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A few months ago there was an annual vote to determine the top 50 virtualization bloggers according to vsphere-land.com. These top 50 bloggers are then added to the vLaunchPad where they will remain cataloged for a year until the next year’s voting. Kudos to Eric Siebert for running this whole process! TheITHollow.com was lucky enough to make the top 50 in it’s first year of existence and to celebrate I asked my good friends (well, family really) over at www.whateverinspires.com to create a top 50 badge to put on my site. They were happy to oblige and even created a top 25 and also a top 10. ...

Only a few years removed from when HP announced they were ditching the workstation part of their product line, they’ve announced a new set of desktops this week. The EliteOne 800 G1 The EliteOne 800 G1 is an all in one solution for companies that include the newer Intel 8 Series Q85 chipset which includes the Intel vPro technology. I haven’t been able to get my hands on playing with this yet, but essentially it uses the trusted execution environment in order to allow access to the PC even if it’s powered off, or if it has a virus. Perhaps this doesn’t seem like a big deal to end users, but the IT group that has to support these devices will certainly take notice. I liken it to having an iLO processor on every desktop so that troubleshooting can be done remotely by support. This will even allow off site or third party support to gain access in order to troubleshoot issues. ...

HP has a new MicroServer out that would be perfect for the anyone who is looking for a solid home lab server. The Microserver G7 was a fairly popular server for home computing enthusiasts and HP decided to add upon that line. The original reason for this server was for small businesses that wanted a small but stable server with features such as integrated Lights Out (iLO) but as it so happens, this line was pretty useful for those bloggers and certification junkies that wanted to take some HP Servers home with them. ...

HP officially announced the new HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 today to some oohs and ahhs at HP Discover. The new 3PAR is an all flash array that can be utilized for small, medium or large business needs. HP is touting that some of their competitors are having difficulty with the flash hurdle because their systems were optimized for spinning disks. And other competitors who designed their arrays specifically with flash in mind from the ground up are not proven arrays from a reliability standpoint. ...

I want to address a concern that many HP Virtual Connect customers have had about monitoring their Blade Chassis. A question I’ve received was “How do I know if I have sufficient uplinks for my traffic?” Depending on the size of the organization and their familiarity with their networking equipment, they could be monitoring the available metrics on their switches. If they are not necessarily that network savvy or don’t have the proper monitoring tools in place, they can use the throughput statistics tools within Virtual Connect. These tools only give a simplistic view to the amount of traffic that is going across your uplinks, and doesn’t show the traffic going out each blade but it does get you some great high level information. ...

Once per year VMware takes time to present the VMware vExpert distinction to members of the community Evangelizing, teaching, helping and speaking about VMware techniques. The annual VMware vExpert title is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year. The title is awarded to individuals (not employers) for their commitment to sharing their knowledge and passion for VMware technology above and beyond their job requirements. ...

If you find yourself in an unfamiliar network and want to understand how the networks are connected, it would certainly be nice to be able to tell what is connected to each other. Luckily there are a couple of protocols that are responsible for just that. Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) As you can probably guess from the name, the Cisco Discovery Protocol is a proprietary protocol from Cisco Systems. ...

One of the new features in the latest version of Windows Server is the ability to create server groups. When you open the server manager you’ll see some server group options on the dashboard. You can add other servers to manage, or create a new group. Also, pay attention to the “Roles and Server Groups” section at the bottom of the screen which shows some of the server groups that were already set up. ...

I’ve almost always preferred HP laptops for work purposes based on how stable they’ve been for me. But while shopping for my last laptop, I decided to try out the Samsung Series 9. To be honest, the biggest reason I decided to look at this laptop was the sleek design. I knew that I would be traveling a lot with my new position and having a light weight laptop was certainly preferable. In addition an SSD drive made me feel better about jostling the laptop around without damaging it. ...

Until recently, I never paid too much attention to flow control. I knew that it was used in networking, and that it was a setting that sometimes needed modified when I would puttyhyperterminal into a device, but that pretty much ended my knowledge of the matter. As the name suggests, “Flow Control” will limit the amount of data across a network interface. It’s a pretty simple concept but typically we’re not trying to slow down our network, but rather speed it up. Flow control can be used to slow traffic down rather than dropping frames. ...