Possibly Priced out by VMWare

July 15th, 2011 by Ian 6 comments »

I had a grand plan, a lovely plan, and plan to end all plans.  Well, not that good but we were going to catch up to the rest of the IT world and come up with a viable DR plan as well.  The new licensing model from VMWare has seemingly killed that part way into it.  Here’s a bullet list of what I was going to do:

1.  Purchase HP P4300 SAN
2.  Purchase 2 servers and create a VSphere 4 cluster using the Essentials Plus bundle
3.  Purchase a server running embedded ESXi, lots of disk space and install HP’s VSA software to replicate data from the production SAN.  This was to be our offsite DR solution.

So far I have purchased the SAN and the two host servers.  I was about to order the Essentials Plus bundle when I found out about the new licensing.  From what I can tell, the new licensing will force me to go to a standard license, more than doubling my licensing costs.  Beyond that, an apparent 8GB of RAM cap on the free hypervisor has killed my DR site plan.  I had planned to be able to bring critical VMs up on the DR site box with at worst, a weeks worth of lost data.  That’s far more acceptable than having to rebuild everything from  tape with no hardware on hand.  That can’t happen now.  A large reason for going with the HP SAN was the VSA software which I can’t use with the free hyper visor.

I have to go back to the drawing board and look at HyperV and Xen.  I’ll have to see if HP’s VSA can be used in another virtual environment as well.

Microsoft and Citrix must be laughing their collective asses off at VMWare for gift wrapping new potential customers.

6 comments »

Posted in Rants, storage, wtf

VARs

February 4th, 2011 by Ian 2 comments »

I don’t like dealing with VARs.  The people are nice enough, but the process is just irritating and we tend to avoid it whenever possible.

Our environment is straight forward and there aren’t many organizational IT requirements that aren’t covered by our existing software/hardware infrastructure.  Generally when it comes time to buy equipment and/or upgrade software, we know what we want and we have at least an idea how we’re going to implement it.  If we don’t, we ask.  Our business processes are such that, for larger purchases, we have to get competitive quotes.  This creates a problem when one VAR talks to the inside sales people for whatever product we want and finds out that there are other VARs involved.  Then they start wanting to talk to you about the value added, which is basically consulting services regardless of they spin it.  I’ve only encountered one VAR that apparently doesn’t charge the end customer for its consulting services, which is an interesting business model, but it’s not the norm.

One common problem I find when talking to these VARs is that when they start talking to you with some sort of solutions expert, they may start talking to you about other options.  I suspect these other options represent stronger business partnerships they might have with source vendors rather than working with what we’re really looking for.  So an example is, you go to a VAR looking for pricing for SAN solution A, and they start talking to you about SAN solution B.  That doesn’t help us.  Solutions to problems we don’t have don’t help us either.

On the flip side, I understand why they do what they do.  They need to differentiate themselves from their competitors to drive their business.  I’d probably do the same thing if the roles were reversed.  I’m sure there are many customers that benefit from the value added.  We don’t benefit from it and having to play the game and go through the motions is generally a waste of time for us and for the VAR.

For anyone reading this, do VARs add value for you?  If so, what?

2 comments »

Posted in Rants

GroupWise on Linux

July 12th, 2010 by Ian 2 comments »

We have been running the GWIA(smtp module) and webaccess on Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 for a couple of years now.  Before that, I had webaccess loaded up on SLES 9 in it’s own eDirectory tree which was something Alex Evans helped me rig up, back before he was involved with GroupWise product management and did back line support on GroupWise.  I’ve just moved two student post offices and they’re running fine, albeit with  a few users and no activity due to it being summer and all.

After figuring out a few quirks, I have to say, I’m not going to miss GroupWise on NetWare.  GroupWise on NetWare was/is a fickle bastard and I’ll be glad to see it gone.  Overall, I’m becoming more comfortable with SLES and Linux overall as we move away from NetWare.  We’ll see how these post offices perform under load once the school year starts fresh, but until them, I feel better with GroupWise on Linux than I do NetWare just because the OS has memory protection that wasn’t an after thought.  Plus, I’m not really going to miss the blue screens.  The combination of “rcgrpwise status” and the http monitor is good enough at the moment.

My only continued gripe, as far as administration goes, is the tool chain for GroupWise is still stuck in 2002.

2 comments »

Posted in Email

Host Based Printers

July 12th, 2010 by Ian No comments »

Somehow I managed to get this far without ever knowing what the difference was between host based printers and everything else. I know now. I also found out after two hours that host based printers don’t play nice with terminal services. I already knew this, but I have been reminded, that HP print drivers are all crap except the venerable LJIII. Well, that’s overkill but holy shit, HP can make an impressively bloated and broken driver.

Also, stay away from Laser Jet 1005s and 1022s. If you have one and it works, congratulations, it’s an accident and I don’t believe it was ever designed to work properly.

No comments »

Posted in wtf

Tags:

Lost supervisor password on a Lenovo laptop

April 20th, 2010 by Ian 5 comments »

One of our little cherubs decided to put a supervisor(bios) password on a laptop that didn’t have the supervisor password already set.  It has been a few years since I’ve had to clear one of these passwords as I don’t do much in the way of workstation helpdesk tasks anymore.

In the old days, you just moved the jumper for the the CMOS reset and that was pretty much it.

On these new laptops, apparently the only way to reset the password, is to replace the motherboard.   Yes, that’s not a typo.  You have replace the whole effing motherboard!  Who came up with that design?  If the ignition core on my car breaks, do I need to get a new engine?  I don’t even know what to say, it’s crazy.  What possible reason could there be to have such a horrid design flaw?

Update:  I found this article on The Register confirming the absurd policy.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/01/thinkpad_password_reset_hard_luck/

5 comments »

Posted in Rants, wtf

Site updates

April 8th, 2010 by Ian 1 comment »

I’ve finally got motivated to make a few changes here.  Until recently it never occurred to me that people might possibly end up here on a mobile phone and that it would be a pain to navigate.  So I added a mobile pack pluggin for wordpress.  I’ll play around with themes a bit, but it’s installed and works…sort of.

There’s an issue with SI Captcha that won’t allow a user to leave a comment from a mobile phone.  I’ll look into that over the next couple of ways.  I also finally fixed the location of the captcha box, which was below the submit button on the forms.  That was just me being lazy for over a year.

I’m also playing around with some themes for desktop users.

1 comment »

Posted in Uncategorized

GroupWise is still alive

March 29th, 2010 by Ian No comments »

Over the years Novell’s GroupWise has lost a lot of ground and mind share to Exchange.  While combating Microsoft in an area of strength(Windows Server and the associated services that run on top of it) is hard enough, Novell hasn’t seemed to put the proper resources into GroupWise that are needed.

For those that may not know, outside of Notes, GroupWise is the only real competitor to Exchange in terms of a comprehensive groupware package with wide client support beyond a web interface.  There is a native client for windows and a java based client for OSX and Linux.  You can also run all of the server pieces on NetWare, SUSE Linux, and Windows.  While NetWare support will be dropped after the current version(8), the server side will still run on an large existing footprint(primarily windows).

Finally, after about a year and a half since Nokia decided to stop supporting Intellesync,  Novell has released a tech preview of their “Novell Data Synchronizer Mobility Pack” which allows GroupWise to communicate with mobile devices using the ActiveSync protocols.  It’s good to see some movement on this front.  Authorized betas are scheduled for April.  Not being able to support modern mobile devices has been a killer for GroupWise.  Hopefully for them, this beta period will be fairly short.

GroupWise still has some other issues though.  It’s management tool is the tired Console 1.  You need direct file access to do any administration.  That means, if you’re running a domain, post office, mta, gwia, or webaccess on anything but an NSS volume, you have to either VNC into that server to run a completely separate instance of C1 or come up with some workaround.  The tool chain badly needs to be fixed.  Personally, I’d prefer not to have a web based tool, but that seems to be the trend at Novell.  Either way, anything that would make it less terrible to administer would be nice.

In the end, every email solution has its quirks and issues.  If you’re looking for an Exchange replacement or something to compare it against, take a look at GroupWise, especially if you’re a mixed shop.

Some useful GW links:

GroupWise Exchange – http://www.groupwise.co.uk/
Mobility Pack Tech Preview Forum – http://forums.novell.com/novell-product-support-forums/data-synchronizer/mobility-pack-tech-preview/
Official GroupWise Support Forums – http://forums.novell.com/novell-product-support-forums/groupwise/

*I’m not a Novell employee.  I don’t own any Novell stock.  I’m just a “Novell admin”.*

No comments »

Posted in Email

Got preliminary approval for PICC Conference

March 15th, 2010 by Ian 1 comment »

After a bit of discussion, I got approval to go to the PICC Conference in Jersey.  I’m looking to jump on the storage and NAS/SAN workshops.  I little knowledge of IPv6, so I’m going to jump on that session as well.  I haven’t gone to a conference in at least half a decade, so I’m looking forward to this.

I’ll probably be the only person who admins a “Novell” network at the conference.  ;)

1 comment »

Posted in General

I finally broke down and got a smart phone

March 8th, 2010 by Ian 6 comments »

My wife and I picked up a couple of Droids yesterday.  Her phone was broken and mine was up for the new in two.  Since they are currently 2 for 1, we took the jump.

This is my first real smart phone.  I like it so far.  There are a ton of options.  I can see why this platform as presented(the normal android interface), wouldn’t be ideal for every day users, and really pointed towards people who aren’t afraid to mess around with their phone.

I like the Gmail integration.  The touch screen works better than I thought it would and I have no problems with the on screen keyboard.  If I’m doing a bit more typing, I’ll slide the physical keyboard out.  Wireless on a phone is great as I’m normally around a wireless AP when at work or at home.  The 3G will work fine in between.

There are a couple of things that bug me a bit.  Novell is still working on their sync tool for modern phone to replace the GroupWise Mobile server.  Outside of the SMTP and IMAP combo, there’s no good way to get your GroupWise mail on the phone.  The default GW8 webaccess interface doesn’t work with the default browser or the dolphin browser.  You have to switch it to basic mode to open mail.  Not that aesthetics are everything, but the basic mode in webaccess is just that, BASIC.  For now, I’ll just be forwarding my Zenoss and other SMTP alerts to my gmail account.

I downloaded a task killer tool which I find myself using often.  I’m not sure how much I really need to be using it, but to keep the battery from getting sucked down, I’m using it.  That’s a bit annoying and takes me back to the old Mac operating system where you had to manage your RAM manually for each application.  It’s not the end of the world, but I guess it’s the price you pay for multitasking.

6 comments »

Posted in Email, General

Resolution: WON’T FIX

February 23rd, 2010 by Ian No comments »

SMTP notification configured to be sent from Backup Exec for Windows Servers, requiring authentication to the SMTP server, fails to be sent:

http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/290886.htm

Basically, it says, “we’re not fixing it”.  Why the hell do you put an option into a program, that doesn’t work and you acknowledge doesn’t work, and don’t plan on fixing it?

Sure, that phone will ring, but too bad if you want to dial with it as there are no numbers and we don’t plan on adding any numbers to it.  Why do we put up with this crap?

No comments »

Posted in Rants, wtf