Posts

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. ...

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4) Configure the Horizon Service Now that the appliances are setup, it’s time to get busy configuring them. Go to the web address of the Horizon service that you configured (from part 1) In our case this was http://theithollow.hollow.lab The first page isn’t very interesting, just begin the wizard. The second page is almost less interesting, because you have to put in your license key that cost you money. It has to be done, so enter it here. ...

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4) In the last part we configured the Horizon Connector, now we’re going to run the setup wizard in order to assign applications and select users. Horizon Connector Setup Wizard Let’s begin the setup wizard Join the domain. Enter the domain name and enter the username and password that has permissions to add a machine to the domain. ...