After installing and re-installing VMware vCenter and VUM many times (mostly for testing) all of the manual database creation steps got old pretty fast. So I put some effort into creating a T-SQL script for SQL 2008 that automates most of the tasks.The T-SQL script below does the following:1. Adds...
This Powershell script creates a 32-bit system DSN on a 64-bit server. I got tired of manually creating DSNs for my VMware vCenter installations, so I automated the process. The only argument you need to pass to the script is the FQDN or IP address of your SQL server. If...
There is a feature/bug in the Windows Server 2008 R2 managed service account PowerShell command that limits the account name to 15 characters or less. First, let's create a managed service account called SVC_SQL01_LongName using PowerShell. The service account is 18 characters long. You can run the following command on...
I'm in the process of doing a market survey for various enterprise backup products. During my investigation, I've found that picking the right backup licensing model can save you a large amount of money. How? Companies like IBM and Symantec offer different licensing models for the same product. Specifically, you...
The other week I was telling a co-worker that in most cases using VM snapshots in ESX was evil and should be avoided in all but exceptional circumstances. He gave me this look like I grew a third eye, my ears fell off, and my skin turned green.I then conveyed...
If you've been following my blog, you know that last year our project acquired a 3PAR T400 Fibre Channel array. One of the features which really sold us on 3PAR was its ease of use and the ability for our technical staff to perform all aspects of maintenance including major...
A couple of days ago VMware released Workstation 7.0.1. No earth shattering updates, but now officially supports Server 2008 R2 and Vista SP2 as host and guest operating systems. You can download it here and read the release notes here.
Network world has a great article on new Ethernet standards that Cisco and HP are proposing to the IEEE for ratification which are directly related to a virtualized environment. You may have heard of Cisco's VN-Tag feature, which was a proprietary extension to Ethernet developed by Cisco and VMware. VN-Tag...
I found a good article that speculates on some possible enhancements that could be coming to vSphere this year and into next year. It will be interesting to see how closely these rumors track with reality as the year unfolds.Highlights of the speculation include:32-way VMs512GB RAM or more per VMEnhance...
Although I personally haven't done it, you can easily P2V Windows servers running on HP Proliant hardware. However, you have major cleanup work to de-install all of the HP-specific software, drivers, agents, etc. If you don't do this your VM will likely run extremely slow and suffer lots of problems.To...
VMware has finally released their draft version of the security hardening guides for vSphere 4.0. After taking a look at some of them, I'll make a few observations:1) Totally different format than previous versions, now organized in tables. Very similar to the DISA STIG security guides.2) VMware adopted various security...
Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, has imposed much stricter licensing controls in Windows Server 2008 and beyond. This is in an effort to stem the flow of piracy, which is probably pretty rampant in some communities. To help combat these evil forces in the world, Microsoft introduced Volume Activation 2.0....