ESX 4 and iSCSI - Networking Setup

My quick and dirty notes on how to setup iSCSI for ESX with Jumbo Frames.

Continue reading ESX 4 and iSCSI – Networking Setup

VMware Hardending Guide

Public Draft for now.

http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/general/security?view=documents

Citrix Branch Repeater

The Branch Repeater is a 1U appliance that is installed in the Branch Office.

It is used to optimize WAN traffic thourgh compression and caching.

Because it is a Citrix product it can de-dupe and increase the compression on ICA connections (XenApp and XenDesktop). This would be a great way [...]

Microsoft Support for Exchange in a Virtualized Environment

If you aren’t running WS08 it isn’t supported…

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc794548(EXCHG.80).aspx

VMware ThinApp

VMware’s Application Virtualization.

Just like Microsoft’s App-V and Symantec’s Workspace, ThinApp packages all the components of an application into a single executable.  What separate ThinApp from the crowd is that the package runs without client software already installed on desktop that runs the package, I would [...]

Citrix XenApp

Citrix XenApp is a technology that delivers applications to users.

Previous versions were an extension of Microsoft’s Terminal Services, allowing for specific applications installed on a Terminal Server to be available to the users, without giving the users access directly to the desktop.  This simplified securing the Terminal Server [...]

Citrix Technologies

I was recently at a Citrix Partner seminar, they covered a slew of their products.

I’ve worked with Presentation Server/XenApp for a while, but I’ve never been had the chance to play with anything else.  It looked very interesting and I want to play with XenServer and NetScaler.

I will [...]

Application Virtualization

Some programs don’t play well with others, some programs are very finicky. Some programs are too much work to install on every desktop and create massive management headaches trying to keep them up to date. For programs like this there is a solution: Application Vitualization.

Application virtualization’s objective is to decouple the application  from [...]

App-V

Microsoft’s purchase of SoftGrid has enabled them to release an application virtualization product, called App-V.

What is application virtualization? That is a question for another time.

How does MS do application virtualization? At it’s simplest (and it can get quite complicated) it is a sandbox for an application to run in. The sandbox [...]

vSphere

vSphere is VMware’s new brand name for their products.  For version 4 they decided to bring all their products under a single banner.

The tag line includes “Cloud” or “Cloud Infrastructure”, which, being buzz words, are confusing many people.

Think of vSphere as just the latest version and don’t worry about the marketing terminology.