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An Experienced Eye
There’s an old adage about a guy who takes his car to a mechanic. The car is coughing and banging and sounds like it is dying. The mechanic listens for a minute, then takes a hammer and takes a big whack at the engine, which then starts purring perfectly. That will be $200 please. ‘WHAT?…
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Pan Am… Do something for nothing, and get so much!
If you follow me on Facebook you will already know that I was selected as a volunteer for the 2015 Toronto Pan Am Games. My decision to volunteer dates back to the 2013 Taekwondo Canada Open; at the end of the event the administrator thanked me for my hard work, and hoped that I would…
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My Next (and Previous) Challenge
I was in Montreal last week-end, and a friend of mine (Rick is a faithful reader of my blog) asked me why I have been so quiet recently. I want to apologize to you all for being a bit cagey about what was going on… and to the myriad friends on Facebook who expressed concern…
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New Interior…
I nearly panicked when I boarded the Air Canada Boeing 777-300 that will take me to Vancouver, for the connecting flight to Seattle. The First Class cabin did not have the pods that I was used to… just regular seats… …or so it seemed. In truth they have revamped the cabin and while the pods…
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Welcome to What’s Next…
There is irony in the title of this post… What’s next. I posted on Friday that it was my last day working full time at Yakidoo. I really enjoyed my time there, and am glad that my next venture will allow me to stay on there on a limited basis. This afternoon I am meeting…
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Onboard SAN… Issues.
A client of mine is a small business with a couple of physical servers and a couple of virtualization hosts. One of the physical servers, a Lenovo ThinkServer, has been acting as a file server, so it has really been very under-used. It is a good server that has never been used to its potential…
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Private Posts
I want to thank all of you who reached out to me this morning when you could not get into my ‘private’ article. I wanted to share something that I had written (that believe it or not is far too incendiary to post on this site) with an old army buddy, so I pass-word protected…
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Keep Up: How to configure SCOM to monitor the running state of services and restart them when they stop
Windows runs on services. Don’t believe me? Open your Services console and count just how many are running at any given time. Of course, some of them are more important than others… especially when you are talking about servers that are critical to your organization. A new customer recently called me for a DEAR Call…
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Way Way Back!
There is a nifty tool on the Internet called the Wayback Machine. It lets you see what websites looked like a long time ago. My blog (garvis.ca, as well as virtualizationczar.com) evolved from mitchgarvis.com, which came about when I decided to take my blog off mitpro.ca. However before any of those there was e-mitch.com, and…
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2015: My New Year’s Resolutions
I can honestly say that I don’t think I have ever made New Year’s Resolutions… at least, I have never written them down. At the end of 2014, my annus horribilus, I am looking forward to a spectacular 2015. Yesterday afternoon – December 30th – I was looking at my dashboard on www.asana.com – a…
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Converting Fixed Size VHDs to Dynamic Sized VHDs
I was called in to help a company recently with a small Hyper-V environment. They created a 2TB VHD file (they had good reasons for not using .vhdx files, but the steps in this article will work for both versions). They realized that they had unnecessarily created the drive as a 2TB Fixed Size disk…
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End Of Days 2003: The End is Nigh!
In a couple of days we will be saying goodbye to 2014 and ringing in the New Year 2015. Simple math should show you that if you are still running Windows Server 2003, it is long since time to upgrade. However here’s more: When I was a Microsoft MVP, and then when I was a…
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Sharing Passwords
This is NOT an article about my mother. She just happens to be the person at the other end of this conversation, but it could have been any house guest. My mother has been staying with me for the past few days. It is the first time she has stayed with me, and it has…
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A VMware Gripe
Okay, I can’t delete a file. Any Level 1 systems administrator would look at this message and say: ‘Okay, VMware is not allowing me to delete an ISO file. Very likely the ISO file is connected to a virtual machine.’ Ummm… but WHICH virtual machine is it? Gee thanks, vCenter, I have scores of VMs……
The World According to Mitch
The day to day ramblings of an IT Professional (and so much more…)
