N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) is an extension to the Fibre Channel industry standard, which is available across the different Host Bus Adapter (HBA) product line and Storage Area Network (SAN) platforms. NPIV delivers significant advantages for running multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) and managing the workload across multiple physical servers. Storage Administrators now have the ability to control access to LUNs on a...

The Windows Remote Assistance tool by default requires the novice user to accept the connection from the admin or an expert. In certain cases, the admin may need to directly connect to a remote machine without user consent, though it is not a good security practice. Following are the steps for doing so. Steps: 1. Ensure the Remote Assistance Check box is enabled under System Properties on the user's machine. 2. Ensure following two...

Following are few issues generally encountered with virtual appliances. 1. There’s no good way to back them up. 2. They want to DHCP. 3. They are seething pits of evil, security-wise. 4. No support for non-QWERTY keyboards. 5. No proper documentation. 6. Unlicensed content. 7. Filled with crap. 8. Trivial or guessable Secret root password. Links: Pros and cons of virtual appliances Failings of Virtual...

One of the common task that is performed by level one support technician is renaming workstations that are part of Active Directory domain. In this post, we will see how to grant the technician proper rights to rename workstations.  To properly rename a domain based workstations the support technician needs administrative privilege on the local workstation and should also have "Write All Properties" permission on the computer...

I had the need to convert few thick provisioned ESXi based VMDKs to thin format. I wanted to change the disk format in order to conserve some disk space to run more virtual machines on the host.  Recommendation: It is recommended to reclaim unused space from the disk before converting it, otherwise only pointers will be deleted but not the actual data. The space reclaimation can be done using Sdelete tool which is part of Microsoft...

While planning a VMware vSphere infrastructure it is imperative to ensure that vCenter layer is properly sized, designed and implemented. One very important design aspect is the availability of vCenter , this is because more and more VMware and third party solutions are being tightly integrated with vCenter to facilitate centralized management of virtual datacenters. After going through VMware documentation and few technical articles on the...