Dell TechCenter

Dell Open Source Ecosystem Digest #19. Issue Highlight: “Dell to Deliver Public Cloud through Partner Ecosystem”

2013-05-24T13:54:52Z

Dell is launching the Dell Cloud Partner Program to deliver public cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) through an ecosystem of partners. more

DevOps

Jedi.be: “Infrastructure as Code - A comprehensive overview” by Patrick Debois
Rackspace: “Cloud Databases vs. MySQL on Cloud Servers”

OpenStack

Dell: “OpenStack Board of Directors Talks: Episode 10 with Joseph George, Director of Product Strategy of Dell’s Revolutionary Solutions Team”
Dell: “Dell to Deliver Public Cloud through Partner Ecosystem”
Dell: “Dell to go Partner route for public cloud” by Barton George - Personal Blog
Dell: “Interview with Anne Gentle, OpenStack Technical Writer”
Dell: “Interview with John Griffith at SolidFire”
Dell: “Dell Cloud News: Hyper-V for OpenStack, Public Cloud Partner Program” by Joseph George - Personal Blog
Dell: “Connecting the dots: Dell stays course on OpenStack private” by Rob Hirschfeld
Mirantis: “OpenStack Project Technical Lead Interview Series #2: Monty Taylor, OpenStack CI(Continuous Integration) Project”
OpenStack Foundation: “Dates For The OpenStack Hong Kong Summit Announced!”
Opscode: “Open The Bifrost!”
Piston: “What is OpenStack?”
Piston: “VMware Cloud Faces Competition from OpenStack, Microsoft Azure”
Piston: “The International Character of OpenStack”
Simplicity Scales: “Stacker Voices: Mark McLoughlin, Red Hat”

Hadoop

Cloudera: “Meet the Project Founder: Roman Shaposhnik”
Cloudera: “FAQ: Understanding the Parcel Binary Distribution Format”
Cloudera: “HBaseCon 2013: "Operations" Track Preview”
Datameer: “How Sears is Using Datameer + Hadoop”

Contributors

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

Contact

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

Twitter: @RafaelKnuth

Email: rafael_knuth@dellteam.com

Interview with John Griffith at SolidFire

2013-05-24T11:48:00Z

Dell: Can you give us a little information about yourself?
John Griffith: My name is John Griffith. I'm currently the technical lead for the block storage project in OpenStack, Cinder.

Q: You're with SolidFire as well?
A: I work for SolidFire. I'm a software engineer and I'm employed full time by SolidFire to contribute to OpenStack.

Q: Imagine the users don't know what Cinder is and give us an overall view of it means to be the project lead. What's that role about?
A: To start with Cinder: It’s block storage service inside of OpenStack. The idea is to provision higher performance storage for volumes for example but also for something persistent such as secondary storage attached to your instances. As far as being a Project Technical Lead, it’s about working with different groups, trying to coalesce different ideas that are out there and trying to make sure that we meet schedules and demands.

Q: When it comes to Cinder, do you have an idea of how many different developers and companies are working on that particular piece?
A: This past cycle has been really interesting in that perspective. We've had 10 new drivers to the Cinder project for backends, which points to about 10 different companies just in the storage space alone.On top of that, we also have a number of service providers that are involved. And as far as regular active involvement on almost a daily basis is concerned, there's at least five companies that are there.

Q: I know that you were listed as one of the hot start-ups in Boulder. Tell us a little bit about the company.
A: At SolidFire, we actually built an all-SSD clustered storage appliance designed specifically to meet the demands of block storage in the cloud. Performance is of course a big thing … as well as IOPs based QoS, we give customers such as service providers the ability to deliver SLAs based on QoS. We're all about changing what you can do in the cloud in terms of block storage.

Q: Thanks John.
A: Thank you.

Resources
John’s Launchpad and Github profile

The Dell Business Intelligence Project Using US Patent Office Data

2013-05-23T22:48:00Z

Leveraging data sets can help you make sharper empirically backed decisions. But first, Data driven companies will need to setup cost-effective proven architectures to get an edge.

My team in Dell Enterprise Solutions has been working on an end-to-end business intelligence solution that shows customers how they can pull in patent data from the US Patent office as an example of the power of business intelligence. During the project we used the data to answer questions like: where are the most patents awarded, who are the top companies, what is the time for patents to be awarded.

Using Dell Boomi our team extracted the patent data which was then stored in a Dell Quickstart Data Warehouse Appliance. Using the Dell Toad Business Intelligence Suite we analyzed the data and found the answers to the above questions.

The details of our project can be found in a series of Dell TechCenter wiki episodes here: The Dell Business Intelligence Project Using USPTO Data. This information will also be presented at a breakout session at the Dell Enterprise Forum in San Jose for those of you attending the conference.

How to change the iDRAC password remotely

2013-05-23T18:07:04Z

1. Log into the iDRAC GUI

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

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

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

5. Enable the "Change Password" checkbox

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

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

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

http://www.delltechcenter.com/idrac

OpenStack Board of Directors Talks: Episode 10 with Joseph George, Director of Product Strategy of Dell’s Revolutionary Solutions Team

2013-05-22T15:32:00Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Snapshot Explorer - New Free Utility

2013-05-22T14:00:00Z

Posted on behalf of Mattias Sundling

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

Snapshot Explorer provides the following benefits:

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

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

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

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

Download Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition

Webinar Playback: 10 Ways to Drive Efficiency in Virtualized Environments

Interview with Anne Gentle, OpenStack Technical Writer

2013-05-21T14:17:02Z

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

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

Q: How can someone become a volunteer?

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

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

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

Q: Where can you get that book?

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

Q: Thank you very much, Anne.

A: Thank you!

Resources

Twitter @annegentle

Anne’s Blog JustWriteClick

Anne at OpenStack

Connect with Dell at Citrix Synergy 2013

2013-05-20T21:34:00Z

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

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

Two breakouts to highlight:

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

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

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

Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) – Best Posts of the Week around Windows Server, Exchange, SystemCenter and more – #29

2013-05-20T12:27:42Z

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

Featured Posts of the Week!

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

Videointerview with Jose Barreto about SMB 3.0 by Carsten Rachfahl

IP Assignment Strategies For Hyper-V Replica by Aidan Finn

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

Exchange

Exchange 2013 Server Role Requirements Calculator available by Johan Veldhuis

Hyper-V

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

Whitepaper: Datensicherung für virtuelle Maschinen in German by Nils Kaczenski

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

IP Assignment Strategies For Hyper-V Replica by Aidan Finn

How Hyper-V Snapshots Work by Aidan Finn

Using Hyper-V Snapshots by Aidan Finn

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

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

Office 365

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

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

PowerShell

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

Measuring PowerShell scripts by Shay Levy

Scrub Up PowerShell Content by Jeffery Hicks

PowerShell Version Profiles by Jeffery Hicks

Test 64-Bit Operating System by Jeffery Hicks

Friday Fun: A PowerShell Tickler by Jeffery Hicks

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

System Center Virtual Machine Manager

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

SQL Server

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

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

Windows Client

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

Windows Server Core

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

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

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

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

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

Videointerview with Jose Barreto about SMB 3.0 by Carsten Rachfahl

Tools

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

Dell Open Source Ecosystem Digest #18. Issue Highlight: “OpenStack Rocks in Poland”

2013-05-17T16:55:51Z

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

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