Geeks in Paradise | Brian Chee » July 2006

July 31, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Interop New York is being built

TAGS: Toys and tools

Coming off the sucess of last Holiday season, the Interop trade show will be at the Jacob Javits Center in New York city September 18th through the 21st.

I'll be blogging about the bits and pieces needed to build the world's largest temporary network, and some of the best practices we're developed over the years. Look for more details on security and convergence trends coming down the pipe.

Look for Steve Hulquist and the Interop iLabs talking about trends in Network Access Control (NAC) and their demonstration of NAC solutions including a sneak peak at Microsoft's NAP.

Let me also welcome Steve to the InfoWorld family as he works on an article on NAC/NAP with the InfoWorld editorial staff.

See you in New York...

/brian chee

Posted by Brian Chee on July 31, 2006 08:22 AM

July 21, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Affordable Virtualization

TAGS: Industry Trends

My lab is littered with computers used during software trials that are in need of being regenned. While Norton Ghost has been truly wonderful for freshening a machine, I've always wanted to have a test machine on demand for quickly testing things.

Several years ago I stumbled over VMWare under Linux and liked it enough that I whipped out my credit card. After the sticker shock, I found it a great way to prototype my new Linux Servers and after a few rev's my Windows servers. However at a price tag that rivaled a low end desktop computer, I didn't go beyond that first license.

However, this has changed...previously Virtual PC from Microsoft limited me to a maximum of 10mb/second on the network, no multicast and limited virtual resources. Virtual Server R2 however is a significantly different beast. With MUCH closer ties to the metal, you can now create virtual networks, and attach the virtual machine's (VM) logical devices (ie. CDROM/DVD, floppy, serial port, etc) to physical ports and devices on the host machine. My biggest surprise was when the Debian netinstall was able to do a hardware probe and installed perfectly. So while the host is running at 1280x1024x32color for video, I purposely dropped it down to 800x60x16bit color and gave it a 16gb virtual disk. Everything worked, Debian partitioned the drive, and now reports exactly the physical conditions I gave it.

So the next time you need to do a test drive on a new release of an OS or application, think very hard about the newly free Microsoft Virtual Server R2 (x32 or x64) or the renamed VMWare Server (ex. GSX Server) from EMC.

Posted by Brian Chee on July 21, 2006 01:27 PM

July 03, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Burning iso's without spending bucks.

TAGS: Toys and tools

If you're tired of having to blow bucks on a copy of a 3rd party cd/dvd recorder software just to burn the occasional downloaded iso, take a look at this power toy...

The ISO Recorder is a program from Alex Feinman.com that takes advantage of the internal CD/DVD capabilities of Windows XP and extends it just a bit so that it can handle .iso images. So while I still have a full copy of the CD Recorder software (Nero, Roxio, etc) that came with some of my machines, I've still got a bunch of utility machines that aren't worth the extra bucks for a license. So take a trip to Mr. Feinman's site for a copy that actually also includes the x64 version and a command line version.

/brian chee

Posted by Brian Chee on July 3, 2006 10:48 AM

July 03, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Why go x64?

TAGS: Toys and tools

I just brought up my el'cheapo special from Fry's and here's why I went to an AMD x64 instead of staying 32bit for my desktop.

On one of my many trips to silicon valley I ran across a 1 day special at Fry's for a super deal on an ECS K8T890-A motherboard, an AMD dual core x64 CPU and a couple sticks of 1gb ram...all for around $450.00 Such a deal, but why x64 instead of spending on a dual CPU Xeon or one of the other really spanky deals?

Simply put...virtualization. With Microsoft and VMWare giving away their virtual server products, it just makes sense to carve off a few virtual machines on this beefy box so that I can test out software with impunity. The basic concept is that I can install the x64bit version of either package and then under that carve off virtual machines with varying amounts of system resources. So I stay in the familier Windows world, but with virtual Linux machines and virtual Windows servers at my finger tips. So that misbehaving beta doesn't kill my workstation nor do I have to keep test servers up all the time.

We've gone much further with VMWare ESX server (baremetal) so that our dual opteron based server could support upwards of six virtual machines (mix of Linux and Windows) in order to support our simulated enterprise in last year's Identity Management Shootout. The really cool part was being able to "revert" to a baseline configuration for each vendor within minutes instead of regenning the whole bunch.

Might I suggest you drop by the Microsoft Virtual Server Site and checkout release 2 for download and also take a visit to the VMWare Site where you also download free virtual machine images.

/brian chee

Posted by Brian Chee on July 3, 2006 10:13 AM