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Excerpt: It’s been a while since I’ve done a review of anything on the site and since I’d rather continue to make use of the category than delete it, I decided to share a piece of software I recently discovered that’s helping make my life easier. Remote Desktop Connection Manager is essentially just that – it manages remote desktop connections. However, it does it in a way that I find appealing and EASIER to use than the native client or other organizational methods out there. Remote Desktop Connection Manager (affectionately referred to as RDCMan) displays all your saved connections to the left in…
Review: Remote Desktop Connection Manager
April 27, 2012 by 4 Comments
Windows Server 2008 R2 Boot From SAN on Cisco UCS
April 25, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Excerpt: For those that have worked with any type of blade server system, you know that boot from SAN is just about the coolest thing since sliced bread. Cisco UCS makes this even cooler by integrating with the service profile concept, allowing for stateless compute provisioning across the board. I’ve done boot from SAN many times, but never with Windows. I’ve primarily used ESXi4.1 or ESXi5.0 stored on a Fibre Channel LUN, then the VMs are stored in either a FC or NFS datastore. Running a BFS for baremetal Windows isn’t something I’d explored yet. So the first thing I do is get…
A Quick and Dirty Netapp SnapMirror
April 19, 2012 by 9 Comments
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Excerpt: Snapmirror is a Netapp feature that’s pretty commonly used to copy data from one system to another. You can copy volumes, or qtrees. It’s also very useful in Disaster Recovery plans, since volumes can be incrementally backed up to an offsite location. I have a VMWare vCenter instance running on Cisco UCS that utilizes a Fibre Channel LUN to store VM templates. It’s pretty large, since it holds templates for a variety of operating systems. I was tasked with getting these VMware templates to be accessible in a completely isolated system in another part of the datacenter. None of the physical…
KICLet: Cisco UCS Socket Connect Error
April 18, 2012 by 1 Comment
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Excerpt: I recently observed some strange behavior with Cisco UCS Manager. When I visited the web page that allows me to download the .jnlp file that launches UCSM, it came up just fine. But when I clicked on “Launch UCS Manager” to actually launch this applet, the splash screen showed briefly, but disappeared after a few seconds, never to be seen again. Eventually, you might also see some java error messages that say something like “java.net.MalformedURLException: unknown protocol: socket”. The frustrating part of this is that it’s a generic Java error message and google’s not really my friend on this one. The error…
Cisco UCS Firmware Upgrade Explorations
April 17, 2012 by 2 Comments
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Excerpt: I’m currently working with a relatively large Cisco UCS installation. Initially, the system was installed and brought up to relatively recent levels of firmware, but a mismatch in the way that the firmware packages were set up in various sub-organizations on some of the UCS systems caused some of the blades to retain the old version of firmware on the M81KR adapters and the CIMC controllers. Due to the scope of the installation, I wanted to ensure that the blades were able to continue operating while I made my changes. I have ensured that the maintenance policy that is set on…
Vital Gadgets for a Datacenter Network Engineer
April 11, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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Excerpt: I would like to share some tips regarding gadgets that I believe every Datacenter Network Engineer should have with them. There are several, but I want to bring up my top two. Travel Router I am often in situations where it is either difficult or impossible to manage Nexus switches and/or UCS remotely. Pick your reasons – sometimes the management network doesn’t exist (yet) or there are heavy security measures in place that restrict wired management, whatever. Sometimes it’s handy to be able to provide wireless access to something on the fly. I will say, that in these types of situations it is…
