During my free time I thought I'd install Lync Server 2010 and check out the new features. If you want a great guide for installing Lync Server 2010, check out Jeff Schertz's blog here. I used Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 slipstream media, since it was just released to the public a...
Over the past year I've been developing Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7 VM templates for my VMware environment. However, the process has not been without its challenges. One of the features I wanted was a customized default user profile so that things like WMP, IE, and other settings...
This post will show you how to configure Windows recovery environment VMware drivers. In a previous blog post here I described how to inject VMware pvscsi and VMNET3 mass storage drivers into your Windows Server 2008 or Windows 7 image. However, that did not cover injecting the same drivers into the...
During my regression testing of my vCenter 4.1 U1 installation instructions on Windows Server 2008 R2, I came across a problem that made me scratch my head. I was updating the vCenter SSL certificates, per my blog here. However, when I opened IE and tried to connect to the vCenter...
One of the continuing pain points with VMware vSphere is the unnecessarily complicated procedure to install trusted SSL certificates in ESXi, vCenter and VUM. Up until 4.1 Update 1 (released 2/10/11), VMware had no public procedures to update the VUM SSL certificate, over 1.5 years after vSphere 4.0 hit the streets. Plus...
Some backup software manufacturers are offering a capacity based licensing model, instead of a agent based model. Depending on your situation, this may be a dramatically easier and cheaper licensing model. Traditionally you had to buy per-server licenses, per-agent licenses, per-library licenses, and maybe other options as well. Backup software...
Over the last couple of days I've been performing ESXi 4.0 to 4.1 build 320137 upgrades. During the upgrade process today one of my servers had a hiccup and the web services was not responding. After a couple of reboots and non-responsive web services I iLO'd in (it's an HP...
During my testing of Citrix XenDesktop 5 I ran across yet another bug, which set me back in my testing. Apparently if the VM template that you want machine creation services (MCS) to use has been configured with the VMware pvscsi controller, creating the VMs will fail when you generate a...
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...
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...
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...
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...