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Now I know we all like to let our hair down at this time of year, but I really do sleep more soundly knowing that these people are guarding our shores: http://www.youtube.com/watc... Have a very Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year.Felix. ......

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Hi Guys, Firstly I must apologise for this off topic post - but I guess this is proof that I don't spend all my time hidden away in a darkened room living a virtual existence - I am still resisting the usrge to leap into action and do battle against the hoard! On Sunday 22nd I'll be taking part in the Great South Run with a view to raising funds for ......

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Okay so at last I've bitten the bullet and upgraded a couple of servers to VI3. Generally it seems to be straight forward enough - following VMware's documentation, although there was one gotcha that did cause more than a little head scratching. There doesn't seem to be to much about it on the web so here's my contribution. It was really a problem of ......

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VMWare have a new product in beta. VMWare's description of the tool is as follows: VMware Converter is a highly robust and scalable enterprise-class migration tool that reduces the time that IT managers spend converting physical machines to VMware virtual machines. Using a snapshot based cloning mechanism that is extremely fast and reliable, VMware ......

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I've just come across an interesting piece on the BCS web site when Martin Allen is advocating that all employees in the organisation should employ encryption when copying data onto a mobile device, whatever that may be (not just the notebook or PDA, but also the USB stick or MP3 player). Those of us in corporate IT have a huge educational challenge ......

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Okay, how many of you out there freely browse the web whilst logged on as an administrator, leaving your machine exposed to the perils of malware, simply because you (or the website you're visiting) have the rights to run whatever code you like. Well there is an easy solution to this problem. I've come across a handy little tool listed on Mark Russinovich's ......

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Following my earlier post on HP Servers for VMware ESX, one of my colleagues suggested that I look at the pain points would be when buying blade infrastructure for ESX deployments. This got me thinking that what I actually need to show is what is the marginal cost of each virtual machine. To those not well versed in economic theory, marginal cost is ......

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Fascinating stuff from the Scobleizer  Take a virtual drive around San Francisco, with Virtual Earth Streetlevel.

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In recent posts on the VMware forums the choice of servers was under discussion. One of the posts queried how HPs DL585s compare in terms of cost against BL25p blade servers. As a starter I've created the following spreadsheet. I take no responsibility for any omissions so use the information with caution, it's for guidance only and was quickly knocked ......

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In response to my previous post Dave Caddick has queried the suitability of the BL25p as a virtualisation platform, given that it can support 4 cores. In response I'd like to point out that the BL25p features 8 memory slots, giving it a maximum capacity of 32GB if each slot is populated with a 4GB DIMM. When creating virtual machines one should be mindful ......

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I've come across an interesting piece which gives cause for concern over the way that hypervisors share HBAs. "The HBA presents a WWN (World Wide Name) to the I/O driver of the server, and that server uses it as it will. In a virtual server mode, all of the server instances can see and access the same HBA - and all the same logical unit numbers (LUN) ......

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I've got to admit that I am one of life's individuals who considers email to be something of a pain in the backside. Okay, it's great if you want to get a message to someone quickly, it's cheaper than a second class stamp, but within the enterprise I think it can prove to be one of the biggest barriers to effective communication since the Berlin Wall. ......

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I came across a handy tool from HP this morning that gives you a simple GUI through which you can create a bootable USB stick - Handy if you need this facility. The tool can be downloaded from http://h18007.www1.hp.com/s... The tool seems to be quite happy to work with non HP devices ......

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Over the last couple of evenings I've had the misfortune to have to call BT's Broadband support line owing to the fact that my connection was down. Okay this is a bit of a niggle in what otherwise seems to be a fairly good and stable service, but I must admit that I am most concerned over their security practices, most notably their protection of my ......

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Hi In the posts that follow I hope to be able to share some of the insights that I gain working as a Technical Architect (at least for now anyway) at a FTSE 50 Energy company. My particular areas of interest, at the moment, include server build & management, Enterprise Systems' Management (in all its guises) and VMware ESX. In the past I've worked ......

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