Category: Technology

VMware Workshop : Video

A few months ago I wrote about a VMware Workshop in Cork, co-sponsored by Pure Storage. All the posts associated with that are linked from the wrap-up post here. This is just a quick note to say a short video of that event came out recently and can be seen here.

There is a brief clip of me sounding dazed and confused, which makes me laugh.

For your information, we use VMware for the following.

  • Oracle databases : All but two of our projects using Oracle databases have the databases running on Oracle Linux inside VMware virtual machines. The two projects that don’t are things we are hoping to switch off soon as they are being replaced.
  • MySQL databases : All run on Oracle Linux inside VMware virtual machines.
  • SQL Server databases : All run on Windows inside VMware virtual machines.
  • WebLogic : All run on Oracle Linux inside VMware virtual machines.
  • Tomcat : All run on Oracle Linux inside VMware virtual machines.
  • Node.js : We recent put some stuff live running on Node. That’s on Oracle Linux inside VMware virtual machines.

You get the picture. We pretty much do everything on VMware and almost always use Oracle Linux. 🙂

Cheers

Tim…

Birmingham City University (BCU) Talk #6

On Monday I did my 6th talk at Birmingham City University (BCU).

During this session I spoke to second year computer science students about graduate employment with a sprinkling of community involvement thrown in. This was a modified version of a session I gave about 2 years ago, which inspired a series of blog posts called What Employers Want.

I always find these sessions fun, as they are not normal tech presentations. I’ve mentioned this before, but these type of session require different skills compared to straight tech presentations, because you can’t hide behind the tech. 🙂

If you are a tech speaker, reach out to your local universities and colleges to see if they need some guest speakers. You will both benefit from this!

Thanks to Jagdev Bhogal and BCU for inviting me again. See you again soon.

Cheers

Tim…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) : That’s Customer Service!

If you were reading my Twitter stream about 11 days ago you will have seen me tweet the following message.

That feeling when your reserved instance ran out and you didn’t realise. 🙁

The story was I logged into AWS and noticed the reserved instance for my website had expired about a month and a half before. For those that don’t know, buying reserved instances reduces your compute costs because you are committing to some resource usage over an extended period of time. There are various combinations of time, up-front payment, instance type and region that save you different amounts of cash… Once I noticed it had expired I bought a new reserved instance and thought no more of it.

Fast forward to this weekend and I checked my “EC2 Reserved Instance Utilization Report”, to make sure my actual instance was using my reserved instance allocation and I was not getting overcharged. The default screen suggested that I wasn’t using my reserved instance, which left me kind-of vexed. I checked the settings and noticed the reserved instance had been bought at “Region” level, rather than for my “Availability Zone”, which is “EU (Ireland)”. I reset it to my availability zone and decided to investigate…

What I noticed was visiting the EC2 reports was flipping my region settings from “EU (Ireland)” to “Global”. When I next visited any EC2 screen my region was flipped from “Global” to “US East (N. Virginia)”.

I reported this to AWS and got a message back suggesting this was impossible. I recorded a video of it and sent that. I also reached out on Twitter and it seems I’m not the only person able to reproduce this bug. After several more interactions with support, it seemed this was the only “Global” service that was having this issue. When I switched to IAM or S3 and back to EC2 I remained in the proper region…

At this point I was feeling a little miffed that I had lost out on 9 days of reserved instance pricing, so I asked for the difference to be refunded. I accepted the 40+ days where I had no reserved instance were my fault… I also made some suggestions about reserved instance notifications and proper buy-the-same-again functionality, that would really help in this situation.

After a few minutes I got a little paranoid and though I ought to double-check that my reserved instance wasn’t being used, so I had a little play around with reporting and noticed the default report (a summary) was not showing it, but if I flipped to a report with finer granularity I could see the reserved instance was being used, which in itself seemed a little odd. I wrote back to support and asked them to ignore my request for the 9 day refund as the reserved instance was being used. As far as I was concerned, the situation was over now as I had not lost out on any money due to this interface bug.

A little while later I got a message from support confirming my reserved instance was indeed being used, so I had not lost out over those 9 days, but they also refunded the difference between the reserved instance pricing and the full price I paid for the month and a half where I had no reserved instance! Wow! I really didn’t expect that!

In financial terms, the refund is nothing to Amazon, or me for that matter, but that sort of gesture is fantastic from a customer service perspective. I instantly switched from being a little annoyed by the whole situation to wanting Amazon to marry my daughter (Heli). 🙂

Before last year’s Oracle OpenWorld I wrote a post called “Oracle : Tech Company or Service Company?“, where I discussed what I think Oracle need to do to compete with the other cloud providers. I can’t imagine Oracle resolving an incident like this so quickly, at the weekend, which resulted in giving me some money I probably didn’t deserve. I hope someone from Oracle reads this post and registers the fact this is what you are competing with!

Cheers

Tim…

VMware Workshop : It’s a Wrap!

Just a few quick comments to wrap up the whole“VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition” event…

Running Oracle workloads in virtualised environments is not a new thing for me. On my desktop I mostly use VirtualBox, but in the data centre it’s always VMware. I first started to run Oracle workloads on VMware about 15 years ago and have never really had any problems from a technology perspective. I’ve never been a VMware administrator, and never will be, but it’s important for me to know as much as possible about VMware to allow me to get the most out of the Oracle database when it’s running on that platform.

A very big thank you to all the folks at VMware and Pure Storage for inviting me to this event and organising everything. I feel hugely privileged to be able to get access to these people and this information!

Thanks to all the speakers, VMware and non-VMware, who took the time to come and educate us and deal with our questions, whether they were good or dumb questions. 🙂 Thanks to Michael Corey for being the event photographer, and not capturing me at my absolute worst. 🙂

For those folks that don’t have the opportunity to take part in an event like this, you can still get all the non-NDA information for free! Just Google “VMware best practice” and the name of your area of interest, like “Oracle RAC”, and you are going to get a whole bunch of links to VMware best practice documents that will tell you everything you need to know! The take-home message from the VMware support folks was the vast majority of customer issues actually come down to misconfigurations that are detailed in these best practice documents. Only go off-piste if you know what you are doing! 🙂

Thank you everyone. Much appreciated! See you soon…

Cheers

Tim…

PS. My posts related to this event were:

VMware Workshop : The Journey Home

It was a later start today. I headed down to breakfast at about 08:15 to meet Heli (and family) and Johannes. It was the first time I had made it to the hotel breakfast this week. Over time more people filtered in to say hello and goodbye. 🙂

From there it was back to my room to write some blog posts and continue the process of playing catch-up with the stuff I have missed while I have been away. I’m officially on holiday, but I can’t stop myself from logging in to work every day, checking my emails and doing odd things to keep on top of stuff. The thought of going back next week and having to deal with the week’s backlog is too much for me. 🙂

When I came to zip up my case the zip broke. I managed to fix it, but I was a bit concerned it might open in transit. At about 13:30 I headed off for the airport. The plane had been delayed coming out of Scotland, so it arrived late in Cork. As a result my flight home was delayed by about 40 minutes. The flight itself went smoothly enough and when I got to the other end my luggage was intact. 🙂

I was going to get a taxi home, but the delay meant I would be stuck in rush hour traffic, so instead I opted for the train. The train is a lot cheaper, but super annoying as I need to take two trains and walk with the bags at the end…

I ended up standing on both trains, then walking home in the rain. I had a coat in my bag, but I was scared to open my bag in case it wouldn’t close again… I arrived home wet, but in one piece… 🙂

I’ll do a wrap-up post next…

Cheers

Tim…

VMware Workshop : Day 3

Day 3 started the same way as day 2. I woke up and felt like a total zombie due to lack of sleep.

The agenda for “VMware Expert Database Workshop Program Oracle Edition” day 3 was packed and looked something like this.

  • “License Fortress from VLSS” by Dean Bolton
  • “VMware vSphere Core & SDDC – Networking – NSX & VCNS” by Chris Rohan
  • “VMware Experts Event – Brocade and VMware Technology and the VMware Solutions Lab” by Marcus Thordal
  • “VMware Integrated Containers and Oracle” by Simon Guyennet
  • “VMware Executive Presentation – The CPBU, vSphere and Friends, and the Experts Program” by Mike Adams
  • “VMware Experts Event – Pure Storage – Technical Session #2” by Somu Rajarathinam & Ron Ekins
  • “High Availability and Disaster Recovery in the SDDC” by Feidhlim O’Leary
  • “Management & Monitoring – Blue Medora and Oracle on vSphere” by Alain Geenrits
  • “License Audit” by Daniel Hesselink
  • “vSphere HA or Oracle RAC, SRM or Data Guard, they are all complimentary when Oracle is run in the SDDC” by Sudhir Balasubramanian

The business proposition from VLSS is super interesting. To put it simply they offer an insurance policy for your Oracle compliance. If you are running Oracle workloads on VMware, or any other platform for that matter, you should definitely look at this!

Since I’m currently going down the rabbit hole with Docker, the vSphere container stuff was pretty interesting. Both what is already GA and what is coming… 🙂

At the end of the last session we recorded a short video question/answer session, which will probably come out in a montage at some point. Kind-of scary and fun mixed together. From there we had a quick tour of Global Support Services (GSS), before heading back to the hotel. Before I knew what happened the last day was done!

In the evening a group of us went out to eat, then it was back to the hotel to chat more about tech, how the workshop had gone, life, the universe and everything. 🙂

I’ll do a proper wrap-up post when I get back home with all the real thank you messages in it, but suffice to say thanks to everyone for making this happen and letting me be a part of it.

Cheers

Tim…