By Nicholas Schoonover on 2/6/2010 11:18 AM

Quite literally! At least I will on February 23rd for all attendees of my San Francisco seminar! That’s right, Double-Take Software has graciously volunteered free copies of our Double-Take Move migration product. That should be really appealing to anyone planning on performing a server migration in the near future. Prepare to get your weekend back. Here are the quick value points of Double-Take migration solutions.

Migrate Data, Apps and Operating System, right down to the SID. ‘nuf said! Completely Server and Storage Independent. The only X2X Migration solution in the industry! Migrate P2P from an old HP server to new Dell, P2V, V2P (Yup!), V2V (VMWare to Hyper-V, etc.), old EMC SAN to new Dell EquaLogic. Eliminates production down-time. That’s right, no kicking users or quiesce needed. Real-Time. No lengthy periodic “refreshes”, it’s real-time. Plus it’s continuous after the initial sync, so you actually migrate when it makes sense and not when you’re forced to by other tools....

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By Nicholas Schoonover on 12/19/2009 3:05 PM

I have a couple of cluster nodes that I failed to size the C: drive adequately and began to run out of disk space. No problem! They’re all virtual machines, so I just need to expand the disks and away I go! Well, I’ve run into this situation several times since my lab has a lot of machines that I’ve upgraded over the years and while 15 - 25 GB volumes were fine prior to Windows 2008, it just doesn’t get it now and I like to use 40 GB volumes. That said, I’ve seen several cases where the virtual disks grow correctly and show up in the OS correctly, but when you try and use the Windows 2008 disk extend feature then you get this error from Logical Disk Manager, “The parameter is incorrect.”

 

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By Nicholas Schoonover on 12/17/2009 10:04 AM

Tim Green at DTM Systems (tim.green@dtm.ca) in Vancouver, BC sent this to me today and I had to share. Tim is a great engineer that I’ve know for years and he does a job bridging business requirements to technical implementation. I have a lot of respect for his abilities and as you’ll read shortly, we have a shared sense of humor.

I’ve also been working with a large company on a HUGE migration project and I’m sure that they would second the motion to use server and storage migration solutions from Double-Take Software as well. So, without further ado…

 

  Twas the night before Monday and all through the room Geeks bent over keyboards as the deadline did loom. Tables were strewn with pizza half-eaten Pop cans and coffee cups and egos now beaten. The clock was ticking slowly as still they all sat While visions of sleep flew past just like that.

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By Nicholas Schoonover on 11/17/2009 4:34 PM

I think that I may have to smash my head into a steel door the next time someone tries to argue network performance with me. I have had this conversation WAY too often for 15 years and can’t take it anymore. I have to blog about it in the hopes of performing some enlightenment. There are way too many people that try arguing that their ping latency is next to nothing, and they usually debate that their WAN is perfectly stable. Trust me, you’re wrong, wrong, wrong. Please allow me to explain why.

PING MEANS CONNECTIVITY – I am SO tired of people telling that they have great WAN connectivity between their sites with excellent ping times. Ping s a very poor indicator of data transfer latency because it runs as an ICMP protocol on IP, and has high priority. Getting a ping response from another machine means that it’s on the network, nothing more can be reliably discerned. One of these days I’ll write a little utility that uses TCP and UDP to send user definable data payloads to another machine and measure that...

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By Nicholas Schoonover on 11/17/2009 11:58 AM

System migration is a difficult and time consuming process, only your boss’s boss thinks otherwise. They never spent all those weekends freezing in the data center wasting countless hours doing migrations, waiting for backups and restores to complete, reconfiguring system settings, testing, tweaking, promising the family that you’ll be home soon. This is migration and anyone that says otherwise, hasn’t really worked in IT. In-fact, that should be my next litmus test for an interviewee. “So, how long did your last migration take?” An immediate shrug and drooping of eyes will indicate an affirmative of real world experience and not another paper certified semi-professional. If the candidate immediately throws their coffee into the wall, then they’ll get an offer immediately. Do not pass Go; please go directly to HR and begin doing your new hire paper work.

I guess that it’s hard for most non-IT people to understand the pain and suffering that comes with migrations because they probably have misconceptions...

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By Nicholas Schoonover on 11/15/2009 12:42 PM

I ran into this issue today when finally rebuilding my lab DC01.Contoso.com and using DCPromo. This warning pops up and since I had crippling DNS issues in the past (Thanks again Mike D!), I got really nervous.

 



 

Solution: It seems that this message can be safely ignored in my case because according to the article that I finally dug up (http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/winserverDS/thread/38ccac86-375c-4402-9bfc-660ce5c0a606),...

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By Nicholas Schoonover on 11/9/2009 1:24 PM

Picked up the new Droid phone this weekend on Pete D's advice. We have the same picky taste in phones. I.e. iPhone was a cool idea, but no physical keyboard sucks (I touch type... and write a LOT of long emails), AT&T sucks (Duh, bad), Apple sucks (yes, I'm still pissed about the screwing they gave us on the Apple IIGS and shall remain so forever), no tethering sucks (I do this a lot too when on the road, some emails/docs just can't be typed on a phone), no I don't want jail break crap. Battery always worries me, because I use my phone a LOT for business and personal, so I'm always cranking away when I'm out of the house, but I figured I'd give it a shot because my Moto Q has reached the end of its' useful life for me. The Droid solved all but the tethering problem on day one and that's coming in January, so I can live until then.

One of my big dilemas, albeit not nearly big enough to stop me from buying it, was accessing my hosted email accounts (here and others). I host them on Live Mail, which is totally...

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By Nicholas Schoonover on 10/24/2009 5:16 PM

Check out my mix of the IT Crowd. If you aren't watching this show, then you're missing out on great fun. You can watch it on BBC or NetFlix has all the episodes thus far.

Hello IT.mp3

By Nicholas Schoonover on 10/22/2009 10:09 AM

Douglas D. sent it to me the other day and it was so truthfully funny that I had to share.