Posts Tagged ‘support’

Simplifying IT support and deployments with converged systems

13, Aug 2011

All IT solutions will experience problems at some point in their life.  Supporting IT solutions is difficult, time-consuming and costly, but also a fact of life – a fact as a systems administrator I am thankful for.  It means, I have a job.  Problem solving skills are absolutely necessary, but all administrators need the expert [...]

Non-standard MSSQL port causes vCenter WebServices problems

16, Jun 2011

After almost a year, I have had problems with the VMware WebServices (the Tomcat web apps packaged into vCenter server) not working properly.  At every upgrade, I have had issues where the apps that were “fixed” by support break again.  I knew I had to be doing something wrong.  I thought that vCenter was just [...]

Monitoring challenges moving critical systems in virtual infrastructure

3, Jun 2010

Like many shops, we have finally attained buy-in from all our stakeholders for virtualization.  As a result, we’ve pushed more and more into our infrastructure.  And while VMware is the most datacenter ready solution for virtualization, it is not without its shortcomings — monitoring and visibility into the infrastructure being one of the biggest. While we were [...]

Path failures on ESX4 with HP storage

8, Apr 2010

Since we began upgrading our clusters to ESX4, we have been having strange “failed physical path” messages in our vmkernel logs.  I don’t normally post unless I know the solution to a problem, but in this case, I’ll make an exception.  Our deployment has been delayed and plauged by the storage issues that I mentioned [...]

Broken iPhone, happy ending

21, Sep 2009

Friday evening, at approximately 10pm, my iPhone fell and was badly injured. It’s face was cracked and looked terrible. Fortunately, it still responded and I could use it. Saturday, after checking, I was still under a long contract with AT&T, so no cheap replacement option there. I knew from reading, that Apple was offering screen [...]

Month of silence, because of a blade enclosure

5, Mar 2009

The past month of my life has been spent dealing with the fall-out over a massive failure of our local blade enclosure.

Twas the Night Before New Years, sysadmin style

3, Jan 2009

Twas the night of new years, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.  The little one had passed out, and we’d put her to bed.  We had all celebrated with Carson, Dick Clark and the rest. Mom in her kerchief and I in my cap, had just settled [...]

HP’s complex products + HP support = fiasco

19, Aug 2008

One of my most recent projects at HTC has been implementing our HP Bladesystem (not to be confused with a BladeCenter – that’s IBM’s product!). For the most part, its gone extremely smooth and the solution is fantastic for a sprawling datacenter. It really allows you to consolidate and concentrate your computing in the datacenter. [...]


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