper-V deployments at the moment, and at INTETX I spend all my time working with Hyper-V and System Center, that’s a huge opportunity and that’s how I get a lot of experience in this area. Also, as a MVP I give presentations for Microsoft, partners and at events like E2EVC conference.

Flo: ITNETX is one of the key companies for private clouds and System Center in Switzerland and was awarded with the Microsoft Data Center Partner Award in 2012. Can you give us a brief overview over your projects? Which were the most challenging ones and what are your biggest accomplishments for customers so far?

Thomas: ITNETX just got awarded by Microsoft second time in a row by the way, for being the Microsoft Partner of the Year 2012 in Data Center and that’s a big honor. We try to achieve this next year as well.

The biggest challenge is: You have to understand customer needs and you have to be always working with newest technology. We are trying to get the best solutions for our customers - the greatest and latest technology from Microsoft. Hardware-wise we are vendor independent; we are looking at different hardware vendors. It’s sometimes a challenge to get new Microsoft technology working on old hardware or getting vendors to build hardware which supports new technologies … specially Hyper-V and many of its functionalities.

Flo: What are the major differences in cloud computing between Europe and the US?

Thomas: I cannot say much about the US market; I am not working for companies in the US. I do work for international companies based outside the US, and we are for example part of the System Center 2012 TAP program.

In Switzerland security and data privacy is a big issue. I think that other countries are doing the step to the cloud really fast and it’s going to happen sooner or later in every country. But it will take some time specially Switzerland, which is not that fast in going forward with new technologies.

Flo: Let’s talk a bit about Microsoft private cloud solutions. What’s your absolute killer feature in Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V?

Thomas: There are a lot of great features such as ESXi or Xen management. If I had to pick two features I would choose first Hyper-V Replica, which allows you to easily migrate or replicate virtual machines from one host or one cluster to another host or cluster. That was a big problem for disaster recovery in the past. There are lot of companies which didn’t have disaster recovery yet. Or if they had it, it was too complex to work with. If a disaster happened no one knew what to do. So they had to call the vendor, and he had to do the failover and it was not that easy. Hyper-V Replica is going to change that because everything is built into Hyper-V Manger and Microsoft Failover Cluster Manger (MSFCM). I think it will be in System Center 2012 as well and that’s one of the greatest features.

The other feature I’d like to mention: You don’t need to place Hyper-V virtual machines on block storage any more. You can use SMB 3.0 for storage instead. You are not limited to expensive block storage anymore. You now have more options and potential scenarios for Hyper-V usage in various hardware environments.

Flo: How do you see data centers change over the next few years?

Thomas:  Well, what I see at the moment in data centers is that there is lack of management capabilities. A lot of companies still do script based “slow management”. Many companies lack a management suite allowing them do everything from within it.

Interviewer: You mean there's lack of automation in data centers?

Thomas: Absolutely, yes. There is no real orchestration in a lot of data centers I have seen in Switzerland. That has to change because a data center is a dynamic environment. You don’t put in a server and let it run for five, six or seven years. That’s changing and you have to deliver faster to your customers. If your customer requests servers or applications, you have to be able to deliver them quickly. That is changing more and more and it has to.

Flo: So in the future you will not care about the rack of servers but only about the mount of storage, CPUs, memory you need for virtual machine deployment for example - correct?

Thomas: Yeah, absolutely! That’s the kind of stuff we already do for customers. We try to go away from a “I need a server!” type of thinking. Instead we ask: “What do you need for your application or service to run?” We are putting a layer between the service, OS and the hardware. So you just have resources which so you can use for your applications and you don’t care as an application owner if this is block storage or file storage, you don’t care which CPU it is … it just has to perform. That’s what the fabric layer has to do and the fabric layer doesn't really care which applications are running inside your virtual machines. Of course the fabric layer has to know what performance is needed and: “Is it disk related? Is it IO related? Or CPU related?” … but: At the end the fabric layer has to take care of that. System Center and Windows Server 2012 provides a perfect solution for that.

Flo: Should hardware be more intelligent or … more stupid?

Thomas: It sounds a little bit strange now but I think it has to be both. Hardware has to be stupid and intelligent at the same time in a way that I want the hardware to take care of itself without installing lots of sophisticated tools to manage it. I simply expect the hardware to run and if it doesn’t, I will replace it.

Flo: Thank you very much, Thomas. I am looking forward to interview you soon and to dive deeply into some of the topics we talked about today.

Thomas: Sure, Flo!

Contacts:

http://www.thomasmaurer.ch/
http://www.itnetx.ch/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/thomasmaurer2
Twitter: @ThomasMaurer

Resources:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/systemcenter/
http://blogs.technet.com/b/virtualization/

Think of RiverMeadow as Cloud Migration as a Service (C-MaaS). It's the key to cloud self-service onboarding. The RiverMeadow cloud migration SaaS automates the migration of physical, virtual and cloud-based servers (as-is) into and between public, private and hybrid clouds.

The RiverMeadow cloud migration SaaS, provides a turnkey, high-performance platform for rapid customer onboarding that dramatically reduces the cost and complexity characteristic of traditional cloud migration solutions.

Without having to manually rebuild into templates, install agents or take servers offline, the RiverMeadow SaaS employs an automated process that Collects, Converts, Deploys and Synchronizes servers into most cloud environments, simplifying cloud migration projects from start-to-finish.

 (Please visit the site to view this video)

TIME                       QUESTION
0.0                          About Scott Metzger
0.42                        Tell us about RiverMeadow
2.22                        enCloud – Product Overview
5.03                        How does the process work?
8.13                        Video Demo - http://www.rivermeadow.com/products-solutions/encloud-demo.html
9.10                        Final Thoughts

BIO

Scott Metzger, COO & CTO

Scott Metzger is Chief Operating & Technology Officer at RiverMeadow Software and is responsible for the overall operations and technology direction of RiverMeadow. Before RiverMeadow, Metzger was vice president of corporate development at Violin Memory, with a focus on analytics. Prior to Violin Memory, Scott held the position of senior vice president (SVP) of products, engineering and operations for Apigee Corporation. At Apigee, he was instrumental in strategically transforming and scaling the company, increasing revenue growth from 400 to 900 percent in just a year and a half. Prior to Apigee, Metzger was CTO of TransUnion Interactive (formerly TrueLink), where he was recognized by InfoWorld as one of the top 25 CTOs for his vision and ability to drive double-digit growth year-over-year. During his tenure at TransUnion, Metzger helped grow the company's revenue from less than 10 million to well over 100 million while maintaining high margins. Metzger has worked in a number of industries including game development, education, healthcare, financial services and technology products and services. He has filed more than a dozen patents with two awarded to date. Prior to his executive roles at Apigee, TransUnion, Metzger held senior consulting and engineering positions at Baxter International, CalPoly Media Lab, and Zmode.

Cloudsoft Corporation is a software company specialising in multi-cloud application management, enabling enterprises to better exploit the benefits of cloud computing: using cloud without losing control.

Cloudsoft provides comprehensive professional open source support and services, actively sponsoring established open source projects such as Apache Whirr and jclouds which together with its recently open sourced control plane, Brooklyn, form the basis of Cloudsoft’s Application Management Platform. This fully supported open source platform enables enterprises to develop, deploy and manage large-scale distributed applications at lower cost, reduced complexity and minimal risk while avoiding vendor lock-in.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

Time                      Question
0.0                          Introduction of Alex
1.03                        Background of CloudSoft
1.50                        What is the Apache licensed project Brooklyn?
2.30                        Is Brooklyn an extension of DevOps?
2.58                        What clouds do you support?
3.22                        Where to get more information?
3.49                        How do I buy your product (AMP)?
4.10                        Does CloudSoft help enterprise customers create missing features in open source solution?

BIO

Alex Heneveld (Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer) brings twenty years experience designing software solutions in the enterprise, start-up, and academic sectors.

Most recently Alex was with Enigmatec Corporation where he led the development of what is now the Monterey® Middleware Platform™. Previous to that, he founded PocketWatch Systems, commercialising results from his doctoral research.

Alex holds a PhD (Informatics) and an MSc (Cognitive Science) from the University of Edinburgh and an AB (Mathematics) from Princeton University. Alex was both a USA Today Academic All-Star and a Marshall Scholar.

Global Solutions Engineering has just completed a detailed study of Lync Server 2010 on Active System 800v. The content in this design and implementation guide is most useful for those seeking a validated design of Lync on this pre-configured set of resources. The results could also be of value to IT professionals who want Lync sizing information on VMware vSphere 5.1. This sizing study is an extension of the group’s previous effort that sized Lync Server 2010 on Microsoft Hyper-V using Windows Server 2008 R2.

The guide provides substantial amount of configuration detail and performance data to those seeking to leverage Active System 800v for Lync. A total of only eight virtual machines (VMs) are needed for a 5,000 user deployment. By using vSphere 5.1 features such as reservations and memory locking effectively, this pool of resources can be leveraged for other workloads without any performance compromise, and it is encouraged that customers do so. For Lync, two VMs are used for Front End, two for AV Conferencing, one for Back End SQL Server, one for Archiving+Monitoring, and two for a load balancer ha-pair. Validation was conducted not only for the Lync Front End and AV Conferencing Servers, but also for the Back End SQL Server. The design presented is for 5,000 users.

Those readers interested in converged networking will also find this guide of interest. Active System 800v uses 10GbE networking and a set of features enabled by Data Center Bridging (DCB) to eliminate segregated LAN/SAN networking within the datacenter. Specifically, for this deployment with Lync, EqualLogic PS6110X iSCSI SAN arrays are used to store the operating system + application and the SQL data stores. There is little or no performance impact by using a fewer networking gear as long as DCB is implemented properly. Customers will have a working configuration, including DCB parameters after the completion of a services engagement on the pre-racked and pre-configured Active System.

The performance study was done using the Lync Stress and Performance Tool. Please note that due to limitations of this tool, web and video conferencing were not validated. For detailed best practices, configuration guidelines, performance validation procedures, and results, please refer to Microsoft Lync Server 2010: Design and Implementation on Dell Active System 800v.

This article provides a comprehensive checklist to be considered while migrating to Microsoft Windows Server 2012 on Dell Servers.

With Microsoft’s leap into Microsoft Windows Server 2012, the IT infrastructure of an organization is all set to traverse a new level of technologies with the wide range of features provided by this OS. As Microsoft announced the release of this OS, the adoption rates across the Industry are expected to scale to the sky.

We at Dell have performed extensive testing of this OS on all supported Dell platforms and to facilitate a smooth transition to this operating system for our customers, have come up with a helpful checklist. We highly recommend referring to the below checklist while upgrading servers to Microsoft Windows Server 2012.

Quick Checks:

Note: Dell doesn’t guarantee any data integrity during the upgrade process and hence it is highly recommended to back up your data before initiating the upgrade.

• Verify if your Dell server is supported for Windows Server 2012.  You can check this information here.

• Verify if the server contains minimum supported BIOS/FW version:
• Check the minimum BIOS/FW version required for your server to run Windows Server 2012 here. It is always recommended to use the latest BIOS which is beyond the mentioned minimum BIOS. 

• Checking the support for PowerEdge Expandable RAID Controller (PERC) and other peripherals with Windows Server 2012. Refer to our Early Adopters’ Guide.

• Software RAID support, limitations and workarounds:

• Dell software RAID S100 and S300 are not supported with Windows Server 2012.Detailed support statement and workarounds can be found here.

• Considerations for Operating System editions while upgrading to Windows Server 2012:

Refer to below table for supported upgrade paths. Additionally you can refer here.

On detailed steps to install the operating system you can refer to our Installation Guide.

• Using Dell-provided Windows Server 2012 multilingual OS experience:

Dell PowerEdge servers that are shipped with Dell-installed Windows Server 2012 OS provides a multilingual experience at first boot i.e. when a customer powers on the server for the first time, he is provided with a language selection screen before login. At this stage customer can select his/her desired language and then proceed. Additionally this server also carries an OS recovery DVD media which will provide exactly the same multilingual experience for the customers when booted through it.

For more details refer here.

• Check for Driver availability:

- A detailed list of devices for which drivers are available within the OS can be found here.

- For a number of devices whose drivers are not part of OS and Dell is working to provide the drivers for our customers can be found here with its latest status or expected time to release.

• Upgrading Dell OpenManage when transitioning to Windows Server 2012:

Dell OpenManage 7.1 provides partial support and Dell OpenManage 7.2 offers comprehensive support for Windows Server 2012. For details on important considerations for upgrading your server with Dell OpenManage refer to this article.

• Known Issues:

For a list of known issues and its workaround refer to our Important Information Guide.

So Say SMEs in Virtualization & Cloud

Episode 50 represents the Season One Finale to So Say SMEs. Kong Yang and Todd Muirhead reflect on Dell World 2012, the inaugural DellTechCenter.com  K1 Racing Event at Dell World, and the software defined era with a dash of DevOps. Below are pictures from the DellTechCenter.com K1 Racing Event.

Thank you for supporting us this past year and we look forward to providing you more techie insights in 2013. As always, we welcome your thoughts and feedback. 

Please click below to view the video.

(Please visit the site to view this video)

This week’s highlight: Interview with Atul Jha co-organizer of the OpenStack Day in Bangalore. For a recap of the most recent event click here. Also, you can register for the upcoming OpenStack Day in Bangalore 01-19-2013 here.

Enjoy reading the eighth issue of the Dell Open Source Ecosystem Digest, a collection of relevant technical content around OpenStack and Hadoop authored by Dell as well our partners and friends. Your feedback is appreciated greatly!

Interview with Atul Jha

Rafael: Atul, can you tell us about the OpenStack meetup in India? When did you start? Who's attending? What are the trending topics in the OpenStack community in India?

Atul: We started OpenStack meetup less than a year back. Most of the attendees have been newbies and people affiliated to companies with OpenStack project. In past 4-5 months we have seen lots of participation coming from college students as well. All the meetups we have a talk which covers basics of OpenStack project. We have had interesting talk on almost all the OpenStack components including the Swift/Nova/Keystone/Quantum. We also covered orchestration tools such as Juju and Crowbar in our talks.

Rafael: Tell us about OpenStack adoption in India. Who are the the drivers? Which trends do you see in OpenStack adoption in India?

Atul: We are seeing some traction in startups and system integrator companies. Even some Government Organizations in India are working/testing OpenStack for their use.

Rafael: How can people help promote OpenStack community activities in India?

Atul: Well, help us in whatever way you can by providing resource person to present in meetup, sponsor our events.

Rafael: Can you point us to OpenStack resources in India? Blogs? People to follow on Twitter?

Atul: Sure!

Slideshare: slideshare.net/openstackindia
Meetup: meetup.com/Indian-OpenStack-User-Group
Twitter: @openstackindia
Blog: openstack.org/blog
People to follow: @kavitaptira@syedarmani@mail2fashion@riteshnanda09@koolhead17

OpenStack

Ceph: “Deploying Ceph with a Crowbar”
http://ceph.com/community/deploying-ceph-with-a-crowbar/

Ceph in the Dell OpenStack-Powered Cloud Solution
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=8i49NeWNgCM

Inktank: Dell landing page
http://www.inktank.com/dell/

Inktank: “Intro to Ceph with OpenStack” webinar 01-24-2013
https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/8847/63177

Inktank: “Ceph and Inktank at LISA12” by Roger Weeks
http://www.inktank.com/ceph-2/ceph-and-inktank-at-lisa12/

Mirantis: “A look at individual membership in the OpenStack Foundation” by David Fishman
http://www.mirantis.com/blog/a-look-at-individual-membership-in-the-openstack-foundation/

OpenStack Foundation: “Event Report: OpenStack Day, Bangalore, India”
http://www.openstack.org/blog/2012/12/event-report-openstack-day-bangalore-india/

Piston Cloud: “How OpenStack is Changing the World: Thoughts from UP 2012” by Joshua McKenty
http://www.pistoncloud.com/2012/12/openstack-changing-the-world-up-2012/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=openstack-changing-the-world-up-2012

Piston Cloud: “My 2012 Predictions: Did they happen?” by Joshua McKenty
http://www.pistoncloud.com/2012/12/2012-predictions-did-they-happen/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=2012-predictions-did-they-happen

Rackspace: “An Introduction To Hybrid Hosting” by Paul Croteau
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/an-introduction-to-hybrid-hosting/

SUSE: “Learn about SUSE Cloud” by Andreas Jaeger
https://www.suse.com/blogs/learn-about-suse-cloud/

SUSE: “SUSE & Dell World” by Phillipp Rockrell
https://www.suse.com/blogs/suse-dell-world/

SUSE: “SUSE and Dell Partner for Enterprise OpenStack Solutions” by Michael Miller
https://www.suse.com/blogs/suse-and-dell-partner-for-enterprise-openstack-solutions/

Hadoop

Cloudera: “Register for any Cloudera Administrator Training for Apache Hadoop class scheduled until March 31, 2013, and get a free ebook copy of Hadoop Operations by Eric Sammer.”
http://university.cloudera.com/training/apache_hadoop/administrator.html

Datameer: “Big Data – Crossing the Chasm in 2013!” by Stefan Groschupf
http://www.datameer.com/blog/big-data-analytics-perspectives/big-data-crossing-the-chasm-in-2013.html

Datameer: “Delivering Insightful Analytics in a Data Driven World” recorded webinar in collaboration with Cloudera
http://info.datameer.com/Web-Delivering-Insightful-Analytics-Data-Driven-World.html

Datameer: “On the Radar: Datameer” by Ovum Group
http://info.datameer.com/Web-ovum-on-the-radar-datameer.html

Datameer: “Building a Big Data Recommendation Engines” webinar 01-30-2013
http://info.datameer.com/Building-Big-Data-Recommendation-Engine.html

Datameer: “Reflecting on Big Data in 2012” by Joe Nicholson
http://www.datameer.com/blog/big-data-analytics-perspectives/reflecting-on-big-data-in-2012.html

Pentaho: “Big Data Speeds Across the Chasm” by Quentin Gallivan
http://blog.pentaho.com/2012/12/14/big-data-speeds-across-the-chasm/

Pentaho: “Top Industry Analyst Firms Recognize Pentaho’s Business Analytics Platform”
http://www.pentaho.com/press-room/releases/112/top-industry-analyst-firms-recognize-pentaho-s-business-analytics-platform/

Pentaho: “7 Things to Ask When Looking for Self-Service Analytics for Big Data Stores”
http://blog.pentaho.com/2012/12/18/7-things-to-ask-when-looking-for-self-service-analytics-for-big-data-stores/

Dell

“My Dilemma with Folsom – why I want to jump to G” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Blog
http://robhirschfeld.com/2012/12/06/dilemma-openstack-folsom/

“Crowbar 2 Design Meeting Dec 18” by Rob Hirschfeld - Personal Youtube Channel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fdi6xD15TDU&feature=youtube_gdata

“What is enStratus? – DellWorld 2012” by Michael Coté - Personal Blog
http://drunkandretired.com/2012/12/15/what-is-enstratus/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cote+%28DrunkAndRetired.com%3A+Cot%C3%A9+Content%29

“I’d prefer my toilet to not fail fast – #InnoIT Think Tank” by Michael Coté - Personal Blog
http://drunkandretired.com/2012/12/14/fail-fast-toilet/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cote+%28DrunkAndRetired.com%3A+Cot%C3%A9+Content%29

“XPS 13 Developer Edition takes off” by Barton George - Personal Blog
http://bartongeorge.net/2012/12/19/xps-13-developer-edition-takes-off/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+bartongeorge%2FnMQw+%28A+Blueprint+for+the+Cloud%29

“Ten Useful Openstack Swift Features” by Adrian Smith - Personal Blog
http://www.17od.com/2012/12/19/ten-useful-openstack-swift-features/

“【第二回】OpenStackボードオブディレクターTalk - MirantisのCo-Founder & EVP Boris Renski” by Oue Yoshihiro at Dell TechCenter Japan
http://ja.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/weblog/archive/2012/12/20/openstack-talk-mirantis-co-founder-amp-evp-boris-renski.aspx

Contributors

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

Contact

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth
Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

At the end of Dell World 2012, I met a customer for an informal discussion. The customer optimizes their Linux deployments for high performance. These optimizations require certain PCIe controller in specific PCIe slots for different servers. Sometimes, these PCIe controllers are not installed in the specified slots and the customer’s software deployment process is not able to catch it – requiring manual audits. My immediate thought was what about lspci? Well, looking a bit carefully, lspci seems to use the bus address as name for a slot which is not much help if looking for the name printed next to the slot socket.

Apparently, there is no Linux command for listing devices by slots – that is by physical add-in slots or that is what many folks have told me. However, this can be done in two steps as described below,

1. Run dmidecode –t slot and match Bus Address and Designation for populated PCI slots
2. Run lspci –s to get info about device at the Bus Address for a given PCI slot.

These steps can be scripted while someone out there is thinking about providing this capability in existing tools.

Disk drives being the performance bottlenecks for any computer systems seem like an eternal truth. There have always been efforts to get the block storage sub-system to deliver more and quicker. Over time, we have seen many caching schemes for performance enhancement; there are block caching solutions that use some sort of cache memory near the disk drive (either on the disk or on the storage controller) or file system level caching solutions that use system memory. Block-level caching with faster block devices has started to look like viable solutions with availability of larger, reliable and economical SSDs.
  
The Linux open-source community has three generic block-level caching solutions - bcache, dm-cache and flashcache. Patches have been released for all three, but flashcache and bcache efforts appear to have more steam until recently (though that may be changing). Facebook released flashcache and they use it in their production so one may safely say it is the most stable of the three.
  
Performance studies available for these caching solutions are using SATA or SAS SSDs. Dell PowerEdge Express Flash, being a PCIe SSD, has a much higher performance. It would be interesting to see a performance study for these block caching solutions with PowerEdge Express Flash devices.

Dell (VKernel) is hosting a 2 day long online conference on virtualisation and cloud computing. This event, VIRTu Alley, will take place on Tuesday, January 15th from 10:00 – 1:00 EST and Wednesday, January 16th from 10:00-1:30 EST.

This events are free and you have the chance to follow such great speaker like:

Aidan Finn - talking about Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V

Didier van Hoye - talking about Cluster Aware Updating (also on Dell Systems) 

Damain Flynn - Talking about Network Virtualization under Windows Server 2012 

and other great speakers. 

Here you can register for Day 1 and here for Day 2. 

Hi Community, here is my compilation of the most interesting technical blog posts written by members of the Microsoft MVP Community. Currently, there are only a few MVPs contributing to this compilation, but more will follow soon. @all MVPs If you'd like me to add your blog posts to my weekly compilation, please send me an email (Florian_Klaffenbach@dell.com) or reach out to me via Twitter (@FloKlaffenbach). Thanks!

Featured Posts of the Week!

Create An Answer File For Windows Server 2012 Virtual Machine Deployment by Lai Yoong Seng

Convert VHD to VHDX by Lai Yoong Seng

Prevent Rogue DHCP By Enable DHCP Guard in Hyper-V by Lai Yoong Seng

Hyper-V Server 2012 from a USB stick by Romeo Mlinar

Hyper-V 

Microsoft Publishes WS2012 QoS Guidance by Aidan Finn

Create An Answer File For Windows Server 2012 Virtual Machine Deployment by Lai Yoong Seng

Convert VHD to VHDX by Lai Yoong Seng

Prevent Rogue DHCP By Enable DHCP Guard in Hyper-V by Lai Yoong Seng

Hyper-V Server 2012 from a USB stick by Romeo Mlinar

CoreConfig Tool for Windows Server 2012 Server Core by Lai Yoong Seng

Useful Command When Managing Server Core and Hyper-V Server 2012 by Lai Yoong Seng

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

VMM doesn't show hosts performance by Kristian Nese

Get An Additional Service Templates in VMM 2012 SP1 by Lai Yoong Seng

Windows Server Core

WMF 3.0 causes problems with Exchange and SCCM in Portugese by Marcelo Sinic

Windows 8

Windows 8 Client Hyper-V by Thomas Maurer

How to convert a PC from BIOS mode to UEFI mode by Robert Smit

PowerShell

Keep your PowerShell script open when executed by Jeff Wouters

#PSCXTip Testing XML for well-formedness and validity against a schema by Keith Hill

#PSCXTip Manipulating file attributes by Keith Hill

#PSCXTip Getting details about a command’s parameters by Keith Hill

Friday Fun: Scraping the Web with PowerShell v3 by Jeffery Hicks

Excel

Excel-Addin “CSV-Export” für Excel 2010/2007 by Nils Kaczenski

Office 365

Office365 Hybrid Szenario – Video 7 – Test und Demonstration in German by Kerstin Rachfahl

Events

Dell (VKernel) VIRTu Alley Online Symposium by Aidan Finn

Other MVPs I follow

James van den Berg - MVP for SCCDM System Center Cloud and DataCenter Management
Kristian Nese - MVP for System Center Cloud and Datacenter Management
Ravikanth Chaganti - MVP for PowerShell
Jan Egil Ring - MVP for PowerShell
Jeffery Hicks - MVP for PowerShell
Keith Hill - MVP for PowerShell
Marcelo Vighi - MVP for Exchange
Lai Yoong Seng - MVP for Virtual Machine
Rob McShinsky - MVP for Virtual Machine
Hans Vredevoort - MVP for Virtual Machine
Leandro Carvalho - MVP for Virtual Machine
Didier van Hoye - MVP for Virtual Machine
Romeo Mlinar - MVP for Virtual Machine
Aidan Finn - MVP for Virtual Machine
Carsten Rachfahl - MVP for Virtual Machine
Thomas Maurer - MVP for Virtual Machine
Alessandro Cardoso - MVP for Virtual Machine
Ramazan Can - MVP for Cluster
Robert Smit - MVP for Cluster
Marcelo Sinic - MVP Windows Expert-IT Pro
Ulf B. Simon-Weidner - MVP for Windows Server - Directory Services
Meinolf Weber - MVP for Windows Server - Directory Services
Nils Kaczenski - MVP for Windows Server - Directory Services
Kerstin Rachfahl - MVP for Office 365

No MVP but he should be one

Jeff Wouters - PowerShell

Welcome to the new episode of tech talks with outstanding Microsoft community members from all over the world. Most interviews are with Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), and if you are not familiar with that program yet, I recommend you reading my recent introductory interview. In this episode I talk with Marcelo Vighi , a Brasil based MVP, expert for Exchange and Messaging Solutions. Enjoy reading!

Readable Interview:

Flo: Marcelo could you introduce yourself to the community?

Marcelo: My name is Marcelo Vighi, and I live in greater Porto Alegre, RS – Brazil. My hometown is located in the extreme south of Brazil, close to countries like Argentina and Uruguay. I am married and I have no kids. I am 31 years old. I started working in the IT field really young. I have had over 14 years of experience in the IT field, always focusing on Microsoft Exchange Server, Active Directory, and other Microsoft Infrastructure solutions like: PKI, Clusters, DNS, WINS, etc.

Flo: What is your focus area as MVP?

Marcelo: I am an Exchange Server Most Valuable Professional focused on Exchange Server architecture. But I have also focused a big part of my career working with Active Directory design, implementation, and architecture.

Flo: Let us talk about your daily work. Your work for Dell as Systems Integration Sr. Advisor at Dell. What do you do there and what are your everyday tasks?

Marcelo: Currently I am a Systems Integration Sr. Advisor for the Dell™ Email Management Services (EMS) for Microsoft Exchange Server in Brazil. I am responsible for onboarding new customers to our Email Management Services (EMS) solutions. As part of this job, on a daily basis, I also provide planning, deployment, and training for Dell™ Email Management Services (EMS), EMS Email Archive, Email Security, Wireless Continuity solutions for enterprise and small business customers.

Flo: Could you tell us something about upcoming projects? If yes how do they look like and what is the challenge?

Marcelo: All I can tell is that I will start writing for a very important Exchange resource website in Portuguese where I will add content on a weekly basis. Also I am working, with other MVPs, for creating new free online training sessions in Portuguese regarding Exchange Server 2010 and 2013 for the Microsoft Virtual Academy website.

Flo: We all know Exchange 2013 is RTM now. Could you explain us the major changes between 2010 and 2013?

Marcelo: I think that the major changes in Exchange 2013 are related with the product’s architecture. Up front the thing that stands out the most is the server roles that are available in Exchange 2013, Client Access and Mailbox. Yes, all other roles are eliminated (Edge role will be available in a later service pack, 2013 will be compatible with 2010 Edge). The Client Access Server role has absorbed internet facing SMTP transport while the Mailbox role has absorbed internal SMTP transport. Outwardly that’s the largest difference in the new version; however there are a number of internal architectural differences as well as new features.

Flo: What is the absolute killer feature for you in exchange 2013?

Marcelo: I think that we can start with some nuances, like data loss prevention, a new Managed Store, high availability improvements and so forth. Those who hated the slowness of the Exchange Management Console will love the speed increases gained with the new EAC. There are now more controls in one place than ever before, and the logical grouping of said controls makes a lot of sense. For those with (just of bunch of disks) JBOD deployments, the AutoReseed feature for Exchange 2013 database availability groups should be very exciting.

Flo: How about PowerShell integration? Could you tell us something about the changes and improvements?

Marcelo: A total of 187 #PowerShell cmdlets were added in the new Exchange. Also, we’ve lost 13 cmdlets, mainly due to the changes in Public Folders. The PowerShell cmdlets are executed only on Mailbox servers, so you need to have an Exchange 2013 Mailbox server available to be able to manage the environment. So, Microsoft recommends that you either install both roles on the first Exchange 2013 server installed or make sure that at least one server of each type is deployed.

Flo: Thank you very much. Is there anything else you would like to share with our community?

Marcelo: You’re welcome, Flo. I would like to say to the community that Exchange 2013 is a brand new product, and before implementing it in a production environment they must perform tests in a lab environment, mainly if they need to upgrade from Exchange 2010, the new version must be tested prior to implementing it in a production environment.

Also, I would like to say that is really important to share knowledge within the communities, so keep studying and sharing knowledge with others!

Contact information:

Twitter: @mvighi
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/vighi
Blog: http://marcelovighi.wordpress.com/