Archive

Things continue apace at Swan Lake.  I’ve been fooling around with various things and I’m slowly rolling in the changes that I and they want to see in place.  It’s a slow process as I have to grab time to do things where and how I can but things are rolling forward and that is …

I was helping a friend this weekend with his new Lenovo server.  TS-430, nice basic server with decent engineering. We discovered one “oopsie” in the ordering process that you might want to be aware of if you are ordering a Lenovo server online.  The server has a basic on-board RAID that your should bypass in …

I have been a committed VMware vSphere and Workstation user for years.  The majority of the infrastructure at itgroove is built on vSphere as is that at many of our customers.  I have used the products since the very early days, even before P2V tools were widely available, and it has been a (mostly) satisfying …

There are times when those of us that work in IT Consulting have the same kinds of experiences that customers have when it all goes horribly pear shaped.  So, this is a cautionary tale that proves even the “gods of IT” (hmmm, maybe I’ll trademark that) are mere mortals. I shouldn’t have to explain the …

I posted this today on our internal blog, it may be of some interest to you. vSphere 5 (ESXi) has a known weird problem on system boot when using software enabled iSCSI (eg NOT using hardware iSCSI HBA’s). ESXi will check each and every iSCSI connection it knows about (so every path to every iSCSI …

Almost all of us in the IT world have been faced with the “emergency” of an old yet critical system that starts to fail and that cannot be easily replaced.  The scenario usually revolves around old line of business software that runs on old hardware/operating system (Widows 2000, anyone????) which is impossible to replace (vendor …

If you spend any time at all with systems you’ll know that, eventually, there will come a time when you have to perform a migration from your trusty but “tired” old server to some shiny new piece of kit.  Depending on what the new platform is you might have access to some nice built-in tools …

We’ve had a few new customers ask this question lately and the answer really is, “It depends”. In most cases we like to see a proper server go in, usually loaded with SBS, because we like the control provided by having a proper Windows domain along with a properly configured server (or servers, as the …