Veeam is offering free, permanent, licenses for Backup and Replication v5 and Veeam Monitor Plus with Business View. These are NFR (not for resale) licenses, and limited to two sockets. But it's great for a home lab, demo, training, etc. I don't know how long the deal is good for,...
Back in 2009 I wrote a blog about the possibility of Microsoft supporting two-factor or multi-factor authentication for some Exchange services. For organizations which require high security, such as the DoD, allowing external access to email requires additional protection. With Exchange 2007 and prior versions there was no easy way...
In my previous blog I discussed how the VMware 4.1 VAAI 'write same' implementation in a 3PAR T400 showed a dramatic 20x increase in performance, creating an eager zeroed thick VMDK at 10GB/sec (yes, GigaBYTES a second). The other major SCSI primitive that VAAI 4.1 leverages is XCOPY (SCSI opcode 0x83). What this...
So in my previous blog entry I wrote about how I upgraded a 3PAR T400 to support the new VMware vSphere 4.1 VAAI extensions. I did some quick tests just to confirm the array was responding to the three new SCSI primitives, and all was a go. But to better...
For those of you using vSphere 4.1, one of the cool new features is VAAI support. What is VAAI? VAAI is a deep level of integration between select storage arrays and the ESX kernel. The three VAAI functions released in 4.1 are:•Atomic Test & Set (ATS), which is used during...
Update: I came up with a new parts list based on Sandy Bridge parts. You can check it out here.Currently I dual-boot my home computer with ESXi 4.1, but that's getting old. Yes, you can run ESXi 4.1 inside of VMware Workstation 7.1 (and I do), but you can't run...
UUID (Universally Unique IDentifier)Â are also known as GUIDs (Globally Unique IDentifier). A UUID is 128 bits long, and can guarantee uniqueness across space and time. Why do I care about UUIDs? Well VMware attempts to assign a unique UUID to every VM. Generally they succeed, but sometimes you can end...
As most Windows administrators know when you logon to any system locally or remotely Windows generates a token that contains a list of security identifiers of all the groups the user belongs to. In large environments or where you have implemented granular role-based security, top-tier users could be a member...
Lately I've been working on our Server 2008 R2 vSphere 4.1 template and ran into an interesting issue. During the template build process we rename the Administrator and Guest accounts, to comply with best practices. However, after vCenter executed the customization specification the accounts got reset back to Administrator and Guest....
With the release of ESX 4.1 and vCenter 4.1, VMware has greatly increased the performance of vCenter. I accidentally stumbled upon this VMware document called VMware vCenter Server Performance and Best Practices.It's a great read covering benchmark performance differences between vCenter 4.0 and vCenter 4.1, plus a lot of tips...
Back in the days of vCenter 4.0 it required a 32-bit DSN to connect to your SQL database. Now that vCenter 4.1 and ESX 4.1 are out, it now requires the use of a 64-bit DSN. This makes sense as vCenter now requires a 64-bit server. The PowerShell script I...
If you aren't familiar with thin provisioning, it's a technology being widely adopted by storage vendors that only allocates back-end disk space to a LUN when data is written. For example, if you present a 500GB LUN to a server and only write 100GB of data, the array only uses...