VM Reference VI3 Quick Reference Card

From installing ESX to VM guest backup the VI3 Reference Card is a great quick reference guide for any administrator working with VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure 3.

How do you grow a VM disk? What tcp ports are need by ESX? How do you change the service consoles IP? How many hosts can you have in a virtual cluster? Quickly reference answers to these questions and more using the guide.

The latest version of the quick reference card can be found here – http://www.vmreference.com/vi3-card/

Download it and keep it handy.

AutoCopy Extension for Firefox

Thanks to @danieldoughty for the RT a couple days ago from @techhie about Lifehacker’s Top 10 Must-Have Firefox Extensions, 2009 Edition. Great list of useful extensions.

For me the real gem in this list is the AutoCopy extension. With AutoCopy text you select in Firefox is automatically copied to the clipboard. To paste you just click the middle mouse button. The official AutoCopy website is here – http://autocopy.mozdev.org/

Looking for Knowledge Management System Suggestions

I am looking for a corporate knowledge management solution and would like to find out what others out there are using. Currently the IT department uses a simple dokuwiki to keep notes about different systems, procedures, policies, documentation, etc. Believe it or not the wiki works well for the department and you can quickly find most of the information you need about the systems we manage – but we really need to take it a step further.

The rest of the company basically just uses file shares with no formal organization, version control, or security (multiple versions of documents in multiple locations) and a staff website that is not organized, updated, or managed as well as it should be.

We are looking for a more formal company wide knowledge management solution that we can use to manage both internal knowledge for employees and external knowledge for our customers.

Here are our basic requirements:

• Easy to use, manage, and administer – IT does not want to have to be involved in the daily management of knowledge for other departments.
• Our staff and customers need to be able to search the knowledge base to get answers to questions.
• A security scheme so that internal staff has access to one set of docs and customers another.
• Version control or version history.
• Staff need to be able to submit documents (knowledge) for approval and inclusion into the knowledge base (work flow).
• Need to be able to track what knowledge our staff and customers are searching for.
• An article rating system would be a plus (Was this article helpful kind of rating).

We have seen demos from a few knowledge management solution providers: Novo Solutions, Talisma, and SilverCloud Systems.

Each of these offer a good solution but so far I am really impressed with the Novo Solutions solution. It met the requirements and I really like the way Novo Solutions integrates the KB with Help Desk/Support functions, the ability for each department to manage their own knowledge, an admin and reporting interface that is easy to use, and the price is within our budget.

I would like to hear about what some other people out there are using for their knowledge management, especially if you happen to be using a solution from one of the companies mentioned above. What do you use? How did the installation go? How much day to day administration/management is required? What do the end users (internal/external) think? Do you feel the system was worth the investment? What is one feature you wish the solution had? What is the most important thing we should consider when looking for a knowledge management solution?

Any input anyone can give would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

RVTools – Free VMWare ESX/Virtual Center Management Tool

This small but useful tool is a must have for any ESX 3.x/Virtual Center 2.x admin. It gives you easy access to tons of useful information about your virtual environment. How much disk space is available on what datastore, what virtual machines have snapshots, what virtual machines have the CDROM currently mounted, how many processors assigned to each VM, and a ton of other information with just the click of the mouse.

Download RVTools here – http://www.robware.net/

Here is the developers description:

RVTools is a small .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual machines. Interacting with VirtualCenter 2.x or ESX 3.x RVTools is able to list information about cpu, memory, disks, nics, cd-rom, floppy drives, snapshots, VMware tools, ESX hosts, datastores and health checks. With RVTools you can disconnect the cd-rom or floppy drives from the virtual machines and RVTools is able to list the current version of the VMware Tools installed inside each virtual machine. and update them to the latest version.

Sociable WordPress Plugin

This afternoon I installed a WordPress Plugin called Sociable that automatically adds icons that link to different social networking/bookmarking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to post. Neat little tool since it allow people to share your post with others on these networks by basically just clicking on the icons. Just check out the Share & Enjoy icons at the bottom of this post.

I regularly post to Twitter and it updates my Facebook status. Anyway the Sociable plugin works well but I found another version Sociable-Italia that has a feature that creates TinyUrls to help you keep to the 140 character limit of twitter. Other than TinyUrls and the settings page being in Italian in Sociable-Italia, I think the plugins are basically identical.

Anyway I added the code that generates the TinyUrl from Sociable-Italia to the Sociable plugin by editing sociable.php in the wp-content/plugins/sociable directory. Find the line

$url = $site['url'];

and add this after it

if ($sitename == ‘TwitThis’) {
$twitperma = file_get_contents(‘http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=’.$permalink);
$url = str_replace(‘PERMALINK’, $twitperma, $url);
} else {
$url = str_replace(‘PERMALINK’, $permalink, $url);
}

I also added the title of the post to the twitthis icon. Find the line:

‘url’ => ‘http://twitter.com/home?status=PERMALINK’,

and change it to this

‘url’ => ‘http://twitter.com/home?status=PERMALINK :: TITLE’,

Of course if I have to update the plugin in the future this will stop working unless I remember to redo this, perhaps the author of the plugin will add this to a future release.

Great little plugin – download it here.

Wireshark is a must have tool

Wireshark is a FREE network protocol analyzer. A must have tool for tracking down network traffic issues. The VoIP analysis has saved me tons of time tracking down phone issues.

Download it here http://www.wireshark.org/

Windows Disk Defrag Tool

Free, easy, and quick.

UltraDefrag – Windows Disk Defragmentation Utility

UltraDefrag is powerful disk defragmentation tool for Windows NT/Vista/XP/Server2003. Extremely fast and useful. Some of the unique features of UD are ability to defragment system files at boot time and defragmenting single file or directory.

How to backup an Active Directory Domain Controller with AVAMAR

Just some notes on backing up an Active Directory domain controller or the system state of any Windows client using EMC’s AVAMAR.
—

Install the AVAMAR client on the DC(s) to be backed up.

In the AVAMAR Administrator create a Dataset for the DCs (WindowsDC).

Use the Windows file system plugin and do not set any exclusions.

On the Options Tab check the Backup Windows System State check box and define a Backup label.

The AVAMAR client uses the NTBackup Utility to create a backup of the system state, it stores this backup in var in the avamar client install directory (C:\Program Files\avs\var\).  If the space on that drive is limited you can set an attribute systemstatefile with a value of the full path to store the back up – D:\avs\SystemState.bkf (after you set the attribute/value make sure to hit + to add it)

Now create a Policy Group for the Dataset and set the schedule, retention, and add the clients (the AD Domain Controllers). Once you enable the group it will be run on the schedule or it can be run on demand.

When the backup runs the AVAMAR client first uses the Windows NTBackup Utility to backup the  critical system state information such as the registry and the Sysvol directory.

Reference the AVAMAR System Administration Manual for more details on System State backup and restore.

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