Virtualization Simplifies the Way We Do Business

Datacenters can be very interesting and challenging environments. Due to the drastic decrease in server prices over the years, we went from large monolithic mainframe servers that process many applica­tions to one that utilizes much cheaper and smaller servers used for individual applications.

In modern datacenters, we are now able to virtualize these many servers onto a relatively few physical servers. Although it depends on the type and utilization of a particular application, a normal rule of thumb has shown that we can effectively virtualize 10–15 servers per physical host. For our Unified Communications servers, we are currently able to virtual­ize up to four servers per physical host. However, this capability will certainly increase with each new version.

Lower CAPEX and OPEX

Given that datacenters are incredibly expensive to run (they require expensive real estate, use incredibly large amounts of electrical power, and have high operational costs), virtualization of our datacenters represent a reduction in a company’s Capital Expenditures (CAPEX), but more significantly, their Operational Expenditures (OPEX).

One of the highest operational costs within a datacenter is the servers themselves. Modern single-purpose servers have been shown to only have 5–10% utilization, on average. Conversely, if your servers are using a large per­centage of your datacenter’s power, like 75%, then we have a very inefficient scenario. By virtualizing these serv­ers, we can now combine many servers (10–15) onto a single physical server, which raises the overall utilization significantly and, therefore, lowers the power requirements.

Additional benefits can be seen beyond the reduced power requirements. In a traditional datacenter, many smaller servers generate a LOT of heat, which must be dissipated via cooling efforts. The yearly cooling costs are extremely expensive; but just as bad, strict formulas dictate that we can place only so many servers within so many of square feet in the datacenter. Through virtualization, we are able to place a greater number of serv­ers per square foot of the datacenter with reduced cooling requirements.

Likewise with these other operational costs, cabling represents a HUGE investment in a typical datacenter. For every server that is virtualized, we are able to reduce the physical cabling required to connect that server. Ad­ditionally, when implemented within the Cisco UCS, we are able to take advantage of Unified Fabric and further reduce cabling requirements, since we can send both LAN and Storage signaling over the same cables.

Improved Availability

In a traditional datacenter, if one of your Unified Communications servers crashes, you normally must restart that device manually. This represents a potentially significant outage for that UC device.

When we virtualize our UC servers, we can take advantage of VMware’s great tools like High Availability (HA) and Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

• With HA, the failed virtual server is automatically restarted, which saves a significant amount of downtime, resulting in greater productivity and profits from that server.
• With SRM, we can provide Disaster Recovery by quickly failing over a virtual machine from a main pro­duction site to a secondary site while ensuring the VM remains active.

Licensing

One of the great benefits that we’ll see when virtualizing our UC servers on the Cisco UCS platform is that we can achieve actual platform mobility. On traditional Cisco Media Convergence Servers (MCS), the UC license is tied to the physical server’s MAC address of the primary network interface card (NIC). This means that the instance of the UC application is always tied to that physical device. But what if that server hardware fails?

With the Cisco UCS, we can create Service Profiles that represent the identity of the actual server. We can then “associate” this service profile with any of the blade servers within the UCS 5108 chassis. By doing this, we can simply associate our UC server with a new blade server, if needed. Within Cisco UCS, we are able to build what’s called a “MAC license,” which is based on several configuration compo­nents of the UC server:

1. Time zone
2. NTP server
3. NIC speed
4. Hostname
5. IP Address
6. IP Mask
7. Gateway Address
8. Primary DNS
9. SMTP server
10. Certificate Information (Organization, Unit, Location, State, Country)

Once the MAC license is configured, it can simply be associated with the Service Profile and applied to whichever physical blade server is needed.

Ease of installation in UCS using OVF templates

One of the barriers to entry, when it comes to UC servers, is the general complexity required to build and config­ure these applications properly. There is a considerable learning curve required, which requires the presence or availability of administrators or engineers with these specific skillsets.

With the advent of integrated solutions like the Cisco UCS, the datacenter has undergone a major paradigm shift in our methodology of both design and operational management. Furthermore, with the greatly increased knowledge we have of the consequences of our designs to not only our bottom line, but to the environment as well, we now know how important it is to make our datacenters as efficient as possible while still increasing performance and profitability.

Related Courses
CIPT1v8.0 – Cisco IP Telephony part 1
CVOICEv8.0 – Implementing Cisco Unified Communications Voice over IP and QoS
CAPPSv8.0 – Integrating Cisco Unified Communications Applications

Excerpted from GlobalKnowledge.com

What is an Incident?

According to ITIL, an incident is an unplanned interruption to an service, or a degradation in the quality of an service. What often determines whether or not something is an incident is whether or not the service level agreement (SLA) was breached. However, ITIL allows for raising an incident even before an SLA has been breached in order to limit or prevent impact.

In layman’s terms, an incident is the representation of an outage.

What is a Problem?

According to ITIL, a problem is the root cause of one or more incidents. Problems can be raised in response to one or more incidents, or they can be raised without the existence of a corresponding incident.

In layman’s terms, a problem is the representation of the cause or potential cause or one or more outages.

What is the Relationship Between Incidents and Problems?

Typically the relationship is that one problem is the cause of one or more incidents. However, it is possible to have an incident (or group of incidents) that is caused by more than one problem.

Why Does ITIL Distinguish Between Incidents and Problems?

The point of distinguishing between incidents and problems is the same as separating cause and effect. Problems are the cause, and incidents are the effect.

ITIL encourages organizations to distinguish between these things because the two are often treated and resolved differently. Treating and resolving an incident simply means that whatever service was impacted has been temporarily restored. It does not mean that the incident will not recur at some time in the future. When I say “temporarily”, keep in mind that temporary could mean 1 minute or 10 years. The point is, a resolution to an incident is not permanent.

Problems on the other hand are the cause of incidents. We might use different techniques to identify the root cause of a problem and ultimately resolve that problem. When a problem is resolved, change management is invoked because addressing root causes often entails some amount of risk.

Effective incident management ensures that as a service provider you are able to keep the promises you made in your SLAs by providing a mechanism to quickly restore service when it’s necessary. Problem management, on the other hand, ensures that as a service provider you are able to reactively respond to incidents so that they don’t recur and proactively prevent incidents from happening.

These are separate processes because they often require a different skill set and entail different sets of activities. Incident management wants to quickly restore service in line with any SLAs that are in place whereas problem management wants to eliminate the root causes of incidents. Sometimes to properly address a problem, a service provider must cause or extend an existing outage.

What’s Next?

In the 2nd part of this series I will give an example that I often use in foundation classes that illustrates the difference between incidents and problems and introduces the concepts of known errors and workarounds.

1. An agreement between an IT Service provider and its customers
2. An agreement between an IT Service provider and another part of the same organization
3. An agreement between an IT Service provider and a third-party supplier
4. An agreement between an IT Service provider and a software vendor

The correct answer is 2.

An Operational Level Agreement is an agreement between two parts of the same organization.

Related Courses
ITIL Foundation
ITIL Service Catalog

2–3 — Cisco Aironet 1200 AP’s
1 — 3524-XL-EN (Power over Ethernet)
1 — ASA-5505 (Base License)
Cisco 2106 Wireless LAN Controller
7 Cat-5 Ethernet Cables
1–2 XP Pro Laptop/Desktop

Correctly assembling these components into an easily accessible lab is fairly simple, and I have built enough of them over the years to help simplify the process. One item not listed above that can be helpful is a terminal server, which establishes console-based access to all of the devices in the lab. In the simplest setup, you can simply swap the console cable between each device, but when you have eight or more devices (as I typically do) a terminal server is a big help.

Step 1: Rack, Stack & Power

This particular lab environment is rather small and probably will not create significant issues if you have to host it in a home environment. You can probably find a very small network cabinet (6-9RU) that would be able to host the rack-mountable pieces. When possible, fasten mountable devices and cable strap the various power cables together to a power strip to provide electricity to the components. If you use Power over Ethernet (PoE), then you need very little else regarding power cabling and such. Additionally, most wireless device configurations are done through the web graphical user interface (GUI), so console access may be somewhat irrelevant.

Step 2: LAN Cabling

The second step in assembling this wireless lab is extremely simple. Run LAN cables from the PoE switch taking care to connect all the following devices in the lab:

• Cisco Wireless Access Points (2–3 depending on your quantities)
• Cisco WLC-2106 (only cable one connection, the others will not be needed)
• Run the AP cables directly to the WLC as two ports supply PoE (Optional)
• Workstation/Laptop Hosting WCS
• Client Workstation (Optional)

You can use CAT 5/6 cables of any length, but the shorter the better (the exception is adequate length to comfortably reach between devices). One option is to cable the client workstation so that you can easily use Remote Desktop Protocol to reach it and perform any wireless configuration on the client adapter without locking yourself out of the device.

1. Insert SM Kickstart DVD into the DVD tray and restart server by unplugging it and plugging it back in.
2. Disk will popout when the install is complete.
3. At the command prompt login using craft/craft01.
4. Type ls to list files.
5. Type ./SMnetSetup and press enter the following input when the prompted:
   1. Server Hostname: sesman
   2. b.      Server IP: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
   3. Netmask: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
   4. d.      Gateway: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
   5. Domain: FQDN
   6. DNS: xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
6. After the last input press enter and then enter again.
7. At the timezone selection screen choose Chicago, then highlight okay and press enter.
8. Verify date… press enter.
9. Verify time… press enter.
10. At the yes (y) prompt press enter.
11. Time and date has been set enter y, then press enter.
12. Would you like to enable NTP, type No, then enter.
13. Customer Account – y then enter.
14. Login ID: cust
15. Password: cust01
16. Password again: cust01
17. Press Enter to complete the installation of the base Linux.
18. Press y then enter when prompted to reboot (disk will popout).
19. After reboot log back in using craft/craft01.
20. Then su – sroot/sroot01.
21. Insert SM6.1 disk into drive.
22. Type cd /dev, then press enter.
23. Type mount cdrom /cdrom then press enter (will show as read only).
24. Type cd /cdrom, press enter, then ls to list files.
25. Type ./install.sh.
26. Press enter when prompted to continue install.
27. Enter the following when prompted:
    1. SMGR Address: created in step 14
    2. SMGR FQDN: created in step 14
    3. Enrollment Password: created in step 22
28. Press enter to continue install. After install is completed, the command prompt will return. Log back in using craft/craft01.
29. Type eject to remove CD.
30. Log into SMGR using username/password created in step 18 [link to first post].
31. Next, go to the Home Screen and click Routing.
32. Click Domains, then click new and enter FQDN, click commit.
33. Click Sip Entities on the left, then click New.
34. In the Name field enter name created in step 42A.
35. In the FQDN or IP Address field enter xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (SM100 equivalent).
36. Under Ports click add, then choose domain from the Default Domain dropdown list.
37. Click Commit.
38. Go back to the home screen and click on the Session Manager link.
39. On the left side click Session Manager Admin.
40. Under the Session Manager Instances, click New.
41. From the Sip Entity dropdown choose Sesman (the one created earlier).
42. In the Management IP field, enter xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx (not the same as step 36).
43. In the Default GW field, enter xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx.
44. Click Commit.
45. Putty to Sesman using craft/craft01, then type initTM and enter enrollment password when prompted.
46. Go back to SMGR and login. Then go to Session Manager link and click checkbox next to Sesman and change service state to Accept.
47. Wait approximately 5 minutes for stabilization, then verify both levels of the security module are up.
48. You are done and your system is now ready for beginning of class.

This will assist you in setting up your System and Session Manager systems. You will, of course, have to use addressing and names that are applicable to your network. This does not address ME templates. I will cover that in another post.

I didn’t get to stick around Cisco Live 2011 long enough to hear William Shatner and Carlos Dominguez in the final keynote. Missing that was a huge disappointment. But I did make the OK Go and Train concert at M Resort. They’re no Captain Kirk, but hearing not one, but two of my favorite bands for the first time live lessened the sting of my disappointment greatly.

This year, I’m planning to be there the whole week — from the welcome reception to the final keynote address. Maybe because I missed last year’s, I’m ultra-excited about this year’s keynote. For months, I’ve wondered and fantasized about the person Cisco might select for that final slot. Here’s my wish list:

Patrick Stewart

So I get that Patrick Stewart is no William Shatner, but I suspect he’s no less wise. He certainly sounds like it. Shatner probably surprised folks last year with his compelling advice at the main event of a company in transition. I’m sure that Patrick Stewart can bring that same reverence. After all, this is a man with the same Star Trek lineage as Shatner. Plus, he has comic book cred as Professor Charles Xavier in Marvel’s X-Men movie trilogy. While it certainly improves his Cisco Live keynote worthiness to me, when we’re making the official argument, maybe we’ll just not mention that stint in Dune, alright?

Leonard Nimoy

I’m not obsessing over Star Trek here, I swear. There is no Whoopi Goldberg on this list, but Spock beats Picard and Kirk hands down. Imagine Nimoy sharing nuggets of sage advice with thousands of geeks hanging on his every word. He’s a logical choice.

Tina Fey

A few years ago, John Cleese of Monty Python fame was the final keynote speaker. I don’t see much geek factor there. Awkward, nerdy, and klutzy — Cleese surely has those going on. And he’s entertaining, I am sure. But this is Cisco Live and it has to have that geek factor. When it comes to geek humor, Tina Fey has it going on for sure. Though she rose to fame during her SNL performances as Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, 30 Rockis the second geekiest show on TV. What’s geekier than walking around an entire episode dressed as Princess Leia to get out of jury duty? Plus if there’s anything the Cisco Live planning committee needs to put on their agenda, it’s getting more females to this show. If they did book Ms. Fey, sorry Carlos, but I think you’d have to turn over the interviewing reins on this one to Cisco’s very own she-geek, Senior VP and Chief Technology Officer Padmasree Warrior. She-geeks unite!

Seth Green

Getting his big break in a stint as Scott Evil in the Austin Powers trilogy is not Seth Green’s only claim to fame. His resume reads like a fanboy’s Netflix weekend viewing list: Tales from the Darkside, Amazing Stories, Stephen King’s It, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, SeaQuest 2032, Idle Hands, and Family Guy. But his geek factor gets a power up from creating Robot Chicken. “What’s Robot Chicken,” you ask? It’s just the most twisted stop-motion animated parody comedic television series on basic cable. We’re talking He-Man and Thundercats references and Star Wars and Star Trek–theme episodes galore. It’s more like Geek Central than Comedy Central. Also, I’ve seen Seth on Conantons of times, and he’s a compelling interview every time.

Big Bang Theory cast

Of course the geekiest show on TV has a wealth of potential Cisco Live keynote speakers. The Cisco Live crowd is more late 30s and early 40s, but the show reaches geeks of all ages.

At first, Jim Parsons, who plays the show’s Sheldon Cooper, BS, MS, MA, PhD, ScD, is the most obvious choice since he is the most popular character, but so was Kramer from Seinfeld. Plus over the holiday break I saw Parsons co-hosting on Live with Kelly and it was unimpressive. Now if he agreed to attend Cisco Live as Sheldon Cooper that would be awesome. But first he’d need to make sure Kripke wasn’t backstage filling the auditorium with helium.

Johnny Galecki, who portrays Leonard Hofstadter, PhD, is more of the straight guy, like Jerry Seinfeld, and a slightly less popular character. Still, he’s a great Conan interview. Yes, I watch a lot of Conan. Plus, Galecki could give us the scoop on working with Jim Parsons.

If the Cisco Live folks really wanted to turn up the she-geek factor, they could have Padmasree interview Sara Gilbert, who portrays sarcastic optical physicist Leslie Winkle, PhD, along with Mayim “Blossom” Bialik, who in addition to playing Amy Farrah Fowler, PhD, on the show, earned her own real-life PhD in neuroscience. Who knew Blossom had it in her?

Though he lacks a doctorate degree, I’d even show up to hear Howard Wolowitz, played by Simon Helberg, or his best friend Dr. Rajesh Koothrappali, played by Kunal Nayyar. Both of them in character could play off their science fiction and comic book obsessions, and then Raj’s parents, the Koothrappalis, could interrupt via webcam direct from India using Cisco technology.

Though a minor character on the show, yes, Wil Wheaton would make an interesting choice as well. No, I’m not completely obsessed with Star Trek. I’m including Wil Wheaton here more for his Big Bang Theory appearances than his portrayal of Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Plus, he’s done enough fanboy geekshows to know what the Cisco Live crowd wants. I do love the ease he plays himself on a show about him playing a character on another show. I’ve also heard he has a mean poker face. Well, I guess I mean Mystic Warlords of Ka’a face, but that just doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

So there you have it, my own personal Cisco Live 2012 keynote speaker wish list. Whether the Cisco Live planning folks get it right by choosing someone I’ve suggested or not, I’m sure I’ll approve of their selection. And I’m also sure I’ll be there this year with Blackberry and laptop in hand.

Microsoft has capitalized on that desire to compete in a perennial competition called the Scripting Games. Begun in 2006, the Microsoft Scripting Games presents scripters with a series of challenges calling for PowerShell script solutions (the 2006 competition sported a VBScript division, as well.) Competitors have a week to submit a solution to the challenge, posting it to www.PoshCode.org, which hosts the competition again this year. Each entry is then evaluated by a panel of judges. Prizes are awarded for the top-scoring scripters in a beginner and advanced division, and additional prizes are awarded randomly to participants, with an increased chance of winning as you participate in greater numbers of challenge events.

Points are awarded not only for the basic functionality of the script but for real-world criteria such as reusability, documentation, and adherence to good coding practices. Maybe there are people out there who like writing documentation — I’m not among them. But would I do it to win a shot at an e-book from O’Reilly or a full version of PowerGUI? You bet. Last year’s grand prize winner got a free admission to TechEd and a personal phone call from the inventor of PowerShell, Mr. Jeffrey Snover. Not everybody gets to say, “Here’s what I told Jeffrey Snover that I want to see in PowerShell 3.0…” you know?

The Games officially begin on April 2, and details are available at the All Links On One Page document posted here. The Games are managed once again by Ed Wilson, who holds the official title of Microsoft Scripting Guy. He posts PowerShell tips and tricks daily (!) to the Hey, Scripting Guy blog. It’s via this blog that the Scripting Games challenges will be announced, so that’s another great reason to subscribe to that blog. The Scripting Guy has somehow convinced his bride to participate in the games again this year, so you’ll see her on the leaderboard as ScriptingWife. The Scripting Wife has her own blog, focused on those who are new to PowerShell-based scripting.

The spirit of competition brings out the best in good competitors; join the fun in the 2012 Microsoft Scripting Games, and I’ll race you to the top!  ¡Vámanos!

Grab this badge here!

There are a number of ways a business can consolidate storage:

Infrastructure Consolidation with iSCSI: iSCSI storage, while still in an early adoption phase, made it possible for many organizations to consolidate direct-attached storage into a storage network. With the use of an organization’s existing IP-network infrastructure, iSCSI eliminates the need to build a Fibre Channel storage infrastructure which helps lower the deployment cost.

When considering storage hardware products, it is critical to take into account capabilities such as built-in support for Fibre Channel and iSCSI protocols to accommodate evolving business requirements of large or small companies from an investment protection perspective.

Infrastructure Consolidation with Fibre Channel SAN: Medium-to-large-size organizations that adopted Fibre Channel SAN technology some time ago continue to benefit from these deployments. The challenge today is that due to either limitations in SAN technology that existed a few years ago or due to limited initial experimental SAN deployments with additional deployments over time, companies have accumulated numerous SAN islands within a data center.

By consolidating storage to a scalable platform, organizations can achieve significant improvement in storage utilization.

Infrastructure Consolidation with NAS—File Server Storage Consolidation: The growth in business can lead to proliferation of storage resources to a point where managing these resources not only becomes difficult but also quite expensive with diminishing returns. In order to reduce total cost in implementing and operating the supporting IT infrastructure, a networked-attached storage (NAS) architecture can play a critical role in heavy file serving environments.

By consolidating file servers and storage to NAS, organizations can simplify file server and storage management, consolidate hardware footprint to save floor space, and reduce the overall cost of operations.

Information Consolidation—Optimization with Tiered Storage: Business information must be retained for many years to remain compliant with regulations and fend off lawsuits and litigations. With the ongoing growth of information, storing all business information on primary disk storage can be costly. Hence, it is important to be able to classify information based on its relevant value to business and associate the appropriate class (tier) of storage for information retention.

Tiered Storage Archiving: A properly designed tiered storage archiving solution helps organizations in several ways. First the solution classifies and maps information value to business. Next, the solution consolidates all archiveable information in a centralized location making it easier to better manage and quickly retrieve information. Finally, by being able to create a balance between information value and its repository and by migrating less-critical information to low-cost storage, organizations can reclaim their premium tier-one storage for their most-critical business information, thus driving down the overall cost of storage and keeping the environment consolidated.

Database Information Archiving: Databases, which are prone to grow very large over many years of deployment, can make use of tiered storage and effectively consolidate database and manage cost. With the use of data classification software designed specifically for all popular databases, organizations can classify their SQL, Oracle, SAP, and other database structures and store database components on different classes/tiers of storage while maintaining relational structure between all database components to make it fully functional and operational from an end user’s perspective.

1. They are destructive
2. They open up security holes
3. They prevent normal traffic processing
4. They can have a negative impact on performance

The correct answer is 4.

Debug commands can have a negative impact on performance because they have high CPU overhead and may generate a lot of data.

References:
For more questions like these, try our CCNA Cert Check

Related Courses:
ICND1 — Interconnecting Cisco Network Devices 1
ICND2 — Interconnecting Cisco Network Devices 2
CCNAX — CCNA Boot Camp v1.1

1. Be leery of links — Never click on a suspicious link, image, or even video that is sent to you on social networking site or through email. While it may appear to be from a friend, these links can install viruses or key loggers on your computer that can be used to target your bank account and credit card numbers.
2. Watch for Tiny URL’s — Tiny URL’s are used to shorten web addresses but can hide a malicious link. Use a URL expander first, such as http://longurl.org/.
3. Use HTTPS when possible — While many sites may offer HTTPS, not all always use it. Tools such as HTTPS Everywhere (https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere) force sites to use encryption all the time. This raises your level of protection from eavesdroppers and cyber criminals.
4. Beware offers that seem too good to be true — Hackers use this technique to lure you to a malicious site or get you to click on a link.
5. Clear out the cookies — Many sites use cookies to track where you visit on the web. While cookies have a legitimate use they can also be used to track your activity on the Internet. BetterPrivacy or NoScript are two other examples of cookie cleaners. Running these tools periodically helps protect you while browsing the Internet.

While there is no totally secure browser, there are some things you can do to help surf the web safely. Hopefully these five tips improve your browsing experience.