Create Your Own Network Assessment Appliance

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

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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ESX + MSCS 2008 R2 + SQL Server 2008

Just a quick note on this little combo. Should you be looking to setup a windows 2008 R2 cluster in a virtual environment (details on specific vmware configuration left to the reader) here are some quick notes that I have on some caveats. 1.) Either keep vmware tools un-uninstalled or make certain not to install the Shared Folder component of vmware tools. 2.) Don’t clone the second node from the first using vmware. Continue reading