Opinions

Over the last 8 or so weeks, if you have been following the Microsoft Blog “Building Clouds”, you would have being introduced to the genius that is “Rob Willis”. Rob has created a Powershell 3.0 workflow enabled script, which replaces the *Junk* System Center Unified Installer which was delivered as part of the 2012 suite. Now, I normally don’t take pleasure in basing the work for the great engineers within Microsoft, but in the case of the Unified Installer, there will have to be an exception. If you have any requirement to deliver a lab for working in System Center, the only real option was to grab a coffee, and lock away a couple of hours to click trough the installers, figure out what will go where, and finally get some...

If you enjoy MMS and Tech-Ed, either physically or virtually then you are going to love this! In association with Microsoft a number of MVPs from the Windows Server / System Center disciplines have organised to run weekly technical presentations, illustrating some of the awesome features of the products, and solutions which you can deliver from the software suites. The content is going to be Level 300 and better, which translates to Geek Fest J Looking at the line-up of presenters and topics for the next 12 weeks, you are going to be in for treat, with some of the long established heavy hitters out in force, to swing open the lid and starting fiddling with the inner workings, just to make your life easier. The only requirement is a copy of Lync 2013 client...

Yesterday, was an all-important day with the Public Beta launch of the Nexus 1000v for Hyper-V. If you missed the Live Presentation, the recording and deck are now available on the Cisco Nexus Community website. https://communities.cisco.com/community/technology/datacenter/nexus1000v Delivering the first truly distributed switch for the Hyper-V platform, a lot of new concepts and possibilities are truly now a reality.   Join the Beta I can only urge you to follow the steps in the slide below, and join the Beta program Then within a few hours you will be greeted with a message similar to the following, directing you to the Beta site, and an active community Online Lab Alternatively, if you are resource locked, I can suggest you take a look at the...

The following post, is “At your own risk”, and only to be used when you can find no other option…. In the odd scenario, when VMM just keeps getting in its own way, and simple jobs keep failing, due to jobs you cannot see, trapping you, sometimes need to call in the heavy guns and stop VMM from hurting itself. The Refresher model has being around since Day 1, and if you have used VMM for any amount of time, it will be nothing new to you, so when jobs need to just stop, you need to flick the switch, and turn them off for a little time, while you get some time to fix the root problems. How? Start with the registry and on your VMM server, navigate to the following location HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager...

The Cisco Nexus 1000V is a Layer 2 distributed virtual switch, originally developed and implemented in 2009 for VMware vSphere 4.0. The Nexus 1000v is crafted from the same operating system which Cisco utilizes for their physical Nexus switches, Cisco NX-OS. Additionally, the Nexus 1000v is fully standards compliant, ensuring that you do not require to have physical Nexus switches to bridge the physical and virtual worlds, permitting you to utilize your current infrastructure. Environment which are already Nexus enabled will benefit from a single unified experience spanning both the physical and virtual ecosystems, with the Nexus 1000v seamless integrating into your current network management solutions, from Cisco and 3rd Parties, e.g. SolarWinds. Structure The...

Brace yourself, the fun is about to truly begin. On Wednesday March 6th, Cisco will unveil its greatly anticipated Distributed Switch solution for Windows Server 2012 and Hyper-V; the Nexus 1000V. What is the Nexus 1000V? Cisco Nexus® 1000V Series Switches provide a comprehensive and extensible architectural platform for virtual machine (VM) and cloud networking. The switches are designed to accelerate server virtualization and multitenant cloud deployments in a secure and operationally transparent manner. Integrated into the Windows Server 2012 Extensible Switch, and fully compatible with System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1, the Cisco® Nexus 1000V Series provides: Advanced virtual machine networking based on Cisco NX-OS operating system and...