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Advice for IT Pros Planning to Open their Own Companies, Part II
In my last article (Advice for IT Pros Planning to Open their Own Companies) I outlined the scenario, and gave some of the history of how I got to where I am today. If you don’t know, I am a Senior IT Consultant and Courseware Specialist with SWMI Consulting Group, as well as a Virtual…
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An interesting movie…
I took Theresa to see the movie ‘The Debt’ tonight. We both enjoyed it (I more than she), but probably for very different reasons. I think it is the first time I have ever watched a movie and said to myself ‘Wow… I think I have to see the original in Hebrew’ after watching a…
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A Humbling Recognition
Last week a tweet came across my Twitter feed from Amy Babinchak congratulating me on being one of the fifty must-read IT blogs. I had to turn to Bing for the details. It turns out that BizTech Magazine published an article titled 50 Must-Read IT Blogs from BizTech. The honour comes complete with a badge…
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P2V Migration for Microsoft Exchange Servers
If you are not virtualizing your servers then you are leaving money on the table. I am often asked if every server in an organization is a virtualization candidate, and obviously the answer is NO. However there are a lot of servers that can be virtualized, but are not because we do not believe them…
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Advice for IT Pros Planning to run their Own Companies
Earlier this month one of the IT Professionals who attended a couple of my sessions over the past few years e-mailed me and told me he had ‘written my last letter of resignation, and plan to work for myself from now on.’ It is a bold and brave decision, one that I made several years…
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Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA):
Occasionally there is an announcement or new offering worth calling special attention to and the teams at Microsoft wanted me to make sure everyone saw this one: Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA): http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/ MVA has been around for a few months and we are trying to raise awareness about its existence to the broader community. I…
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On airline staff and Windows 7…
Yesterday morning as I walked up to the Maple Leaf Lounge at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport (YYZ) I was greeted by Tony Falcone, one of the Air Canada agents that I meet from time to time. As he looked up my Aeroplan number I fumbled with my Samsung Focus phone (barely avoiding dropping it), and…
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Green is GOOD, Red is BAD, Yellow… look both ways!
It has taken a lot of managing and work, but today I can see the fruits of my labour – an entire environment of GREEN checkmarks. When all systems are healthy, this IT Admin is happy! Of course, a few of my virtual machines are off, and my laptop is configured to get updates from…
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A Gotcha For iSCSI Software Target Users
Having built and rebuilt several demo environments with Failover Clustering using the Microsoft iSCSI Software Target 3.3, there is one gotcha that you have to be careful of: Make sure that you leave at least one domain controller un-clustered, and not stored on the Software SAN. Here’s the deal: Microsoft Failover Clustering requires Active Directory…
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Creating a Virtual Machine from VM Templates and ISOs using System Center (Video)
If you are starting to use System Center Essentials (or, for that matter, System Center Virtual Machine Manager) to manage your virtual environment, then you can save a lot of time creating virtual machines by using VM Templates to build and configure the virtual machines, and ISO files stored in Virtual Machine Libraries to deploy…
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Creating a Highly Available Virtual Machine (Video)
In the past few months I have written a great deal about creating Failover Clusters for Hyper-V virtual environments. In this video I will demonstrate how we take a regular virtual machine created in Hyper-V Manager and make it highly available. The first step that is not recorded in the video is to place the…
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Designing and Building an SMB Infrastructure for SWMI CG
As companies grow it is important that their IT infrastructure mature with them. with respect to Small Business IT Professionals, of which I know many and for whom I have great respect, there are several challenges that IT departments must address as they mature beyond Small Business Server with regard to planning, architecture, hardware, and…
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A Brief History of how Microsoft (and others) Changed the World… Part 2
On July 7, 2011 I posted the first instalment of what started out as a short article for BackBone Magazine, and soon developed (and continues to morph) into something else completely. You can read the first part here: https://garvis.ca/2011/07/07/a-brief-history-of-how-microsoft-and-others-changed-the-world-part-1/ This is the second part of the article, and it starts to get interesting if you…
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Busting the Myth: You cannot cluster Windows Small Business Server
Microsoft created Windows Small Business Server as a one-box solution for companies that did not need more. It has always been a hobbled product, based on Windows Server Standard, but limited in things like domain trusts, FSMO roles, and more. Of course even if it were based on Windows Server Enterprise, the idea of creating…
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HP Insight with System Center Essentials
I have been working on this tour for HP Insight with System Center Essentials 2010 for a few months, and I am glad to have overcome a lot of pitfalls that I discovered along the way with regard to the installation process for the product. As one of the people involved quipped (after a relatively…
The World According to Mitch
The day to day ramblings of an IT Professional (and so much more…)
The World According to Mitch 