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Showing posts from September, 2014

Mac: Background flashes, Dock not showing up...

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Not sure what caused this as I hadn't done anything unusual w/ my Mac for awhile.  Long story short, some preference in my user profile was causing this issue. In particular, the thought it was my dock preferences, but I had to delete my everything under my user's ~/Library/Preferences to get my account back and working properly.  You should have only to do the following: Delete ~/Library/Application Support/Dock Delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist Here is screenshot by screenshot on how to do this:

Interview w/ William Lam on AutoTrader.com Mac Mini vSAN (MacCloud)

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Enjoyed my conversation w/ William talking about my ghetto MacCloud setup.  You can read the interview here: http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2014/08/community-stories-of-vmware-apple-os-x-in-production-part-4.html Some things people have asked me for clarification: We are using Mac Mini 'Server' versions.  These have two drives by default. You can get a kit to add a second drive to the standard mac mini version. Mgmt and VM traffic flows over Standard vSwitch0 (Onboard as Uplink) vSAN and vMotion flows over dVS (Thunderbolt as Uplink) Onboard 1Gb and Thunderbolt 1Gb adapter Booting to USB thumb drive plugged into the back of the Mac Mini w/ ESXi. vCenter is a vCSA built and running on another vCenter instance.  Here is what it looks like configured:

Converged Networking Perils...

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Summary: Had a wonderful experience where a P2V VM w/ bonded NIC's brought down several of our ESXi hosts.  HA compounded the problem by powering up the VM on other hosts once the host w/ this VM was brought down.  The perils of converged networking and why it's important to keep your ESXi management/storage separate from your other physical ports.  If these were 'physically' separate, the problem would have isolated to one host and prevented the cascading HA events. Here is the config in short: Dell Blade two nPar'd 10Gb ports --> Internal Dell I/O aggregator ports --> External Dell I/O aggregator ports --> Nexus 5K Management, vMotion, NFS, AND VM traffic go over these two ports. One port goes over Fabric A, the other over Fabric B.  Two physically separate uplinks. What happened: VM w/ bonded NIC's comes online.  This seemed to cause a 'spanning-tree' like event which caused the Internal Dell I/O aggregator ports to go into an