While having two complete setups of VMware is probably cost prohibitive, with the small footprint of VMware ESXi, you can use a simple workstation or even a laptop as a cold spare DR backup.  As you’ll see below, I have easily installed VMware on my laptop, and with a large enough hard drive, and enough memory, I could run a small to medium office server environment setup on my one laptop, or even a mid-range business desktop.  The cost of these is usually around $1500-2500, and when you consider the cost of a second server may come in at $5000 or more, this is a great low-budget way to have your office back up and working quickly in the event of a major disaster.

To do this simply, just power off the VM’s on a schedule that fits your DR needs and copy the files from the main DataStore and upload them the the DataStore on your backup setup.  You will want to make sure your backup processor is a 64-bit proc with VT enabled if you are running 64-bit VM’s, you have enough storage space for the foreseeable future, and definitely install as much memory as your budget and workstation will allow, and that should be it.

You clearly shouldn’t expect the same performance of this setup as you would get from a true server, but it would get people back online and running again while you work on the main server.

Here is a quick picture I took of my laptop running VMware ESXi just for fun.  I had installed ESXi on a USB stick, and booted to that when I powered on my laptop.  This install was originally done on a PowerEdge 2950, and without any modifications to the install, it came up just fine on an Dell Latitude E6500.  Simply carry a USB flash drive and a large external storage drive and you can have a backup ESXi server wherever you go.

Since this machine was part of a cluster, we simply migrated the VMs on the failed server to the other working ESXi server through vSphere vCenter Server.  The working VMware server was able to overcommit the available physical memory by almost 50% with room to spare.  We then took down the server with the bad drives to rebuild.  We also took this opportunity to install the OS onto a USB flash drive, which installed internally to the server, and remove the remaining two working hard drives to run a completely diskless server configuration.  With a small amount of configuring to VMware, the newly rebuilt server was ready to join the cluster again and the VMs were then evenly distributed throughout the cluster, all the while never having to power anything off.  That means never having to send out maintenance notices to customers that their hosted servers will be offline, and keeping out uptime in tact.  The whole process took only about 5 hours as well.  When was the last time a total failure on a system RAID drive, and nothing went down, and everything was upgraded and repaired in 5 hours?

Wild Heart Bulk Landscape Supplies Exciting New Website

Wild Heart Bulk Landscape Supplies is a woman owned business with a goal to create superior work and service at a reasonable price. Wild Heart offers a  wide variety of products and services from their store in Hillsborough, NJ. To help the company grow Corner Edge has designed and developed a new web site that highlights  their bulk products, custom sheds and landscaping and maintenance services. Corner Edge custom developed specially designed calculators to help customers and staff to determine the volume of product needed for a given project. The site also includes order request forms for bulk supplies and sheds, which will soon be incorporated into a full online e-commerce site linked directly to the company’s sales ticket system also developed and securely hosted by Corner Edge. Be sure to visit the various services pages to see some fun Flash animation created to represent each service. In addition to Flash Corner Edge has begun implementing the latest website development techniques available through the use of  html5 and CSS3.

Now, with SSD laptops that can handle mutiple hard drives, docking stations that can handle dual DVI connections for monitors, and the flexibility in windows 7 to quickly boot into all these different docked/un-docked modes, we are making a complete shift away from all the workstations and towards living off of laptops only.  We are also saving energy and operating in a more “green” fashion this way.

So, when considering a replacement computer for your power users, I strongly consider a nice laptop and docking stations again.

Our support team will NEVER send you a spam message like this below.

————————————————————

Dear Customer,

This e-mail was send by corneredge.net to notify you that we have temporanly prevented access to your account.

We have reasons to beleive that your account may have been accessed by someone else. Please run attached file and Follow instructions.

(C) corneredge.net

If you need to get organized with your to-do list, check out remember the milk

Also check out these advanced tips

Anybody with a hotmail account, Windows Live account, or msn account should take the time to change their password. This is confirmed by Microsoft, and a customer of mine had this happen to him: someone used his compromised password to send bad links to several of… his contacts.

More details here

When I upgraded my workstation to windows 7 earlier last week, I found that Kavoom! is not compatible with windows7.   (Or at least that’s what windows told me.  I honestly didn’t try re-installing, I couldn’t find the original download)  I went to check the Kavoom website for an update, and NOTHING?!  The site has been down for the last two weeks… so it forced me to look into a new solution.

Of course I easily found Synergy+ – a free tool that does the same thing.  Not as smooth of a setup process, but it seems to work fine.

So Kavoom is gone, but we are not lost… and perhaps the free option explains why they are gone.   Its a shame when a fair product that sells for $30 goes out of business due to a free solution.   Go open source, but its not fun to be a developer who owns an eliminated product… which is better?

UPDATE: Synergy also works with MAC and Linux… so yes, its cooler than Kavoom… its so nice to have my mac working also… 4 screens!

When I took delivery of my new laptop in January I struggled with this issue.  My old machine had been in place for 3 years and now I was faced with starting fresh.  64-bit Vista on my laptop also presented a challenge for old applications I used.  Not to mention that old PCanywhere, old VPN connections, etc…

SO, I decided to virtualize my old laptop.  I can litterally run that computer in VMware faster than I could before, and I don’t have to worry about old applications or old VPN configurations for customers, they all just work!

So how do you do it?  Simply install the free Vmware converter on the machine you want to virtualize and point it to your nearest VMWare workstaion or server.  I highly recommend this, it was a truely painless process.

Fore more information check out these sites:

VMware converter site

How to run VMWARE converter step by step

I learned that Comcast has decide to centrailze and essentially “customize” our DNS service so when something is not found we are re-directed to their own search page.

Here is some more information:

Comcast Re-direction goes nationwide

Your Rights with comcast DNS Re-direction

DON’T PUT UP WITH THIS!

Re-direct your DNS to an outside service like Open DNS.  I did this and my problems are SOLVED!

Here are the instructions for you newbies:

Open DNS Step 1

For advanced users, just use these servers:

208.67.222.222
208.67.220.220

Fast DNS lookups are here again!

Here are some setup tips on setting up SMTP relay over port 587 securely.

After setting up your network with a back-end Exchange 2007 Hub Transport/Client Access/Mailbox server and an isolated Exchange 2007 Edge Transport server in a DMZ or separate internal network, try setting up an IMAP connection to the Exchange Client Access server.  Since all incoming mail traffic is supposed to flow through the Edge Transport server, you set up that as the endpoint for your outgoing SMTP server in your mail client like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, but no matter what you do, it just won’t work without authentication.  The Edge Transport server is not (or at least it’s not supposed to be) a member of the domain, and therefore cannot authenticate the user.

One way to fix this is to set your firewall(s) to pass SMTP Submission traffic to the back-end Client Access server (CAS).    Mail will  be sent first to the back end Exchange Client Access server for authentication, and then be forwarded on to the front end server for external delivery.

Also, don’t forget to to check off the TLS or SSL security option and change the outgoing SMTP port number to 587 for SMTP Submission, rather than port 25 for standard SMTP traffic.  And now, you should be sending mail securely.

Fast forward to today and the loaded computer has the processor, RAM, and performance to still get the job done.  The cheaper laptop is so slow it’s basically un-usable.   It’s too slow to take advantage of any of the current search technologies, and is really only useful for surfing the web.  The video is slow, the hard drive and ram are slow, and the cheap Celeron processor is slow.  All of it adds up to a slow computer.  Sure it “did the job” when it was new, but with today’s software and multimedia intensive applications on the web, its painful to use.

This problem is all to common with customers who try to scrape every last dollar out of a computer configuration.  Don’t forget the old adage – Penny wise but pound foolish.  Time value of money is realized here in two ways.  Sure I spent another $1000 on the faster laptop, BUT I gained another YEAR of use out of it at least AND its been faster all along as well.  So that’s two ways I saved time and money in the long run with the faster computer.

This is why you’ll often find us suggesting a more expensive computer.  Its not about money, but true value.  Ask us to price out the most valuable computer for you so we can get you what you need to be efficient with your time, more profitable, and therefore more successful.  Computers are so cheap these days, spend the extra $500 to get a machine that will last you longer and make you more productive.

Highlighted you will see the data store block size.

When data stores are created, their default block size is 1 MB, which gives you a maximum virtual hard drive size maximum of 256 GB.  So how do you get larger VHD’s?

Hopefully you are reading this and have a brand new ESX/ESXi setup, in which case you can just delete the data store and recreate it, choosing a different block size.  If you already have machines running on the data store, you have a project ahead of you, because deleting the data store will format all data on that drive, and you will have to start from scratch, or be creative before you make the change (there are some ideas of how to work around this below).

If you have the disk space to cover 2TB, then I would go with the maximum of 8MB block size to give you a maximum virtual HDD size of 2TB.  There is no noticeable I/O performance difference by using maximum size, so use the largest size to mazimize your storage.  Here is a quick reference of what block size you can choose and what the maximum VHD that will give you:

Block Size     Max VHD size

1MB                256GB
2MB               512GB
4MB               1TB
8MB               2TB

Already have servers running?  How do you fix it?

If you already have the data store in use, and can afford some downtime for a maintenance window, here is a workaround you could do, asuming you have more than one ESX(i) server at your disposal.  You can power the VM down and use the free VMware vCenter Converter (http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/) to move the virtual machine from one ESX(i) server to another.  Figure on about 1 minute per gig of hard drive size when moving it, with a GB network.  Once the VM is moved to its new location, power it an and make sure all is working well before you delete from disk the VM on the original ESX(i) server.  Once all the VMs are moved off the ESX server, you can go ahead and remove the data store and create a new one using the new block size.

If you hapen to have your VMs in a cluster with vMotion, this task is even easier, as you can change the location of the datastore through the migrate option.  If you dont have any other ESX servers, you could probably do it to VMware Servers, but at that point, you would probably be better just adding multiple drives to the VMs, it would be a lot less work.

Here is a nice reference guide from VMware with this and other importand configuration information: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_config_max.pdf

Ok, so your hard drive fails.  How do you diagnose the failure?  Is it the click of death?  Are there bad heads, bad clusters, a stuck spindle? Does it sound fine, but just not load?

When its making strange noises, this site might help you decide exactly what has happened with a close listen to the drive:

http://datacent.com/failing_hard_drive_sounds

A lot of times these noises mean you are toast, or in for a costly repair & data recovery job.  If you have backups, this can serve for great entertainment to satisfy your inner geek.  You’ll know exactly what happened…

Without backups, well, at least you can add the exact diagnosis to your new data loss nightmare story.  But those stories are getting REALLY old these days, so please make sure you are getting good backups, there is no good excuse.

-Russ

On of the ways I’ve been able to keep my office cool is by taking advantage of windows Vista’s ability to SLEEP.  yes, it works, and works almost as well as a MAC!  go figure.  Between that and our virtual office system, I can work much more efficiently and cooler!

I recommend trying it if you are running vista, and while you are at it, check out some of these other power saving tips.  Many of them will help you manage your heat too!

“10 power-saving myths debunked “

Posted in CES Systems, Corneredge News, Tech post Tagged: cooling, heat management, power saving, virtual office, vista sleep ]]> http://blog.corneredge.com/2009/07/08/power-saving-myths/feed/ 0 Russ http://blog.corneredge.com/2009/06/01/domain-spf-records-on-network-solutions/ http://blog.corneredge.com/2009/06/01/domain-spf-records-on-network-solutions/#comments Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:08:49 +0000 Elias http://blog.corneredge.com/?p=224 ]]> If you send email from your domain you should really consider setting up a “Sender Policy Framework” (SPF) DNS record for it.
There are already great resources out there for setting up and for verifying your work; I won’t repeat them.

I WILL write about how to properly set the SPF at Network Solutions (NetSol).

After you use online resources to make up your SPF record string, at NetSol it is configured under.

Account Manager  >>  Dns >> Manage Advanced DNS Records >> Text (TXT Records)

Though their site has some documentation on SPF, it lacked a important piece of information.

The default TXT settings are:

* (All Others) and

@ (None)

Of these default fields, which one (if at all) should be overwritten?

The correct answer is, set your SPF record in the Text field of “@ (None)” line. Leave the TTL alone.  Careful to add it to the right spot, adding your SPF to the “* (All Others)” won’t work, trust me I know.

That little tidbit of information may help someone.

Enjoy!

Here is an intro:

http://pbwiki.com/content/supportcenter

With todays talent and social media at our finger tips consider the technology of a wiki to pull your team together.

Server Manager >> “Configure Remote Desktop” >> Systems Properties >> “Remote Desktop”

as “Allow connections from computers running any version of one of Remote Desktop (Less secure)”

And your XP clients get a quick RDP connection but Vista clients hang for a long time and sometimes connect and sometimes don’t, then it’s a firewall issue. (Clarification: this post does NOT apply to a TS Gateway.)

Not a firewall issue for traffic to the Terminal Server (TS) but a connection between the TS and your Domain Controller (DC)!

If your design includes a firewall between your TS and DC, first make sure you have the basic rules configured.

Then make sure you’re allowing outbound TCP port 49157 between TS and DC. It is a port used by svchost.exe and lsass.exe during authentication.

Presto! The connections from your Vista clients will be lightning fast.

Corner Edge likes their Vista lighting fast.

-Elias

Setting up Blackberry Professional Software for your Exchange environment may seem daunting- you get your arms into SQL, Exchange permissions, MAPI profiles… but the task is actually very simple, and with these four video guides from Blackberry the task couldn’t be simpler.

One strong recommendation we would make is to install SQL 2008 Express BEFORE installing BPS; it makes the install go much easier than if you use the SQL 2005 Express packaged with BPS.

http://www.blackberry.com/select/professional/installation_toolkit/module_1/

http://www.blackberry.com/select/professional/installation_toolkit/module_2/

http://www.blackberry.com/select/professional/installation_toolkit/module_3/

http://www.blackberry.com/select/professional/installation_toolkit/module_4/

Multiple monitors are great for productivity.  Here’s a tip to use multiple monitors with your remote desktop or terminal server connection.

Use the “/span” and “/f” command line switches for the Microsoft remote desktop client for dual monitor support.

e.g. to remote desktop into a Terminal Server named “myRDPname” from the command line and get the RDP client to span dual monitors in full screen mode:

mstsc /v:myRDPname /span /f

If you use the /? switch you can see all the command line arguments.

I recently had to set up a Blackberry on a BES server on a new network we were supporting.  Despite repeated efforts, the Blackberry consistently made contact with the BES Server, and then failed on the IT Policy.

The issue was this: even if your bringing a blackberry from a domain (domain.com) in Site A into a same-named domain (domain.com) in Site B, you must break the connection that the Blackberry’s PIN has over the Blackberry network.  Until then, the Enterprise Activation will not work.  This type of situation would come up when you change your MX record, for example.

You basically have two options here:

1. Contact the old BES host in the old site and ask them to remove the PIN; or
2. Go to the Blackberry Device / Options /Advanced / Service Book, and blow away the value “”Desktop [CMIME]”.

Once that happens, the Blackberry brings you through the mail setup routine as if it were brand new out of the box, and will sync fine with your BES server in the new environment.

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To ring in my new year, I had some outlook 2007 issues.  Like most of us out there, I have been struggling to get some performance out of this new version of outlook for some time.   Now, I should mention that I’m far from an average user.  I have 10+ gigs of email in my exchange mailbox (no I don’t believe in archiving), and I I’m also running Xobni, so I do hit outlook pretty hard.  I feel it is fair for me to wait on occasion for things, but I’m running a fairly new Vista 64-bit machine with 12 gigs of ram, so Outlook cannot complain about resources.  I know its only 32-bit, but I can give it a full 4 gigs of ram if it wants, and it usually takes it.   It would be nice if there was a 64-bit version of outlook… someday.

One of the common performance tweaks is disabling the searching in Outlook.  With Google desktop, Microsoft, and in my case Xobni, you need to pay attention to how many programs have there hands on your database for indexing.  I disabled outlook and Google to only rely on Xobni for searching.  I followed the instructions, and THOUGHT I had removed all the search features in outlook.  Today I was VERY surprised to find the index service in Vista was STILL indexing my outlook data file.  Here is how I found it.

I had an unrelated search speed issue, so I looked into tuning my indexing settings to speed things up a bit.   If you are like most of us, you are running Google desktop as well, so I don’t really need the Vista index, but I do want it there for the occasional focused or advanced search.  Anyway, when going into the search options, I clicked modify and found that my Microsoft Office Outlook was still selected to be indexed!

I unchecked it, adjusted some other areas like “offline files” and other network shares that I don’t want indexed.  Then I initiated a full re-index to ensure it was cleared.

I’ll post later and let you know if I notice an increase in speed.

We’ll be able to request the downgrade from Dell until then. Nice!

http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=210800478

We work with anything our customers use: Windows (all possible flavors), Linux (many flavors), OpenBSD, and Mac OS, DOS (yes DOS).

Sometimes we forget that even Macs running OS X crash, maybe it’s the genius of the Apple marketing that has us numb to that fact.

So, when those crashes happen on a Mac (an oldie but goodie eMac to be exact) we can’t help but chuckle… it’s sort of cute in a geeky way.

Running a System Update and a Office for Mac update at the same time provided us with these latest screenshots.

Enjoy -Elias

This time around I want to add another tidbit to the online body of knowledge.

I recently received the following error while configuring Vmotion on our Vmware ESX 3.5 server cluster:

Error during the configuration of the host: SysinfoException: Node (VSI_NODE_net_tcpip_plumb) ; Status(bad0005)= Already exists; Message= Unable to Set

Now what is THAT supposed to mean? Vmware has amazing technology, but that “amazing” thing hasn’t yet reached their error messages.

It turns out that if your iSCSI traffic is configured with a specific network (Example: 10.0.10.10), and you try to configure Vmotion ports within the same network space (Example: 10.0.10.20), the Virtual Center wizard fails with the error above.

“Best practices” dictate that iSCSI traffic and Vmotion traffic should be completely separate from each other. But even if they are physically separated, and you may want use the same network space… well, you can’t.

Solution: Make the network address space for iSCSI (Example: 10.0.10.x) and Vmotion (Example: 10.0.20.x) different.

Oh and a better error message could be:

Wow buddy, you may think you’re really smart using the same network for iSCSI and Vmotion, but might as well forget it. I refuse to work that way. Make them separate networks!

Cheers,
Elias