I Don't RTFM and Neither Should You

Jack PC from Chip PC was cool

2008-09-19T16:24:43Z

One of the neatest things I saw at the VMworld 2008 conference was the Jack PC from Chip PC. I've been around for long enough to remember all the hype about thin clients, and the promise that everything would live in the cloud.

Todd is intimately familiar with it, and he'll be more than happy to share his experiences in the early days with the failed NetworkStations

I think this time around all the infrastructure is in place. 10-12 years ago we didn't have the network, nor great technology that exists from VMware and other companies. I think there is a much better chance that VDI, ThinComputing, whatever you want to call it, will take hold.

Great idea to have the Jack PC live in the wall and be powered over ethernet. That wouldn't have been possible 10 years ago. They are supposed to be sending one of their thin clients to all the lab attendees, hopefully it will arrive soon. I've got the spot in the kitchen that will work perfect !

My thoughts on the vCloud

2008-09-19T16:01:27Z

At the VMworld 2008 keynote there was an emphasis on vEverything, and in particular the vCloud. At the high level, the idea is a great one, be able to seamlessly move workloads in and out of the Cloud, no matter where the resources exist in the cloud. My datacenter, your datacenter, their datacenter.

In my previous life I was lucky enough to work on the team at IBM that was engaged in the beginning of the TeraGrid project. A great project with a goal of uniting several academic HPC Cluster sites across the US, so they could share the computational resources.

We thought the biggest challenges would be of a technical nature, turned out the political and trust challenges far outweighed the technical.

How can I trust my data is secure at your site ? Who will have access to the data ? I need admin rights on your site. How do we charge back for your hogging all the bandwidth with your project ?

I would encourage Paul Maritz to meet with the leaders of TeraGrid and discuss those challenges and how they deal with those issues. It's the natural order of the world for us to learn from academia.

Formulating plans for Dell TechCenter dominance at VMworld

2008-09-08T20:25:46Z

Meeting with Todd in about 30 mins for VMworld dominance plan. Since we'll be in the desert, no chance to have laser sharks - dang.

We picked unique schedules so we can cover as many sessions as possible and do a brain dump on each other to get the knowledge. This will also allow us to twitter and blog about as many sessions as possible.

We also plan on spending some time in the Dell booth and the VMworld community booth to meet and catch up with old friends and new friend. Just follow our twitter stream and we'll update with where we are.

My script to deploy Dell Server Updates on ESX ... might be broken

2008-09-05T19:12:54Z

I wrote a script a few months back to automate the deployment of Dell Update Packages, DUPs on ESX servers.

Got a message today that it might be broken with the new version of SUU.

Testing now. Will update here if it can be fixed, or if it is beyond repair.

UPDATE : Script didn't break for me. Tested on PE 2950 with SUU 5.4.1. Anyone else out there use this to deploy DUPs on your Dell hardware ? Run into any problems ?

Getting excited for VMworld 2008 - almost here !

2008-09-03T17:26:15Z

I don't think I've missed a VMworld for the last 5 years, but I'm gettting older and my memory is not so good. Actually today is my birthday, w00t ! Using VMware workstation for much longer than that.

I was working with IBM at the time in the Linux Cluster group and Jay Urbanski came in one day and said, "you gotta check out this VMware thing, really cool". He was right, it was and is pretty cool.

Then when the team started working with ESX, I constantly got pulled into the lab. What was the vital information they needed from my head ? ... "How do I copy and paste with vi ?" .... fun fun ... "yy ? , you linux guys are a bunch of geeks."

So really looking forward to Vegas, satisfies my love of poker and computers all in one place ! I'm coming in Friday night, so I'll be playing mostly at the Venetian - they've got some great touraments. Probably hit the MGM for some $2-5 NL action, always great action at that room.

See you all soon !

Tony got me to thinking .....

2008-08-28T04:38:54Z

.... with his comment on my first blog post about having yet another blog. I decided to change the subject from Scott's Blog (about as generic as you can get ) - to something that speaks to my core belief from working in the IT industry for over 15 years.

Manuals are only good for one thing, digging you out of a hole after trying to actually use the product. I've only ever gotten a solid grasp on any subject by doing. I'm sure many feel the same way.

I think that's why YouTube is so popular -- or one of the reasons Because of this core belief, I tend to do more demos than other type of work. You can view them from my YouTube account.

So I guess I'll continue to blog on multiple places, until the internets finally decides to have one "me" .. anyone remember Novell's DigitalMe about a decade ago ? Funny how we see the same themes repeat themselves over and over.

Strange how all this blogging, tweeting, social media stuff feels like the BBS's I was on in middle school

Dell TechCenter and my personal blog

2008-08-20T19:47:49Z

If you really want to stalk me and have not found where I hang out, let me point you there.

For rants on my personal life and playing poker, you can keep up with me at the PrettyPokerBoy Blog.

For rants on Systems Management happenings around Dell, you can catch me on the SystemsEdge blog at the Dell TechCenter