For quite a while I've been searching for pricing on the Cisco Nexus 1000v switch for ESX vSphere 4.0. Today I had some success at the Cisco booth at TechED. It's licensed on a per-socket basis like ESX licenses. They sell various packs which give you slight cost breaks.The packages...
One of the really mind blowing new features of Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 is something called DirectAccess. What is DirectAccess? Think of it as a background VPN to your corporate intranet, but with none of the end-user hassles of a traditional VPN. Work anywhere in the world as...
Here's a short list of some of the new features in Exchange 2010. This is certainly not a comprehensive list, but gives you a flavor of the many enhancements. Built-in e-mail archiving, with full OWA and fat client access. Support for 10+GB mailboxes Shows OCS contacts and can send basic...
During one of the Exchange 2010 sessions at TechED 2009 I attended, Microsoft made what I think is a major announcement. Given a proper design, Microsoft no longer recommends RAID protected disks for your Exchange server and goes a step further and suggests using locally attached SATA drives.This is in...
Once again, I'm here at TechED. This is a great opportunity to learn about the latest and greatest Microsoft technologies. You can also collaborate with peers, and talk with a wide range of vendors. I'll be posting some notes from various sessions that I'm attending. The notes will likely not...
So today I received a request for assistance from another project on a very peculiar problem their system was experiencing. They were deploying a new version of their system and the 'go live' date was fast approaching. Their thin client architecture relies on a Citrix server and during some final...
For eveyone that has been waiting for some juicy technical details on the Cisco Nexus 1000v, Cisco and VMware have broken the silence and published a document describing many of the new features. It consists mostly of a table comparing the various features that the built-in VMswitch has verus the...
Microsoft has released rollup 7 for Exchange 2007 SP1. To read all of the fixes in this rollup, see this link. As always, Microsoft recommends you update your systems to the latest RU, after thorough lab testing.
According to this article at Extremtech, ATI will release updated video drivers for Vista and Windows 7 on a monthly basis. To download the new drivers go to this link. New drivers were released today, and I'm downloading them as I type this.
Check out this article for a very scary flaw in current Intel CPUs which could render an exploit virtually impossible to detect. The exploit was discovered by the same researchers that developed the Blue Pill hypervisor rootkit.Hopefully Intel and motherboard manufacturers can release firmware updates to patch this bug.
1. Snaphotsa. What is the maximum number of read-only and read-write snapshots per LUN?b. Is a separate pool (reserve) of disk space required for snapshot use?c. Are snapshots space efficient?d. If a LUN has 10 read/write snapshots, and if the source LUN is modified, are 10 copies of that data...
The project I'm supporting is looking at 'mid range' enterprise Fibre Channel storage arrays. As part of the investigation, I perform market surveys of leading vendors. After we narrow down the field, I submit a long list of technical questions. While vendor's web sites make their array sound like the...