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One of the new features I really wanted to check out in Server 2012 was the ability to setup a highly available DHCP server. Prior to Windows 2012 if you wanted to setup a highly available DHCP solution, you only had a couple of options. 1. You could setup up a split scope, which required you to setup identical DHCP scopes on two servers, and then adding exclusion ranges on each of them so they didn’t both hand out the same IP Addresses. Usually this was done in an 80/20 fashion. ...

I often hear Port Address Translation (PAT)referred to as Network Address Translation (NAT). Its a pretty common to hear this and is really not a big deal because the two are similar and I know what is meant. But to clear things up I decided to put together a quick post. Network Address Translation NAT is the process of “translating” an IP Address in a router or firewall. This is most commonly done to present a private IP Address into a Public IP Address that is accessible on the Internet. For instance, you may want to have your E-mail server have a public address so that it can route mail. ...

I was recently integrating Veeam Backups with HP Data Protector for a backup project when I found a great Powershell command that I didn’t know about. Invoke-Command -comp [computername] –scriptblock {script} If you’re familiar with PSExec.exe this is an equivalent powershell command, but if you’re not, this command will allow you to execute something on another machine. Veeam has the ability to call a script when a backup job completes, but I needed a different server to execute that script. ...

It’s hard to believe but theITHollow.com is now 1 year old! The first year has been great and I feel like I’ve probably learned more writing it than the readers have learned from reading it. Thank you for a great first year and if you keep reading it, I’ll keep writing it.

There was some exciting news released today so I wanted to get it in a post in case you hadn’t heard about it yet. The HP Global Partner Conference is going on in Vegas and they release some new gear to accentuate their converged infrastructure model. A new BladeSystem Platinum was announced which will include the options for infiniband, 16Gb Fibre Channel, and 40Gb Ethernet! If you’d like more information about the new BladeSystem Platinum please check out HP’s video. ...

If you’re an engineer and you’re trying to get more experience with a variety of different storage devices, you might find yourself in a bit of a pickle. Most customers settle one one or two storage vendors and that’s it. So if you work for one of these companies you can learn EMC or Netapp, etc. I highly doubt your company would be interested in purchases a few different types of storage devices so that you can learn them as they are quite expensive. ...

Oh Noes! I sense lolcats in this post. I’ve been seeing Category 6a cable if a few datacenters recently and thought it might be a good idea to review when and why we would use this type of cabling. Wiring The Category 6a cabling is wired the same as Category 5e at 1000BaseTX speeds. Note: that you can get away with splitting two sets of pairs off of Cat5e, but this only allows 100BaseT Ethernet. ...

Disaster Recovery has never been easier to manage than it is right now. Virtualization has given engineers a tremendous tool to allow us to almost effortlessly move workloads between datacenters. Now that we’re virtualizing workloads, we’re now capable of standing up exact copies of our servers in two offices and have them up and running in very short RTOs. In the past year we’ve seen two major storms hit the East Coast causing severe power outages as well as making commutes difficult or impossible for users to get to work. Thanks to the cloud we have many more mobile users than we used to and even if they’re not considered mobile, their servers may not be located in their office. Cloud presents some great options for disaster recovery that should be taken advantage of, no matter what your geographic location. If you’re in a SMB and you don’t have a DR plan, GET ONE NOW! ...

VMware slot sizes are an important topic if you’re concerned with how many ESXi hosts are required to run your environment. What is a Slot? To begin this post, we need to understand what a slot is. A slot is the minimum amount of CPU and memory resources required for a single VM in an ESXi cluster. Slot size is an important concept because it affects admission control. A VMware ESXi cluster needs a way to determine how many resources need to be available in the event of a host failure. This slot calculation gives the cluster a way to reserve the right amount of resources. ...

I recently decided to give VMware Horizon a shot and found the install to be a little confusing so this gives me a good opportunity to lay it all out so that others can try it out for themselves. A big “thank you” goes out to Raj Jethnani for a helping hand with this post. If you’d like to follow him on twitter his link is here: @rajtech For those of you who don’t know, Horizon is a nifty SAAS platform for you to present thinapp applications too. I could see many organizations benefit from this technology in the near future. ...