Month: January 2011

Inject VMware drivers into Windows Install Discs

I like to perform unattended installations of my operating systems, like Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 7 using autounattend.xml so that requires that the image have the required drivers to recognize critical devices like mass storage hardware. One of the performance optimizations that I always include in our Windows...

Finally…strong ESX 4.1 root passwords. SHA512 baby!

Historically VMware has not used the strongest hashing algorithms to store root passwords on ESXi or ESX hosts. And to make matters worse, ESX/i 4.1 had a major security hole that was open for over four months, which you can read about here. The short story is that ROOT passwords...

Free Microsoft security tool: EMET for you!

Yesterday I stumbled upon a blog post about a free Microsoft security tool. No matter how secure you think your system is, it can always be more secure. So I eagerly read Ed Bott's article about Microsoft's EMET (Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit). I quickly installed it, configured it for maximum...

Exchange 2010 and vSphere 4.x Best Practices

Virtualization has taken off like wild fire, and now organizations are in the process of virtualizing tier-1 applications like Exchange 2010. However, sizing and designing Exchange 2010 for a virtualized environment requires some additional care and thought versus a traditional physical server deployment. Critical sizing requirements like memory, vCPUs, and...