VCP Certificate

I received a certificate of VCP (VMware Certified Professional) finally today.
It took about 50 days after passing the exam. :(

Day 576 : Exhausted?

Today, we got back to Tokyo from my home town.
Against a traffic jam forecast yesterday, we weren't caught in traffic jams almost at all.
But, it was more than 5 hours drive, and anyway we were very much tired. :(

After arriving at home and getting luggage over with my wife, I was doing some PC things such as checking e-mails. I knew that my wife and daughter took a nap together.

But, after a while I was astonished looking at the scene below... :o



Oh, my God...
Maybe, it's because my daughter was exhausted...

Day 576 : The First Shot

The above is my little brother. It's nothing special about the picture.

But the point is, that my daughter loves playing with a cell phone and the above is her first shot.
Yes, it's a memorial photo. :)

Day 575 : Trampoline

This is a snapshot at my home town. :)

Formerly, my mother did some exercises in trampoline for her health, but it looks like she gave it up and that was almost abandoned for a while there.

At first, we expected that my daughter could enjoy the trampoline, but it looked like too early for an 18 months baby playing with a trampoline. :o

Day 574 : Shimada Rose Hill Garden

Finally, I took my daughter to the Shimada Rose Hill Garden in my home town. :)
Before going there, I expected that she could be excited looking at bunch of beautiful roses , actually today we had limited time and my daughter looked like a bit sleepy. :(
So, I'm not sure if she really enjoyed the garden or not today, but on this summer vacation she might have began to speak, then I'm going to ask her what she feels about looking the flowers. :)

Day 574 : Hobby Horse

Ha ha, my daughter got on a hobby horse for the first time. :)

BTW, today we had almost no time there. So, I'm not sure if she likes it or not...
Actually, it's a very busy day... :o

Day 573 : Telephone

This is a snapshot at my home town.

Different from the case of our house, their telephone station is located almost on the floor where my daughter can reach.
So, she was very much pleased to find a new thing to play with... :(

I'm not sure whom she is speaking with ... :o

In Memory of Kiyoshiro

Today, one of the greatest rock singers in Japan, Kiyoshiro Imawano (忌野清志郎), past away because of cancer. He was 58 years old.

Although the English page of Wikipedia does not have much information, but as the Japanese page says, Kiyoshiro was not like any other musicians, and in a sense, he established a style of singing rock music in Japanese.

As for me, I loved YMO (Yellow Magic Orchestra) when I was a junior high school student, and he appeared as the singer of the tune below (い・け・な・いルージュマジック) which is in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto who is, needless to say, a member of YMO.
In those days, I felt his song a bit strange, but still I thought that this singer is something special.
-

-
One more his work I want to refer here is a collaboration session with Akiko Yano singing "Hitotsudake (ひとつだけ)" which means "The Only One Thing." As I wrote several times, I love Yano's songs, and listening to the song especially I'm always moved to the point of tears.
Furthermore, Kiyoshiro's voice has something special and appeals to me especially with the lyrics.
-

-
It was really a great loss of Japan...
I prayed for the repose of Kiyoshiro's soul today.

Day 571 : Taking a Nap

Ha ha, this is a snapshot of this mid-afternoon.
I was trying to get my daughter to bed, but I also fell asleep with my daughter on my stomach... :o

Day 571 : LEGO -- A Double Helix

My daughter got a LEGO Zoo Kit from grandpa yesterday.

The below is a work of my daughter using the kit.
Wow, it's a double helix, DNA! :o



Ha ha, it's a joke.
Not my daughter's but mine. :)
I also got LEGO kits when I was a small child from one of my uncles and my parents. I really enjoyed them very much. Anyway, I was really looking forward to Christmas season. :)

Day 571 : Zoo

Today, we took our daughter to a Zoo, Toyohashi Non-Hoi Park, in Aichi prefecture.



Unfortunately, today she looked like sleepy and a bit grizzled.
But anyway, she saw various animals such as monkeys like the left above.

As for the right above, it looked like a cage of so called Homo sapience. :o

Kodaira Udon

-

As I wrote several times before, there are lots of good ramen restaurants around my house.
Today, it's a topic on a new Udon shop along the ramen avenue.

• http://r.tabelog.com/tokyo/A1328/A132804/13087964/

The above right is my choice at today's lunch time, Niku-Udon (400g) (肉うどん(400g)).
Compared to common style Udon, they offer very strong and thick noodle, and its soup with sliced pork is served separately. I felt the soup is a bit salty, but it's because the soup is also strong, I think.

Furthermore, it's not expensive! :)
It's worth trying at least once for ramen freaks. :)

Day 569 : Fashion Model?

This is a snapshot when we were about to set for the Golden Week Journey of this year.
She is like a fashion model, ha ha... :o

4KB per Sectors?

It has been a common sense that the most basic size of an HDD is 512 bytes in case of commodity computers. But, there seems to be a plan extending the size to 4K bytes now.

• http://bigsector.org/

When I got into the business more than 10 years ago, I was assigned to a division which is working on software for mainframe computers. In those days and still now, main stream block storage devices were variable block size ones. Furthermore, they are called DASD (Direct Attached Storage Device) not HDD, and conventional HDDs (for outside the mainframe world) were called FBA (Fixed size Block Architecture) volumes.
Well, it's an old story, but the news reminded me of the old days...

Anyway, thanks for interesting news, JR0BAK!

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence - FYI

I didn't know that Utada did a cover of "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" in her third studio album, "This is the One."
Its lyrics is here, and I'm wondering why she didn't choose completely different title from the original. What does she mean by just adding "FYI" to the original title?

Oh, but anyway I like it.
I know several covers of the tune, and among them Utada's cover could be the best. :)
-

-
Maybe this link is better. The latter half is the tune above.

Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo 2009

Today, I went to Oracle OpenWorld Tokyo 2009, and there I attended at the 6th lecture of Professor Maruyama's lecture series:

• http://www.itmedia.co.jp/enterprise/special/dev_marulec/2008.html

Basically, his talks are on cloud computing. But, the 6th lecture was titled "On the Latest Trend of Cloud and SOA."

That reminded me of my business trip to New York last year. :)
I attended at this conference there, and I was a bit surprised that in North America SOA looked like finally launching. I felt it would take roughly 2 years till the trend comes to Japan.

Maybe it's better taking SOA into account for the cloud computing related project which I'm involved on at work now...

Compressed (LZH) Folders

LZH format is one of major compression format at least in Japan.

I didn't know that Microsoft added LZH format for compressed folders recently.
After passing Genuine Microsoft Software check, now the extension seems to be offered by Microsoft for Japanese version Windows XP and Vista.

The left below shows the icon for an LZH format archive file, and the right below shows properties dialog of an LZH file.



There are several restrictions.

1. It's not supported by Microsoft, it's provided as is.
2. The extension does not support compression, it does only de-compression.
   Thus, we cannot add files to an LZH archive file nor create an LZH format archive.

Actually, there are many LHA format archiver which are implemented as shell extensions. But, so far as I know, all of them extract LHA files temporary and I didn't like that. I wanted to handle LZH archive files like Compressed (Zipped) folders for browsing contents of LZH files.

The extension resolved the issue, and I'm happy now. :)

New Workplace

Since the beginning of this April, I was relocated to a division working on R&D
activities at work.

Formerly I felt like a prisoner till the end of this March, but now I can see a lot of interesting people on behalf of the organization which I'm working for now.
So, although I've been a bit busy since then, I'm enjoying the current works. :)

Kemari

Kemari is an implementation of Fault Tolerance feature using Xen hypervisor on top of commodity IA32 hardware.

Actually, I was in touch with the author of Kemari since the project was very early stage about 3 years ago. To tell the truth, I was doubtful if he can finish the plan he explained me in those days because the theme was too aggressive and he had limited time.

But, today I saw a live demo where a running Windows XP instance was migrated to another machine within seconds on a hardware crash (pressing the reset button) and continued playing video streaming.

His work, Kemari, will be merged into Xen 3.5, and furthermore, he seems to be working on porting Kemari to KVM.

Really impressive...

Ideas of Phenomenology

Ideas of Phenomenology 現象学の思想
Gen Kida (木田元)
ISBN 4-480-08570-X

Well, actually it was too aggressive trying to work on books on philosophy
for me. I gave up the book. :(

I could understand the big picture of ideas of phenomenology, but there are
too many undefined terms for me and adjunctive expressions beyond
my understanding in the book. :(
Anyway, phenomenology was an effort to re-formulate philosophy
from the ultimate stand point where no assumptions were made.

One more thing which the book reminded me was that philosophy is the
most ancient science and not a small number of modern (social or human)
sciences were forked from philosophy. For example, psychology, sociology,
linguistics, history and so on. Furthermore, even some areas of natural science
are also influenced by philosophy especially positivism which phenomenology
criticized constructively.

In this sense, it might be useful to try to study philosophy again
for understanding evolutionary theory, in particular, evolution of
human brains.

But, I'm not sure how long it takes for me... :(

Day 559 : Flowers

Today, we went to Kokubunji Marui, and the above is a snapshot at the roof garden there.
My daughter began to show interests in flowers.
Now, I'm looking forward to taking her to the Shimada Rose Hill Garden in my home town in this golden week. :)

Guin Saga 126

Beauty in Black
Guin Saga 126
Kaoru Kurimoto
ISBN 978-4-15-030952-7

Well, this time I missed the on-sale day of Guin Saga.
Actually, it was April 9 for the 126th book, and I was 10 days behind. :(

Brain Pollution

Brain Pollution (脳内汚染)
Takashi Okada (岡田尊司)
ISBN 4-16-367840-9

This is a shocking book.

It's often mentioned that addiction in video games is very harmful for brains.
But, according to several psychological surveys, there seems to be strong
correlation between diffusion of TV and increase of crimes resulted from
psychological problems.

Simply speaking, contemporary media from TV to video games are
NOT natural for the development of mind or humanity and
human being cannot adapt to the rapid dissemination of contemporary media,
thus they can be said as poison for especially small children.

So, after finishing this book, I reduced time for watching TV actually.
Of course, this is mainly for my daughter...

Isolation Ward

I've been suffering from hemolytic strept coccus since this Monday, and I had days off since yesterday.

Of course, I slept in a small room which usually we use as a lumber room and isolated my self from my daughter.

The above is a snapshot at dinner time today, it's like an isolation ward of hospitals... :o

Day 555 : Ruins

Ha ha, I think the above picture explains everything.
Of course, the wrecker is my daughter... :o

The Kingdom of this World

The Kingdom of this World (El Reino de este Mundo)
Alejo Carpentier
ISBN 4-387-85162-7 (Japanese Translation)

In a sense, this is a chronicle of Haiti's short but amazing history after
standing on their feet.

It's often said that Carpentier's works are magical realism.
Simply speaking, it's because like the following:

1. The old saying that fact is stranger than fiction is true.
2. Different from Western Europe, in Latin America (of those days) people indeed believed in magical events described in the book. In other words, they were facts for them.
3. This work is based on facts Carpentier collected in Haiti actually.
4. Thus, the chronicle is a so called Magical Realism.
   

Anyway, almost all the events and behaviors of people there are dizzying... For us Japanese at least, it's almost unbelievable that this kind of the kingdom of this world existed. I'm not sure how many Japanese people feel happy if they were placed in the situation.
But, in the last several pages, Carpentier says that this world is better than the world above because only in this world it makes sense or there is room to make effort improving ones current situation, and that's what an old man, the leading character of the story, perceived.

Thus, in a sense, the conclusion is common. But, the tour with magical reality leading to the (common) conclusion is excellent. It's really worth reading...

BTW, back cover of the Japanese translation says that the original title of the book is "El Derecho De Asilo." I'm not sure why, because I don't understand Spanish... :(

Saki Best Selection

Saki Best Selection (サキ傑作選)
Saki
ISBN 4-00-322611-9

After reading this anthology, I regret that I didn't read that as soon as I bought it about 10 years ago!

Among the short stories there, I like "Tobermory."
It's a short story of a mad scientist and a cat which the scientist
gave ability to speak a human language. After getting speech of humans,
the cat began to reveal inappropriate secrets of people around her.
After describing comical behaviors of the people, Saki gives readers
a bit unexpected and ironical ending.

Like other good story tellers, Saki shows us egoistic behavior of the
people but softly. In some regards, the story can be an irony of
innovation in science. But more than anything else, Saki does not
make us bored.

BTW, according to a commentary in the end of this book, Saki seems to be often
ranked with Maupassant and O. Henry. That makes sense for me at least
O. Henry firsthand, and I believe that the former is also true.
But, as a reader in Japan, I felt something similar in Saki's works
to Hideo Nakai. Nakai's short stories are full of fantasy in addition to
unexpected and ironical endings. So, I'm not sure if English translation of
Nakai's works are available or not, but I would suggest trying Nakai's
short stories if one likes Saki.

Yet Another SCM

Recently, I'm working on Eucalyptus which is an open source Amazon AWS clone software.

I didn't know that now there is one more source code management system, Bazaar.
I believe that clearly the name comes from "the Cathedral and Bazaar."

But, to tell the truth, I took it for Bizarre at first. :o

The Silent Miaow

The Silent Miaow: A Manual for Kittens, Strays, and Homeless Cats
Paul Galico
ISBN 4-480-03440-4 (Japanese Translation)

The (English) subtitle describes contents of this book very good.

Aside from the book itself, it reminded me of a woman who insisted on a two way classification of human characteristics intensely.

According to her, human can be classified into two types, a cat type and
a dog type.

A dog type human wants to to get involved with other people, especially
one's partner. On the contrary, a cat type human does vice versa
regardless of one's gender, and she insisted on strongly that she
was a typical cat type woman.

But, in those days, the essential problem was whether I and she should
carry on a connection with each other, and for me she looked like talking
her theory like a problem of someone else. She explained the theory
extremely methodical, but I could not understand what she wants really to do
in those days after all.

In this sense, it reminded me of Masahiko Fujiwara's book.
In short, her logic looked perfect, but the principle which she based on was
not appropriate for the situation those days. Furthermore, it's meaningless
arguing ones (possible) partner down.

Well, but anyway it's an old story today.

I wonder what she is doing now and then as yet so far.

BTW, it could be a good textbook for my daughter. :o

Day 543 : Second Cousin

Today, we drove to my hometown and attended at a wake of my cousin, Yuka.
All of my cousins were there and recalled memories of her.
Thus, the atmosphere was funeral there.

But, there was a small event of the next generation of us.
Last year, another cousin of mine got a baby, the second cousin of my daughter.
We were looking forward to seeing her, and it has become a reality finally. :)



The left is my daughter's second cousin, Sana, 6 months old.
She is smiling innocently, but recently my daughter is very shy with strangers. So, my daughter was keep holding my arms tightly as you can see above... :(

Day 543 : Monolith Girl?

Recently my daughter loves playing with blocks, and we were a bit surprized to see her work below.

Ha ha, she might be a Monolith Girl ... :o

BTW, the blocks are from BRIO. I like its colors. :)

The Library of Wonders

The Library of Wonders (不思議図書館)
Shuji Terayama (寺山修司)
ISBN 4-04-131521-2

For me, Shuji Terayama (寺山修司), was one of major contemporary Japanese
dramatist so far, but actually it looks like that he was one of the most avant-gard creative artists in Japan.

This book is a collection of Terayama's short essays.
He covers extremely wide range of topics. For example, Street Magicians, Robots, Mazes, Fetishism, Trompe L'oeil, Dragons, Gambles, Strange Murder Cases,... etc. etc.
Readers might feel a lack of oneness, but it makes sense that Terayama had huge variety of interests and they were the very backbones of his creative works.

BTW, I like the following 3 essays in the book.

3. Playing with Mazes of Books
12. Art History of Trompe L'oeil
22. An Encyclopedia of "One Thousand and One Nights"

Especially, "Playing with Mazes of Books" refers to J.L. Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" included in "Ficciones" which I read recently. I felt a kind of synchronicity.

In Memory of Yuka

Today, one of my cousins, Yuka, past away because of cancer.
She was only 29 years old.

I know her since she was a new born baby, and I met her about 3 times every year, end of the year/new year season, summer festival season and the lantern festival season. Since she was a small child, she had been a very active girl. The most impressive memory of her for me is that she ran into a glass door and broke it when she was about 3 years old. Thus, she had a crescent shape scar on her forehead like Harry Potter. :o
After she had grown up, she loved Mr. Children, a very popular Japanese rock band very much, and she studied English in her university days. Actually, I and she shared some likings.

BTW, my grandma was also in hospital this month. During her stay at the hospital, a cancer was found in her stomach, and we were a bit shocked because my mother also got a cancer about 5 years ago. So, my mother's family line could be a cancer family.
I hope that my daughter didn't inherit that gene... :(

I hope that she can take a good rest in the heaven.

The Magician

The Magician
William Somerset Maugham
ISBN 4-480-03008-5



Actually, I bought this book about 15 years ago. But, I forgot that and lent
a mass market paperback version of the book at a library. :o

I bought the Maugham's book just because I love Fantasy and Sci-Fi originally,
but the book is not just a simple fantasy.
There appears a strange guy who says himself as an alchemist (a magician?)
in the book. Almost in the end of the story, it turns out that the guy
was not just a big mouth, he succeeded to create homunculus.
In short, he succeeded to create life!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus

Here, Maugham let us think what magic is...

In history, phenomena which cannot be explained by science were
treated as magic. But, what does a man 100 years ago think about
a cell phone? It must be a magic for him.


BTW, there appears an old French doctor from the beginning of the story.
It's true that the doctor was studying alchemy after retirement,
but still he embodies common sense and contemporary science of the day
in the story, I think. What I thought ironical was that the doctor conducted
a seance and exchanged words with the heroine after she died.
Actually, it was the most impressive scene for me...

Day 538 : I Love Mommy!

Ha ha, a nice snapshot, isn't it? :)

Day 538 : Lost in Meditation?

Today, we went to a shopping center in Musashi-Murayama, and the above is a snapshot there.
It looks like that she is gazing at patterns of the floor and thinking deeply something.

Perhaps, she might have found a new theorem of geometory!? :o

Vaughn-Ueda International Prize 2008

It's honour of classmates in high school to hear that Tomonari Takao, a Mainichi Shinbun journalist, won the Vaughn-Ueda International Prize 2008.
He did stories on south African countries. For example, Zimbabwe chaos and Kenyan enthusiasm on U.S. election last year, and got the prize.

In our highschool days, Takao played soccor football with Masashi Nakayama and Akihisa Yamamura who, sad to say, past away in the end of last year. When Akihisa Yamamura past away, he sent a telegram in condolence from Johannesburg, and we were surprised that Takao remembered a very small but impressive topic of the departed in our high school days and mentioned that in his telegram.

To tell the truth, it was a bit unexpected when I heared that Takao took a job at a newspaper publisher, but that makes sense for me realizing his good memory and acute power of observation.

Good Job, Takao! :)

Ficciones

Ficcones (伝奇集)
Jorge Luis Borges
ISBN 978-4-00-327921-2 (Japanese Translation)

To tell the truth, I just wanted to read "The Library of Babel" included in this book at first after reading Hiroshi Aramata's "Rikakei no Bungakushi" and in conjunction with Stanisław Lem's "A Perfect Vacuum". But, I really regret that I didn't read the entire book when I saw it a book store about 15 years ago. :(

Granted that "The Library of Babel" is really amazing, but other stories are also very much thought-provoking, as for me, from a view point of world view.

In this sense, it's a bit beyond my expectation that "The Library of Babel" states the universe (of the Library) is finite and closed. In other word, if a man keeps to walk through a corridor of the Library in one direction, the man will arrive at the start point again taking no account of his life time. I understand that this is a natural consequence, but still I'm feeling there could be some more ideas such as introducing topological twists which enriches variety of the universe.

Among other stories, I like Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. But, this might be because I need some more time to think about other stories.

The problem is, if I can make enough time... :o

A Personnel Change

In Japan, the end of March is the hottest season of personnel changes because most Japanese companies start their fiscal year from April.

For these three years, I was sent to a subsidiary and placed a bit complicated position.
There I didn't have any basis to justify doing open source community activity nor going out with my works outside the organization where I spent three years.

But, finally I will be released from the situation, and I can work on R&D related activities not only ones directly connected to(mostly troublesome) production systems.

BTW, the next main theme I'm working on is, cloud computing. :o
In a sense, I might be in a fog. In other word, I could be struggling with cloud-built things from this April. :o

The Moebius Strip

The Moebius Strip: Dr. August Moebius's Marvelous Band in Mathematics, Games, Literature, Art, Technology and Cosmology
Clifford A. Pickover
ISBN 978-4-8222-8318-6 (Japanese Translation)

The subtitle explains all about the book, I think.
In short, it's a great work of a Moebius mania. :o

What didn't know about Moebius is that he did more works than just the discovery of Moebius's strip. For example, Moebius function is used in number theory and furthermore even elementary particle physics!

BTW, Pickover's books is not for just specialists of scientists. General readers can enjoy various puzzles or graphics based on Moebius' theories. :)

Day 531 : At Mark Girl?

Ha ha, the pants with a big @ mark is a present from her grandma now staying at our home.
Both of them looked very happy today. :)

BTW, I'm wondering what if she said, "I want to be an SE!"
I'm wondering what I should tell her about the IT industry...

Got VCP

Today, I had an examination for VMware Certified Professional (VCP).

As I wrote several times, I've been working on virtualization using VMware Infrastructure for a couple of years, thus I thought it's not so difficult to pass the exam. Actually, I was undervalueing the examination level and thinking it's easy to achieve the acceptance line, 70%.
After starting the exam this morning, I was a bit surprised that my knowledge had several biases and it's not so easy that I expected... :(
After all, I could pass the exam fortunately with a score of 71%, only one percent highter than the acceptance line. :o
Anyway, it's a lucky day today, and I can say "I'm a VCP" from today... :o

BTW, I didn't know that VMware introduced one more certification program, VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) recently. According to the VMware web site, to get VCDX we need to pass two more examinations and have a kind of presentation.
There is a long way...

Day 529 : Yarning

Haha, my daughter looked like a bit sleepy today. :)



A snapshot in Tachikawa.

Bubba Gump Shrinmp Co. ?

Today, I had free time to walk around Toyosu station.
So, I walked to Urban Dock Lalaport Toyosu.



Actually, I wanted to look for some books at Kinokuniya Books there, but I was surprised a bit seeing a sign below.



The restaurant seems to be inspired by Forrest Gump of course, and I want to have lunch there once. :)

BTW, now my mother in law stays our home. When I talked about the restaurant with my wife and her, she mentioned that she loves a famous phrase which Forrest Gump often says in the film. Actually, I didn't know that, but after Googling some time I got it. :)

• Like peas and carrots

I also felt it a nice phrase, and I hope our family is like peas and carrots. :)

BTW, I guess I didn't know the phrase because I saw the film in Japanese language mode...

Haijin?

Today we were preparing for moving of office location at work, and a snapshot at work today.
The Kanji in red on the label, "廃", means "on the scrap."

Haha...perhaps, I'm being on the scrap. :o

BTW, title of this entry, "Haijin" is in kanji "廃人" which roughly means a wrecked guy.
In this sense, "俳人" has the same pronunciation, but this Haijin means a Haiku poet.
Definitely, I'm not a Haiku poet. :o

Doughnut

Now, my mother in law is staying our house to help my wife's household works for a week.
She is very good at cooking, and her repertry covers from a bit formal style dishes to handmade cookies.

Among them I love her doughnut, and today I enjoyed it very much. :)

Mt. Fuji

I was born in the central part of Shizuoka.
Mt. Fuji was always there, and so indeed I feel it's beautiful and great, but it's not so special seeing the mountain.

I saw Mt. Fuji on my way back to Tokyo from one day trip to my home town today to visit my grandma at a hospital. Actually, yesterday was her birthday, and now she is 97 years old now!
She took the cure at a hospital and bounced back a couple of times so far. But, this time the situation looked like a bit different. Actually, on the birthday of grandma, all the relatives there including my mother, uncles and my brother and I were feeling that she have lived a full life without mentioning so.

This morning, before visiting her again, we got a good news that she became conscious and began to have food again. We know that it's not so long when she leaves this life, but anyway all the descendants of her hope to have some more happy days with her. Especially, I hope she can celebrate the summer festival with her two great grand daughters this year.
Of course, one is my daughter. :)

Thus, I saw Mt. Fuji with a deep emotion today.

Twitter

I got a twitter account after such a long time.

My Twitter URL is here, but I'm feeling it's better posting what I felt or thought in more real time. The problem is that Japanese cell phones are not suitable for inputting English phrased. :(

Speech understanding cell phone?
Ha ha, there might be such an application of iPhone. :o

VMware ESXi on GIGABYTE Mother Boards

Finally, I succeeded to boot up VMware ESXi on my GIGABYTE M/B box.


Picture 1. VMware ESXi initial boot up screen

It looks like there are not a small number of people struggling with ESXi, USB stick and GIGABYTE mother boards. So, this post might be useful for them.

In case of me, I built my PC about 3 years ago, and so the mother board is a very old one, GA81945G Pro. Furthermore, I think it's a Japanese local version. But, still I think the knowhow below is applicable to other GIGABYTE mother boards.

I just followed a workaround described here. Unfortunately, it's written in Japanese, but the summery is like the following.

Here is the procedure:

(a) In case your mother board BIOS has a "USB HDD emulation mode" for USB sticks

1. Turn it on, and boot from your USB stick.

(b) In case your mother board does not have the emulation mode
(It looks like GIGABYTE M/Bs usually do not have this.)

1. Get an IDE HDD
2. Write the ESXi boot image onto the IDE HDD
   
   • ESXi boot image is contained in 'INSTALL.tgz' in your ESXi CD image
   • The file name is 'usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0_Update_3-123629.i386.dd.bz2' or like this.
     
   • As it's bzip2 compressed, extract it and write it using dd command.
3. Get a USB stick
4. Write the ESXi boot image onto the USB stick too.
5. Setup your BIOS to boot up from the IDE HDD, not the USB stick
6. Plug both the IDE HDD and the USB stick
7. Power on!

I'm not sure why the above procedure works well, but I guess the picture 4 below implies ESXi boot image looks for filesystems on the USB stick even when it's booted up from an IDE HDD.


Picture 2. Installation failure message


Picture 3. Boot up failure message in case of USB stick boot


Picture 4. Boot up failure message in case HDD boot without the USB stick with ESXi image

VMFS Driver?

I didn't know that there was an open source VMFS driver, a cluster filesystem intended for virtualization environment by VMware.

• http://www.virtualization.info/2009/03/ghost-of-past-develops-open-source-vmfs.html (English)
• http://www.virtualization.info/jp/2009/03/vmfs20090309-1.html (Japanese)

After having a look at the project:

• http://code.google.com/p/vmfs/

I was a bit surprised because it's implemented in user land. Furthermore, written in Java!
It looks like it's intended for WebDAV access for the content of VMFS volumes. But, I'm wondering why they need such a software. Perhaps, managing VMFS volumes disconnected from VI Infrastructure fabric by their products? I'm not sure...

Well, anyway what I would do next is writing a (possibly) Linux kernel modules doing the same thing. :o

Purple Screen?

Well, it's not blue screen, but purple screen. (!?)
The screen seems to be called PSOD, "Purple Screen of Death."

As I wrote yesterday, I got a trouble in installing VMware ESXi using my PentiumD(!) box with a bit old Intel 945G based GIGABYTE M/B. Not only installing ESXi locally but even booting up from a USB stick failed. :(

So, I was checking if I can boot up VMware ESXi from the USB stick on my ThinkPad X61 to see which of the USB stick or others causes the problem.
The boot process on the ThinkPad succeeded, and it's OK so far.

But, I saw the above purple screen when I shutdown the ESXi.
What was wrong? :(

BTW, I found an interesting screenshot in Flicker.
16Way Opteron!
Amazing...

One more thing.
It seems that Vista also has PSOD and RSOD!?
I would like a Green Screen of Death for the heaven. :)