by Katherine
8. December 2009 13:20
Cloud Computing is a popular topic right now. I have compiled some articles that are worth a browse if you want more information.
Security fears holding back cloud computing: Cisco report highlights concerns around cloud model and scareware scams
Hope these articles are of use for learning more about a very popular technology topic.
by Katherine
5. October 2009 14:41
Do you have computer-related questions that you cannot get answered?
If so, you have come to the right blog!
Send your questions to me at khobt@bncsystems.com with the subject line "Expert Q & A" and I will post your question and answer in a future blog. It can be anything from computer networking to server support to desktop setup to software-specific questions!
Please do not post as a reply to this blog - emailed questions will get a response.
by
8. October 2008 12:10
Saves time and lowers cost. Virtualization is a hot topic. Join the fast-growing number of businesses like yours leveraging virtualization to reduce IT management overhead and streamline hardware resources for backup and recovery.Symantec Backup Exec already protects 1.5 million customers globally and Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 continues to build on two-decades of market leading Windows® data protection. Upgrade to this new release and benefit from reduced management time and storage costs with new comprehensive data protection for VMware® Virtual Infrastructures and Microsoft® Hyper-VTM environments - efficiently backup physical servers and virtual images with a single backup, through a single console. Upgrade to a new level of Windows data protection
- Expanded support for Microsoft Windows 2008 Environments Windows Small Business Server 2008, Windows Essential Business Server 2008 and SQL Server® 2008, and Hyper-V environments.
- Unmatched patent-pending Granular Recovery Technology quickly restore individual emails, documents, or list items and user attributes for critical Microsoft applications like Exchange, SharePoint, and Active Directory® from a single-pass backup.
- New Innovative Management and Scaleable Platform Benefits simplified license and patch management through Backup Exec Infrastructure Manager, flexible protection for NDMP enabled devices and a new remote media agent for Linux servers for enhanced backup performance.
Upgrade now and save up to 35% off MSRP. Learn more. Ensure that your mission-critical systems are protected with Symantec Backup Exec System Recovery 8.5. Now with new capabilities for automating physical to virtual system conversions for immediate recovery. More information on Backup Exec System Recovery.
by
15. July 2008 10:07
This weekend an instructor came in to talk to us about Windows 2008, and one of the topics covered was the Microsoft virtualization platform “Hyper-V”. The presenter offered the opinion that hyper-v is significantly cheaper than Vmware (e.g. $28) and offers the same functionality. On the surface this rings true, but I dug into this a bit deeper and have found that the reality is slightly more complicated. Comparing hyper-v to Vmware products is really trying to compare apples and oranges. A simple example of this would be the feature called “memory over commitment”. All Vmware solutions (including the free Vmware Server) allow for allocating more memory to virtual machines than is physically installed on the host and uses a variety of memory reclamation techniques (not just paging) to balance the requests for memory that the guests (virtual machines) make. This is not true with hyper-v – you are only allowed to allocate as much RAM as a host has. This means two things: 1) Vmware allows for a greater density of guests to be deployed per host, and 2) in instances where you have more than one Vmware virtual host and one has gone down you can start more VM’s in a degraded state to keep things running until you can correct the issue. These two things are not true for hyper-v – it refuses to allow you to start up more VM’s if the memory limits have been reached, even if the guests may not always use all the RAM allocated. At the end of the day this means that you need to spend more money on hardware with hyper-v to achieve the same results you would get with Vmware technologies. You might say “most SMB only have four or so servers, so you don’t need the overkill Vmware provides at the premium cost.” I agree, but only as far as the ESX line of software goes. Vmware also has a free version called Vmware server that provides excellent features for...well...free. I have personally deployed Vmware server v1.0x in production environments where we were getting a minimum of 8 guests per host on dual core dual cpu Dell hosts with 8gb of RAM. In some cases we were able to get 15 or more guests per host for things like file-n-print servers and domain controllers. Again your mileage may vary depending on the requirements of the guests, but the take away I want to highlight is that Vmware Server can do everything that hyper-v can at no cost and provides some advanced technologies that hyper-v has yet to implement. XEN is another alternative that is worth mentioning. You can use the free open source XEN and roll your own, or buy into the Citrix offering if you desire an easy deployment. Either way the XEN product is more comparable to ESX than it is to hyper-v with features such as live migration. The main issues I have found with XEN is it’s poor support for guest OS’s other than Linux or Windows, but for the SMB market this is not really much of a problem. The bottom line for me is that hyper-v is a v1.0 product whose feature set is very slim compared to other offerings in the same space. I look forward to seeing what Microsoft will do with this product, but the jury is still out. A colleague recently commented that “Microsoft can throw lot’s of engineers and money at hyper-v, so it will be feature rich and crush Vmware shortly.” and I agree that it could be done...but after a careful review of their recent attempts at revamping Terminal Services I have to say that it’s not necessarily the case that they will. My $.02 – I would love to hear what you guys think! Thanks!
Subscribe