There used to be a day when VMware's ESXi was the "go-to" solution general virtualization workloads. Some would argue this is still the case. However, the major players in the hypervisor space have matured, largely making the hypervisor a commodity for the simplest of scenarios. Now, if you're considering moving from VMware to Hyper-V, you … Continue reading Is Microsoft making it more painful to move from VMware to Hyper-V?
Setting the multi-writer flag on a VMDK
Clustered applications often need to be configured in such a way where multiple servers perform read/write operations to the same volume. One such example is Oracle RAC. With VMware virtual machines, VMDK multi-writer sharing is turned off by default. However, it can be turned on without much trouble. As the use case is quite specific, … Continue reading Setting the multi-writer flag on a VMDK
My us-east-1a is NOT your us-east-1a…
Not too long ago I was attending one of the AWS Raleigh Meetups. The topic was an overview of EC2... The speaker happened to mention that when provisioning instances, the AZ tagged us-east-la in one account wouldn't be the same as another account. Now, I had heard this before, but I'd actually forgotten about it. … Continue reading My us-east-1a is NOT your us-east-1a…
VMWare vSAN 2-node + Witness Deployments & vSphere Essentials Plus licensing…
Recently, my team started looking into potentially spec'ing vSAN for a client hardware refresh. While doing our due diligence, I came across an interesting point about licensing here. To sum up the scenario: The Essentials and Essentials Plus kits provide licensing for 3 hosts Each host in your 2-node cluster consume a license. Since the … Continue reading VMWare vSAN 2-node + Witness Deployments & vSphere Essentials Plus licensing…
Working with the AutoEnableIO Volume Attribute on EC2 volumes.
It's a setting not likely to be accessed often, but it's good to be a aware of the AutoEnableIO Volume Attribute on EC2 volumes in AWS. In the EC2 Dashboard, you'll find it under Volumes > Select Volume > Actions >Change Auto Enable IO Setting. So what does this setting do? "When Amazon … Continue reading Working with the AutoEnableIO Volume Attribute on EC2 volumes.
Handling huge LDF files when SQL Recovery Mode is ‘Simple’
Recently, I was reviewing a space issue on a server, only to find that the culprit was a 35GB LDF. It was the OpenManage Essentials database. I've been trying to qualify it as a method of detecting hardware issues on ESXi hosts and various Dell hardware (Powervault SAN, etc). I reviewed the recovery mode and … Continue reading Handling huge LDF files when SQL Recovery Mode is ‘Simple’
Placing Deleted items in a Shared Mailbox (rather than the user’s deleted items)
As a follow up to a previous post about sent mail and shared mailboxes, we'll now make mention of how to address deleted items. While handling sent mail was nicely done against Exchange, handling deleted items must be done via group policy/registry on each user's machine. This link references both the reg key and the … Continue reading Placing Deleted items in a Shared Mailbox (rather than the user’s deleted items)
Saving Sent Mail in a Shared Mailbox When Users ‘Send As’ the Shared Mailbox.
Shared mailboxes are handy for a variety of functions that involve several users monitoring a mailbox. However, it's not uncommon for a user to need to reply to the message as the shared mailbox address. This can be done in Exchange 2013 CU9+ and Office365, but it is NOT enabled by default on the shared … Continue reading Saving Sent Mail in a Shared Mailbox When Users ‘Send As’ the Shared Mailbox.
JUSTIN | BLOG 