Jase's Place

Have to(?) access the Internet to download patches
Using the default configuration of vSphere Update Manager, it must be able to connect to the Internet to download vSphere patches.  This configuration is not always possible, depending on network architecture, policies, security configuration, or other reasons.  Often times, simply using a proxy will accommodate the requirement of getting to the Internet to download patches.

But what if there is a situation, for what ever reason, that you do not want to allow the server where VMware Update Manager is running to access the Internet?  I talked to a customer not too long ago about the process of patching vSphere hosts in a situation such as this.  In vSphere 4, it was somewhat bothersome using the VMware vSphere CLI, as opposed to using Update Manager.  Also, when only using the VMware vSphere CLI, it is hard to get a good graphical representation of how a host is patched.  VMware Update Manager does this well.  But what if the server running VMware Update Manager is not going to be allowed online to download patches?

VMware Update Manager Download Service provides the ability to create a local repository of vSphere patches and Virtual Appliance patches. Jason Horn posted an article on the process for vSphere 4.x back in 2010. You can find his article here: VMware Update Manager Download Service

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Well, it has been a year since I joined the ranks of the EMC vSpecialist Team.  What a whirlwind year it has been.

Slow start
I started December out doing a lot of the training and processing that goes along with taking on a new job.  Within 3 weeks however, I joined Nick Weaver at a “Preso and a Movie” engagement where Nick talked about EMC offerings, and afterward Tron Legacy was shown.

It was really interesting, coming from a customer role to the vendor side of things, with every new day as an eye opener for me.

Hitting the ground running
When January came, I got my first real taste of getting on the road.  I took care of a couple customer engagements, as well as participated in a high profile proof-of-concept.  To be honest, it felt like I was thrown in the deep end of the pool.  Was I intimidated? A little…

After 5 years of being an Adjunct Instructor for 2 Universities, presenting information in front of people was not really a big deal.  After 15+ years of working with software, hardware, storage, and the like, the POC was not really a big deal either.

Immersion, Speak America, & GeekWeek

Team 5 was a really great group of EMC vSpecialists & VCE vArchitects to say the least.  We had a good time getting to know each other at Immersion training, followed by an intense deep dive into speaking at Speak America.  I really enjoyed the camaraderie we had, and feel as though all of my teammates are not only kindred spirits, but brothers/sisters in my journey with EMC.

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“Cloud bursting” is a new term that describes leveraging compute resources external to an organization, when the demand is greater than the organization has capacity for.  Basically it is a process that provides additional resources that an organization doesn’t typically pay full price for the additional resources initially, but pay based on a consumption model when those additional resources are used.

Is IT the only organizational unit that does this?
Nope, not by far.  Scaling quickly during a time of increased demand isn’t really isolated to just infrastructure and technology units.  It has been around for a long time.  In fact this practice has been around a long time, longer than most IT departments have been around.

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A little background
I speak with customers all the time on various technologies.  One such technology that I speak about is virtual desktop technologies, architecture, sizing, and so on.  I don’t know if I can say that 2011 is the “Year of VDI”, but I can say I have spoken to quite a few customers about it.  Remember that 2009, 2010, & 2011 were touted as the “Year of VDI.”

I will say that I exclusively use a VMware View instance to do my daily work at EMC.  Yes I have an EMC laptop, but I typically use it for demos, testing, and a few other things.  I was lucky enough to have been allowed to have one of the first phase of VMware View instances rolled out.  To be honest I’d be lost without it.

Now, to get back to my topic…

A typical end user conversation
I was talking to a friend earlier today, and during our conversation, their laptop had an error about a particular application.  They asked me “Do you know anything about application.exe?” As this was a phone conversation, I couldn’t really see the error message, so I asked them to read me some of the debug information.

The application didn’t sound like a normal Windows application, and it appeared strange, given that the location of the file was in the Prefetch folder of Windows XP.  I said words to the effect of “It sounds like some type of malware.”

I asked if they had received any odd/strange emails lately. “I got one the other day, and I clicked a link to unsubscribe from it. Why?” they asked me. I told them that could have been a possible point of infection.

They asked, “Can you help me with it? I already ran a virus scan, and it didn’t find anything.”  I suggested that they call their IT Support department for escalation.  They responded with “They’ll just ask if I ran a virus scan, and then it will take me months before they take a look at it. So… can you help me?”

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