Protego is a company that has been involved with the development of flame arresters, valves and tank accessories for industrial process engineering for more than 50 years. Headquartered in Braunschweig, Germany, Protego has locations across the world including one in Charleston,SC. Read more >>

The following article written by blogger Eric Langley is a compelling argument for why there is no better time to take that first step on your cloud journey. Following the article see how eGroup can make the BSOD a thing of the past. Read more >>

Ok, so I’ve drank the Kool-Aid, taken the plunge and gone Mac.

I was really excited to get my hands on one, and a lot of colleagues of mine have already switched and made comments like, “You’ll never go back to a PC”, or “I rarely ever use my windows VM”.

I decided to test these thoughts and go full emersion into the Mac OS, no Bootcamp partition with Windows 7 loaded as a safety net, and only allowing myself to use Fusion with a Windows 7 VM when absolutely necessary (Still no VI client on Mac.)

I did install the 2011 Office Business suite and decided to use the Outlook 2011 client for my email.  But I think I will review that in a later post.

Ok, here are my first impressions….

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I wanted to take a moment to pass along a very useful link from the Exchange Gurus at MSExchange.org. It relates to Exchange 2007 and the granular nature of managing folder level settings on your Public Folder Infrastructure. It is not obvious where these settings are controlled when first using the latest and greatest Exchange Management Console from Microsoft.

Enjoy!

http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Managing-Public-Folders-Exchange-Server-2007-Service-Pack1-Beta.html

I don’t think I am paving new roads with this tidbit of information but it was somewhat of an obscure find when performing an Exchange 2003 to 2007 upgrade recently. Exchange 2007 Management Console allows many controls when manipulating internal and external URLs for accessing OWA, OAB, EWS, etc. When running the tools at testexchangeconnectivity.com you may discover an issue with msstd when also using a wildcard certificate. This is because msstd defaults to the subdomain that is used for the External URL of Outlook Anywhere and is generally different from the Autodiscover subdomain. Furthermore it won’t match the configure subdomain of the wildcard certificate which is “*”. The fix is easy – run the following from the Exchange Management Shell:

Set-OutlookProvider -Identity EXPR -CertPrincipalName msstd:*.yourdomain.com

Here is the authoritative TechNet article from Microsoft:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc535023%28EXCHG.80%29.aspx

With the increased growth of server virtualization and the introduction of virtual desktop infrastructures, organizations are now facing challenges associated with risk and how to mitigate those risks. Companies must ensure that virtualization technologies are deployed and used securely. To further complicate these concerns, many governments and industry associations have created regulations and standards such as HIPAA in healthcare, GLBA in financial services, and PCI Compliance in the retail industry.

To address these potential risks and meet compliance requirements, there are several Best Practices companies can adhere to including the following:

• Simplify management framework and maximize visibility

• Utilize Guidelines provided by virtualization vendors to harden both the hypervisor and administrative layer

• Implement proper Network Security and Segmentation

• Maintain proper logs and monitor those logs

• Separate access to administrative control by role/privileges

• Implement processes to manage configuration and change management

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Here’s a quick tip…..

There are a few caveats to the Nexus 1000v virtual switch from Cisco, but I ran into a new one when dealing with an iSCSI environement.

After implementing the 1000v, I found that I lost all connectivity to the EMC array.  I checked all the settings on the array and even deregistered the connections to the host.

The host connection status would show connected, but not logged in. Strange…

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