TOGAF study material

Recently I was getting more into the Enterprise Architecture topic and one of the areas I was investigating was TOGAF – The Open Group Architecture Framework. I have noticed that TOGAF is getting more and more recognition in the market and also it was interesting to me to compare how different IT architecture frameworks are similar and in the same time different. Because I am working as a Solution Architect at CSC and because I am familiar with CSC’s framework called Catalyst, I was also curious on how Catalyst potentially aligns to TOGAF.

The Open Group offers certification of TOGAF. The TOGAF Certified title is achieved by passing two exams – Part 1: Foundation and Part 2: Certified. To prepare for both exams The Open Group did a good job and prepared study guides, which can be obtained here.

Besides of the official study material it was really hard for me to find anything else that would be useful to study and get more into TOGAF. The only what I have I found useful was the Knotion provided introduction to TOGAF videos on YouTube. This company seems to be specializing in providing Enterprise Architecture trainings, including TOGAF. Here is the first video of the Knotion TOGAF 9 Trainings:

The rest of the videos are assembled in this YouTube playlist.

Fedora 14 on VMware and VMware Tools

If you have tried to install VMware Tools on a VMware ESX (probably Workstation too) Fedora 14 virtual machine, then you probably noticed that there are no suitable pre-compiled VMware Tools modules available for the kernel version that the Fedora runs and also it is not that easy to make the modules to compile from the sources.

First of all, the VMware Tools configuration script is looking for header files of the running kernel. It goes without saying, that the kernel-devel package must be present on the system to proceed further. However, the configuration script is looking for a variable named UTS_RELEASE, which is not present in the latest Fedora kernel headers – the utsversion.h is just not there. A simple workaround for this is to add the UTS_RELEASE definition into version.h header file. Continue reading “Fedora 14 on VMware and VMware Tools” »

Cisco Nexus 1000V and packet loss

The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual switch for VMware vSphere infrastructure brings quite a significant advantage to the networking implementation of the virtual environments. Comparing to the standard VMware vSwitch and DVS virtual switches, the Nexus family virtual switch adds most of the functionalities in the virtual environment that are found in today’s physical switch products. This fills up the gap between the physical network infrastructure and the virtual machine, allowing the network engineers to have more control on the virtual environments.

Despite that VMware and Cisco co-developed this solution for years, I would say that it is still in early stage and has some bugs out there. Those, of course, are rapidly being fixed by Cisco and new releases are coming one after another. Although, that is not an excuse and neither helps, when you face strange and hardly digestible issues happening in the production… Continue reading “Cisco Nexus 1000V and packet loss” »

Performance tuning Linux virtual machine

For my personal, development and testing purposes I am running around ten Linux virtual machines. Those are mainly based on RedHat Enteprise Linux / CentOS version 5. The virtualization platform setup is nothing close to exclusive – an IBM x345 server running VMware ESXi 3.5, custom-made NAS box based on OpenSolaris with ZFS. All together, the setup is not pouring extensive amount of computing resources, neither I/O performance. Therefore, good optimization of whatever possible is pretty much required and I like to experiment in this field too.

In this post I will not go deep into overall performance tuning stuff I have done on the ESX and storage side, but will focus more on the Linux OS tips, that personally for me makes some difference comparing to running a standard installation. Continue reading “Performance tuning Linux virtual machine” »

VMware Tools HGFS and Terminal Services profile issue

The VMware Tools is a good set of optimized virtual device drivers and utilities for the virtual machine environment. If during VMware Tools setup the complete installation option is chosen, the shared folders, or HGFS, functionality will be included together with all the essential components. However, HGFS is not supported on ESX and the bad thing is that turning it on will probably make bad things, especially if the virtual machine serves as a terminal server.

When a user with a roaming profile logs-on to such a terminal service server, the user profile for the session is being synchronized on the terminal server. Afterwards the HGFS system drops in a hgfs.dat file on the user profile directory. The issue begins when the user tries to log-out of the system. During this process the roaming profile is being synchronized and will probably fail to copy the hgfs.dat file, throwing out an error message that the file cannot be accessed.

This situation also causes the profile directory to be left on the system and whenever the same user will log-on to the system – a separate (e.g. user.000, user.001 and etc.) profile directory will be created. In the end, all in all this issue will make some mess in the system. Continue reading “VMware Tools HGFS and Terminal Services profile issue” »

“Could not initialize Opera” – Opera Mobile 10

Lately I have been using some custom Windows Mobile 6.x ROMs on my phone and today after a fresh flash I noticed that the Opera Mobile 10 (final build) installation gives me a “Could not initialize Opera” error prompt, when trying to start the browser. Continue reading ““Could not initialize Opera” – Opera Mobile 10” »

Cannot enable EtherChannel on port 14 of the IBM blade system

A specific discovery. If you are using IBM BladeCenter system with Cisco 3120X / 3120G enclosure switches and face problems, when trying to enable EtherChannel on NICs of blade server at bay #14, then update the Cisco enclosure switch firmware to the latest version. It seems to be a bug and it was fixed several days ago.

Technorati blog claim verification

Update: Seems that I have to place M939Q5QR3TVV somewhere in the beginning, as the RSS feed is truncated and the Technorati crawler cannot get it. Still playing… :-)

I was always and still am interested in all kind of management, marketing strategies and how some of them seem to make to have an enormous influence on this planet. I always firstly see superb marketing, when I see something related to Apple, Lady GaGa and lots of other business pearls that hits us everyday through various channels.

Today I took a look at various ways the blog owners are promoting their writings. I am kind of a newbie in this Internet marketing thing. However, some of them I tried myself. And the result is that now I have to put this code – M939Q5QR3TVV – so that Technorati.com would accept my claim and approve that this is really my blog. Despite that I do not think that this makes sense for me and possibly looks stupid too, I am still in with that, because I like fancy stuff… :-)

Microsoft Windows NT 4 on VMware vSphere – networking problems

It is correct, that the Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 is already “end-of-life” for quite some time, but believe me – there are still some systems on Earth running it. And still, VMware ESX / ESXi 4.0 supports it as a guest operating system. But, the sad part is that the VMware Converter 4.0.1 does not support it as a source…

Despite of that, if you managed to migrate a NT 4.0 from an older ESX version, you will probably face problems with network connectivity. That happens due to virtual machine hardware upgrade from version 4 to 7. Because NT 4.0 lacks some support plug-and-play specifications. A re-install of the network adapter can be a solution. Continue reading “Microsoft Windows NT 4 on VMware vSphere – networking problems” »

VMware vSphere Communication Map

Recently I got several questions from my colleagues, asking about the TCP/IP ports various VMware products uses and how they interact with other components.

A good guide is provided by VMware in their knowledge base – VMware KB 1012382 – where all the communication between the VMware components and their dependencies are described in writing.

However, written information is harder to digest comparing to a visual one. I have found a very good diagram, made by Dudley Smith, which basically represents in a visual way the information provided in the VMware knowledge base. Continue reading “VMware vSphere Communication Map” »

VMware Converter and failed P2V migrations

Successful server migrations to the virtual environment is an essential part of all virtualization initiatives. In this post I will try to consolidate some experience and information about VMware Converter conversion process problems and possible solutions.

Some consolidated general tips from VMware that could help to solve problems that could occur during migrations to virtual environment: Continue reading “VMware Converter and failed P2V migrations” »

VMware vCenter 4 database migration

There could be several situations, which would require to move the VMware vCenter database from one SQL server to another. Here is an action plan for moving the VMware vCenter database properly (by VMware): Continue reading “VMware vCenter 4 database migration” »

Lotus Domino Web Access & View XML Output

I do not imagine how popular is Lotus Domino / Notes tandem as an e-mail, collaboration solution, but I am sure that I have to use it on a daily basis. There are things that I do not like about it, but there are some good ones that make the day.

One of such is the Lotus Domino Web Access. It is simply a web-frontend, thru which the main resources like your mail, calendar and tasks are reachable without the Lotus Notes client. Talking in Domino / Notes language, the mentioned resources are databases and the data is represented in pre-customized views. So, the e-mail tab in the Lotus Notes or Web Access is actually a database view, which representation can be customized with some programming.
The interesting thing about the Web Access is that some of the general views can provide a XML output instead the actual layout to the browser. So, for example, if you open Calendar entries in the Web Access and all the data that is used to generate the Calendar view can be easily provided as a standard XML file (or a JSON). Continue reading “Lotus Domino Web Access & View XML Output” »

VMware ESX 4.0 Kick-start

Congratulations to me and my first public blog post – now I can truly say that I am very much into nowadays IT things (though a little bit late, I guess…).

During the days I had a lot of things to do with VMware vSphere. My virtualization journey started due several reasons, which are not that important, but led me to do some hands-on activities on this subject. Despite that I own VMware Certified Professional certification on vSphere, I can truly say that now I have a strong practical knowledge on a quite wide area of subject of this virtualization solution.
But let’s start from simple things… I will share some ESX 4.0 kickstart script, which was done by me for a specific situation. I know that there are lots of examples, blog posts about this ESX kickstart scripts – this will be some kind of backup of the script for my own reference. But who knows, maybe it will also bring some value to someone… Continue reading “VMware ESX 4.0 Kick-start” »