Skip to main content

Tons of progress this week – VM, Exchange, Firewalls, Security, Storage/NAS

Had a very productive, and busy week. Balancing out server crashes taking down the production site, and the build-out project we are working on the team was very busy. I built over a dozen VMs, and 3 ESXi boxes.

I also worked on some of the config to finish out the main exchange 2007 implementation. We are waiting for ESXi boxes to ship to the remote offices, which will house a mailbox server, a domain controller, and possible a client access server.

One of my colleagues (who knows the setup of the WAN well) is working on the configuration and testing of our new firewall infrastructure. We are putting in all Sonicwall NSA series appliances. We have a 2400 for Shanghai, and 3500's for Atlanta and Geneva. The production environment will be off a pair of HA 4500 series boxes. The features, ease of setup, and price were excellent. We also have good resources from the reseller and the vendor if we need them.

We are also running a pilot (which has been going quite slow) of the Q1labs qradar product. I have used this product in previous companies, and its been a great tool for security, network analysis, and troubleshooting. The problem is running the pilot with these huge projects that need to be done over the next few months isn't really feasible. I hope to invest more time in testing it, but my priorities are dictating that not to be the case.

I also got rid of a couple older boxes this week by doing P2V using VMware converter starter edition. Now the enterprise ESXi boxes are pretty much full, so I need more disk space in order to do anymore work. That should be happening as we get the NAS implemented.

We wrapped up the Bluearc v. Netapp stuff, we are going with a couple of Netapps. The solution looks very good, and we should have it up in a couple weeks. I'm looking forward to building out some Exchange, MSSQL, and ESXi clusters using it!

Talk to you all soon, have a nice weekend. Loving the weather in Georgia J

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Industry Insights: The Challenges Behind New User Interfaces

The future of computing will be bifurcated. On one hand, there will be entirely new models for computing such as voice, autonomous agents, and bots, with no traditional user interfaces. On the extreme opposite hand, there will be new user interfaces augmented with our ‘real’ worlds, such as the innovation done by Microsoft holographic computing technologies, along with virtual reality platforms coming to market from Google and Facebook. Bringing these trends to fruition, though, will require some key enabling technological limitations to be overcome. Voice It’s been slowly happening for a while now: Voice recognition will change one of the key interfaces with today’s computing and applications. Apple’s Siri, Google Now, Microsoft Cortana, and the super-hot Amazon Echo, along with their smart agents, are the practical embodiments of a growing trend toward the application of machine learning to voice and data. Andrew Ng, chief scientists at Baidu, says that 99 percent accuracy is th...
Post a Comment
Read more

Dynatrace Growth Misinformation

For my valued readers: I wanted to point out some issues I’ve recently seen in the public domain. As a Gartner analyst, I heard many claims about 200% growth, and all kind of data points which have little basis in fact. When those vendors are asked what actual numbers they are basing those growth claims on, often the questions are dodged. Dynatrace, recently used the Gartner name and brand in a press release. In Its First Year as an Independent Company, Gartner Ranks Dynatrace #1 in APM Market http://www.prweb.com/releases/2015/06/prweb12773790.htm I want to clarify the issues in their statements based on the actual Gartner facts published by Gartner in its Market Share data: Dynatrace says in their press release: “expand globally with more than three times the revenue of other new generation APM vendors” First, let’s look at how new the various technologies are: Dynatrace Data Center RUM (DCRUM) is based on the Adlex technology acquired in 2005, but was cr...
10 comments
Read more

Misunderstanding "Open Tracing" for the Enterprise

When first hearing of the OpenTracing project in 2016 there was excitement, finally an open standard for tracing. First, what is a trace? A trace is following a transaction from different services to build an end to end picture. The latency of each transaction segment is captured to determine which is slow, or causing performance issues. The trace may also include metadata such as metrics and logs, more on that later. Great, so if this is open this will solve all interoperability issues we have, and allow me to use multiple APM and tracing tools at once? It will help avoid vendor or project lock-in, unlock cloud services which are opaque or invisible? Nope! Why not? Today there are so many different implementations of tracing providing end to end transaction monitoring, and the reason why is that each project or vendor has different capabilities and use cases for the traces. Most tool users don't need to know the implementation details, but when manually instrumenting wi...
2 comments
Read more