Blog entries tagged virtualisation

How to remove old NICs after virtualization

Tom Finnis — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 01:37:35 +0100

After performing a physical to virtual conversion one of the tasks you have to do is to set the IP address of the new virtual NIC. When you do this you then get a warning message saying the IP is already assigned to the physical NIC, Windows 2008 is better than 2003 as it at leasts removes it from the old NIC for you.

All the same this seems a bit illogical, that physical NIC is no longer connected to the server so why should it keep the details? Also it can cause confusion for somRead More...

SCO Unix on VMware ESX - virtualisation solves a client's problem

Tom Finnis — Mon, 11 May 2009 23:00:00 +0100

A few months ago we took over the IT support for an insurance firm in the City, but with the contract we inherited a problem the previous IT company couldn't resolve. Part of the firm's business still ran on a ten year SCO Unix server which was barely clinging to life and hadn't been backed up for three years. They still had a support contract with the original suppliers of the SCO system but they had quoted over £10k to migrate their data to the current platform. The system was runningRead More...

Windows 7 Beta on ESX - no NIC driver?

Tom Finnis — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 00:00:00 +0100

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 tRead More...

Create a desktop shortcut to connect to an ESX VM console

Administrator — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

So we've got a nice fat ESX server running in our training lab with 20 XP VMs installed on it - and a bunch of barely IT literate users each with a desktop PC that is fully locked down so there is no chance of them screwing anything up. We want to give them access to the XP VMs so they can screw those up instead, e.g. see how much malware they can acquire in 10 minutes of unprotected Internet browsing. That means we can't allow any sort of network connection between our nice safe desktops andRead More...

Using ESX for a workshop/training environment

Tom Finnis — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

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. ThisRead More...

Integrating OCS with Asterisk

John Hudson — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

We have been using Asterisk for the last four years; it facilitates our distributed model of operation, effectively bridging the gap between traditional PSTN and VoIP. Asterisk enables us to bring important customer calls into our head office via trustworthy ISDN technology whilst at the same time linking branch offices and remote users via VoIP. If we cannot make an outbound call with our SIP and IAX2 trunks, we simply fall back to ISDN.

Many organisations use Asterisk in conjRead More...

Linux Disaster Recovery & Bare Metal Restore

Tom Finnis — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 00:00:00 +0100

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 butRead More...