I don’t know what else to say, I’m just going to post links to the obituary and the note that got posted to procrastinators.org.

• Alisha’s water broke at home this time, she was pretty nonchalant about the occurrence, until she noticed the contractions weren’t that far apart. She said I should call my mother to get her to come over and watch Robin. Robin was asleep and Mom had an hour to drive, so we thought we had plenty of time. (After the fact, Alisha said we probably should have called our closer help and gone to the hospital sooner.)
• Once my mother arrived, we got right in the car and went to the hospital. The 57 to 74 ramp was not a fun place for Alisha to have a contraction.
• We went directly to Labor and Delivery and got the quickest admission process I’ve ever seen. They got an IV started, after a little assistance, and got fluids hung. Next up was the epidural, which went just fine.
• Time seemed to go faster than usual, but there was quite a bit of waiting. I sort of learned how to read the monitor that shows contractions and fetal heart rate, so I could give Alisha some feedback on what was happening, and verify what she was feeling.
• The nurse midwife came in and decided to do a check of things, and his head was about an inch from coming out. (I’ll spare all the details from here on, other than to say childbirth is a miracle. And anyone that can, or chooses to, do it without drugs is an amazingly silly person.) 25 minutes later, Jonathan Allen was born.
• Most of the post birth health checks and things were done in the room, but eventually Jonathan had to be taken to the nursery for his first bath, immunizations and other things. While he was gone, I called the grandparents and others and then we got moved up a floor to our postpartum room.

Robin likes watching and listening to the baby monitor, every time Jonathan hiccups, he stops and waits for more noise.

He’s home now and seems to be feeling, eating and pooing much better.

He was born 4/24 at 9:57 pm, weighed 7 lbs 3 oz and was 19.5″ long. Mom and baby are doing fine, we came home from the hospital on Monday evening. More pictures.

Housing

• New Hardware and a new cluster – Housing has added 2 Dell PowerEdge R710s and an additional HP EVA 4400 SAN to be our “Production” virtualization environment. (Production is a bit of a misnomer, as we’ve had production class virtual machines for over a year.)
• Upgrading the existing ESX 3.5 nodes to ESX 4 is on the schedule for later this semester or early in the summer. To make the reinstall easier, I’ve scripted out the installs just about as much as possible using some excellent examples: Cylindric.net and Ubiquitous Talk.
• We are working on a fairly aggressive plan to virtualize or retire our remaining test and development physical servers, hopefully to be completed by mid-summer. This should allow us to retire another 5-10 2U Dell 2650, 2850 or 2950 servers. Any new systems we are bringing online are being virtualized unless the vendor refuses to support it.
• I’ve reduced 5 partially populated racks down to 2 fully populated racks and another 2 less full racks. The key to increasing our density was installing 208V power and in-rack UPSes and PDUs. (Yes, it’s not as efficient as whole room UPS, but it’s better than the 110V solution we had before.) I’d like to repeat this work in our other “data center”, but I’m sure you’ve heard about the campus budget situation, so it’s on hold.

Hoopeston Schools

• With the knowledge and scripting that I learned at the day job, I’ve started on upgrading our two ESX 3.5 nodes to ESX4. By leaving the upgraded node in Evaluation mode, I’m able to use Storage vMotion for migrating running VMs across storage locations.
• Shared storage is currently powered by a pair of OpenFiler nodes in an HA/DRBD cluster. I followed a couple of excellent howtos: TheMesh.org and HowtoForge. I’m not completely happy with the underlying OS and package management that comes along with OpenFiler, so the plan is to reinstall the nodes with CentOS and recreate the cluster.

Maybe I’ll find some motivation to write about my recent experiences with Openfiler at both jobs, one in an HA cluster and the other as temporary storage while our Fibre Channel SAN was offline for an upgrade.

So, I set out to write something portable (VBscript?) that could:

1. Get the Service Tag
2. Query the Warranty Status page and parse it for the Ship Date
3. Populate the “Purchase Date” field with omconfig

So, I did, it’s available on NetFiles. The script has to be run once on each server once OMSA is installed, but that’s it. At least until it gets reinstalled. (And, I am not a VBscript programmer and have never played one on TV, that script comes with no warranties expressed or implied.)

We also run IT Assistant and after an Inventory occurs (or you force it), we can query the SQL database for the ship date and other things with something like:

SELECT [Device].[DeviceName]
,[Device].[DeviceServiceTag]
,[Device].[DeviceSystemModelType]
,[Device].[SystemRevisionNumber]
,[CostOfOwnership].[PurchaseDate]
FROM [ITAssist].[dbo].[CostOfOwnership],[ITAssist].[dbo].[Device]
where [CostOfOwnership].[DeviceId] = [Device].[DeviceId]
order by [CostOfOwnership].[PurchaseDate]


That will give you some easily parsed csv data that you can do whatever you want with.

Sweet. Something else to add to the standard server install process.

(And, thanks to Erinn Looney-Triggs and the check_dell_warranty nagios plugin as a starting inspiration for this.)

But, I’ve been pretty busy at both jobs with virtualization and storage projects. Just a few of the highlights:

• Housing
• • Our ESX node installs are now as close to fully automated as I want to make them, using Leo’s Ramblings as a starting point.
  • All our nodes are now running the latest and greatest ESX3.5u4+patches, thanks to enough excess capacity to empty one node at a time with vMotion and reinstall.
  • The HP EVA 4400 SAN has had a second Fibre Channel switch added and all the ESX nodes are now dual path to storage. The original plan for this SAN was to only have development and test level VMs, but production VMs came online once management gained confidence in virtualization and P2V conversions. Hence the need to add dual path support.
  • Some of those production VMs will involve adding “on demand” capacity to a web app that has usage peaks once or twice a year, so we’ll be adding a hardware Server Load Balancer to the mix as well. HTTP load balancing is easy, SSL support not as easy.
  • I’ve started to look at vSphere, but it’s not a pressing upgrade need for us.
• Hoopeston
• • We’ve been transitioning to ESX since finding more affordable pricing through a state contract. As we retire VMware Server, we’ve been able to greatly increase VM density on the existing Dell PowerEdge 2900. And, we’ve purchased a new Dell R710 and it’s showing promise to get much higher density than the 2900.
  • Since ESX supports iSCSI, we’re investigating using Openfiler with DRBD and Linux HA as a storage option. (Some very good howtos are here, here and here.

Over the next few months, Housing is planning on purchasing an additional SAN for “production” workloads and continuing to virtualize anything that seems like a good idea. (And maybe a few things that are a bit of a stretch.)