Ars Technica has a really excellent summary of the major new features in Windows Server 2008 R2. Some of the new features that jumped out at me are: Full Aero Glass with RDP. Great for virtual desktops. Remote server management tool now is network enabled so you can manage remote...
Today I was reading a whitepaper by 3PAR regarding SQL 2008 performance on their storage arrays. It's an interesting comparison of wide striping, RAID levels, mixed workloads, and number of disks. While browsing through the document I stumbled upon a SQL 2005/2008 feature which I was unaware of, but is...
Wow and Exchange 2010 was just recently released and now there's rollup 1. You can download it here. Fairly short list of bug fixes, but involves the crashing of some Exchange services so probably best to install the patch.
*Shocked* to see that Adobe has major security problems with Flash Player and Air. Be sure to download the latest versions, released on December 8th, here. You can read the related security bulletin here.
I was very disappointed when I was looking over the vSphere 4.0 Update 1 compatibility matrix. I was hoping for wide spread Server 2008 R2 support for all roles. When in fact, the only support for Server 2008 R2 is as a guest VM. The matrix doesn't even show vSphere...
You can check out the improved, and officially supported method here. This works for vCenter 4.0 and 4.1. -- After a significant effort of research and trial and error, it appears I have gotten VMware Update Manager (VUM) 4.0 Update 1 to use SSL certificates generated from an internal Microsoft...
In the release notes of vCenter 4.0 Update 1 it mentions that the SSL thumbprint problem is solved. The bug in 4.0 caused various thumbprint entries buried deep in the ADAM LDAP database to not be updated when the certificates were replaced. That caused all kind of issues. Today I...
For quite a while I've been trying to get SSL certificates uploaded to an ESXi 4.0 host which were issued by our internal Microsoft CA. Unfortunately I ran into issues, the last being that adding an ESXi 4.0 host to vCenter 4.0 with the certificate would die at 80%.After additional...
During my process of testing the SSL functionality in vSPhere 4.0 ESXi Update 1, I found a helpful set of OpenSSL commands. OpenSSL is used to generate the certificate signing request (CSR), which is then submitted to a CA which in turns provides you a certificate you can install on...
The much anticipated first update for VMware vSphere 4.0 is upon us. I've been awaiting this update with eager anticipation since we've uncovered some issues with 4.0 in our deployment. If you want to read the release notes for update 1, you can check them out here.If you have already...
For all of you TechNet or MSDN subscribers, the latest beta of Office 2010 is now available for download. Just sign in to your TechNet/MSDN account and download! Remember, Office 2010 now comes in native 64-bit support, as well as legacy 32-bit versions. I've been running the pre-beta since the...
A couple of days ago 3PAR made more announcements about their added features in the upcoming major release of their InServe operating system for their enterprise fibre channel and iSCSI storage arrays. If you missed their previous announcements, click on 3PAR on the right side of my blog for the...