Introduction

I previously did a write up on a personal virtual machine I like to keep at hand for performing network analysis and discovery. I’ve since added a few tools to the VM and documented how they were installed so I figured I’d share on how it was done. Even if you don’t setup everything in this post it may be worthwhile to glance through it for some network engineering tools which are free to setup and use but not highly publicized. Anyone who cares to read this post has likely heard of Solarwinds but I highly doubt you have heard of all the tools in this list (let alone how to set them up). Regardless, I’ll start with a tool anyone worth their salt has heard of though, Cacti…

Create Your Own Network Assessment Appliance

2012-04-09 10 min read Active Directory Active Directory Linux Microsoft Networking Security System Administration Virtualization VMware Zachary Loeber

In this write-up I setup several network assessment tools which can be used in the discovery process of a new environment. This can be useful for a newly hired sysadmin or a consultant in rapidly gathering information to assess the health and/or state of a network. Introduction I often find myself assessing a foreign network infrastructure for performance or other issues. Depending on the size of the environment, digesting everything can be daunting without the help of some third party tools. Continue reading

Virtualization: vCPU Provisioning Best Practices

2012-03-23 9 min read Microsoft Networking Virtualization VMware Zachary Loeber

I had always been of the mindset that when provisioning new VMs it is best to start out with less vCPUs and add more as they are required (unless you specifically know that you will be using and needing more for such things as sql server or exchange). I had even recently felt some vindication of this provisioning best practice in reading a book recently (Critical VMware Mistakes You Should Avoid)

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