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When I was a Systems Administrator, one of the things we wanted to know was if there were issues with our Active Directory environment. Things like directory health, stale computers, and if someone had modified the domain admins group were at the top of that list. The scripts below were built in an attempt to give a quick overview of the Active Directory. These plugins were built on top of Alan Renouf’s vCheck ( @alanrenouf) which provides a great framework for the building of your own scripts. Check out his site if you haven’t already! ...

QLogic has introduced a new product that combines their already reliable Fibre Channel host bus adapters with solid state storage in order to do caching. Think Fusion-IO cards with a Fibre Channel HBA as well. (Yes I know that’s an over simplification) The new QLogic cards come in 2 flavors. A 200GB SSD option and a 400GB SSD option, both of which are 8Gb Fibre Channel. I’ve been told that 8Gb was used to get started with this concept because it was already proven and solid, where as the 16Gb Fibre is much newer. I’m sure these cards will be a hit and 16Gb Fibre cards are in the works with even larger capacities. ...

My configuration is listed below if anyone is interested in the details. Similar designs have been done before by both Chris Wahl @Chriswahl and prior to that by Phillip Jaenke @RootWyrm who called them " Baby Dragons". I used their base config and made a few tweaks of my own based on pricing, part availability etc. Part List ESXi Servers - Quantity 2 Case: Lian Li PC-V351B MicroATX PSU: SeaSonic Platinum SS-400FL2 Fanless 400W RAM: Kingston 16GB (4 X 8GB) 240-Pinn DDR3 Unbufferred ECC Motherboard: Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz NICs: Intel EXPI9301CTBLK 1000Mbps PCI-Express, SuperMicro Dual Port Gigabit Card Boot: Kingston DataTraveler 101 G2 8GB USB 2.0 Local SSD: 64 GB Intel SSD Flex Server - Quantity 1 (Used for a Hyper-V server, VSA or 3rd ESXi Host) Case: HP Gen8 Microserver Storage: 4 480GB SSD’s from OCZ Storage Array Synology Array: 1- Synology DS1513+ Hard Drives: 5 1 TB Wester Digital Blue 7200 3.5 inch hard drives Networking Equipment Layer 3 Switch: Cisco WS03750G-24T Switch Firewall: Cisco ASA Wireless Router: Dlink Wireless N+ Router ESXi Server Notes: I’m not going to lie, when I saw these cases on Chris Wahl’s lab and had to have them. They look crazy sharp and I love the pull out Motherboard mounting option. There are other components in common but I have a feeling these were copied because of a similar taste for components and budget rather than lust! :) ...

Today HP announced their new initiative called Project Moonshot. This initiative takes converged infrastructure and puts it on steroids. Hewlett Packard identified that the amount of compute, power and cooling that is necessary to continue providing resources for Big Data, and mobile platforms is unsustainable at the current rate. It just isn’t feasible with the current technology to continue to throw the same servers into data centers without optimizing. ...

I see a good number of IT shops with my job and in most cases the largest priority is system uptime. I might be there to install, troubleshoot, etc. but in the front off my mind is the idea that everything must stay up and running. IT departments are adding redundant WAN connections, server clusters, fault tolerance, failover devices, disaster recovery sites and redundancies at every level. But in some cases these departments are forgetting a pretty integral part of continuous uptime. ...

I’m often asked about how to provision virtual machine disks. This almost always comes down to, “Should I use thick or thin disks?” and then “Should I do thin provisioning on the array or on the hypervisor?” So here we go: Thin vs Thick Thin provisioning: Thin provisioned disks don’t allocate all of the space during the provisioning of the storage. Instead, they allocate the space on demand. This is a great way to get more bang for you buck out of your storage. Let’s take a closer look with an example. ...

I’ve recently had to label more network cables than I care to discuss, but found my mind wondering over the best method to label these cables. I’ve come up with three different ways to label networking cables and wanted to get some thoughts from other Engineers about how they go about this. Method 1: Same label on both sides This method creates 2 labels that are identical and puts one label on each side of the cable. This give the advantage that if you’re running multiple batches of cables all at once, you can determine exactly which cable you’re working with. ...

One of the benefits of using HP Virtual Connect in C-class blade Chassis is the ability to have MAC Addresses and WWNs set on a server bay as opposed to the physical server. I’m sure you’re aware that each device that has a network card has a Media Access Control (MAC) address which is a burned in identifier that makes that NIC unique. HP decided that it might be nice to control those MAC Addresses in their blade chassis. Before you setup any server profiles, you have the option to choose “Virtual Connect Assigned MAC Addresses”. These are addresses that are assigned to each server bay so that no matter what blade is put into the bay, the MAC addresses will stay the same. You might find this very useful in the case of a failed blade. If you receive a new blade from HP and throw it into the same bay, it will retain all of the same MAC Addresses and thus look the same to your switches. ...

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. ...