This little tidbit from The Lone Sysadmin saved our bacon this morning: if you’re finding it impossible to migrate a VM off of a host because of a stuck VMTools installation process, there’s a quick way to kill this process off via the command line to get things moving along. First, you need to know [...]
So I’ve been restoring some Windows servers from NetApp snapshots today, specifically single hard disks that had been having problems (long story involving Windows problems, etc). I found this pretty easy to do once I got the syntax down – basically, all I was looking to do was to restore the C: of a server, [...]
…when I flipped the page over on my desk calendar this morning and noticed that the January 31st Virtualization Tip of the Day from the fine folks at PrintedOwl.com has this to say: It’s a best practice to keep the number of COS software installations to a minimum. Here’s a case that’s justified for some [...]
It’s good to see Lifehacker focusing on backup tools. After literally years of struggling with backing up various computers and laptops I’ve owned over the years, and having learned my disaster-recovery lesson the hard way when I lost the hard drive on my desktop in 1996 or something, I’ve recently settled into a very cozy [...]
Click for larger, more confusing view Virtual Geek has an amazingly insightful post combining multiple presentations and points from representatives from EMC, MVWare, NetApp, Dell/Equalogic, HP/Lefthand, and some other folks in the business. As you can see by the names involved, we’re talking about most every major virtualization storage player in the industry today – [...]
It’s inevitable: hard drives just fall by the wayside. Even more so with the switch from IDE to SATA over the last couple of years. Where I work, large amounts of data had been stored on single spinning IDE disks (bad), so one of my goals was to migrate that data to redundant arrays for [...]
I currently admin a sizable VMWare ESX deployment hosting a couple dozen domains and over a hundred Windows servers. Most are for testing and could be rebuilt pretty quickly, but some are for production deployment – at least one of which is fairly irreplaceable. This past summer our office suffered some extended outages due to [...]