I finally felt I had time to get round to installing the Windows 7 Beta and see what all the fuss was about for myself. Now I could setup my shiney new Samsung NC10 to dual boot it but I thought it would be best to play it safe and start off with a virtual machine. Apart from the helpful snapshot function in ESX it would also be more team friendly as the rest of the technicians could access it. So I created a new VM on one of our ESX dev servers, assigned it a 12GB virtual disk and attached the 32bit ISO of Windows 7 Beta, then started it. All went according to plan to start with, the standard Windows install questions, a reboot or two and eventually I ended up with a Windows 7 desktop in the console.

 The plan worked for about two minutes until I noticed there was no network connection, and checking the Device Manager showed it knew there was an Ethernet Controller but it couldn't find a suitable driver. The driver update utility looked very similar to the Vista one but of course wanted to look on the Internet so was a non-starter. I thought this was pretty peculiar as you can't get much more standard than VMware virtual devices, and Microsoft must expect users to test a beta in a virtual environment. Suspicious that this might be a cunning ploy to encourage the use of Hyper-V I had a quick Google, expecting a rapid answer.

I've been helping one of the nice people upstairs prepare for some lectures he is going to present for his local community. Its an IT education class but concentrating particularly on domestic users and the dangers of the Internet - malware, phishing and the rest. Now his local council helpfully have a large IT facility with about 50 PCs in it which would be ideal for training except of course they have gone to an awful lot of effort to prevent anyone installing any sort of malware. This makes it impossible to demonstrate to your average home user how easy it is to pickup Internet nastyness on your usual sort of home PC.

 The title rather gives it away, but of course I suggested VMware ESX as the ideal solution, especially since they give it away free now.

We'd recently taken over the IT support for a small 10 user network in the Aldgate area and just completed our network healthcheck report. Amongst the recommendations was to review the UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) setup. Of course, in line with somebody's law, they had a major power outage before all our recommendations were implemented....

We recently had an enquiry from a client who has around 150 Linux servers in about 20 data centres scattered around the UK. They have a perfectly effective backup solution but were interested in improving their Disaster Recovery, in particular how to speed up recovery of a server in the event of hardware failure. In particular they wanted a solution that would allow them to take complete system images that when required could be quickly restored to a replacement server. Not only that but it had to be doable remotely and by a non-Linux technician following a simple sheet of instructions.