NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 1

Posted on 25th January 2013 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 1

Having been looking to do a home lab tech refresh of late, I have been spending quite a bit of time examining all the options. My key requirements, mostly determined by their relative WAF score (Wife Acceptance Factor) were as follows:

  1. Silent or as quiet as possible (the lab machines will sit behind the TV in our living room where my current whitebox server sits almost silently but glaringly large!).
  2. A minimum of 16GB RAM per node (preferably 32GB if possible).
  3. A ‘reasonable’ amount of CPU grunt, enough to run 5–10 VMs per host.
  4. Minimal cost (I haven’t got the budget to go spending £500+ per node, trying to keep it under £300)
  5. Smallest form factor I can find to meet requirements 1–4.
  6. Optional: Remote access such as IPMI or iLO.

I have previously invested in an HP N36L, which while great for the price (especially when the £100 cashback offer was still on) is a bit noisy, even with a quiet fan mod. Its actually also fairly big when you start looking at buying multiples and stacking them behind the telly! Even so I was still sorely tempted by the new N54L MicroServers which are just out (AMD Dual Core 2.2GHz) and max 16GB RAM) and are within my budget.

Similarly I looked into all the Mini-ITX and Micro-ATX boards available, where the Intel desktop / small servers ones seemed to be best (DBS1200KP / DQ77MK / DQ67EP are all very capable boards). Combined with an admittedly slightly expensive Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2, these would all make brilliant white box home labs, but for me they are still limited by either their size or cost.

In late November, Intel announced they were releasing a range of bare bones mini-PCs called “Next Unit of Computing”. The early range of these 10cm square chassis contain an Intel Core i3 i3-3217U CPU (“Ivy Bridge” 22 nm, as found in numerous current ultrabooks), two SODIMM slots for up to 16GB RAM, and 2 mini-PCIe slots. It’s roughly the same spec and price as an HP MicroServer, but in a virtually silent case approximately the same size as a large coffee cup!

Even better, when you compare the CPU to the latest HP N54L, it achieves a benchmark score of 2272 on cpubenchmark.net, compared to the AMD Turion II Neo N54L Dual-Core at only 1349, putting it in a different class altogether in terms of raw grunt. Not only that, but with the cashback offer from HP now over, it’s about the same price or less than a MicroServer, just £230 inc VAT per unit!

On top of the above, there is an added bonus in the extremely low power consumption of just 6-11 watts at idle, rising to ~35 watts under high load. Comparing this to the HP MicroServer, which idles at around the 35 watt mark, spiking to over 100 watts, the NUC shows a marked improvement to your “green” credentials. If you are running a two node cluster, you could conservatively save well over £30 per year from your electricity bill using NUCs instead of MicroServers. Add to that a 3-year Intel warranty and I was pretty much sold from the start!

This all sounded too good to be true, and in all bar one respect it is actually perfect. The only real drawback is that the Intel 1gbps NIC (82579V) is not in the standard driver list currently supported by ESXi. This was a slight cause for concern as some people had tried and failed to get it to work with ESXi and held me off purchasing until this week when I spotted this blog post by “Stu” who confirmed it worked fine after injecting the appropriate driver to the ESXi install iso.

I immediately went to my favourite IT vendor (scan.co.uk) and purchased the following:

Intel ICE Canyon NUC Barebone Unit – DC3217IYE
16GB Corsair Kit (2x8GB) DDR3 1333MHz CAS 9
8GB PNY Micro Sleek Attache Pendrive

Total cost: ~£299 inc vat… bargain!

IMPORTANT: You will also need a laptop / clover leaf style kettle cable (C5) or your country’s equivalent. In the box you get the power block, but not the 3 pin cable. These can be picked up on ebay for next to nothing.

With very little time or effort I was able to create a new ESXi installer with the correct e1000 drivers, boot the machine and I am now happily running ESXi on my first node.

Intel NUC with ESXi 5.1

I should add that as part of the install I discovered a bug which Intel are looking to resolve with a firmware fix soon. This was the fact that I was unable to press F2 to get into the bios (it just rebooted each time I pressed it). Another symptom of this same bug was ESXi getting most of the way through boot and coming up with an error saying “multiboot could not setup the video subsystem”. This is not a VMware fault. I resolved this by simply plugging the HDMI cable into a different port on my TV (ridiculous!). You might also try a different HDMI cable. Either way it was not serious enough to stop me ordering a second one the same night I got it running!

Disclaimer: Mileage may vary! I will not be held responsible if you buy a b0rk3d unit. 🙂

In Part 2 of this article, I will expand on the process for installing ESXi to the NUC, and my experiences with clustering two of them (second unit arrived in the post today so will be built and tested this weekend).

Other parts of this article may be found here:
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 2
NanoLab – Running VMware vSphere on Intel NUC – Part 3
VMware vSphere NanoLab – Part 4 – Network and Storage Choices

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Tools to Reduce Information Overload – Part 1 – RSS & Podcasts

Posted on 20th January 2013 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on Tools to Reduce Information Overload – Part 1 – RSS & Podcasts

Like many in the IT industry I am finding more and more that keeping up to date with the latest technology advances, whilst remaining sane and keeping my wife from killing me, is becoming trickier by the day! Between the tens or hundreds of blogs, podcasts, Twitter, Facebook (ok that’s more personal, but you get the idea!) feeds, its hard to both a) manage that information, and b) keep up with the sheer volume. This is especially true when you consider the volume of brilliant content being produced by bloggers within the virtualisation / Cloud (gag) industry alone…

I used to be fortunate enough to work from home 80% of the time, which meant that it was relatively easy to keep up with all the different streams, feeds, etc by simply having a second machine and screen up and running when in the house. Since starting a new role as a Solution Architect, I am lucky to be at home one day every few weeks, so I have been forced to rethink my strategy.

Devices
I have always been a bit of a fandroid, however after starting the new role, I was presented with a shiny new iPhone! After I got back from gagging in the loo, I had to think about how to integrate the Apple app ecosystem into my current Android (tablet and phone) setup, so the number one requirement moving forward was that apps should be able to communicate, access and share information outside of their walled gardens!

Having done some fairly in-depth research on different free and paid apps available on both Android and iDevice, I have re-jigged my setup for each information stream as follows:

Blogs / RSS Feeds

My old method for keeping up with blogs was to simply add them into Outlook’s built-in RSS reader. This was brilliant as you can then assign Outlook rules to feeds, to remove any junk articles, or move articles you wish to highlight into other directories –  a superb feature! Unfortunately this doesn’t have any feasible remote access / sync options (other than RDP which I already use if I am online) so I decided to move all my feeds up to Google Reader to track instead. The migration was really simple as I just exported all my feeds (over 50 of them!) from Outlook as an OPML file, which I was then able to import into Google Reader. Much quicker than having to add each manually! The only thing you lose at this stage is their folder structure, but you can then go to Options\Subscriptions and add the blogs into a single layer of subdirectories. I choose to separate mine by subject, e.g. Virtualisation / Networking / Storage / Tech News / Training etc.

Filtering the Junk –  FeedDemon Pro
To get rid of any articles you are / aren’t interested in, you need the ability to mark them as read / unread in your Google feed. After testing a few different apps, the best I found (for now) is called FeedDemon Pro (currently version 4.1). The free version is a a simple RSS reader with tagging, podcast sync, etc but the pro version (paid for) allows you to filter articles as either “mark as read if…” or “mark as read unless…”. The biggest bugbear with this app is that you can only do a positive or a negative filter on each feed, but not both. I would love to see this ability added in future versions, for example I follow the HotUKDeals feed, where I like to keep any post with tags like “SSD”,”Kindle” etc, but I want to remove any posts with the word “Win”, “Competition” etc. This was possible with Outlook, but not FeedDemon, which is a shame.

This app is left running 24/7 on my workstation VM at home, as it is only able to filter content whilst running (obviously). There have been a number of sites which have come and gone over the past few years offering filtering of Google Reader content, but I can’t see there being an easy way to monetise them, which probably explains why they have virtually all gone offline within a year or two. For now I will stick to the local filtering option but if a clear SaaS-type google reader filter emerges and sticks around (such as perhaps FeedRinse), I’d happily take their service (and even pay a couple of quid a year for it!). Frankly I don’t know why Google don’t just add this functionality natively?…

Once the feeds have been filtered, I needed a way to access them on each of my devices. For that I use the following apps (which each mark items read / unread in the feed so they all stay in sync, irrespective of vendor and device!).

Android –  gReader
Not the prettiest interface, but a great app which works on my phone and tablet, and provides all the usual sharing options, plus the ability to offline cache whole articles should you wish to do so. It also has generated voice options so you can listen to blogs if you so wish (e.g. in the car).

iPhone –  Reeder
I really like the nice clean interface, and the huge array of sharing / integration options. For me, this is the app to beat when it comes to mobile RSS reading. If it came to Android I would be first in line to purchase!

PC –  Outlook integrated Google Reader
This takes advantage of Outlooks ability to display whole webpages within Outlook folders. As per this article on Lifehacker “Just right-click on the folder, choose Properties, enter the URL to Google Reader on the Home Page tab, and then check the box for “Show home page by default for this folder”. You can even use the full URL to a specific folder in Google Reader, or create extra folders in Outlook and use a different URL for quick access to different views.”

Podcasts

Many of the above applications will support auto podcast downloading, but to keep things simple and seperate out this high storage requirement (average podcast is 30–100mb in size), I prefer to have a dedicated app. My preference is to listen to podcasts in the car as it passes the time a little quicker on my 35–45 minute journey to and from work, and you can generally listen to a podcast a day that way.

Android –  BeyondPod
My preferred app (which I use solely on my Android) is BeyondPod. This app has been designed brilliantly and integrates perfectly with my car’s audio system via bluetooth, auto playing the current podcast playlist as soon as bluetooth connects, pausing for phone calls, and saving my place when i turn off the ignition ready to continue where it left off on my next journey! In addition it will auto connect my phone to my wireless network overnight and download the latest podcast episodes I have subscribed to, ready to play at my convenience.

I have also just noticed time running away with me, and this article doing the same, so I think I will split this out into a couple of pieces covering Twitter, email and offline reading / Pocket next time. Please feel free to comment on how you manage your feeds or anything else related? More next week!…

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Intro to Telephony, Call Routing and VoIP

Posted on 5th January 2013 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on Intro to Telephony, Call Routing and VoIP

I came across this great little video series the other day by elithecomputerguy and though it was well worth a share.

We are in the process of releasing a superb new IP telephony / unified comms product at work and I found the following videos most useful in augmenting our training.

It goes right through the technologies from PSTN, PBX etc, to the latest VoiP systems.

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Cisco ICND1 640-822 Exam Review and Study Guide

Posted on 4th December 2012 by Alex Galbraith | Permalink Comments Off on Cisco ICND1 640-822 Exam Review and Study Guide

I am embarrassed to say that I am a (seasoned?) IT professional who has never quite found the time to get down and dirty with Cisco networking. As I am about to start a new role as a Solution Architect for a managed service company (who are big into their Cisco gear, MPLS etc), I thought now would be the time to bone up on my 1s and 0s and certify in the Cisco space!

I can imagine that for someone new to IT, the CCENT / CCNA would perhaps be quite daunting, but even having worked with MS, VMware and storage environments for the past 9 years, I discovered that I still had plenty to learn (and in a geeky way, quite enjoyably so!). I did add to my burden by simultaneously going through interviews, completing handovers at my old job, and generally being ridiculously busy whilst trying to find the time to study for this, but even with all that on the go I passed the first exam (640-822) less than 6 weeks from beginning to study the subject. Based on this I would suggest that anyone dedicated to complete the CCENT could comfortably learn the content in full, pass it in 4 weeks of part-time personal study (in my case a couple of hours a night on the nights I had time to work).

I would also say at this point that for those people considering whether to do the ICND1/2 (2 exam) route, or the single CCNA exam, I don’t really know why virtually anyone would consider the latter? The combined exam costs twice as much as the single exam (give or take £2-3), and splitting the exam gives you an initial qualification (CCENT) and an easier ride. Unless you are so time poor that you can only afford enough time to do a single exam (saving you a whole 2 hours of your life), why not take the pressure off yourself and split it? Also if you did happen to mess it up, then you’ve only lost £100, not £200!

The exam itself was not too bad. One question I came across seemed to be bugged, (the responses in the sim to certain commands were conflicting), but other than that it was perfectly reasonable. Bear in mind that the pass mark for Cisco exams is considerably higher than MS / VMware ones, so if you are used to these, ensure you adjust your expectations accordingly. It is also slightly disconcerting not to be able to go back to a previous question; not that I regularly use this feature in other exams, but its always nice to know it’s there if you need it!

In terms of the actual resources I used to study for the exam, they were numerically limited in comparison to those I may use for a VMware or an MS exam, (and more expensive as I generally stick to free resources!), but I felt that to gain the knowledge in the quickest time, it was worth a the meagre financial investment I made (~£45 for training materials, ~£45 for my lab, plus the exam cost – normally covered by my employer, but I was working out my notice period at the time, so even attempting to claim for exams whilst walking out the door isn’t exactly ethical and might get me a slap from my old boss!).

Being a relatively old certification, there is obviously a wealth of different resources out there on the net, but the ones I chose to use are as follows:

  • CCNA Bootcamp by Chris Bryant – $44 (voucher code BULLDOG)
    I’ll say off the bat this is a simply great resource, taught in Chris’ inimitable laid back, easy style. Hey not only teaches you how to pass the exam, but gives plenty of real world advice and anicdotes too. He is also more than happy to answer any questions and does so promptly via twitter, email, Udemy etc. 90% of my learning came from these videos, along with the brilliant binary / subnetting practice questions provided as part of the accompanying ebook.I found that the best way to use the videos was to watch them whilst taking copious notes, then practicing every command and activity discussed using my GNS3 lab. The more you practice this, the better it will stick. I enjoy Chris’ style and have such confidence in his teaching, I have already pre-purchased his CCNA:Security and CCNP courses on Udemy, for which I am hoping to squeeze some time in next year.
  • CCNA 640-802 Official Cert Library, Updated (3rd Edition) by Wendell Odom – ~£15 (Kindle Edition)
    In my case I used this book to supplement / consolidate my video learning, and read the book after completing the video course. It is very well written, and any subjects not fully explained in Chris Bryant’s course are covered in detail here. There are also useful tests at the start of each section to help you guage your progress.You also have the option of buying the same book split into the two exams (ICND1 and ICND2) but the cost of the combined publication works out at half of that of buying the seperately, so why would you?One thing I always mention when it comes to tech books, is that unless you have a need to fill the shelves of your home office with dead trees, I would always recommend opting for the ebook version over the hard/softback. There are several reasons for this, but the two biggest are that the ebook is cheaper (we all like saving money, right?), and what is the point in killing a few trees for a book you will probably only read once or twice, and will be out of date within a couple of years anyway? Add to that the portability of ebooks for later reference and you have a compelling argument… the only draw back is putting money in the pocket of a company who is not particularly great at paying taxes, but other vendors are available!
  • Cisco Binary Game
    Not only is this great geeky fun, but it will hone your brain to very quickly do binary maths without the use of big tables etc, saving valuable time in your exams, and in your actual job. Chris Bryant does a great job in his course of teaching you the simplest and “correct” way of doing binary. Once you have this down and practiced with the binary game, you will easily be able to do binary conversions and subnetting etc in your head (especially when you start to see the patterns used to create subnets etc).
  • GNS3 – Graphical Network Simulator
    For me, this is an absolutely MUST HAVE resource, both for your studying, but also in your day job, where you can safely test any new configurations or commands to ensure you dont break your production environment! In essence it is a Cisco (other vendors are available) simulator, which allows you to build virtual networks using actual Cisco IOS images, and mess with them to your heart’s content. CBT nuggets kindly did a free intro video to GNS3 (link below).Getting hold of the IOS images is also very easy. I would simply say google is your friend (especially when searching for exact IOS image names). To understand how the IOS naming works, see this great little article.Once you have your lab up and running, all I can say is practice, practice, practice! Throughout every video session I had my lab running in parallel, and implemented each command several times on several machines, to really ingrain the commands and knowledge.

    The only drawback of GNS3 is its inability to simulate / emulate the ASICs in Cisco switches. For this they simply give you a fake switch you config from the GUI. If you want to be able to practice switch configuration to a greater level, I recommend getting your hands on a cheap second hand switch. I bought a 24-port Catalyst 2950 switch for just £30 on ebay, and a rollover cable and USB adapter for about £5. This gave me the ability to practice switchport and VLAN commands, have a physical play with the kit, and even link my physical switch into my GNS3 environment using the NIC on my GNS3 host machine! The only drawback is that it’s very loud, so I try to minimise the use of it in my home office! I can imagine the WAF (wife acceptance factor) of a full blown lab would not be great, an even better reason for using GNS3 wherever possible!

  • Intro to GNS3 by CBT Nuggets – free!
    Great little one hour course showing you how to setup a basic GNS3 environment. They also have a much longer course which you can pay $5 for a month access, but it isn’t necessary for a simple setup.
  • Official Cisco ICND1 Study Resources – free! (mostly)
    There are plenty of free videos, pdfs, presentations and even whole lab sims available on the ICND1 page. I would suggest you go through all of them.
  • Cisco Official ICND1 Practice Questions
    Make sure you are able to complete all of these successfully before attempting the actual exam.

In closing, I think the key thing to remember when learning Cisco is lab, lab and more lab… GNS3 is a great resource and more than sufficient for your CCENT (and I would hazard your CCNA) studies. If you have the budget to buy a cheap switch as well (e.g. a 2950) then all the better.

Next steps: New job, Xmas, then CCNA in Jan.

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