churchIT

Virtual Iron

I had been planning on moving to ESX server from VMWare server for months but the $5000+ was a major stumbling block and made it harder to justify its ROI. I ran across a couple reviews of a server virtualization product named Virtual Iron a couple months ago. It is a competitor to VMWare ESX Server and other hypervisor based virtualization products. One review performed by Infoworld really caught my attention and prompted me to call their sales department for more information. I talked with a gentleman that went over the features of Virtual Iron. They offer some of the advanced features VMWare does like Snapshots, LiveMigrate and LiveCapacity and at 1/5 the price of VMWare. This looks like it could be a very compelling product and I have received the evaluation for their product so I will keep you posted on how that goes.

Terminal Services and Disk Management

I had the craziest problem the last 2 months. On one of my two Windows Server 2003 with VMware Server boxes I was not able to mount and format any volumes on our EqualLogic iSCSI SAN. I troubleshot this from every angle and Googled every possible phrase. I just could not figure it out. I finally broke down and called Microsoft Professional Support last week and spent 4 hours on the phone with Microsoft. They tried everything and could not figure out a solution. The tech finally suggested that I log on locally to the server and the problem was fixed. All drives mounted and formatted successfully.

I do 95% of my server management through the Terminal Services Client (MSTSC) and almost never at the console. I was told a couple times before that some operations could only be done at the console and not through MSTSC. I honestly thought those techs were full of crap and were trying pass on a tough service call. To get around this issue you can also run MSTSC with the /console switch "mstsc /console". You may also run the console switch if you were logged into a console session on a server and need to remote desktop to that session.