Windows 7 at 50% off?

Hello again folks, as you know the Windows 7 launch is getting closer and closer to us. Well as of late I just saw this new offer from Microsoft.

Microsoft is offering Windows 7 at 50% off for a pre-order deal. You can go to Amazon and pre-order it now. You can also check out the offer here at Microsoft. So what’s going on you might ask?

In my opinion, Microsoft has decided to take advantage of all the buzz surrounding Windows 7 and take a much needed break from all the crap they’ve been getting about Vista. By selling Windows 7 for 50% off, they will instantly generate good will towards themselves after the Vista boondoggle. This is a smart move on their part and it should be interesting to see how this plays out.

So if you were on the fence about upgrading from Vista, let me tell you now, do it! Windows 7 is way better than Vista and the early releases I have tried have been great!

-RP

Extended vlans in Cisco switches

For those of you venturing into switching for the first time, one of the things that can be hard to wrap your head around if you’re just a beginner is vlans. Vlans are great ways to make the management of your network a lot more organized, and are used everywhere in this world. You’re not going to be able to enter the switching world without running into them so it’s best to learn about them asap.

Now one of the things that can cause you troubles down the road is configuring vlans across many switches in large environments. This is made easier by the use of VTP (VLAN Trunking Protocol). You can use this to automatically configure vlans across many switches.

Unfortunately you might run into a problem when using extended vlans. If you use extended vlans and VTP version 2, you will find that you can’t use vlans all the way up to 4095. Instead what you need to do is use VTP version 3 which will enable you to use the entire range, or you can put your switch in VTP transparent mode to allow it to use extended vlans.

RIM doing well despite the iPhone

Hi folks, so recently RIM has been claiming more market share due to their BlackBerry phones. Recent reports have pegged RIM at having 55 percent of the smart phone market share in the industry.

This is more than any of the competing companies going against RIM. Even Apple! So despite the poor showing with the new BlackBerry App World store, how is RIM doing it? I suspect they’re doing it with the inherent usability of the BlackBerry devices.

RIM has always made great smartphones, and now by expanding their offerings by including the Storm and the Javelin, it’s easy to choose RIM. I love the iPhone as a personal use device, but not for business. I still personally prefer the BlackBerry. I carry around an iPod Touch for other functionality I need that my BlackBerry doesn’t provide. It will be interesting to see how this competition turns out.

For more information see this article here.

-RP

How’s BlackBerry App World doing?

Hi folks, I’d thought I’d take a moment to speak about App World again. Now that it has been out there for a while I thought I’d offer up my opinion on what I think of it.  For those of you that don’t know, App World is the application store for BlackBerry devices. This is RIM’s answer to Apple’s app store for their iPhones and iPods.

Now the strategy to come up with their own app store was a good idea on RIM’s part. I’ve always said that software is a huge determining factor when choosing a platform. After all, if a device doesn’t have the apps you want, you’re not left with much of a reason to buy it.

Well I have to say that App World is easy to use and very cool. It’s very easy to navigate through, read reviews and download my favourite apps. Also now that I’ve had it for awhile it also notifies me when my current apps need upgrading and it makes that process fairly simple too. So what’s the downside on all of this?

The apps themselves. There are only a few really good apps for the BlackBerry. Even after the AppWorld launch I’ve found that I don’t have nearly the selection that my friends do on their iPhones. I have to say I’m quite dissapointed in the app turnout. Let’s hope that this changes soon because right now, Apple has nothing to worry about on the app front.

-RP

New version of ghettoVCB out!

So my favourite script has a new version out! William Lam’s ghettoVCB script is now called ghettoVCBg2 and it’s bigger and better than ever!

He has come out with a new script that works with version vSphere version 4 without the need for the SSH console. He’s also added a lot of new features such as logging support and VM snapshot memory and quiesce options!

I am currently using this script testing it in my test lab environment and will write a detailed setup for you guys on how to setup the script in your new ESXi 4.0 enviornment. Now with VMware’s move to using VIMA for management everyone should start getting used to doing things this way as the rumor is that VMware will move away from having a normal console and move towards using the VIMA model for management in the future.  Stay tuned for more information on how to setup the new version of this script.

In the meantime if you can’t wait and want to give it a whirl on your own, you can grab it from the VMware communities here and give it a try!

-RP

Upgrade ESXi 3.5 to ESXi 4.0 without vCenter

So ESXi 4.0 is now available and you want to get cracking learning everything you can about it. You go to upgrade it in your home environment or your test lab and you realize you can’t do anything because you don’t have vCenter. What do you do?

Never fear! You can upgrade it anyway! What’s the secret? The vSphere host update utility! You can gain access to it by downloading the vSphere upgrade zip file from the VMware website first and then extracting it using the program 7zip. 7zip will allow you to drill down into the following path: VMware-viclient.vib\data.tar.gz\data.tar\.\4.0.0\client\VMware-viclient.exe to extract the VMware client install file to install the vSphere client.

Once you install the client it will ask you to install the host update utility and then after that is done you can just launch the utility. Point it at your server and tell it to upgrade after putting your ESXi host in maintenance mode and presto, your ESXi server has been upgrade to 4.0. As per usual I always recommend you do backups before you attempt any upgrading or patching.

There is detailed instructions with screenshots you can follow here.

-RP

Time to start planning for 10 GbE networks

So in this day and age 10 GbE switches are starting to become more popular. Recently many 10 GbE offerings have been announced from various vendors. This has got me thinking. Taking a quick survey of networks I have come across, there is still a huge proliferation of 10/100 and people are still starting to embrace 1 Gbps.

I think network admins, or whomever is responsible for their budgets need to loosen the purse strings a bit and let us network guys upgrade our network to handle the proliferation of high bandwidth applications out there now. We live in a media enriched world and more and more each day we are getting inundated with tons of large media content. If we don’t have the networks to support a constant stream of data we are going to fall behind.

At this point in time with the cheap cost of gig, I see no reason why every network shouldn’t be gigabit throughout and then 10 GbE through the major backbone connections of your internal network. Especially with virtualization here now, we are going to need those pipes to push all that data through. The next time you’re looking at network upgrades I urge you to look at your network and seriously think about upgrading from 10/100 to at least a gig.

-RP

Implementing Location Awareness in your Organization

Hi folks, so if there is one thing that is annoying it’s misplacing things. Whether it’s some sort of important customer inventory, or whether it’s a piece of hardware you own and you need to know it’s whereabouts. What do people do in large organizations where you need to keep track of things?

Location awareness! In this day and age of wireless, there should be a technology out there that can be leveraged to help us with this and there is. Using RFID you can tag valuable mobile equipment or product and then use a device to keep track of where that stuff is in your organization.

Cisco has a product called the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance that does just this and fits into the grand scheme of their Cisco Unified Wireless Network. Something like this would be deployed in an environment with wireless controllers and managed lightweight APs across your network. I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more of a need for these kind of things as mobile devices and our need to keep track of them becomes more prevalent in the years to come. You can read more about this here.

-RP

Configuring UPS Server Shutdown in your network environment

One thing I’d like to add to my previous post regarding UPS’. The other thing that is consistently seen out there in the IT world is not only administrators forgetting to change out expired batteries, but also administrators not configuring UPS’ to shutdown their servers properly.

Most UPS’ come with a serial port, usb or network connector and some sort of free software agent. This software agent can be installed on your servers and when the UPS detects a power outage you can configure the software to shutdown your server gracefully after a pre-determined amount of time.

All to often this software is completely left out of the loop in a server configuration or even still the administrator forgets to even connect the UPS monitoring cable to the server. This is just sloppy work in my opinion and it really should be done.

Some administrators have mentioned that they don’t configure UPS shutdown because with virtualization they have no idea how to configure this. If you go to the VMware communities you can find many scripts that show you how to configure UPS shutdown in a virtual environment.

-Cheers, RP

Replacing UPS Batteries on a timely basis

So when asking clients about the most important things in their server room you will consistently hear answers about the speed and power of their network, or the latest loaded server they have. Perhaps they will even talk about the great things they’ve done with virtualization.

However, the one thing that people never seem to mention is their UPS power. The funny thing is without your UPS’, nothing would be running in the first place. Funnily enough, this is the one place people seem to consistently neglect in my experience.

You see UPS batteries should be replaced at least every 3 years otherwise they tend to get old and not perform as well as you’d expect them to. Instead you see people leaving in batteries for over 5 years with no replacement. At this point the batteries provide no backup power and they’re all but useless.

So the next time you are thinking about keeping your server room up to snuff, please make sure that your UPS batteries are replaced on a regular basis before they expire.

-RP