10-part Site Recovery Manager – with IBM XIV

This is a step-by-step process on how to install, configure and utilise VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) with the IBM XIV SRA (Storage Replication Adapter).  This has been loosely based on a similar post on the Sys@dmin Tutorials site (http://www.sysadmintutorials.com/tutorials/vmware-vsphere-5-x/site-recovery-manager-5/) but has been used in a Production environment to migrate servers from one data centre to another.  Please also note […]

Excluding Backup Disk from Veeam

I came across this issue the other day whilst I was installing Veeam Backup & Replication 6 for a customer.  The issue was not so much about excluding a disk from the Veeam backup but excluding the Veeam backup repository disk from a backup. This is the story of the situation, the reason for the issue and then the solution […]

Checking Process Age Powershell Script

The other day I stumbled across a powershell that is useful for checking out the age of a process running on a computer, unfortunately I cannot remember where I discovered it and therefore cannot give the relevant credit to the creator. I can here many of you say, about why is this Powershell script important and why have I placed […]

Huawei G300 Android Phone

So anyone who knows me, also knows that I like Android phones and especially like budget Android phones with good features. I previously had the ZTE Blade (also known as the Orange San Francisco), this was the ultimate budget Android phone, encompassing relatively good components into a cheap phone.  The ZTE Blade also caused a bit of a phenomenon, it […]

Tablets – Revisited – My Purchase

Okay, so here is the follow-up of my purchase and a general review of the tablet I chose after my previous post. As you may have seen, I was undecided on which tablet to purchase but was leaning towards getting the Asus Transformer TF101 tablet. Well, a month or so ago, I went and made my purchase.  I purchased the […]

Virtual Machine Disk Alignment

Some of this information is taken from the excellent work that Ricky El-Qasem (http://read.virtualizeplanet.com/) has done.   I have gone through and tested this procedure on a few machines with good results but please note that I do not take any responsibility for any damage that occurs to a virtual machine through performing these tasks.  My advice is to always […]

Veeam Backup & Replication – Full System Restore

The restore procedure for Veeam Backup & Replication v5 is really very simple, if you have suffered a system crash… as long as you have the correct files in place. I recently had this issue, I had Veeam Backup & Replication v5 installed on a virtual machine using the inbuilt SQL Server 2005 Express edition.  The backups are stored locally […]

Veeam Backup & Replication 5 – A review

Before Veeam Backup & Replication v6 is released, I thought that I would take some time to go through the use and features of Veeam Backup & Replication from a user’s point of view. Within our company we have been using Veeam Backup & Replication for the past three years, since version 3 of the software.  We had chosen the […]

Configuring a vMA Syslog Server

A similar post has been posted by Simon Long but this focused on ESXi 4.0, these instructions are designed for ESXi 4.1. With the following instructions you should be able to configure the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) appliance to be used as a remote log collection server for ESXi 4.1. The reason this is required is because ESXi clears its […]

Tablets

I thought that it would be a good idea to have a brief discussion about Tablets and my personal preference. As most people would realise there are a number of tablets that are out on the market at the moment.  Tablets are the new technology fashion accessory alongside mobile phones.  The success and the sudden rise in the tablet arena […]