Sam has been working in the IT industry for nearly 20 years now, and is currently working for VMware as a Senior Technical Marketing Manger in the Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) focussed on Automation. Previously, he has worked as consultant for VMware PSO, specializing in cloud automation and network virtualization. His technical experience includes design, development and implementation of cloud solutions, network function virtualisation and the software defined datacentre. Sam specialises in automation of network virtualisation for cloud infrastructure, enabling public cloud solutions for service providers and private or hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise.
Sam holds multiple high level industry certifications, including the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) for Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2013-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert NSX, vExpert VSAN and vExpert Cloud sub-programs.
Getting a SCOM 2007 R2 SCOM agent on TMG is a useful way of monitoring TMG, especially with the SCOM TMG Management Pack – it’s not exactly “out-of-the-box” functionality though, with many sources I’ve read simply stating that it can’t be done. There are some half-working solutions I’ve seen, but nothing that worked for me.
The process involves simply opening the correct ports and protocols between the TMG servers and the SCOM management servers, which after a few attempts watching the live logs, I found.
SCOM 2007 R2’s Audit Collection Services (ACS from now on) is very useful for meeting compliance (e.g. Sarbanes Oxley) and security audit requirements – working with financial companies often requires such compliance. It’s pretty simple to install in a domain environment – you run the installer to create a collection server, then activate the forwarder on the client servers.
When it comes to servers you really want to audit, those that are by definition more at risk from security breach because they are publicly accessible, it’s not so straightforward.
Today I was configuring a new FTP server based on IIS7 (well, 7.5 technically as it’s a Server 2008 R2 host), and I wanted an easy way to add and remove allowed IP addresses based on either an XML config file or a CSV import. Customers’ IP addresses are added or removed regularly, but I didn’t want to have to update their details twice, once on the server and once in the documents.
Recently I had cause to configure iSCSI multipathing on a test ESXi server. The production environment servers use iSCSI HBAs to connect to the back end storage, so multipathing them is a straight-forward setup.
It’s good practice to separate VMotion, virtual machine and iSCSI traffic, it also helps you manage those logical and physical connections.
Connect to your ESXi server using the vSphere Client and select the host. Go to the configuration tab and click “Add Networking…”.
In this post I will be installing a TMG Array as a “back firewall” behind a hardware firewall. The Array will consist of two virtual servers, TMG01 and TMG02 which each have 3 NICs. One NIC will be dedicated to the LAN network, accessible internally. One NIC will be dedicated to the DMZ network, accessible to the outside world on a static mapped IP. The third NIC will be a dedicated intra-array communications NIC as per Microsoft’s recommendation.
vMA is available as a Virtual Appliance (OVF) from VMware. To install it on VMware Workstation 7, open Workstation and select Import or Export to import a new OVF, the URL for the latest OVF for vMA is on the vMA download page
As per this article on virtualkenneth.com, you need to edit the VMX file to change the SCSI card and OS type, otherwise you’ll have a kernel panic on boot.
Wordle.net is a great little site that’s been around for ages – but it gives quite a unique insight into the content of your blog – just shove the RSS feed in and out comes a nice word cloud. I found it interesting to compare this to the Tag cloud generated from how I tagged my posts – for example Exchange is the predominant word in the Wordle.net cloud – but not in the tag cloud.
With the release of Exchange 2010 SP1, administrators can now use separate Mailbox Databases to store the Personal Archives of users – this is particularly useful if you have some larger, slower (and probably by virtue, older) storage that’s not really up to the I/O of your Exchange Server (that old SAN/NAS sitting in the corner of the server room?). It’s also useful if you just don’t have the capacity on your main storage.
Exchange SP1 has now been released, so I thought I’d document the upgrade process for my small Exchange 2010 organisation, consisting of one CAS/Transport/Mailbox server, and an Edge Transport server.
References The starting point is always working out if you *need* to upgrade – what’s the business argument. For that you need to look at what’s new in Exchange 2010 SP1, the release notes and prerequisites. Finally, the installation instructions for upgrading from Exchange 2010 RTM to SP1.
