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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…
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The shoemaker’s son always goes barefoot…
It was three years ago when I put my HP ProLiant DL585 server in my basement. I ran a wire from my router to the basement and plugged the server in. It was crude, but worked great. And then one day, a couple of years ago, I started needing more servers down here, some temporary…
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A follow-up to my article on configuring iSCSI Initiator in Server Core & Hyper-V Server
There are real advantages to being a veteran of the IT industry… you learn to do something, and it continues to work through version changes; when people discover features in Windows 2008R2 I am often amused to point out ‘Yeah, that’s been there since Windows Server 2003… it’s just never been popular.’ One disadvantage, though,…
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VMLimited… Are you stuck in the past?
Tad the VMLimited Sales Guy… he looks like he would be lost working at WKRP Cincinnati, but he does drive the point home! http://vmlimited.ctp.trafficmgr.com/
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A brief response to the vSphere 5 vs. Hyper-V question…
I know, I’m slow to react on this issue… especially knowing my background; I should have been out of the gate and all over this issue a month ago. With that being said, I expect that the Virtualization team at Microsoft has been dancing with glee for the past two months, ever since VMware announced…
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System Center Essentials: Microsoft monitoring and management for SMBs
Most of you know that Microsoft’s System Center family of products are the leading solutions for IT systems management. They have come a long way in the past seven years, to the point where it is a rare company that does not have at least one System Center product installed in their organization. Although there…
The World According to Mitch
The day to day ramblings of an IT Professional (and so much more…)
The World According to Mitch 