Author Archives: Dennis Morton

OSS Integrators alliance with DeployPartners

OSS Integrators will be entering into a strategic alliance with Australian Service Assurance Solution provider Deploy Partners in the near future. The merge of OSS Integrators and DeployPartners will enable both companies to benefit from each other’s experience and skills resulting in our customers getting the benefit of a wider set of solutions and product knowledge.

About DeployPartners: DeployPartners deliver high-quality Service Assurance Solutions expertise throughout the Asia Pacific region and are the IBM C&SI focus partner for Tivoli Automation in ANZ and Asean regions with Gold Accreditation. DeployPartners have recently been awarded the Software Group IBM MiddleWare Partner of the Year for Australia 2013. DeployPartners was founded in 2005 and pioneered a new breed of Service Assurance Solution Integrator, placing customers’ needs first and operating outside the traditional model of billable hours and project-based engagements. Instead we continue to work side-by-side with our clients, maintaining their deployments and ensuring they remain at peak efficiency.

About OSS Integrators: OSS Integrators, founded in 2002 is an IT Operations Consulting and Analytics solution provider focused on improving customer network uptime and dependability. OSS Integrators who have achieved a great reputation in the US region are an industry leader in the Service Assurance field and a Premier IBM Partner. OSS Integrators are seen to provide unparalleled technical services and are considered trusted advisors by their customers. Using industry-leading tools, OSS Integrators provides fully integrated solutions for all aspects of Operations Support Systems.

Our companies work with complimentary solutions and technologies and OSS Integrators sees this merge as a great opportunity for both companies to leverage each other’s solution experience, partner relationships and expert resources. Over the next 12 months our two companies will work together with the end goal being to join and become one organization

Getting Started with VMWare PowerCLI

I’ve recently been spending some time “cleaning up” our VMWare infrastructure and making it more functional – both for demos and for internal lab use. To that end, I’ve been trying to automate/simplify as many things as possible. One task that I’d been wanting to simplify is snapshot creation/deletion of multiple VMs at once since this is something we do all the time. Imagine you have a set of VMs that are used for a single lab instance of a product. Before you make any major changes – for example patching or upgrading the product – you want to create a clean snapshot so that you can revert if something goes wrong. Unfortunately, this is something you can only do one VM-at-a-time in a vanilla-vCenter environment. However, it’s dead simple using Powershell and PowerCLI!

Continue reading →

Adding Additional Disk Space to an ESXi Boot Partition

This post aims to solve the most common issue that I’ve faced with our (admittedly not too large) ESXi infrastructure – how to add more drive space to a CentOS VM that only has one virtual HD. Strangely enough, this is more obtuse than it really should be!

Note: this would be normally be completely unnecessary if you allocate enough space when creating the VM, but sometimes that’s just not an option.

Warning: you cannot expand the disk of a VM with snapshots!

In general, you have two options for adding drive space:

Make the existing VM HD larger.
Add another VM HD.

I’ll cover option one here, since this makes things somewhat easier because you’re not adding additional virtual hardware.
Continue reading →

Splunk + Revision Control (Subversion Example)

Why?

You might be asking “Why should I use revision control with Splunk – I’m not developing code or anything!” The thing is, with Splunk you are developing code, it’s just that Splunk does a great job of hiding that fact from you! For example, when you add/update a saved search or dashboard, Splunk is adding/updating a text file on the server with that information. This means that we can track those changes and (gasp) document those changes as we make them!

Here are just a few of the advantages to doing things this way:

Makes it simple to track what you did, when you did it and why you did it.
Instills some discipline in your Splunk development.
Gives you the ability (combined with a ticketing system) to associate changes to requests.
Makes it easier to be experimental via features like branching. Want to see if a revamp somewhere works better? Go ahead – it’s easy to roll back to a known good configuration while retaining all your experiments! Continue reading →

Using the Omnibus HTTP (OSLC) Interface (from .NET!)

One of the new features in Netcool Omnibus 7.4 is a REST-like interface to the ObjectServer added to support OSLC. This interface allows you to query, update, add, and delete entries from any ObjectServer table. The documentation says that there is at least one IBM product that supports it, but we’re going to start simple and give the straight HTTP interface a try (documentation is available here).

Continue reading →