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I thought that it would be a good idea to post an update on my progress of the book/whitepaper/guide that I am writing on building a low cost VI lab. Life has been very busy in the past couple of weeks. I have therefore not been able to post a lot of articles to this site. I normally make a note of interesting things I find and then blog on them the same day. Lately I've been so busy (and on holiday last week I must add) that when I finally decide to blog on them, it's old news and not worth blogging over again. Most things are covered by Scott Lowe, Mike Laverick, Jason Boche and other top bloggers anyway.

For now I've decided to concentrate on the low cost lab book. Writing the book is taking longer that what I first anticipated because I'm doing a lot more testing than what I first thought would be necessary. But this is a good thing, as it's against my beliefs to state anything technical as facts if not tested. I don't like theories, I like facts. To also make sure that everything in the book is as true and accurate as possible, I will be passing it to a couple of peers for a peer review before it's released for download, so please bear with me.

Originally I only wanted to write a proper blog post on "Building a low cost VI lab", but I soon realised that it would be too much to fit in a single blog post, so I thought I could write a document on it. Now it's turned into a little book, rather than just a document. Most of the easy stuff is done, including hardware options and ESX installation and configuration options for non-HCL hardware and basic network configuration tasks. I've also completed most of the storage and shared storage sections of the book, but I've now turned my attention to fine-tuning iSCSI. I will then focus on advanced network configurations, like setting up secure hosting with DMZ configurations using cheap non-managed switches.

I have also decided to include service console commands for every change made within the VI Client. Also, as the whole point of the book is to illustrate a "low cost lab", I will cover configurations for both ESX 3.5 as well as ESXi 3.5 installable.

I'm just fighting the urge to start on the ESX 4 version, but I think it's best to finish this one for ESX 3.5 first. I don't really want to say "THIS BOOK WILL BE AVAILABLE ON SO AND SO DATE", but I don't like making promises that I can't keep. I do however thing the end of Feb should be a good time for the peers to have their review of the book. And yes, you will be able to download a free, full version of the book.

Thank you for your patience, I'll keep you posted.

I know it's got nothing to do with virtualization, but I felft like posting it anyway. The South of England is covered in snow this morning. We are about to leave on holiday for the week, but I now realise that it's going to be an interesting drive! Here's a picture from just outside my house in Hertfordshire:

I've come across an insanely brilliant blog post on iSCSI. One of the best technical blogs I've seen in a long time. Actually one of the best technical blogs I've ever seen! I took some time out and sat down with a mug of coffee to read the post in detail. I found this blog post every interesting and in good time as I've actually started on the iSCSI shared storage section of my book on "Building a Low cost VI Environment" just yesterday.

Ok, I do have to say that a lot of the stuff in the blog post is "too heavy" for my new book as the aim for my book is to build a low cost lab VI environment, not an enterprise VI environment. However I do think that a lot of what they have in the blog post can be used to optimize even a low cost lab environment. I've been using Openfiiler for a while now and I will certainly be looking at improving my home VI environment's iSCSI implementation. In my new book, the shared storage section is based iSCSI provided by Openfiler 2.3. I will definitely look into improving the iSCSI section of the book by looking into some things like "jumbo frames" mentioned in the blog post!

Thanks to Chad Sakac (EMC), Andy Banta (VMware), Vaughn Stewart (NetApp), Eric Schott (Dell/EqualLogic), and Adam Carter (HP/Lefthand) and David Black (EMC) for this great post.

Administrators that's got some experience in running Linux guest operating systems in virtual machines, may know that the time of the guest OS can drift by several hours per day. Normally, in my experience the time in the guest OS runs too fast. This can have serious implications on some services that these servers provide, such as Mail/Spam relays and web servers.

VMware has now released a very good KB article on best practises for Linux Guest OS time keeping, with a table of kernels and their parameters.

The KB article is a must read for those who have Linux guests. You can find VMware KB Article 1006427 here