NetworkSydney

You know, after working with virtualisation for over 2 years and many virtualisation projects, the biggest pain point about doing this job is dealing with the “No! Don’t touch it, its not your server”. I just feel there is no sense of “hey, this may be beneficial for the company” let’s take a look at it. But, unfortunately some laid back, overpaid, uninterested, useless people have this enormous amount of hidden energy to do anything to stop. Maybe I should take a sales course, maybe my emails are scary and make people feel unstable or maybe I should use another word instead of virtualisation - something like “synergise your server”.

oh well, such is life I guess.

Well here is something new, a project to consolidate (virtualise) servers using Microsoft technologies. This is my first go at using Hyper-V and supporting products. I feel fortunate enough to start at Hyper-V R2 and nothing earlier. It seems the decision has already been made to use Hyper-V as the hypervisor, which I probably would have challenged if I had the chance. However the reality is Microsoft is maturing their product and, given the agility it has, will continue to mature and ultimately (hoperfully) contend with VMware if not surpass. So expect to see some future posts around Hyper-V as it looks like VMware may be a little dorment for me for some time.

Although the IBM HS21-XM blade servers are great for Virtualization, I have had great trouble with the solid state drives in these servers. At least 4 out of 10 of these servers have had some issue with the disks resynching which seems to be addressed by upgrading to firmware version 2.5

When trying to install ESX 3.0.2 on the IBM blades using remote console I would get upto the graphical mode or text mode selection screen. After this stage, I would have some text run down the screeen then nothing, simply a blank screen. It did this on both the text mode and graphical installation mode. After trying a couple of things including updating the BIOS, the genius that sits beside suggested just sending the keystrokes. Brilliant! It actually worked and starting to see the screen at the start of the anaconda installation page.

Wow, there goes 4.5 years in a flash. I have just submitted my resignation with AGM IT now known as S Central. I was very fortunate to be a part of this fantastic roller coaster ride which has really prepared me as a Senior Technical Consultant. My reason for ending this awesome job was to drop myself into the IT Contracting market and build my career as a Consultant/IT Architect.

Just purchased my RVS4000 router and am quite surprised with the features. It was partially an impulse buy, but looking at it in more detail now and it’s got some great features. After you upgrade the firmware it gets even better with things like Inter VLAN Routing and QoS/CoS. I will be replacing my existing netgear router as it was crashing a couple of times a month. Hopefully with all the features in this router I will be able to replicate more of those problems that I face at customer sites and dont get a chance to resolve.

Interesting problem today when trying to copy a folder (Intel Network Drivers) which contained a file name “autorun.inf”. The copy failed and responded with a “Access Denied” error. I didnt really need to the file but I felt the urge to figure out why this wasn’t working. I then created a text file, renamed it to autorun.inf and recieved the same error - Access Denied. After some troubleshooting found that the AntiVirus software, in this case McAfee, was blocking the creation of “autorun.inf” files.

Well this I think is my official blog. I was trying to get this up and running for a while now and finally managed amongst all the other things to do on the list.