Looking Forward to Storage Field Day 9 (#SFD9)

So for those of you who love to nerd out on storage like I do, you have probably already heard of the awesome streaming events put on by Stephen Foskett and the crew from Tech Field Day, otherwise known as Storage Field Day. These have grown so popular that Stephen is having to put on extra events just to cater for demand, which I think speaks volumes as to their efficacy and indeed quality!

For those not yet indoctrinated, these events involve taking a group of around a dozen storage and technology delegates to visit a number of different startups (think Pure, NexGen, Coho, etc) and more established companies (think Intel!) to talk about the latest things going on both at those organisations and in the industry in general. Each session lasts a couple of hours, but is generally broken down into several bite sized chunks for consumption at your leisure.

As a stream viewer you get the opportunity to learn about your favourite vendors latest funky stuff and watch them answer questions about all the things you probably wanted to know but never got the chance to ask. It is also a great way to get your head around an unfamiliar technology or vendor. Lastly, if you watch live, you can also ask questions via twitter for the delegates to ask of the presenters.

As a delegate this goes to a whole new level as you get to spend almost an entire week mahoossively geeking out on tech, learning from some of the smartest people in the tech industry, and meeting with the senior people at some of the industry’s best-known companies. I find it generally safest just to wear multiple layers to avoid any embarrassing nerdgasms! 😉

So with that in mind I am really chuffed to have been invited back to attend Storage Field Day 9, next month (16th-18th March) in San Jose!

Not all of the companies have been announced as yet, but we already know that the likes of Cohesity, Intel, VMware & Violin Memory will be in attendance. More will be confirmed over the next coupe of weeks and having seen the provisional list I can tell you it is definitely going to be a great event!

vendors

Needless to say the lineup of delegates is awesome as usual, with many well known bloggers from the EU, US and APAC. Make sure you check them out and follow the crew on twitter if you are so inclined. Most delegates post their opinions around the vendors and tech both during and after the event, so make sure you check out their blog feeds. For example, here is mine:

http://www.tekhead.org/blog/feed/

If you want to tune in live, simply go to http://techfieldday.com from 16th-18th March (PST) or catch up with the recordings on youtube later.

Finally, be warned my Twitter stream does get rather busy during the event, so feel free to temporarily mute me if need be! 😉

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Quick Fix for “The task was canceled by a user” when deploying OVA in vCenter 6

So I came across a very odd vCenter bug today when trying to deploy an OVA file on vSphere 6.0, specifically the latest CoreOS image.

The import was repeatedly failing with the same error message.

What was more frustrating was the fact that the error message was “The task was cancelled by a user”, which it blatantly was not!

Error log example below:

OVA Import Errors

OVA Import Errors

A quick bit of testing and Googling and I came across an article by my good friend Ather Beg from the LonVMUG, who had a very simple fix for the same issue in vSphere 5.5.

  1. Install 7-zip or a similar archiving tool
  2. Extract the OVA file using 7-zip into its component parts
  3. Import into vCenter, selecting the OVF file for the import target

That’s it – simples!

Success!

Success!

What’s really weird is that after importing the OVF successfully, I then went back and imported the OVA, and it worked fine!

Very strange indeed…

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Installing Docker on Amazon AMI Quick Fix

I was installing and playing with Docker on an AWS EC2 instance this evening, using the default amazon AMI [specifically Amazon Linux AMI 2015.09.1 (HVM)] and came across a stupidly simple issue.

Docker containers would not start and were showing the following error:

Cannot connect to the Docker daemon. Is 'docker -d' running on this host?


Checking processes I don’t see docker running:

$ ps -ef | grep docker
ec2-user  2518  2485  0 22:20 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto docker


After looking at a similar issue I had with Ubuntu a year or so ago, I realised (duh!) the Docker service was simply not running, even though it had installed fine.

A quick start of the service fixed this:

$ sudo service docker start


And now…

$ ps -ef | grep docker
root      7119     1  1 22:30 pts/0    00:00:07 /usr/bin/docker daemon --default-ulimit nofile=1024:4096
ec2-user  7539  2429  0 22:41 pts/0    00:00:00 grep --color=auto docker
$ sudo docker info
Containers: 1
Images: 4
Server Version: 1.9.1
Storage Driver: devicemapper
 Pool Name: docker-202:1-263816-pool
 Pool Blocksize: 65.54 kB
 Base Device Size: 107.4 GB
 Backing Filesystem: xfs
 Data file: /dev/loop0
 Metadata file: /dev/loop1
 Data Space Used: 291.9 MB
 Data Space Total: 107.4 GB
 Data Space Available: 6.695 GB
 Metadata Space Used: 892.9 kB
 Metadata Space Total: 2.147 GB
 Metadata Space Available: 2.147 GB
 Udev Sync Supported: true
 Deferred Removal Enabled: false
 Deferred Deletion Enabled: false
 Deferred Deleted Device Count: 0
 Data loop file: /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/devicemapper/data
 Metadata loop file: /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/devicemapper/metadata
 Library Version: 1.02.93-RHEL7 (2015-01-28)
Execution Driver: native-0.2
Logging Driver: json-file
Kernel Version: 4.1.10-17.31.amzn1.x86_64
Operating System: Amazon Linux AMI 2015.09
CPUs: 1
Total Memory: 995.6 MiB

 

This has now continued to work fine through reboots, so hopefuly saves someone spending more than a few seconds troubleshooting!

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End of an Era for #LonVMUG

I will keep this post short and to the point, and will do my best to try not to sound too sycophantic!

I just wanted to publicly thank Alaric Davies, Jane Rimmer, and Stu Thompson for their years of hard work and service to the London and UK VMUGs and all of their members (and of course, not forgetting Simon Gallagher who is staying on to steer the ship). Were it not for a chance meeting with Mr Davies at a tech event in Leeds some years ago, I personally would know a lot less, have met far fewer awesome people and be in a completely different place in my career right now.

The London and UK VMUGs have had a real impact on the careers of many people I know over the past few years and I hope they continue to do so for years to come!

So thank you very much all of you for your immense efforts and the hundreds of hours of your own time you have dedicated over the years…

Team Awesome

Lastly best of luck to the new VMUG leadership team members Linda, Dave and Chris, who along with Simon I have every confidence that the torch will be carried on without so much as a splutter!

If you want to get involved in the VMUG community as an attendee (and perhaps one day as a speaker), I strongly recommend popping along to your nearest meeting. You will definitely come away with a lot more than just the instructions on how to upgrade vSphere from 5.1 to 6.0! 😉

The next London VMUG is on the 14th of April at Tech UK, 10 Saint Bride Street, EC4A. I look forward to meeting you there!

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