VMware ESX, NIC Teaming, and VLAN Trunking with HP ProCurve

Found this great article and thought I would share it with RH readers: Original text from http://blog.scottlowe.org/ In an earlier article about VMware ESX, NIC teaming, and VLAN trunking, I described what the configuration should look like if one were using these features with Cisco switch hardware. It’s been a quite popular post, one I … Read more

ZFS Performance Testing: Dell PowerEdge 2950 III

In my previous post on ZFS performance testing I ran through various tests on a particular test system that I had running at the time. That system has come and gone to a better place in the proverbial cloud. This go round, I have a similar server with a different ZFS configuration. Lets dive in … Read more

ZFS Performance Testing: Dell PowerEdge 2900

***Update*** This started a simple post to share a few results from various levels of zfs/array testing. Be sure to check back from time to time as I add additional configuration results. ***Begin Original Text*** I have been playing around with ZFS on various operating systems lately and have been trying to compare performance. I … Read more

VMUG: Tech Data in Clearwater, FL.

Attended my second VMware User Group Meeting (VMUG) today. The first meeting that I attended was held at the Southwest Florida Water Management District’s office a couple of month back. Today’s meeting was sponsored by Tech Data and held at their Clearwater, FL headquarters. First up was VMware which gave a presentation of upcoming features … Read more

Recreate OWA Virtual Directory IIS7 / Exchange 2007

Ran into an issue today where a clients SBS 2008 server stopped servicing requests made to hostname/owa. I am still unsure as to what caused this issue but find a fairly simple way to recreate the OWA virtual directory for IIS. Many admins are familiar with this procedure / howto for Exchange 2003 but are … Read more

The Beauty of Being Hardware Agnostic

We can all agree that virtualization has numerous benefits. One of the obvious benefits is that virtualization makes systems hardware agnostic. This is one of my favorite features of going virtual. I am responsible for the network operations of many businesses and being able to forget about hardware compatibilities on the OS level is a … Read more

Breath a little life into your Small Business Server

This one seems like an obvious one, but I will post it anyways. Chances are that you have deployed and/or maintain Windows 2003 Small Business Server. Many small businesses purchased SBS during “the good times” of 2003-2008. Due to the licensing restrictions imposed on the product by Microsoft, these servers are always one boxed. That … Read more