The Important Things In Life

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I delivered this speech for my “Advance Communication” Toastmasters project, speech #2 of the Specialty Speech manual, “Uplift the Spirit” project. Here it goes:

I can still remember everything, as if it only happened yesterday. I was 12 years old, in 6th grade. My friend and I skipped school one sunny day and went to a pond. I was so naive, I jumped into the pond without checking it first. It was 8 feet deep, and I barely knew how to swim. Then, my foot got stuck in the mud at the bottom. I panicked! I was drowning! I thought I was going to die that day. Then suddenly I felt my friend pull me out to safety.

Fellow Toastmasters and most welcomed guests, did you also have a near death experience? Did it change your perspective in life?

Recently, I was reminded again that life can be short. I was driving late one evening after attending a conference in Cambridge. I was so tired that night. The road is not my normal route and at an intersection in Leicester on my way home, I did not stop at a stop sign. I only realized it after I crossed the intersection. And I exclaimed, “What just happened?” Then, I checked my rear view mirror, I saw a large trailer truck crossed the intersection. What if I was 3 seconds late? I could have been hit by the truck.

Life can be short. We should make the most of it.

So how do we live life to the fullest. Well, let’s learn from the people in their deathbeds. Research shows that there are 3 common deathbed regrets. I’ll talk about these three common regrets. My nurse friend who worked at a hospice confirmed these to me.

The first one is, I wish I had pursued my dreams.

I wish I had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

We should pursue our own dreams — not what our parents, friends, or other people told us to pursue. If you want to be a musician – go for it while there is still time. Climb Mt. Everest. Take that job at a non-profit charitable organization. Don’t mind what others think about it.

When I was a kid growing up in the Philippines, I would dream of coming to America. America as I’ve read in books and watched in movies is nice and prosperous. So I pursued this dream. I took a computer engineering course which I thought would be in demand in America. After college, I worked in the Philippines for 3 years to gain experience, and I relentlessly pursued technology companies in the US. With perseverance and a little bit of luck, I was hired by a telecommunications company in New Jersey, and I realized my dream of coming to America.

I have other dreams such as to travel around the world and experience other cultures, and I’m working towards these dreams.

What about you? What are your dreams? Are you pursuing them?

The second common deathbed regret is, I wish I hadn’t work so hard.

I wish I had spent more time with family and friends than at work. People in their deathbeds do not cherish the long hours in the office . Instead they remember the time they spent with their families and friends.

The other day, after getting home very tired from work, my daughter Justine approached me, “Dad, can you help me with my homework?” I snapped at her, “Can’t you see I’m so tired from work, and I still have to mow the lawn?” She meekly said, “Ok Dad, maybe later.” But then I realized, I just told my daughter that she is not my priority. I thought hard about it, and I realized that I had my priorities wrong – my work is my first priority, then household chores, then my daughter/family. It should be the other way around!

People in deathbeds also wished they had stayed in touch with their friends.

I always planned to call my friends, but because of work, and other responsibilities, I always put it in the back burner and never really got the chance to call them. I will often say, “I’ll call them tomorrow, they will still be there anyway.” Well, I think I should be getting in touch with them before it’s too late.

The lesson here is to reach out to friends. Have a long chat over a glass of wine (or beer). Call them If they live very far away.

Fortunately, it’s now easy more than ever to stay in touch with friends, via Facebook. So if you haven’t been using Facebook yet, sign up and reconnect with your old friends.

The third common deathbed regret is, I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Too often we postpone happiness. I remember when I was in high school, I would often say, “I’ll be happy when I get to college.” When I was in college, I would often say, “I’ll be happy when I get a job.” Now that I have a a job, I would often say, “I’ll be happy when I retire.” “I’ll be happy if I win the lottery.” When my day gets challenging, I would often say, “I’ll be happy when this day is over.”

Then I realized that I will never be happy if I keep on postponing it. The present is all we’ve got. Today! Now! Be happy now, because tomorrow may never come.

So, open that expensive wine. Eat that delicious chocolate cake. Play ball with your son, or play pretend tea party with your daughter. Book that European vacation you’ve been longing for. Move to Florida if you love warm weather — although we’ll really miss you if you move out of Massachusetts. Buy yourself a kindle and read; whatever it is, be good to yourself. Also, be good to others, because making others happy makes us happy too.

It is hard to prioritize and do the important things in life. We always get caught up with daily activities – work, household chores, interruptions.

But I think, for me, that near-death drowning experience when I was a kid taught me a lesson – never skip school to go to the pond. But seriously, recalling that story every time reminds me to put my life in perspective and do the important things in life. Life is short, make the most of it.

The Value of IT Certifications

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I recently passed the VMware Certified Professional 5 – Data Center Virtualization exam. The last VMware certification I took was in 2007 when I passed the VMware Certified Professional 3 exam. It’s nice to have the latest VMware certification under my belt.

VMware certification is a little bit unique, because it requires one-week training and hands-on experience. You will find it difficult to pass the test without hands-on experience. Most of the questions in the test are real life scenarios and you can only understand the questions if you have encountered them in real life.

Some people argue the value of certifications. They say that certifications are useless because most of those people who have them are inexperienced. I agree that experience is the best way to learn in the IT field. I can attest to this after almost 20 years in the field. But IT certifications are valuable for the following reasons:

1. Not all IT certifications are created equal. While some certifications are easier to pass just by reading books, most IT certifications such as VCP (VMware Certified Professional), CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional), and RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer) certifications need a high degree of experience to pass the tests.

2. Not all people are lucky enough to have access to expensive hardware to gain hands-on experience nor lucky enough to be assigned to IT projects to get the maximum exposure. Some people take the certification route to get knowledge and experience.

3. Not all IT knowledge is learned via experience since not all scenarios can be encountered in real life. Some are learned via reading books and magazines, taking the training, and passing certification tests. For instance, if your company’s standard is Fiber Channel for VMware datastore, the only way to learn about iSCSI datastore is to read or get trained on it.

4. IT certifications are solid evidence of your career. It will be very useful, for instance, when looking for a job. Prospective employers do not have a concrete evidence of your accomplishments, but a solid and trusted IT certification can prove your worth.

5. And finally, seasoned IT professionals, just like me, take certification tests to validate our knowledge.

Important Features and Capabilities in the New vSphere 5.1

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vSphere 5.1 has been released several months ago, and among its new features and capabilities, I think the important ones are the following:

1. Larger virtual machines. Virtual machines can now have up to 64 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) and 1TB of virtual RAM (vRAM). This means that enterprise apps such as SAP, large databases, email, and other high demand apps can now be virtualized without worrying about CPU and memory resources. The goal of attaining 100% virtualization in the Data Centers can now be realized.

2. vSphere Data Protection and vSphere Replication. vSphere Data Protection is used to backup and recover virtual machines. vSphere Replication is used to replicate virtual machines to remote Data Center for disaster recovery. No need to integrate third party tools such as Veeam for backup or Zerto for replication to remote DR site.

3. vSphere 5.1 eliminates the need to reboot virtual machines for subsequent VMware Tools upgrades on Windows.

For a complete list of the new features and capabilities, go to this website:

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/products/vsphere/vmware-what-is-new-vsphere51.pdf

However, the vSphere Web Client is now the core administrative interface for vSphere. The vSphere client is still available but I’m afraid it will not be supported in future releases. I still like the vSphere client because it’s more roubust, stable, and faster. In addition, there are a lot of plug-ins that are still not available in the Web Client such as the NetApp Virtual Storage Console for VMware vSphere. We use NetApp for our datastore and this plug-in is very important to us.

Accomplishments as a Toastmaster Club President

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As the Toastmaster year draws to a close, I am proud to say that our AbbVie Bioresearch Toastmaster club, where I am the President, achieved the President’s Distinguished Club award, the highest award a club can get. We obtained this award because:

1. two of our members completed the ten Competent Communicator speech projects;
2. two of our members completed the ten Advanced Communicator speech projects;
3. two of our members completed the ten Competent Leadership projects;
4. two of our members completed the Advanced Leadership projects;
5. we signed up 13 new members;
6. all of our officers were trained in both the summer and winter Toastmaster Leadership Institute (TLI) trainings;
7. we submitted our membership dues on time;
8. we submitted officers and members list on time;
9. and we maintained a membership base of 38.

In addition, our club sponsored a Youth Leadership Program, an eight-session, workshop-style program, designed to enable the youth to develop communication and leadership skills through practical experience. Our club also premièred the movie “Speak,” a powerful and inspiring documentary about conquering life’s hurdles and finding your voice.

We also held several Open Houses to attract new members and held Speech Contests to enhance our members educational experience.

All of these accomplishments were made possible because of the untiring and enthusiastic efforts of our officers and members.

Being a Toastmaster officer is challenging. I have to constantly motivate people to attend the meetings, volunteer for roles, and finish their communication and leadership projects. But it is a very rewarding experience. I learned practical skills on leadership, management and organization. I learned “people skills” such as interpersonal communication skills, conflict resolution, and patience. But there is no better reward than knowing that our club members are getting better in their speaking and leadership skills.

I signed up for an Area Governor position for the next Toastmaster year and I am looking forward to bigger challenges.

The Importance of Disaster Recovery (DR) Testing

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Recently, we conducted disaster recovery (DR) testing on one of our crucial applications. The server was running Windows 2008 on an HP physical box. We performed bare metal restore (BMR) using Symantec Netbackup 7.1. However, after Symantec BMR completed the restore, the server will not boot up. We troubleshoot the problem and tried several configurations. It took a couple of days before we figured out the issue. The issue, by the way, was that the boot sector got misaligned after the restore and we have to use Windows installation disk to repair it.

What if it was a real server disaster? The business cannot wait for a couple of days to restore the server. We defined an RTO (Recovery Time Objective) for that server to be 8 hours. And we did not meet it during our testing. This is the reason why DR testing is very important.

During DR testing, we have to test the restore technology and the restore procedures. In addition, we need to test if we can restore it on time (RTO) and if we can restore the data at a point in time (or RPO – Recovery Point Objective) (e.g. from a day before, or from a week ago).

With a lot of companies outsourcing their DR to third parties or to the cloud, DR testing becomes even more important. How do you know if the restore works? How do you know if their DR solution meets your RPO and RTO? Companies assume that because backups are being done, then restore will automatically work.

We perform DR testing once a year. But for crucial applications and data, I recommend DR testing twice a year. Also, perform a test every time you make significant changes on your backup infrastructure, such as software updates.

Security Done Right

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During my job-related trip to Israel a couple of months ago, I was subjected to a thorough security check at the airport. I learned later on that everybody goes through the same process. It was a little inconvenient, but in the end, I felt safe.

With all the advance technologies in security, nothing beats the old way of conducting security – thorough checks on individuals. I also noticed the defense in depth strategy at the Israel airport – the several layers of security people have to pass to get to their destinations. No wonder some of the greatest IT security companies come from Israel (e.g. Checkpoint Firewall).

As an IT security professional (I’m a CISSP certified), I can totally relate to the security measures Israel has to implement. And companies need to learn from them. Not a day goes by that we learn companies being hacked, shamed, and extorted by hackers around the world.

Sadly, some companies only take security seriously when it’s too late – when their data has been stolen, their systems have been compromised, and their twitter account has been taken over. It will be a never ending battle with hackers, but it’s a great idea to start securing your systems now.

Backing Up NetApp Filer on Backup Exec 2012

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The popularity of deduped disk-based backup, coupled with snapshots and other technologies, may render tape backup obsolete. For instance, if you have a NetApp Filer, you can use snapshot technology for backup, and snapmirror technology for disaster recovery. However, there may be some requirements such as regulatory requirements to keep files for several years, or infrastructure limitations such as low bandwidth to remote DR (disaster recovery) site that inhibits nightly replication. In these instances, using tape backup is still the best option.

The proper way to backup a NetApp Filer to tape on Backup Exec 2012 is via NDMP. You can backup your Filer on the network, using remote NDMP. If you can directly connect a tape device to the NetApp Filer, that would even be better, because backup will not go through the network anymore, thus backup jobs will be faster.

However, using NDMP requires a license on Backup Exec. The alternative way to backup the Filer without buying the NDMP license is via the CIFS share. Configuring the Backup Exec 2012 via CIFS shares though can be a little tricky. These are the things you need to do to make it work:

1. Disable NDMP service on the NetApp Filer. This is done by issuing the command “ndmpd off” at the command line.
2. Change the default NDMP port number on the Backup Exec 2012 server. The default port number is 10000. You may use port 9000. This is done by editing the “services” file located at C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc and adding the line “ndmp 9000/tcp” Reboot server after editing the file.
3. Make sure you have at least one Remote Agent for Windows license installed on your Backup Exec server.
4. Make sure that the “Enable selection of user shares” is checked in the “Configuration and Settings -> Backup Exec Settings -> Network and Security” settings.
5. When defining the backup job, select “File Server” at the type of server to backup.
6. When entering the NetApp Filer name, use IP address or the fully qualified domain name (FQDN).

The backup status for backing up NetApp Filer this way will always be “Completed with Exceptions,” since Backup Exec still looks for remote agent on the client. But this is fine, as long as all files are being backed up.

Easy and Cheap vCenter Server

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If your VMware infrastructure contains no more than 5 hosts and 50 virtual machines, you can save some effort and Windows license fee by using the VMware vCenter Server Appliance instead of the vCenter Server on a Windows machine. The vCenter Server Appliance is a preconfigured Suse Linux-based virtual machine, with PostgreSQL for the embedded database.

The vCenter appliance is easy to deploy and configure, and it will save you time and maintenance effort, because unlike Windows, you do not have to install anti-virus and monthly patches. It can join Active Directory for user authentication. It will save you Windows license fee, but you still need to purchase vCenter license.

The vCenter appliance can be downloaded from the VMware site as an ova or an ovf plus vmdk files. You do not need to download the ovf and the vmdk files if you downloaded the ova file. Ova file is merely a single file distribution of ovf and vmdk, stored in tar format.

To deploy the appliance, use the vSphere Client and deploy the downloaded ova file as an ovf template. You can deploy it as a thin provisioned format if you do not want to commit 80GB space right away. Once deployed and powered on, you can continue with the rest of the configuration using the GUI browser based interface at https://vCenterserver:5400/. The vCenter Server Appliance has the default user name root and password vmware.

The wizard will guide you through the rest of the configuration. There are really very few configuration items. The common ones are static IP address (if you don’t want dhcp), and the Active Directory settings. And the best thing is, you do not have to manage/configure the Suse-Linux-based appliance via CLI. Everything can be managed via the GUI browser-based interface.

Teaching Kids to Program

Should we teach our kids computer programming? I believe we should, even though their future careers will not be in computers. Computer programming teaches kids logic, mathematics and computation, design, and creativity — skills that are necessary in any chosen profession.

Many will argue that kids these days are very computer savvy. They can easily figure out how an app on a computer, tablet, or iPhone works. I totally agree with them. However, for the most part, they are consumers or users of the technology. Being a creator is totally different. Creating or programming an app is a skill that is learned and developed over the years.

Recently, I took on the task of teaching my eleven year old daughter computer programming, since her school is not teaching them programming. At least not yet. I believe that the earlier you teach your kids computer programming, the better they will be. It’s not that I wanted my daughter to be a nerd, or take up a computer career. I just wanted her to learn a very valuable skill — a skill that will be very useful for her future. We all know that the future will be dominated by computer technology.

Teaching kids to program is easier than you think. There is a program called Scratch that was created by MIT to basically teach kids or any beginner to program. From their website: “Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.”

I used a book called Super Scratch Programming Adventure!: Learn to Program By Making Cool Games by the Lead Project to teach my daughter Scratch. I was glad that she got totally engaged in Scratch. Up next, Python programming for kids.

My Top 10 Favorite Books

Aside from the technical (computer) books I read to keep my skills up-to-date, I’ve read numerous business and self-help books that helped me in my personal and professional life. Here’s a list of my top 10 books:

1. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. I read this book when I was just starting my career way back in the early 90’s. This book has a tremendous impact in my personal and professional life. It helped me how to be proactive, how to manage my time, and how to prioritize my goals.

2. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twentieth-First Century by Thomas L. Friedman. This is the best book I read on globalization. It argued that one should be a “versatilist” to compete in a shrinking world.

3. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell. This book explains that an idea, trend, or behavior can reach a “tipping point” where it spreads rapidly. The book is well research and has a lot of examples. I also like Gladwell’s Blink and Outliers books.

4. Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time by Keith Ferrazi. This is the best book I read on networking. The best advice I got is that you have to be generous – ask other people how you can help them.

5. The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch. I like this book because the author is a Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon who taught about overcoming obstacles and achieving dreams.

6. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t by Jim Collins. This is one of the best business books I’ve ever read. It is based on research and careful analysis on companies that are doing great in the market.

7. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. This book explained how the universe and humans came into being, from a science perspective. It recounted the researches and scientific discoveries and inventions from the Big Bang to the rise of civilization. The author made the book very entertaining.

8. The Harvard Sampler: Liberal Education for the Twenty-First Century by Jennifer M. Shephard, Professor Stephen M. Kosslyn and Evelynn M. Hammonds. The book is a collection of essays by distinguished Harvard professors, showcasing diverse subjects such as religion, cyberspace, evolution, medical science, energy sources, morality, human rights, and many more. The essays are entertaining and thought provoking.

9. Confessions of a Public Speaker by Scott Berkun. Aside from the Toastmasters manuals and magazines that I’ve read, this book provides tons of practical tips on how to conquer your fear of public speaking, how to organize your speech, and how to deliver your speech.

10. The Magic of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz. Very inspirational book – provides useful methods on how to improve one’s life and achieve greater happiness.