#gonegoogle
You may not be a twitter person (twitterer?). But one of the popular hash tags (that funky thing we usually refer to as the number sign ‘#’) over the past several days has been #gonegoogle.
This is Google’s latest campaign to get folks to migrate to google apps. Google apps compete directly with the tools from Microsoft Office, but the neat part (well I think it is neat) is that all of the applications live in the cloud!
Since the school district that I volunteer with really needs some assistance in technology, we figured we should look at this too.
I am going to journal my experiences in my efforts to move from our exchange server to GMail. I started this adventure today and am glad to report that the first day went pretty smooth! See my next entry for details.
ESXi Server Diagram
A quick look at the configuration setup on the test ESXi Server.
#gliffydiagram(1787101)#
NOTE: The gliffy plugin has stopped working, so until they fix it, take my word for it!
My friend Powershell
A good tester is always at home at the beloved command prompt.
Who hasn’t used the command line at one time or another? Especially to work around pesky windows or GUI issues.
I have been experimenting with Microsoft’s latest product for the command line – Powershell. This is a very powerful command line tool that utilizies .NET capabilities right from the command line. There is also an integrated development environment available that makes debugging and testing pretty slick! The IDE that I currently use is PowerGUI from Quest Software. Check it out right here .
Some of the uses of Powershell that I have implemented along with Silktest
- Send email at the end of a test run and include logging information and the results written to an excel spreadsheet.
- Enumerate files and directories, and merge data into a single file.
- Perform SQL Queries against databases, and return results to the screen or to a file.
Some good resources on the web:
- Powershell Dot Com
- The Powershell Guy
- Powershell Blog
- VMware: vSphere PowerCLI
- Scott Hanselman’s Computing ZEN
- The Scripting Guy
Check them out. Next post will deal with some of the books I have found interesting!
Running ESXi from USB Stick
One of the issues I faced in trying to benchmark ESXi for our QA work was to have an adequate platform to create the ESXi Server. I had two DELL R900 boxes (4X Quad Xeon, 32GB RAM, about 1.2TB storage) to perform a certain part of the testing for the spring 
release. These machines were critical, and I couldn’t just take one for this pilot. If the pilot failed, I had to make sure the machine was reprovisioned back as a Windows 2003 Server.
When I started this pilot only ESXi V3.5 was available. My research lead me to believe that I could build an ESXi distribution on a thumb drive. This would keep my windows boot drive in tact, and could allow me fast re-provisioning if need be.
I found a very good guide to accomplish this out on yellowbricks.com While it does the trick, a slightly “nicer” explanation can be found here on Vladan Seget’s “ESX Virtualization Blog“ The second link talks about Version 4. But the steps are very similar. Have a look.
The remarkable thing is that by doing this, I had this very powerful Server machine available for ESXi, running off of this 1GB USB Drive! I was pretty impressed!
While you can always use more disk space in these trials – especially for snapshots etc. the disk space was the limiting factor. I never saw any other resources compromised during the testing. Of the 1.2TB available on the machine, I could only really access 1/2 of this, as I needed to keep Windows in place for the re-provision if need be. Even with this limitiation this configuration worked well for me.
Next: What I built and how I built it for my testing.
vSphere Client on OS X
I wanted to be able to use my MacBook to connect to the vSphere client back on my desktop. Sure I could fire up the old IBM Thinkpad and connect that way, and run the client natively under Windows XP. But really what fun would that be? I used my favorite search engine to see if such an environment existed. Many of the initial hits had you firing up Fusion (the Mac VMware Workstation ) and from the virtual windows box, run it that way. Too cumbersome, eats too much memory on this MacBook (only 2GB Memory).
There had to be a better way!
Sure enough, the folks at Punching Clouds had found a way to integrate the client seamless to your OS X desktop. Here is the write-up and procedures right here. Also a picture is worth a thousand words, so here is a quick snap of my MacBook desktop.
If you look closely, you will see across the top, the OS X menu bar. Also on the bottom you will see your typical Windows XP task bar, start menu etc. While this takes a bit to setup, and get running, the instructions provided at Punching Clouds is spot-on. This coupled with the better VPN Client installed on this machine (the free IP-Securitas) made this MacBook the platform of choice for all of those remote hours spent testing and analyzing data for my employer.
Here is a video of the setup in action
Intro to my work in the Virtual Space
One of the projects I have been involved with over the last quarter was to on an ad-hoc basis, prove out the concept of moving our QA environment to a Virtual solution.
We have been doing “poor man’s ” Virtualization for years. We have used various versions of VMWare Workstation and server to create virtual boxes to achieve certain tasks, such as installation testing, upgrading and other repetitive tasks that really didn’t test capabilities or performance, but rather met our objective of “yeah, you can upgrade from version X.Y to X.Z”.
In a pinch these virtuals would also be used to establish benchmarks for tests, and even some functional testing. The performance was poor, disk space was at a premium and we did a pretty good job at convincing ourselves this was okay. Bottom line was that we didn’t have appropriate hardware, nor did we have the support to put the right stuff in place.
In the following entries I will try to outline some of the work I did this year in a real Virtual environment.
What a difference that makes! I will also show you some of the resources I found, and applied to be successful.
Hello world!
This is my professional blog site, for sharing various projects and skills with the rest of the universe.
Check in often, you never know what you might find!
