Month: February 2010

SQL 2008 Security and vCenter 4

This past weekend I worked on automating our SQL installs and scripting security lockdowns. During that effort I found the new policy evaluation tool in SQL 2008. This built-in tool allows you to run specific checks against your SQL 2008 installation to report on best practices. During my evaluation everything...

Scripting SQL Server Firewall Rules

On servers that are running Windows server 2008 or later, you can take advantage of the built-in two-way firewall. SQL server firewall rules can be pretty easily created through the GUI, but it can be a bit tedious. So I wrote a little batch file that asks you for an IP...

Install vCenter and vSphere Client via command line

I stumbled upon this technical note from VMware on how to install vCenter and the vSphere client silently via the command line. Unfortunately the syntax is pretty convoluted, unlike the SQL 2008 unattended method. The vCenter command line install document can be found here.Just to give you a flavor of...

Automate vCenter/VUM Database Creation Process

After installing and re-installing VMware vCenter and VUM many times (mostly for testing) all of the manual database creation steps got old pretty fast. So I put some effort into creating a T-SQL script for SQL 2008 that automates most of the tasks.The T-SQL script below does the following:1. Adds...

Create 32-Bit system ODBC DSN with Powershell

This Powershell script creates a 32-bit system DSN on a 64-bit server. I got tired of manually creating DSNs for my VMware vCenter installations, so I automated the process. The only argument you need to pass to the script is the FQDN or IP address of your SQL server. If...

Revisiting your backup licensing model

I'm in the process of doing a market survey for various enterprise backup products. During my investigation, I've found that picking the right backup licensing model can save you a large amount of money. How? Companies like IBM and Symantec offer different licensing models for the same product. Specifically, you...

Banish the evil VMware ESX VM snapshots

The other week I was telling a co-worker that in most cases using VM snapshots in ESX was evil and should be avoided in all but exceptional circumstances. He gave me this look like I grew a third eye, my ears fell off, and my skin turned green.I then conveyed...

3PAR InForm OS Upgrade – Easy as pie!

If you've been following my blog, you know that last year our project acquired a 3PAR T400 Fibre Channel array. One of the features which really sold us on 3PAR was its ease of use and the ability for our technical staff to perform all aspects of maintenance including major...

VMware Workstation 7.0.1 Released

A couple of days ago VMware released Workstation 7.0.1. No earth shattering updates, but now officially supports Server 2008 R2 and Vista SP2 as host and guest operating systems. You can download it here and read the release notes here.