With the release of ESX 4.1 and vCenter 4.1, VMware has greatly increased the performance of vCenter. I accidentally stumbled upon this VMware document called VMware vCenter Server Performance and Best Practices.It's a great read covering benchmark performance differences between vCenter 4.0 and vCenter 4.1, plus a lot of tips...
Back in the days of vCenter 4.0 it required a 32-bit DSN to connect to your SQL database. Now that vCenter 4.1 and ESX 4.1 are out, it now requires the use of a 64-bit DSN. This makes sense as vCenter now requires a 64-bit server. The PowerShell script I...
If you aren't familiar with thin provisioning, it's a technology being widely adopted by storage vendors that only allocates back-end disk space to a LUN when data is written. For example, if you present a 500GB LUN to a server and only write 100GB of data, the array only uses...
With leaks starting to grow about next release of ESX(i), v4.1 is now out the door! It is a big upgrade and include a lot of new goodies for people. Below is a small sampling of the changes in 4.1:- VMware now made it obvious ESX is dying and everyone...
Several months ago when Microsoft moved their System Center management packs to their "PinPoint" site, it was a horrible mess. Trying to search or find the right MP was an exercise in futility. In fact, it's beyond me how MS released that interface to the public. Clearly they didn't consult...
Today a colleague of mine asked me if I really thought one could tell what cipher strength is used during SSL transactions. I said sure! Piece of cake if you know what to look for. Just like in the movie Matrix, if you stare at the cipher text long enough...
One of the neat security features with SQL 2005 and later is the ability to use a SSL certificate to encrypt off-host SQL server communications over port 1433. Encrypting communications between your SQL server and your remote applications is strongly recommended. Do you really want credit card data, personal information...
As previously mentioned in my blog about SQL TDE (Transparent Data Encryption), the example script I gave just used a SQL self-signed certificate to encrypt the database. While this is fine for a demo, you should only used trusted certificates in a production environment.Getting a trusted certificated inserted into SQL...
One of the new features in SQL Server 2008/R2 is Transparent Database Encryption, or TDE. TDE lets you encrypt any database, without having to change your application. This means you can fully encrypt databases and log files for SharePoint, RMS, or anything else you wish. For the ultimate in security...
One of the last things I do during a SQL installation is configure the temp databases. Temp databases are very important to some applications, as they are used as a scratch or buffer space. Other applications may not use them hardly at all, so it really depends on your environment.One...
One of the best things Microsoft did with Windows Server 2008 and later is the built-in firewall. Unlike previous OS releases where the firewall was pretty much a joke, Microsoft started from scratch and came up with a very robust two-way firewall. SQL is one of the prime targets for...
Yes, time for part 2 of the Wyse PXE booting series. Part 1 described the general concept and why you might want to PXE boot your Wyse zero client instead of having embedded flash for the ThinOS. The remainder of this post will cover the technical details on how to...