1971 Fender USA Stratocaster
Well, after a bit of hunting around, I am now the proud owner of an original 1971 Fender USA Stratocaster. Am I happy? Hell yeah 
And to boot, along with the obvious unknown elements of its life, the previous owner was someone that most people will have heard of.. Justin Hawkins from The Darkness. Oh yes..
Where did I get this beauty? Guitar Village – they are a great bunch of people who make you welcome and are as helpful as they come. Do check them out ! Their website can be found here: http://www.guitarvillage.co.uk/
As you can see above, they have a great selection of vintage and relics. My new bad boy is below
Xtravirt Co-Founder Achieves Chartered Fellowship Status
I found out on the 22nd December that the British Computer Society have awarded me the status of a Chartered Fellow grade (FBCS CITP). This for me is a great honour and I am really chuffed to have been awarded it! If you don’t know anything about the BCS I urge you to have a look and consider membership. There are many benefits of being a member as well as providing you the ability to put something back in to community – whether it be helping people new to IT or providing input to focus groups on various aspects of IT.
Who are the BCS?
BCS—The Chartered Institute for IT is a professional body and a learned society that represents those working in Information Technology in the United Kingdom and internationally. Established in 1957, it was formerly (and is still legally) known as the British Computer Society.
With a worldwide membership of over 70,000 members in over 100 countries, BCS is a registered charity and was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1984. Its objectives are to promote the study and application of communications technology and computing technology and to advance knowledge of education in ICT for the benefit of professional practitioners and the general public.
BCS is a member institution of Engineering Council UK, and therefore is responsible for regulation of ICT and computer science fields within the UK. The BCS is also a member of the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies (CEPIS). The BCS is the only professional body in the United Kingdom with the ability to grant chartered status to IT professionals.
(as stated by Wikipedia)
What is Fellowship Status (FBCS)?
The grade of Fellowship comprises the most senior and respected professionals who have demonstrated eminence, authority and seniority in the field of IT.
(as stated by Wikipedia)
What is Chartered Status (CITP)?
As the Chartered Institute for IT, only BCS can award Chartered IT Professional status. CITP is the benchmark of IT excellence, and is a rigorously assessed, employer led qualification, recently updated according to the needs of such international IT industry leaders as IBM, Microsoft and BP.
(as stated by BCS)
ThinApp: Capture, Build & Applink
One of the newer members of team Craig Whelan has released a youtube video of a thinapp capture, along with a demonstration of Applink.
High-res demo of a Capture & Build of Firefox 3.5 using ThinApp. Also a CnB of Adobe Flash Player 10 to demonstrate the abilities of AppLink.
Three systems used in this demo.
1, Clean machine for CnB – with ThinApp installed, VM for snapshot revert purposes
2, Host for source files, capture files, updates via IIS
3, Test machine, reference any architecture to prove functionality of the ThinApp’d application
Brief edit of the package.ini to use AppLink, pointer towards video 2, 3 and 4 for the AppSync feature. This functionality isn’t all that new but seems to be gaining exposure recently – so I thought why not put my own 2c out there and join the community!
Apologies for the lack of sound or commentary.
Note: there are 4 videos, part one to part four.
The vCloud Portable Lab: Part Two (A.K.A April Fools)
Ok, so if you are reading this, hopefully you have taken the time to read through the previous posts. If you have, and you have tried it you will have hit a slight problem after the last post. It’ll look something like the below
Well, for those who read the Part One post, you might have noticed that we never resolved the following point.
- Change the listener port from 8080 to something else (8081)
Well, early April Fools (or I forgot to resolve this in the previous post.. you can decide 
)
To change the listener port from 8080 to something else (I’ll be using 8081) simply follow the process outlined below.
Launch the ‘Run SQL Command Line’ shortcut from the Oracle program group under the Start Menu, then enter the commands below.
connect
system
<your password>
exec dbms_xdb.sethttpport(8081)
Congratulations! You have changed the port successfully. Now reboot your server!
The vCloud Portable Lab: Part One
You may have heard some news about something called VMware vCloud 
Well, the vCloud solution has multiple components comprising of technology and process. One of the key ingredients is the vCloud Director component. What you may not know is that currently vCloud Director only supports Oracle for its database. That’s right, no MS SQL support, just good old reliable Oracle.. or so I was told. Oracle was a minefield for me, having not used it before. So to try and save some of you the horror that I went through, I’m going to provide you the shortcuts. You may also be wondering why I am going to use Oracle Express to provide the database for my vCenter server and not use MS SQL/SQL Express… well, practice and use (and pain..) makes perfect!
Oracle 10g Express
Before we talk about Oracle and installing it on to the vCenter server, do yourself a favour and turn off the Windows Firewall. This is a lab, you can configure it if you want to, but to keep this simple I am going to assume that you will follow the above advice.
Ok, to start with you are going to need to grab some software from Oracle and download it to your vCenter server. Don’t panic! The registration process on Oracles website is quick and easy. Point your web browser over to Oracles Express Site. You need to download Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2.0.1) for Windows. If you are being lazy looking, you can find it here. Don’t forget to accept the License Agreement.
You are also going to need two other items from Oracle to enable the creation of a 64bit database connection.
You need to go to this page and download following from the Version 10.2.0.5 section:
Now we finally have what we need to install Oracle!
Installing Oracle 10g Express
On the vCenter server you need to run the OracleXE.exe file. The installation is pretty straightforward; make sure you perform it logged on as the local administrator.
The observant ones of you may notice something in the summary dialog box – the Port for HTTP Listener is set to 8080. This is going to conflict with the vCenter installation. You can’t change the port from 8080 during the installation, but you can do afterwards. I’ll even tell you how to do it.
Once the installation is complete, we will need to carry out a few actions
- Change the listener port from 8080 to something else (8081)
- Create a database account for the vCenter server to use
- Create the 64bit ODBC system connection
In the meantime, run the OracleXEClient.exe file and install the Oracle Express Client. Once you have, keep on reading!
Oracle 64bit ODBC
Extract the following two downloaded zip files in to a folder. You want to combine the extracted contents from both zip files in to a single folder.
- instantclient-odbc-win64-10.2.0.5.zip
- instantclient-odbc-win64-10.2.0.5.zip
You will end up with 21 files in a single folder, as below
Open a command prompt window (it must be run as administrator) and change directory to the above folder. Run the ODBC_Install.exe file.
Now we need to configure an environment variable so the system knows where two specific files are (tnsnames.ora and sqlnet.ora). If you have been accepting the default paths during the above installations, then the files are in the following path:
C:\oraclexe\app\oracle\product\10.2.0\server\NETWORK\ADMIN
Copy the sqlnet.ora and tnsnames.ora files from the above location in to the location where you extracted the two zip files. So for me, this was
C:\OracleFiles\instantclient_10_2
From Computer Properties, Advanced System Settings, Environment Variables we create a new system variable as below
Variable Name: TNS_ADMIN
Variable value: <folder path to files>
Now we are going to create a ‘database’ for vCenter and a user account for the connection in Oracle. First of all, create a folder called vpx in the following location
C:\oraclexe\oradata\vpx
From the Oracle programs group under the Start Menu, launch a SQL Command Line session
Enter the following commands:
connect
system
<your password>
CREATE USER vpxAdmin IDENTIFIED BY vpxadmin DEFAULT TABLESPACE vpx;
grant unlimited tablespace to vpxAdmin;
Exit
From the Oracle programs group under the Start Menu, launch the ‘Goto Database Home Page’ link. Login using system as the username and the password you provided during install. From the Administration section, select the Manage Users option.
Enter a password for the VPXADMIN user and configure the options as per the below screenshot. Click Alter User to save the changes.
Now we are finally ready to create our 64bit Oracle System DSN. From Administrative Tools, launch the ODBC Data Source Administrator Tool. From the System DSN Tab, click Add and select the Oracle 10.02.00.04 driver.
Configure the connection as follows:
Data Source Name: vCenter Server Connection
Description: vCenter Server Connection
TNS Service Name: XE
User ID: VPXADMIN
Click ‘Test Connection.’ When you are prompted enter the password you specified in the previous steps.
Assuming that the test is successful, click OK.
Congratulations! You can now install vCenter Server and connect it to the Oracle Database!
Cloud Confusion..
Whilst Google instant search is pretty impressive, the results can be somewhat.. unusual.. I only searched on cloud..
Moving swiftly on..
The vCloud Portable Lab: Overview
This post is part one of a series, detailing experiences, likes/dislikes and the ‘how-to’ process that I am going through to create a simple vCloud Lab on my laptop. Why on my laptop? Well, we (Xtravirt) do have a lab which is more than capable of running this lab environment, but I want something that is portable that can be used anywhere and at anytime.
I should probably start by telling you what I will be running this lab on! I am using a Lenovo W510 Laptop with the following specification:
- Intel Core i7 CPU (Q720 @ 1.60GHz)
- 16GB RAM
- Seagate 500GB Momentus XT Hybrid SSD/HDD SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache
- Windows 7 Ultimate Edition x64
The laptop is a pretty beefy specification, although as you will see I do keep allocated resources pretty tight. To run the virtual machines on the laptop, I am using VMware Workstation 7 (the latest patched version). Initially, I have created 3 virtual machines as follows:
- ESXi 4.1 – nickname cloudesx1
- ESXi 4.1 – nickname cloudesx2
- Windows 2008 R2 Standard x64 – nickname cloudvc1
ESXi Servers
The two ESXi servers have the configuration as show below. Additionally, the processor virtualisation engine Preferred Mode has been forced to Intel VT-x/EPT or AMD-V/RVI. The 40GB disks are thin provisioned.
vCenter Server
The vCenter server has its disk thin provisioned. It is running DNS as well, providing forward and reverse lookup zones for PDLAB. There isn’t much to say beyond that!
Virtual Networking
You may have noticed that I am using the VMware Workstation NAT Virtual Network. The only change that I made was to amend the IP range to something else that I would be able to remember 
Software
Here is the list of additional software that I am using to build the lab
- VMware vCenter 4.1 download with all the bells and whistles
- Oracle 10g Express Edition
- vCloud Director
- VMware Chargeback 1.5
- VMware vShield
In the next post I’ll take the first steps towards getting my vCloud lab up and running… I’m pretty sure that you can all install Windows and ESXi in some VMs without me explaining that part 
vCenter MAC Address allocation and conflicts
Fridays in the Xtravirt office offers a time for consultants to gather round and have a great chinwag about whats been going on for them in the week and, more importantly, ask questions and get answers! Something raised this week was the allocation of MAC addresses to virtual machines. If you have multiple vCenter instances creating virtual machines, how can you guarantee that you wont get conflicts generated? It’s an interesting question and the answer is documented; but you may not already know the answer.
When a vCenter server is installed a unique ID is generated. This ID is randomly generated and is in the range of 0 to 64. The ID gets used when generating MAC address and the UUIDS, or unique identifiers for virtual machines. You can see that if two vCenter servers had the same unique ID, a possibility exists that duplicate MAC addresses might get generated; cue packet loss, connectivity issues and your desk phone ringing a lot…
So what do we do?
Solution: If you deploy virtual machines from multiple vCenter Server systems to the same network, you must ensure that these vCenter Server systems have unique instance IDs. How can you check the ID of each vCenter server? It’s simple.. login to vCenter, and go to Administration, vCenter Server Settings. Click Runtime settings and you can see the unique ID.
Simply, do this on each vCenter server. If you have a duplicate ID, change it! Just dont forget to restart the vCenter services afterwards!
VMware Provide SDK/API Support Offering
If you spend any time developing applications and utilities (like these) utilising the VMware APIs then there is a high probability that you will have hit a brick wall at some point during the process. The VMware APIs aren’t the easiest in the world to work with. However, once you get past the first few common hurdles you will find that there is a refreshing amount of functionality and information in there which will keep you up all night as you code your next masterpiece!
For those developing commercial offerings there have been some issues with supportability of the API and SDKs in the past.
However, VMware have now launched a bolt on to your support contracts enabling you to obtain a high level of support to make sure you development efforts are successful.
Here is what VMware has to say about it
VMware is happy to announce that the SDK Support Program is now available for direct order. The offering helps developers get vSphere solutions to market more quickly by providing them with access to VMware expert engineers.
Customers can access information at http://vmware.com/go/sdksupport.
If you have questions about the offering, please send us an e-mail.
VMware SDK Support Program FAQs:
Q: What products will the SDK Support Program support?
A: The following products will be supported:Products for Administrators:
VMware vSphere PowerCLI
VMware vSphere Command Line Interface
VMware vSphere Management AssistantProducts for Software Developers:
VMware vSphere Web Services SDK
VMware vSphere SDK for Perl
VMware vSphere Guest SDK
VMware VIX API
VMware vCloud API (Future)
VMware Virtual Disk Development
VMware CIM SDK (SMASH – SMI-S)
VMware vSphere Client Plug-ins
VMware vCenter Orchestrator API (creation of custom workflows)
More information can be found on here
vExpert 2010
When I woke up on Saturday morning I had the great pleasure of an email from John Troyer in my inbox informing me that I have been awarded VMwares vExpert status in 2010 for contributions and effort to the communityduring 2009. I am honored to be given this award. If you haven’t heard of the vExpert award, this is how VMware describe it on the public vExpert page
The VMware vExpert Award is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year. vExperts are book authors, bloggers, VMUG leaders, tool builders, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others. These vExperts have gone above and beyond their day jobs to share their technical expertise and communicate the value of VMware and virtualization to their colleagues and community.
You can see the VMware vExpert page here. Congratulations to all of the vExpert 2010 recipients, to those at VMware that put the award together and to those who did not receive an award but provide incredible positive efforts in to the VMware community. Lets hope that everyone keeps it up!
Although my blog may sit quiet for a period of time, it is due to the fact that I am publishing material over at Xtravirt, helping out on the communities or, actually out earning some money for a change! But don’t worry, when things go quiet it doesn’t mean that there is nothing going on! There are a load of new whitepapers (free), applications (free) and utilities (yes, free!) that are in the pipeline for 2010. Watch this space!
