Basic curry in a hurry - Parsnip, prince of roots

Serves two people.

Ingredients:
vegetable oil
3 medium sized onions.
5 parsnips, not the largest, just under medium sized.
2 chillies, a green one and a red one
ground cumin
ground coriander
turmeric
6 medium sized cloves of garlic.
dried chillies
tomato puree
black pepper
1 tin of chopped tomatoes
1 tin of chick peas in water unsalted
red lentils
1 teaspoon of sugar
A big pan
A big wooden spoon

Some rice
Another big pan

Method:
This will take about an hour.

18:17 (0 minutes)
Put your oil in a large pan on a low heat, enough oil to almost completely cover the onions you are shortly going to put in the pan.

Chop your onion. Chuck a bit of onion in to check whether the oil is hot enough yet, a gentle sizzle should do it. If hot enough put all of your onion in and turn up the heat slightly and cook the onions slowly. Scrub, brush, top and tail, or do whatever you do to parsnips before cooking, then cut them in half so you have a short stubby bit and a thin bit of parsnip. Split the parsnip halves in two along their lengths, if cooking for a longer time than here don't bother cutting in half but just split the parsnips along their length.

The onions should be on their way to being translucent now, add the parsnips and stir around making sure they are covered in oil. I fed the cats at this moment so leave cooking for however long that took, a couple of minutes perhaps. Chop your chillies and add them.

18:30 (13 minutes)
Crush and add the cloves of garlic, give it a good stir, I listened to The Now Show at this point, add cumin, coriander, turmeric and dried chillies, this probably worked out at a couple of rounded teaspoons of each apart from the chillies which were level teaspoons, stir it up. These were the only spices in the cupboard, fenugreek, cardamom and ginger would have been good additions.

After a couple of minutes add about two tablespoons of tomato puree, give it a good stir, grind in some black pepper. Let this cook for a couple more minutes and then add the tin of chopped tomatoes, stir in then add the tin of chick peas including the water. Turn up the heat slightly, give a good stir.

18:36 (19 minutes)
Add two handfuls of red lentils. Keep it on a slow simmer while stiring occasionally to prevent stickage. There about 40 minutes cooking time left.

18:43 (26 minutes)
Cook some rice. Marcus Brigstocke having a bit of a rant about political apathy. Put a pan of water on the heat, lots of water as the rice should be able to move freely while cooking. When the water is just about to boil put your rice in, I used Basmati rice, enough for two people. One stir with a wooden spoon should be enough to stop the rice sticking, don't boil the water but keep it simmering. After about 6 or 7 minutes retrieve some rice on your spoon and check for consistency, to bite it should still be reasonably firm in the middle but soft externally. Take it off the heat and run cold water through to stop the rice cooking, this also rinses the rice. Once cold, drain but leave the rice in the pan for later.

The rice will have a kettle of boiling water poured on it later to heat it through before serving, this reduces the possibility of a last minute flap and potentially overcooking the rice.

19:05 (48 minutes)
About 5 to 10 minutes before serving add half a teaspoon of coriander, of cumin and a teaspoon of sugar. If you have Garam Masala add that instead of the cumin and coriander

19:10 (53 minutes)
Get the kettle on for the rice, once boiled pour the water on the rice and leave for about 2 minutes.

Get the plates and cutlery ready.

Get the mango chutney out.

19:15 (58 minutes)
Serve it up. I didn't add any salt, you may wish too. The parsnips should have absorbed the flavours, the longer the cooking period the better the parnips will taste, there is no need to hurry this.

All vegetable offcuts were put aside for the compost, 'stir it up' references, copyright Bob Marley.

Cloud Computing and the Virtualised Datacentre

VMware event at Old Trafford Theater of Dreams (TM)

Piled over to Manchester from Sheffield on the train to attend a day of sessions on Cloud Computing and the Virtualised Datacentre. I expected we would get the tram to the ground but major maintenance work was being carried out on the tram infrastrucutre in the city centre - they have a replacement bus service on to St Peter's Square but it is as quick to walk. This added a little delay, as well as mysterious stops every minute or so along route, taking lessons from the tube I expect!

We missed the first few minutes of the keynote speech but it was general background stuff, there were lots of references to computing in the cloud, internal and external clouds.

Three sessions were to run simultaneously during each session block, we split up and took a session each. Not all sessions were repeated through the day.


The first session I attended was on storage, this focussed on EMC and how they were ahead of other storage vendors in tying in to the new vStorage API framework available for vendoirs to hook in to vSphere. No surprise really that as EMC own VMware, but Netapp and other vendors either already have or will be working on those areas too. The EMC capabilities will be typical of the sort of stuff coming - Netapp already have have rapid cloning and other functionality that is triggered from the VI Client using the new API. Thin provisioning from the VMware side (not required if you are already doing it at the storage side), sVmotion that can be done within the storage array rather than via an ESX host, recovering VMs from native storage snapshots (rather than VM snaps) from
within the VI CLient, storage tiering, where storage can be moved from expensive disk to less expensive disk, nice stuff like that.


The second session attended was a very good one from Cisco. Lots of interesting stuff albeit with a cheesy video about the infrastructure 'tribes', the Networking, Storage, and Server tribes and how as virtualisation encompasses all these areas there is now a fourth tribe, and the potential for disharmony - I don't think we've had any of that but as I occupy three of those roles I'm not about to own up to disagreeing with myself;-)

Much was said about putting the network team back in control of the networking, right down to the virtual switch in ESX - something that has been the department of the Virtual Environment admin until now. This is a good thing, there should be a consistency in how switches are managed even when virtual. New technology (vNetwork in VMware which is built on by Cisco soft/hardware) allows a distributed vSwitch to be created, this means port/machine policies, statistics, rules and the like follow the virtual machine when the machine is migrated. There are other ways of picking up some of these statistics by monitoring each VM directly, something we do now, but the fine level of control normally available to Network Admins has been missing. An example of one of these levels of control is security. Currently all VMs attached to the same vSwitches can communicate with each other unhindered as when talking to each other over the same vSwitch traffic is never sent out to the managed LAN, in many environments this is not desirable and there may be requirements that machines are walled off in various ways.

The VMware environment needs to be running at least Enterprise Plus to be able to use this new technology. There is a Cisco Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) that exists as a VM that controls the DistributedvSwitch. The Nexus 1000v is the Cusco hardware that sits out in a rack provides ports that create an extended ethernet in to the virtual environment, as physical hosts are added to the virtual environment they automatically pick up the distributed vSwitch configuration.