Simon Long has shared with us this fantastic article he wrote regarding VMotion performance. More specifically, fine tuning concurrent VMotions allowed by vCenter. This one is going in our document repository and tweaks ‘n’ tricks collection. Thank you Simon and everyone please remember that virtualization is not best enjoyed in moderation!
If you install Virtual Center on a server and find Update Manager running into issues – the issue could be as a result of the Proxy not being noted correctly during the Virtual Center installation process.
1. Determine your Proxy address (example: https=yourproxy:8080)
2. Uninstall the Virtual Center Update Manager module
3. Reinstall the Update Manager Module and be sure to specify the proxy during the install.
You will find the module working once the install is peformed correctly.
Travis Baird, eGroup
http://egroup-us.com/
WSUS 3.0 SP1 is out, and IT administrators should take a good look at the technology. For those that spend time updating clients or servers on a network, the task can be arduous and time consuming. WSUS gives administrators a one-stop-shop to quickly report on the Enterprise and know where your clients and servers stand with regards to being patched with the latest updates, roll-ups, service packs, and hot fixes.
I recommend installing WSUS on its own VM with at least a 30 GB partition. You’ll be downloading the updates directly from Microsoft and creating your own update server in-house, so be sure to give it some room to house the updates. Next you’ll want to configure Group Policy (Default Domain), so all the machines check your server for updates. Once all the machines have checked in with the WSUS server, you can begin grouping them into logical containers for updates. There are a couple additional configuration items that should be considered environment specific especially considering how every IT shop differs with how they want updates installed. Preferably you will want a test group or pilot group that represents a small microcosm of your organization that can report back to you on how the latest updates went. Your next task is to approve the updates you want to rollout, and approve them to be deployed. WSUS handles the rest. You can track monitor and report on the all the related activities.
The overall simplification of the update process, quick and easy reporting capabilities, and not to mention the savings bandwidth utilization are just some of the really beneficial considerations that IT organizations should think about regarding implementing WSUS.
Did I mention it’s FREE.
Travis Baird, eGroup
(Columbia, SC) – Founded in 1995, McAngus, Goudelock, & Courie (MG&C) began in Columbia, SC as a boutique law firm practicing primarily in the defense of workers’ compensation cases. MG&C offers comprehensive legal services in Administrative & Regulatory law, ADR, Appellate Advocacy, Business Litigation, Captive Insurance, Commercial Transactions, Construction law, Employment law, Environmental law, Litigation, Probate & Estate Planning, Real Estate, Utilities, and Workers’ Compensation.
In an effort to reduce the cost and complexity of server management, while focusing on business continuity, eGroup recently implemented a 16 CPU VMware ESX farm at MG&C. eGroup engineers performed a VMware jumpstart, and utilizing VMware converter they converted several physical servers to a new virtual environment with little to no downtime per server. Read more >>
(Charleston, SC) — For its second time, eGroup was honored at the Charleston Regional Business Journal’s annual “Roaring 20′s” event as one of the exclusive twenty regional companies whose combination of explosive growth and gross percentage revenue increases over the past 3 years has moved them to the forefront of the dynamic Charleston area business community. The event took place on January 22nd at historic Hibernian Hall in downtown Charleston, and eGroup was recognized as the 4th fastest growing company of the 20 honored in front of a sold-out crowd of business and community leaders. Read more >>
(Charleston, SC) – In addition to eGroup being a corporate sponsor of The Charleston Digital Corridor Foundation’s second annual Innovator’s 5K run (ifive:K) on April 17th 2008, eGroup employees laced up their running shoes and participated in the fun as a company. Open to runners and walkers, the iFive:k started and finished at the Charleston Maritime Center, with a post-race celebration immediately following on the harbor.
An official 6 member team comprised of Ben Gaddy, Chris Hogan, Mike Carter, Mike Hall, Gunnar Berger, and Will Turbeville represented eGroup under the name “Serious Competitors”, and raced their way to an impressive 2nd place finish in the challenge against other 6 member teams. Ben Gaddy also took 2nd place among the males in his age group race-wide, and eGroup as a whole received the “Team Spirit Award” for its collective enthusiasm during the event. Read more >>
It inevitably fails that I’m on-site doing SAN work or cluster work and needing to add a drive to a cluster for some reason or another – whether that be physical or virtual within VMware.
After all the creation, alignment, formatting, LUN masking and everything else is done to prep the disk, hosts, etc. Windows always gives me grief in that it does not recognize the drive letter I want to add in the cluster admin GUI.
In this case, I pull out my trusty “cluster.exe” command line utility and add the disk the old fashioned way – forcefully 
Example:
C:>cluster . res “Disk L:” /create /group:”Exchange Group” /type:”physical disk”
C:>cluster . res “Disk L:” /priv Drive=”L:”
Voila! Breakfast is ready….
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