2010 – Time For Some Action!

Another year has flown by, and all in all it’s been a pretty good year for me. I’ve co-authored a book, became one of the inaugural 300 vExperts, turned some acquaintances in the community into friends, met some cool people, done some pretty interesting stuff at work and travelled to some nice places (Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Japan, Singapore, USA – and here I was thinking I didn’t do much travel in 2009!).

But when I look back at 2009 one thing stands out to me – talking. A _lot_ of talking. But not much action. Which is fine, but if 2010 continues in this way then it will be a very frustrating year indeed.

We’ve talked the whole Cloud thing to death, we now need to bring it to life by actually implementing it. Sure it’s not 100% ready for every conceivable use case, but <insert your favourite analogy along the lines of “the journey of 1000 miles begins with the first step” here>. We’ve had a lot of innovative thoughts and conversations, but what’s the fucking point of innovation without implementation? That’s right, there is no point. Innovation without implementation is not innovation at all.

So in keeping with my classification of 2009 as being a year of thinking and talking, and calling out 2010 as a year for doing, I’m going to get a head start and leave it at that for this post.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my blog in 2009 as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it, and thankyou for doing so and especially for all the emails and comments – if not for that it wouldn’t be worthwhile.

Have a safe and happy New Year celebration (for those whole celebrate New Year’s Eve on December 31st), see you on the other side (errrr, of the decade that is!).

Why You Shouldn't Update vCenter If Using ESXi… Yet!

UPDATE A patch that resolves this issue has now been released – read more about it here.

Although I did enjoy a brief moment of smugness when the HP related ESX 4 Update 1 problems arose, it was cut short by another issue effecting vCenter 4.0 Update 1 and ESXi.

VMware haven’t povided much information about the cause of the problem thus far, there is simply a disclaimer on the Support & Downloads page saying not to apply vCenter 4.0 Update 1 if ESXi hosts are being managed, and pointing to a KB article that doesn’t go into much depth. So allow me to elaborate on the cause of the problem, so we can all be a little more enlightened.

The problem boils down to the way updates are performed on ESXi, and are a side of effect of it’s non-reliance upon a local disk based filesystem. Basically, anytime a piece of non-OS software is updated on ESXi, it is done so via a 64MB ramdisk. Such updates could be for the VC agent, the HA agent, or even 3rd party modules such as PowerPath or the Nexus 1000V.