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Thursday 25 February 2010

Sgn up and become apart of the movement for Christ. From a youth to the youths

We have to take God out of the four walls of the church and stop keeping him trapped in a box. If the people on the streets are not coming to church then we need to take the church to them...it's all about relationships...check out the link below and show your support.

www.choppinituptv.ning.com

in reference to: Troubleshooting : Contribute with Sidewiki - Toolbar Help (view on Google Sidewiki)

Monday 22 February 2010

DNS virtualization storage secrets

VMware vSphere v4
Best Practices
VMware vSphere v4 is an extremely powerful virtualization software, designed to reduce costs and improve IT control.
Most storage systems provide a highly reliable, easy-to-use, high value storage platform for this deployment.
There are several factors for you to consider, however, to
ensure that the needs of your applications and data are met. This document provides valuable insight on determining the number and size of datastores, planning the storage environment, and tuning performance of the system. It is intended for storage administrators with an
understanding of VMware vSphere v4 and your storage systems.



VMware vSphere v4 includes the ESX server virtualization layer, VMware VMotion for live virtual machine migration, VMware DRS for continuous load balancing, and more. VMware ESX abstracts processor, memory, storage, and networking resources into multiple virtual machines (VMs), enabling greater hardware utilization and flexibility.

However, in order to leverage the power of VMware vSphere v4, you need to do your homework planning the deployment.
DNS recommends you do extensive performance monitoring of your VMware ESX server environment to determine the optimal number of servers and datastores. VMware publishes comprehensive material on monitoring ESX servers; please visit www.vmware.com to learn more.

Datastores
When designing your organization’s vSphere storage environment, it is important to determine the
number of datastores that best fit your virtualization needs. Factors that weigh into this decision include
the desired number of VMs, organizational design/departmental units, the use of VMware High Availability (HA) or VMware DRS, and backup and restore requirements/service level agreements (SLAs).
DNS recommends that each datastore exist on its own virtual disk (VDisk). For example, if your organization has a single ESX server with 2 datastores, you will need to create two VDisks, one for each datastore.

This provides much more granularity in how you can manage that datastore on the storage array. If you wish to expand a VDisk because the related datastore has grown near capacity or you wish to move the mailbox to a different storage tier, you can do this independently of the other datastores.
In most cases, striping each VDisk across all the available ISE in the Emprise 7000 system will meet the performance requirements of the ESX server.


Planning Storage for VMware vSphere v4.x
Prior to rolling out VMware ESX, you must first determine the I/O requirements of the VMs so you can determine the optimal number of physical spindles (disk drives) needed to support the environment.
Your applications will still have the same I/O requirements even though they are virtualized, so remember to add all I/O requirements together. Please review the appropriate technical references or white papers for the applications that you are planning to run on the ESX server to determine the I/O requirement for each.

Having an I/O pool that supports all the virtualized servers/applications is rule #1.
The second most important decision you can make when designing your VMware ESX environment is to decide on maximum performance or maximum data protection.

• ISE-RAID provides the maximum VDisk performance and usable storage capacity by having data protection handled in the ISE module itself.

• ISE-Mirror provides the maximum level of data protection by using both ISE-level and controllerlevel data protection, but the amount of usable space is decreased.

Planning assumptions for calculating IOPS:
• 10k rpm spindles = 100 IOPS
• 15k rpm spindles = 150 IOPS

Sizing the Datastores
In addition to planning the necessary I/O pool to support your applications, you will need to determine storage capacity requirements. You will need to consider:

• VM disk files
• VM swap
• Configuration files
• Redo/Snapshot files
• Metadata

Basic Sizing Assumptions
VMware has given a number of presentations at VMworld that contain formulae for calculating the
recommended storage capacity.

in reference to: Proweb for Reliable Web Hosting & custom CMS systems (view on Google Sidewiki)

Sunday 21 February 2010

I am a Technician, and I hate Windows 7!

Posted on February 19th, 2010 by John Allen

john_allen_background.jpgFollowing on from my “Devalued Skill Base” blog, that hoped to put all us “Silver Technicians” back in the running, I would like to raise a blog regarding the over ‘Dumbing Down’ of Windows and scaling up of windows graphics.

Since the start of Windows I have seen a gradual dumbing down of the OS, to a pictographic hunt for and click-on environment that often takes twice as long to find what you are looking for and takes twice as much space to load as previous version.

No doubt Microsoft (probably) asked home and end users what they wanted, but did they actually ask of us any Technicians? Yes, of course it is great that we now get real problems to deal with, and not just the “Have you turned it off and on again?” ones. People’s knowledge of the self-fix solutions is getting better, but as they say “A little knowledge is dangerous.” However, as a Techie having to go through menu after menu to get to where you want to be is so frustrating.

After phoning a help desk regarding setting up a broadband connection, I had to speak to 5 different support guys before I found anyone that could navigate around Windows 7. In fact, the first four support people were working from XP and Vista prompts and couldn’t find what they were looking for, and so just gave up. So why does Microsoft have to complicate / change what was working well before? Is it to protect their own Certified qualifications that we all need to have? Do we really need this extra over-simplification of Windows and the hiding of the things you need too see?

As many Users out there are getting more knowledgeable, and use the Self-Help Fixes and Wizards. So why does Microsoft hide the very thing you are looking for in a multi layer screens, that relies so heavily on random pictographics? Really, the Windows OS does need to be smaller and clearer, but that doesn’t seem to of happened. When Windows looks and works more like an application than an OS (as it does now), system resources suffer, giving us slower and slower PCs.

I wouldn’t mind so much, if Windows did everything I wanted it to do out of the box, but even with the super big Vista loading up at 12-16Gb, we still had to load codec, Flash Player etc to get it to run what we wanted. Wouldn’t a smaller Windows OS have been better? A version that you decided what you loaded on it or not, depending on your usage or needs, a thin end version, totally user customisable, without all the dross that Microsoft insist we have and hardly ever use, and no more silly graphics whizzing around the screen and bloody Nag screens.

The more I use Windows now, the more I like Linux! It runs from a single DVD, it has all the codec, media players, apps and bits I need… Without the Dross and runs so Fast, I wish Widows did!

in reference to: IT blog: I am a Technician, and I hate Windows 7! « theitblogjobboard (view on Google Sidewiki)

Saturday 20 February 2010

Ten Reasons Why Thin Client Projects Fail

At DNS we have had a few problems with putting thin clients. So we have found this podcast brings up some interesting points so watch this...........

DNS Team Vince Bailey

in reference to:

"Ten Reasons Why Thin Client Projects Fail"
- Ten Reasons Why Thin Client Projects Fail by Pano Logic, Inc (view on Google Sidewiki)

Monday 15 February 2010

Picking the Right Thin Client

This is another great podcast from Brian watch this..............


Vince Bailey DNS

in reference to: Picking the Right Thin Client (view on Google Sidewiki)

Server Virtualization: The Complete Story

Server Virtualization: The Complete Story
by Intel Technology Provider
Watch this webcast to learn about the little-known benefits of server virtualisation. Discover the critical role virtualisation plays in the security of your customers' data centre upgrades. Gain insight into different virtualisation technology you can provide to end-users.

For those of you who are new to virtualisation this will give you the basics.

Vince Bailey

What the Future Holds for Desktop Virtualization

Hi all i have been away but i thought you would like to see this podcast it is a real dinger!!!!!!!!!!!!

The info that Brian talks about make you takes a second look at this tech of desktop virtualization.

Vince Bailey

in reference to:

"What the Future Holds for Desktop Virtualization"
- What the Future Holds for Desktop Virtualization (view on Google Sidewiki)

Delivering Business-Critical Applications with Citrix XenServer

Adoption of server virtualization has helped organizations deliver IT solutions faster and at lower cost. But while adoption of virtualization has been strong for lab and second-tier applications, its use for business-critical apps has lagged.

By deploying on Citrix XenServer and adding Citrix Essentials for XenServer, IT staff can simplify management of virtualized IT resources and increase application availability. In this webinar, we will discuss:

High availability and workload balancing for business-critical applications;
Taking advantage of intelligent storage (including fast cloning, thin provisioning, hardware snapshot and replication) with advanced StorageLink integration;
Dynamic provisioning for storage capacity savings as well as patch-once-run-many image management; and
Lab and stage management for cradle-to-grave virtual infrastructure management as well as self-service
Citrix Essentials for XenServer enhances the widely-adopted, free enterprise-class XenServer virtualization platform with these advanced management capabilities for delivery of business-critical applications.

Well that's what we think at DNS

Vince BAiley