Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Wow... things really get strange, eh?

Anyway, things have yet been in the air again. My second oldest daughter came down to visit me, and things finally calmed down enough with her visiting her family up north for me to even remember I have a blog.

I'll admit, I'm horrid about these things.

Anyway, doing some home work right now (damn wood fences... evil things), as well as additional network maintenance around the house. I've gotten several servers and a custom APS/UPS solution setup and I'm currently working on the monitoring and notification interfaces for it. I've even designed a custom pcb based on the arduino for the monitoring hardware. But now for today's topic-

After several years of supporting various server OS's, I finally found the time to install Windows Home Server. At the moment, I can't say I'm terribly impressed with it, especially given how crippled it is out of the box. I'm going to keep it around to see if there's anything I really like about it, besides it's use of Single Instance Storage.

Another first... well, first in years anyway. I installed and tried to run hyper-v when it was first made available with the community previews and such... and I hated it. By the time it had come to market, I was already used to using, scripting and monitoring vmware esx. I have just gotten an old server out of my company's racks and decided I would give it a good stress test. After being impressed that only two drives out of 16 had suffered any damage (one's dead, and one's having ECC errors) I decided to install win2k8 and hyper-v on it.

Just to see what's changed, mind you.

The weird thing is, I've been supporting it in a half ass way for years for other people, just solving issues second hand from descriptions of the problems. I can't say I've touched the software in years. So when I loaded the MMC for hyper-v today, I was pretty disgusted. It's every bit as clumsy as I remembered, and I'm going to have to learn the powershell scriptlets to use for it. One thing that had put me off in the beginning had to do with the inability to easily identify a vm from the command line- definitely a game ender in my eyes. We'll see in the coming weeks if that's changed or not.

Another thing that will be up and coming- a (hopefully new 1u twin) box for Xen studies. While I'm nowhere near conceited enough to believe I'm an expert in any of these fields, that doesn't keep me from wanting to know as much as humanly possible.

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