VMware ESX has the ability to clone templates, and this is a great feature when using iSCSI or FC datastores. When leveraging NFS datastores however, you lose thin provisioning on those NFS datastores. One way to get around this is to use a third party imaging software. Microsoft provides a free imaging package titled imageX. […]
Category: Microsoft
Troubleshoogling
This weekend was one of those weekends, spent more on Google, looking for potential fixes, than with our families. One problem was a firewall was put in place between two sites and they were not correctly configured to allow extended DNS to pass. The firewalls used DNS guard and a limit of 512 bytes on […]
Microsoft Licensing 3 – Clusters
In this post, I’ll discuss licensing when working in a clustered Microsoft environment. I’ll pick some of the more common Microsoft Apps and detail what is required to properly license them. Windows 2003 and 2008 support eight node clusters. In a two node cluster, you can technically have them configured in an active/active configuration. However, […]
Microsoft licensing 2
In a previous post, I spoke about licensing Window Server in a virtualized environment. Today, I’ll be addressing Client Access License or CAL, especially revolving around web facing servers, for Microsoft licensing. By web facing, I mean any server that services requests from any machine not owned by the firm. The underlying Windows OS license […]
Microsoft licensing
We are beginning to go a usage audit to true-up our Microsoft licensing. For the most part, the licensing is straight forward. Use a product, get a license. Don’t use the product, don’t get a license. But where confusion creeps in is around items such as virtualization, Public web access, Clustering. In this blog I’ll […]
Virtualization Server Sprawl
When a firm is contemplating virtualization, there are many positives: server consolidation, improved DR, reduced energy consumption, reduced infrastructure costs, etc…. There are also negatives: increased risk due to single point of failure, additional complexity, server sprawl… Server sprawl has long been a part of the Windows Server realm, due to the overwhelming mindset of […]
IWUG and Essential Business Server presentation
Last night’s Indiana Windows Users Group (IWUG) was a web conference presented by Nick King, A Microsoft Technical manager for the Essential Business Server team. While we were sitting enjoying Dinner , Nick was sitting in Redmond Washington. What is Essential Business Server (EBS)? A Product sku designed for medium business that have one or […]
Microsoft Remote Desktop on IPhone
As a Windows administrator, there are many times where you are out and get the emergency call that a service is down and you need to come into the office. You need to drop everything and run to the office or the datacenter. Smart phones, specifically the Apple Iphone can help out. An application WinAdmin allows […]