links for 2008-07-12

Delicious Bookmarks

• PowerCLI Tidbit of the Day
  Find all hosts that were in a state other than connected within a datacenter. Could do the same thing for VMs as well.
• 32-bit ODBC DSN for VUM 4.1
  "Although you can install the Update Manager server only on 64-bit machines, Update Manager is a 32-bit application and requires a 32-bit DSN"
• Cisco UCS Networking Best Practices (in HD)
  Awesome 10-PART video series on configuring networking in a Cisco UCS blade environment.
• New YouTube Videos by Jerome - Wireless QoS
  Great coverage of the various options for QoS on 802.11 wireless networks.
• YouTube - NetApp Today w/ Weta Digital's Paul Gunn
  For Avatar, Weta Digital and NetApp created several caching servers on Weta's network to handle the large number of users requesting access to the movie's visual effects files. NetApp Snapshot ensured copies were readily available and helped protect the captured data.
• Inside Bing’s ‘Battlestar Galactica’ Container
  A look inside a data center container at Microsoft's Boulder, CO facility used to store 5 PB of data for Bing Maps.
• Scalable Guest Account Provisioning
  Nice overview of the different options from Cisco for managing real guest wifi user access. Note that these all require a unified (e.g. Controller-based) wifi deployment
• HA Deepdive » Yellow Bricks
  Very, very detailed look at the internals of VMware's high availability feature.
• VMware KB: Securing Credentials in vMA 4.1
  Using an encrypted filesystem to secure the VI credential store in vMA 4.1
• vMA 4.1 - Active Directory IntegrationTip
  How to join a vMA host to an AD domain and how to integrate AD with sudo
• How to kill a stuck VM on ESX(i) 4.1 using esxcli
  Using the vSphere CLI to forcibly shutdown a VM that won't die cleanly.
• Inside AT&T's National Disaster Recovery Batcave
  Amazing look at AT&T's "something blew up" team, who can recover a central office or other major facility loss using a fleet of equipment trucks. They restored service after 9/11 in 52 hours, including the time to drive up from Atlanta!
• So You Want to be a Network Consultant
  Some terrific advice not only for traditional consultants, but anyone who works in a customer-facing role.
• Data Compression, Deduplication,
  Great overview from Vaughn at NetApp covering the different types of "space saving" mechanisms in enterprise storage.
• So why all the fuss about Alignment?
  Why it's very important (for performance reasons) to align the partitions of your virtual machines.