Date: Tuesday, February 13
Time: 6:30pm - 9:00pm CDT
Location:
Dallas Makerspace
1825 Monetary Lane
Suite 104
Carrolton, TX 75006

It's been a while since our last meeting, and we're starting 2018 back at the Dallas Makerspace thanks to Paul Mai (paulmofyourhand). The focus will be on hacking and automation.

Hacking for the IT Generalist

The single biggest reason people don’t sign up for hackathons is they aren’t developers or don’t feel they can contribute anything to the team. But what if there were some practical ways you could start hacking a little at a time and make yourself more efficient at the same time? Automation starts with small steps. We’ll share some practical tips to get started, advice on languages to learn, and have experts share their experience getting into hacking and automation. We hope you will come and join us!

We will be meeting in the main lecture hall. Feel free to bring your own food and beverage.

If you want to learn more about the Makerspace, check out their site here: https://dallasmakerspace.org.

Parking Info:
When you first arrive at the DMS in the vestibule, please sign the waiver on the iPad. Then once that is done, you'll go through the second entrance and look for the signs to lead you to the meeting. I bet Paul would be willing to give anyone interested a tour of the facility after the meeting.

RSVP here - https://community.spiceworks.com/meeting/show/2598

Regardless of your field, if you aren’t a member of a professional networking group / community, I hope 2018 will be the year you choose to get involved. There are powerful benefits to your career for participating.

I’m the kind of guy who participates in IT communities and happen to be the co-leader of the SpiceCorps of Dallas / Fort Worth. What is SpiceCorps, you ask? At the core, SpiceCorps are local meetings of IT professionals to discuss technology, career, and support one another as we navigate the fast and furious world of IT. These groups were formed by members of the Spiceworks community after the first Spiceworld in 2008, originally meeting to discuss the Spiceworks application. Over time, the conversations evolved into general IT discussion and became what you see today.

In case you weren’t able to make it, here’s an overview of 2017 in our SpiceCorps - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2018/01/09/dfw-spicecorps-a-2017-year-in-review.

Regardless of the platform's intended purpose, isn't it about how someone leverages the platform to his / her advantage?

I think of Spiceworks and blogs as platforms to showcase things you know / have accomplished. If I have a project listed on Spiceworks with all technology used and a description of the project, it's more than just something listed on my resume as an accomplishment. "While at company ABC, I was able to complete this project. Even though I only helped my boss implement technology XYZ, I was exposed to these components of it such as blah, blah, and blah. I have those listed on my Spiceworks community profile if you would like more information."

I think having a blog or some projects on your Spiceworks community account page would work better to reinforce your normal resume as visual representations of what you have actually accomplished.

I think the technology experience you list depends on whether it is 1) relatable to the technology the new role requires you to use or 2) is specifically the technology the new role requires you to use. Anything else is just noise. I'd encourage you to watch the video here
titled A Recruiter's Advice to the IT Pro. It has some good advice for LinkedIn, etc.

Make sure LinkedIn is updated with all of your skills and experience (and I mean all of it). Then take that and whittle down to those items that can be highlighted to get you the new job.

On a serious note, it's great to see Zimbra continuing to be developed. I thought it was way ahead of its time and better than OWA 5 years ago, but I have not really used it since that time.

@stacksofplates said in Zimbra 8.8 Has Released:

Seriously...

We're sorry - we will need all your information so we can sign you up to get spammed by our mailing lists. Thanks, and have a great day!

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@scottalanmiller said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dave247 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

@dustinb3403 said in Trouble converting an OVF to VMDK using MVMC...:

I'm confused why your UTM device would even know or care what hypervisor it may or may not be on.

Have you tried using it, on your ESXi 6.5 system?

The appliance is downloadable in OVF which is for VMware. It is not compatible on 6.5 and displays errors, which is why I called support and that's when they told me it only works on up to 6.

Oh, is this an older UTM that they aren't supporting any longer? Do they have a current version?

hahaha.. No. They (SonicWall) said 6.5 will eventually be supported.

That's insane. vSphere 6.5 has been out for over a year, and they can't support it yet? This kind of stuff bothers me about vendors.

I was talking with someone the other day who had moved a bunch of VMs from a vSphere 5.0 cluster host to a fresh vSphere 6.5U1 cluster. There were some Linux VMs that were not supported on 6.5 per the 3rd party vendor and would have required a tremendous effort to update the 3rd party software running in the Linux VMs. So they ended up being left on the 5.0 cluster for now. It's not exactly the same as your situation here, but it was equally frustrating to hear.

@dustinb3403 said in Captain vSAN and the Case of the Cluster License Mystery:

One hell of a teaser...

Maybe next time I should do one in video form with the movie preview voice over guy.

Excitement was in the air for the technology team of Beast Mode, Inc. After months of planning, some shiny new vSAN ReadyNodes finally arrived at the datacenter. The implementation team gathered to rack and cable the new cluster and all other necessary equipment. Even though ESXi was installed on the hosts with basic network settings configured, there was no datastore on which to install vCenter. They had yet to configure the vSAN cluster.

A bit of worry set in, but John, the team lead, remembered something. As part of the vCenter Server Appliance installer in vSphere 6.5d and later (vSAN 6.6 and later), they could leverage Easy Install to create a vSAN datastore on some of the hosts and use it to deploy vCenter. With vCenter online and hosts updated to the latest patch of ESXi 6.5, they configured the rest of the hosts in the vSAN cluster with all networking needed for vSAN traffic, management, and vMotion. Now that the cluster was fully functional, the team was ready to deploy some virtual machines…or so they thought.

John also reminded the team to apply the VMware licenses before going any further. The cluster in question contained 4 hosts, each with a single physical processor, fully licensed for vSphere Enterprise Plus and vSAN Standard. Each host would be managed by vCenter Standard. The team knew how to apply the vSphere licenses as well as the vCenter license. But the mystery began when they tried to apply their licenses to use vSAN.

You can read the rest of the story here - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2017/12/11/captain-vsan-and-the-case-of-the-cluster-license-mystery/

Also, I would highly recommend watching this session from VMworld 2017 about monster VMs that could help anyone needing to virtualize a DB server - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXbOoRo_Wn4. You can get the slide deck here.

I'll throw in a couple of recommendations here as well. One thing you want to be careful of is not spanning a NUMA boundary with the number of vCPU you're giving the SAP VM as this can actually slow down the VM overall. Make sure you do not turn on hotplug CPU for the VM (ability to add additional vCPU with the VM powered on if supported by the guest OS) because it will disable vNUMA.

I have a friend who uses Automatic in conjunction with his car's ODB-II connector. He's also a SE who does a ton of driving.

Maybe these will help you:

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1995291-importing-csv-with-custom-attributes

https://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/67984-spiceworks-v7-importing-new-tickets-from-csv-including-assigned_to

Keep in mind there are two ways to import: through the GUI or via the script that some of these posts mention.

I was actually writing a blog about this but stopped because someone at SW corrected my thought process (I had made some errors in it that needed correcting).

If you PM me, I will e-mail you a PDF of that unfinished post and comments from SW support on it.

@scottalanmiller said in I can't even:

@mike-davis said in I can't even:

@scottalanmiller said in I can't even:

This guy's FIRST post on SW is to go into the SpiceCorps of Syracuse group and post that he wants to start a new meetup - but apparently can't be bothered to attend the existing ones or to post on SW. Seriously? That's your first ever post?

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2094925-looking-to-start-a-new-syracuse-ny-meetup

@thanksajdotcom @Minion-Queen @Mike-Davis

He PMed me as well. I do need to get back in to the swing of organizing the meetings. I think I saw @NetworkNerd had a good idea for one where he called in a local tech recruiter. It looks like tomorrow the snow will be upon us and if I have a vendor coming in that doesn't have to travel that far, that might be the best bet.

He did, yeah. I didn't manage to make that meeting, though

In this case, I was working at the same company as the recruiter in question and knew him pretty well. He was not specifically a tech recruiter but had interviewed plenty of folks looking for tech positions. Have a look at how the meeting went for yourself - https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2090834-dfw-spicecorps-11-16-2017-career-night. It was very successful in my opinion.

@scottalanmiller said in Centralized Management of KVM Hosts:

What features are you looking for? What stuff is, for example, oVirt lacking?

I'll have to read up on oVirt before I can answer that one. I had not heard of it until today. Thanks for the tip.

@coliver said in Centralized Management of KVM Hosts:

@scottalanmiller said in Centralized Management of KVM Hosts:

@coliver said in Centralized Management of KVM Hosts:

Wouldn't you just manage then similar to any Linux server?

Yes, in most cases, you'd be managing them with Salt, Ansible, Cockpit, SSH scripts, or whatever you normally use. I'm not sure if there is a specific KVM feature that he's wondering about, or more generically how it is done.

That's what I thought. Wondering if @NetworkNerd is looking for something like vCenter for these hosts.

I wrote this post in a hurry and really should have said what you said here. Does something like vCenter exist in the KVM ecosystem (i.e. a management interface someone could use to manage both hosts and VMs)? Or, is it more like, you can get to that point, but it takes a little work on your part to do it?

I didn't want to poop all over this thread, but as I started reading up on KVM a little (and I do mean only a little), it seemed like there is a tool to centrally manage VMs but not hosts (see section 8.2 here about libvirt - https://www.suse.com/documentation/sles11/singlehtml/book_kvm/book_kvm.html).

Is there some separate tool to manage the hosts themselves if you have a pretty massive cluster, for example (whether the tool is free or requires a purchase)?

Hey DFW IT Pros - don't forget about the DFW VMUG meeting on 12/15 in The Colony.  Remember that these are free events and last the entire day (if you choose to stay for the movie screening).  They are definitely geared around VMware and its partners and are a great way to network with some peers in the virtualization community.  It is completely free to attend.

Representatives from NetScout, PureStorage, and DellEMC will be present.  And I'm hoping to be there too.

I look forward to seeing you there! The full agenda and registration link can be found here - https://community.vmug.com/events/event-description?CalendarEventKey=15103c19-8adb-4553-8512-558ce67...

When is the last time you remember having a dream of some sort of achievement? Maybe it was what you wanted to be when you grew up as of Kindergarten graduation, or perhaps it was something else. Are the young the only ones who dream? Are they the only ones who would pursue a dream? With age comes responsibility. Marriage, children, a mortgage, and a job that supports the family are all part of it. And as responsibility comes, we tend do give up on our dreams. We give up our own dreams for those of our children. The dream becomes, as Langston Hughes put it, deferred.

I’d like to share the story of one of my dreams. And in a way, it’s a dream that, rather than me chasing it for many years, found me.

Ten years ago I walked out of my classroom for the last time. After 3.5 years teaching high school math, it was time for a new adventure. I told the principal I was giving up something I loved for something I loved even more, which was the dream of someday being a dad.

I went from math teacher to support analyst. Six months later I took a role that was part analyst and part IT. Over the course of nine years with the company, the role took me into full blown IT systems administration. I made a move one year ago to a different company to help rebuild the server infrastructure. While I enjoyed the work I was doing, something unexpected happened.

You can read the rest here - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2017/12/04/a-letter-to-the-dreamer-be-brave-enough.