Scott Lowe - Keynote at the 2014 SoCal VMUG User Conference

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to see Scott Lowe (http://blog.scottlowe.org/) present the Keynote at the SoCal VMUG users conference.   The Keynote was titled Closing the Cloud Skills Gap and he "kept it real"

Below are some key facts that ALL Technologists should consider:

Virtually all IT job growth will be in cloud services (26%).

Top Skills in Cloud Services:
1. Risk Management
2. IT Service Management
3. Project/Program Management
4. Business - IT alignment
5. Technical skills in the Cloud (Ok, the low ranking of technical skills surprised me - KU)

IT Alignment:
1. Talk to the Business.  What are their goals and challenges.
2. Dont use IT Jargon.  They don't care. (IOPs, TB, PB)
3. Try to say "Yes".  Solve the problem.  Offer some options and have them make the decision.  Saying "NO" is asking for Shadow IT.

Technical Skills Needed:
1. Software Development Basics - ex. promoting from dev --> prod.  
2. Linux - Ubuntu,  Red Hat, CentOS. (WD-40).
3. Automation and Orchestration - PowerShell, Python, Ruby.  Configuration management - Puppet, Chef.  No "Snow Flake Servers".  No more "Hand Crafted" efforts.
4. Public Cloud Services - vCloud Air, AWS, Azure.

All of us need to take a good look at ourselves.  We need to make sure we evolve and gain new skills.

Some neat phrases I picked up during the conference:
"If you don't like change, you will like irrelevance less" (See above - KU)
"Security puts the "NO" in "Innovation"
"One throat to choke"

 Phrases I'm tired of:
"Software Defined ANYTHING"
"Single pane of glass"
"Game Changer"

One of my posts was referenced by Dell Enterprise Server Support

What a crazy coincidence!  A friend of mine in the UK just let me know that Dell Enterprise Server Support referenced one of my Blog posts to help resolve his issue!

VMware Update Manager: The host returns esxupdate error code:7.

I received the following error while patching the very LAST host in the Datacenter.

The host returns esxupdate error code:7. Cannot download VIB. Check the Update Manager log files and esxupdate log files for more details.

I tried the recommendations on the following KB to no avail....  Attempting to Stage the patches produced the same error.

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2020961

So, I went "Old School" with the the host.  I placed it in Maintenance Mode and proceeded to reboot it.  After the host reconnected, I was able to successfully patch the host.

REBOOT THE SERVER!  (I hate this answer...)

vCenter Inventory Service Database Backup

Everyone backs up the vCenter database and the Single Sign On (SSO) configuration. (I Hope)   BUT, do you backup your Inventory Service Database?

Starting vCenter 5.1, the Inventory Service was broken out into it's own independent component.   The Inventory Service contains the vCenter Web Client Custom Tags and the Storage Profiles that you are using via the vSphere Profile-Driven Storage Service.  In addition, it's the cache for the Web Client. 

To backup the Inventory Service database, perform the following steps:

1. Stop the VMware vCenter Inventory Service.

 

2. Using the command prompt, drill down to the \Inventory Service\scripts directory.  By default, it's located here.

C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Inventory Service\scripts

3. Run the following command:

backup.bat -file backup_file_name

 

4. After the backup completes successfully,. restart the VMware vCenter Inventory Service.

5. Confirm that the backup file is properly backed up.