Howtos Archives - Page 2 of 4

What I’ve learned about IT purchasing

Posted on July 20, 2015 by Justin Paul | 10 Comments

Disclaimer: What I share with you in this article is not a secret, if you do your research you can find all of this information with the help of Google. I’ve worked in the VAR (Value Added Reseller) business for over…

Repurposing PC’s as VMware View Clients

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Justin Paul | 1 Comment

If you are one of the people who keeps Microsoft Software Assurance on your licensing you are going to love this option if you are thinking about VDI. Microsoft released a stripped down version of Windows 7 called ThinPC and the…

MS SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups, a better way to cluster

Posted on September 12, 2013 by Justin Paul | 3 Comments

I’ve done posts before about how much I hate Microsoft Clusters, mainly because of their shared disk requirements. While VMware does support a virtualized Microsoft cluster with shared disks, the bottom line is that its just a pain in the…

Using the VMware OS Optimization Tool for VDI locally

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Justin Paul | 0 Comments

In July VMware released a new fling on the VMware Labs site that is designed to help you apply all VMware best practices for virtual desktops in one easy swoop. There are two ways to run the tool, locally and…

Moving to HP Cloud DNS Services

Posted on July 8, 2013 by Justin Paul | 1 Comment

Update 2016-10-20: Since writing this article HP has shutdown their cloud offering. I now host my DNS at Cloudflare and it works great! The other day I got an email that said something to the effect of “HP Cloud DNS…

Microsoft Licensing in a Virtual World

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Justin Paul | 4 Comments

I have thought about touching this topic several times, and each time I start to write the post I find myself stopping. I think it’s mostly because this debate is hard for some people to get their hands around, and…

Getting Started with a vCloud Service Provider (a customer How-To)

Posted on October 4, 2011 by Justin Paul | 1 Comment

The goal of this post is to convey just how easy it is to work with virtual machines in a public cloud that is using VMware vCloud Director software. This post will assume that you have already signed up with…

How to Size Memory for VMware Servers

Posted on June 8, 2011 by Justin Paul | 15 Comments

One of the things you have to do when building out your VMware cluster is size the amount of memory (RAM) you need. From what I have seen most people assume that by adding up the total amount of RAM…

Veeam Storage Best Practices

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Justin Paul | 6 Comments

Note that right now these are mainly based upon my experience with the ExaGrid backup storage appliance. However, as I get the chance to test other appliances I will update this post and add to the list. Disk to Disk…