In the midst of all the uproar about the vSphere 5.0 licensing changes, I missed the fact that Microsoft released SQL 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 yesterday. You can download it here. The master list of bug fixes can be seen here. The new features are listed below. For the full...
If you a regular follower of my blog, you will probably notice I'm a bit of a storage geek. VAAI, FCoE, WWNs, WWPNs, VMFS, VASA and iSCSI are all music to my ears. So what's new to vSphere 5.0 storage technologies? A LOT. That team must have been working over time...
One of the new features of vSphere 5.0 is a VMware VSA, or virtual storage appliance. VSAs are nothing new, as HP and FalconStor have offered VSAs for vSphere for a number of years. VSAs work by using DAS (direct attached storage, e.g. SAS or SATA) and turn it into shared storage...
One of the major announcements today that has gotten customers worked up a little bit is the change in the licensing model with vSphere 5.0. In previous versions licenses were tied to the number CPU sockets, and the various editions had limitations on maximum physical memory supported and the number...
In case you were living under a rock today, or don't have lots of RSS subscriptions for virtualization blogs, you may not have heard that VMware announced their vSphere 5.0 product today. Although not shipping until late in Q3 of 2011, the cat is now out of the bag and...
A friend of mine, Chris McCain, has some cool t-shirts for sale on his site, Get Your Nerd On. Check 'em out and get one today!
Microsoft recently released SQL Server 2008 R2 cumulative update package 8 to the web for downloading. You can request the hotfix from this page. Also remember that the June 2011 monthly security patches included some for SQL Server (2005 through 2008 R2). You can find the whole bulletin list here....
The Citrix NetScaler can be configured to authenticate users against a variety of sources including RADIUS, LDAP, TACACS, and PKI certificates. If you are going to use the NetScaler as an Access Gateway (proxy) between and untrusted network such as the internet and your corporate network, you will probably want...
When using a load balancer in an enterprise environment it opens up the possibilities for service level redundancy that you may not have thought of before. For example, maybe you have appliance devices on the network that can be Active Directory integrated, but only allow you to specify one LDAP...
When you install the Citrix NetScaler it comes with a self-signed certificate which is bound to the management IP interface for the purposes of encrypting management traffic. However, using self-signed certificates are not recommended in anything but a lab environment. So that means you need to install and configure the...
As I mentioned in yesterday's blog post, any enterprise VDI deployment needs redundant broker services for high availability. Other enterprise applications such as Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint can all benefit from a load balancer, be it virtual or physical. Building on yesterday's post about configuring SSL on the NetScaler, it's...
A high availability VDI deployment, such as XenDesktop 5, demands that you use multiple servers to provide broker redundancy. As such, a load balancer such as the Citrix Netscaler comes in mighty handy. The NetScaler can also act as an ICA proxy between a trusted and untrusted network, such as the internet...