After a few months the highly anticipated vSphere 4.0 hardening guides have been released. Several months ago VMware released beta versions which I thought were pretty good. Seeing as DISA doesn't have STIGs for vSphere, the next best thing is vendor provided documentation.You can see the full release here and...
During the build process of my Windows Server 2008 R2 VM templates, I had perplexing problem with my second virtual disk after sysprep completed. In my previous blog post I showed a PowerShell command that reassigned a drive letter. Worked great, but a noticed a problem. My "D" drive, which...
I ran across a useful command that instantly reassigns a drive to another letter, and another one liner that detects a CD-ROM and assigns it a particular letter. For additional details and a richer script, check out this blog post from The Admin Guy. The piece that I found most...
VMware just released a killer whitepaper on how to optmize SQL 2008 performance for vCenter 4.0. It has quite a few details that I was not aware of and will result in changes to my production environment. Tips that were new to me included:- Optimizing the clustered index fill factor-...
Ok so I'm a bit tardy in this notification, but VMware released a new version of the Ethernet driver for the 10Gbps NIC that's in the HP BL490c G6 servers, and other brands as well. Technically the update is for Broadcom NetExtreme II BCM57710/BCM57711/BCM57711E NICs. In HP terms this is...
A co-worker of mine, Mark, turned me on to this company called QNAP. They make a really dizzying array of SOHO and small/medium business "NetApp" like NAS devices. These little babies support a wide range of protocols including iSCSI, NFS, CIFS, ftp, etc. It's really amazing what these critters can...
Last week I was listening to a HP video where the HP CTO said that Fibre Channel drives will cease to exist in the coming years. Instead, enterprise storage disk arrays will be configured with two tiers of storage: SSD and SATA. I thought for a minute, and this made...
Hot off the press! Last night VMware posted critical updates to vSphere 4.0. You can find the patches here. If you want to read the release notes, they are available here. Patches apply to both ESX and ESXi hosts.This does not appear to be Update 2, which was rumored to...
Back in January I wrote a blog about emerging Ethernet standards that are converging Ethernet, Fibre Channel and virtualization. During one of HP's recent tech days they had a session on all of these new standards, their ratification status, and how they will apply to HP products. Even if you...
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...
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...
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...