As the title states, you don’t realise how important something is until it’s gone.
What am I talking about? Who or what has disappeared from my life?
It sounds far more sinister than it actually is, however it affects a large chunk of my everyday life.
Air Conditioning…..
The concept of heating or cooling an environment making it more comfortable to live in.
We as humans love our air conditioned houses and offices, however we can survive without it.
IT equipment such as servers, disk storage, networking gear, tend to frown upon the lack of cooling and eventually commit suicide or in some instances shutdown to save themselves from impending doom.
I recently lost most of my A/C capacity in one of my larger server rooms and it has effectively crippled most of the services I look after.
Focusing on your IT infrastructure as much as I do, you may fall into the trap of ignoring your UPS humming away in the corner, or your two large redundant A/C units. Even with maintenance contracts and outside contractors to service the equipment, you may choose uptime over repair time.
My main message, remember that the infrastructure around your gear is just as important as the gear itself. Without electricity and cooling, you may as well pack up and go home.
I’m working on automating and upgrading the Corvus High Performance Computer at my employer eRSA / Uni of Adelaide.
It’s currently running Novell SLES 10, so I’m working on getting it up to SLES 11, which is coming along quite nicely. Part of my upgrade plan is to implement a better installation method along with automating the configuration of the compute nodes in the cluster.
Corvus has 75 compute nodes and a single head node. The compute nodes are SGI Altix XE310′s which are largely a generic supermicro chassis with and intel server thrown inside. The trick is that a single 1U chassis has two physical nodes in it, making it an ultra dense solution. Each node has a standard intel BMC which supports IMPISH.
The existing automated installation system for installing the nodes is the Scali Cluster Manager. Scali has been gobbled up by Platform Computing. This seems to mean big bucks to upgrade our Scali license. As a result I’ve replaced the existing Scali Cluster Manager with the opensource solution from IBM called xCAT.
xCAT is really good and handles the scaling up of the cluster really well. The include post install scripts cover most requirements and writing my own has been fairly straight forward. So now I have a standardised way to install the nodes, I need a way to automate the configuration.
To automate the configuration I’m going to be using Puppet. I created a small test system using some virtualbox guests and it worked great out the box. I’ve bought this book from Apress, which has only recently been released. It’s really good and I’d highly recommend it. http://apress.com/book/view/1590599780
In the end I should have an excellent and scalable way to install and manage the nodes.
My place of employ, eResearch SA has appointed an new Director and I’ve been helping setup the new equipment that was purchased for her. The new MacBook Pro is very shiny with all it’s aluminium bits and has a nice quality feel to it. The magic mouse, which looked a bit weird and was bit confusing to setup at first is a really clever piece of tech. I loved being able to assign virtual buttons to different parts of the mouse. Very clever. Although, my personal opinion is it wouldn’t work that well for gaming without a better sensor when compared to my Razor Boomslang or Diamondback for example.
I also configured my bosses iPhone to sync up with her MacBook. To be honest, my experience with the iTunes / syncing setup with the iPhone has always been via Windows. The integration with the Mac is so easy and smooth with regards to contacts and so.
I also had a look at her iPhone 3Gs and realised just how slow and clunky iOS 4 is on the old 3G. The 3Gs is much smoother.
Makes me almost want to go out and buy a new Mac 
The new release of virt-manager in Fedora 13 comes with a slew of new features that are designed to simplify the management of your virtual guests. Today I’m going to talk about the storage manager and in particular it’s lvm management.
Virt-manager has a built-in storage manager that makes handling your vm guest storage far simpler.
Yes, we can all use the lvm commands to create our logical volumes for our virtual guests, but the storage manager simplifies this down to a couple of clicks.
For my example, I will be adding a new volume group I created called storage2 which has a physical volume /dev/sdc1.
PLEASE NOTE: It appears that in the current virt-manager release you are not able to add volume groups to the storage manager that already contain logical volumes. You volume group must be completely empty and contain no logical volumes, otherwise you will receive errors with regards to “lvs”.
Here is the layout. I intend to add the new “storage2″ volume group to the storage manager:
Start up virt-manager and select “edit” and ” host details” to bring up the hypervisor options:
Select the storage tab:
Next, select the “Add Pool” button near the bottom left of the window as shown below in red:
Change the storage type to “logical: LVM Volume Group”
Now enter the name of the storage pool. As the volume group is called storage2, I’ll call it storage2. Using the same name as the volume group allows the storage manager to auto detect the lvm.
Now, the storage2 volume group is managed by the storage manage. Clicking the “new volume button” allows you to create new volumes.
You are also able to create new volumes on the fly using the storage manager during the creation of a virtual guest. Simply select the volume under “storage pools” and click the “new volume” button.
Got up this morning and decided to go for breakfast. On the way downstairs in the lift I met up with Ben who is from TPAC, which is the Tasmanian equivalent of eResearch SA. So I checked out from the hotel and went out for breakfast with Ben. We picked a random place and went in. We both realized that it was the Sebel restaurant which is renowned for it’s breakfasts. I can definitely agree with that
After breakfast I went off to QUT in preparation for the start of the second day of the DMF user group. We started out the morning session by connecting, via Goto Meeting, to the DMF user group in the USA that was occurring at the same time as our meeting. Effectively having a joint meeting. Turned out really well as we were able to speak directly with the lead engineer on the DMF project in the US while having Bill the lead developer in the room with us. All in all it was interesting.
Other talks included how the CSIRO use DMF, handling and understanding tape failures etc. All in all it was a good day. I learned many new tips in tricks which I hope to use in my environment back in Adelaide.
We finished up the meeting early as we had gotten through all the presentations and question sessions in excellent time.
After that I got a shared taxi with some of the SGI guys to the airport where we bummed around for about and hour, before getting on the plane back to Adelaide.
All in all it was a really good couple days, but it was great to be home again
View the photos of Brisbane here
