Rack Tables

Asset management of datacenter
http://racktables.org/

Orion solarwinds

Orion Network Performance Monitor (NPM) makes it easy to quickly detect, diagnose, and resolve performance issues within your ever-changing corporate or data center network. It delivers real-time views and dashboards that enable you to visually track network performance at a glance. Plus, with our dynamic network topology maps and automated network discovery features, you can keep up with your evolving network without breaking a sweat. And Orion NPM is the easiest product of its kind to use and maintain, meaning you will spend more time actually managing networks, not supporting Orion NPM.

http://www.solarwinds.com/products/orion/

Simplify Virtualization Management

http://www.toutvirtual.com/index.php

VMware Support - Advanced Root Cause Analysis

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1717-Behind-the-scenes-at-VMware-Support-Advanced-Root-Cause-Analysis.html

http://www.slideshare.net/esloof/advanced-root-cause-analysis

NEXENTA Storage - NFS, iSCSI, CIFS

Enterprise class Open Storage

NexentaStor provides enterprise class unified storage capabilities via a software solution that ends vendor lock-in while delivering superior storage management functionality with a particular focus on virtualized environments.

http://www.nexenta.com/corp/

Zenoss Zenpacks

http://community.zenoss.org/community/zenpacks

The gateway to cloud storage

http://www.nasuni.com/

Oracle on VMware

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/03/more-on-oracle-and-vmwareincluding-other-must-see-resources.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2FdsAV+%28Virtual+Geek%29

VCAP4-DCD Exam Simulation

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1698-VCAP4-DCD-Exam-Simulation.html

http://mylearn.vmware.com/courseware/82525/VCAPDCD_Tutorial.swf

VCAP-DCA Objective 2.2 : Configure and Maintain VLANs, PVLANs and VLAN settings

http://virtual-vargi.blogspot.com/2011/02/vcap-dca-section-2-22.html

Cloud storage

Client software for mounting cloud storage to OS as a local drive
http://www.gladinet.com/p/moreaboutDesktop.htm

Tech Wiki http://www.gladinet.com/gladwiki/moin.cgi/Install_Cloud_Desktop_2_0

Cloud storage can be from simple FTP, through Google Docs, up to EMC Atmos.

PowerGUI

PowerGUI is an extensible graphical administrative console for managing systems based on Windows PowerShell. These include Windows OS (XP, 2003, Vista), Exchange 2007, Operations Manager 2007 and other new systems from Microsoft. The tool allows to use the rich capabilities of Windows PowerShell in a familiar and intuitive GUI console.

Introduction to PowerGUI demo
http://www.powergui.org/shares/powergui/sbin/docs/PowerGUI_Overview/PowerGUI_Overview.html

PowerGUI Library » Virtualization
http://powergui.org/kbcategory.jspa?categoryID=290

PowerGUI and VMware vCenter Virtual Machine attributes
http://vcommunity.vizioncore.com/monitoring/vfoglight/b/weblog/archive/2011/02/07/easily-create-vfoglight-services-based-on-vcenter-custom-attributes.aspx

EATON Intelligent Power Software Suite

Eaton’s Intelligent Power^® Software Suite gives you all the tools you need to monitor and manage power devices on your network, even in a virtualized environment. This innovative software solution combines the most critical applications in ensuring system uptime and data integrity: not only power monitoring and management, but also graceful shutdown during an extended power outage. Both software programs in this suite, Intelligent Power Manager and Intelligent Power Protector, can be downloaded free of charge.

http://powerquality.eaton.com/products-services/power-management/software-drivers/intelligent-pm.asp

GroupDrive Collaboration Suite

GroupDrive Collaboration Suite
http://webdrive.com/products/groupdrive/index.html
http://webdrive.com/products/webdrive/

Shared network disk as a service.

Project Management Software

Project Management Software As a Service
http://basecamphq.com/

VMware Converter - Summary of Snapshot Errors and Fixes

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-6842

P2V tips

32 bit DSN on 64 bit Windows Server

c:\windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe

Synchronize the Time Server for the Domain Controller with an External Source

Original article: Synchronize the Time Server for the Domain Controller with an External Source
Updated: March 28, 2003

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 R2, Windows Server 2003 with SP1, Windows Server 2003 with SP2

By default, the primary domain controller (PDC) emulator gets its time from the BIOS clock. In a network with a single DC, that DC automatically has this role.

The PDC emulator establishes the time and date settings for all computers within its domain. If the time is not accurately set in the PDC emulator’s BIOS, all computers in the domain have incorrect time and date settings.

To prevent this, you can synchronize the domain controller with an external time source such as the time servers provided by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For a list of the names and IP addresses of NIST time servers for your area, see the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Internet Time Servers link on the Web Resources page at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/reskits/webresources.

Note

* Be aware that the Network Time Protocol (NTP) is unauthenticated, and unencrypted, and it is possible for an intruder to spoof the time root source, causing the wrong time to be set on the DC. You can avoid this possibility by using IPSec to secure the transmission, by accessing the time root source by its IP address rather than its fully qualified domain name, or by purchasing an NTP-capable hardware clock for your DC time synchronization.

To synchronize the domain controller with an external time source

1. Click Start, and then click Command Prompt.

2. In the Command Prompt window, type the following line, where peers is a comma-separated list of IP addresses of the appropriate time sources, and press ENTER:

w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:peers /syncfromflags:MANUAL

The time sources you choose depend on your time zone. For example, if your domain controller is located in the Pacific Time zone, this line might read:

w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:131.107.1.10 /syncfromflags:MANUAL

In this example, the IP address of the timeserver is used instead of the fully qualified domain name for security purposes.

3. Press ENTER. You should get a message that the command completed successfully.

4. Type w32tm /config /update

5. Press ENTER. You should get a message that the command completed successfully.

W32time uses a variable poll interval based on the quality of timesync with the server. On DCs, this interval defaults to between 64 and 1024 seconds.

6. To immediately synchronize with the external time server, type w32tm /resync and press ENTER. You should get a message that the command completed successfully.

7. Type Exit and press ENTER.

=============================
BATCH FOR CZECH REPUBLIC
=============================
Here is quick batch for Czech NTP servers provided by CESNET.

 w32tm /config /manualpeerlist:"195.113.144.204 195.113.144.240" /syncfromflags:MANUAL  
 w32tm /config /update  
 w32tm /resync  

Virtual Machine - Disabling Time Synchronization 

If you are running your Active Directory domain controllers (more specifically PDC emulator) as a virtual machine in VMware vSphere another recommendation is to completely disable VM time synchronization with ESXi host. It is explained in VMware KB 1189 - Disabling Time Synchronization (1189). This will help you to mitigate the problem of Active Directory time issues after several VM operations (vMotion, snapshot, etc.) in case of ESXi host bad time. AD tolerance for time skew is 15 minutes max, at which point things start to fall over. For example during the vMotion operation, the PDC-E's time is adjusted to match the host's time (even though the "synchronize guest time with host" option is not checked on the PDC-E VM). This is a default behavior in ESX, and it should be changed as instructed in VMware KB 1189.

In a nutshell following VM configuration options has to be set to 0.

 tools.syncTime = "0"  
 time.synchronize.continue = "0"  
 time.synchronize.restore = "0"  
 time.synchronize.resume.disk = "0"  
 time.synchronize.shrink = "0"  
 time.synchronize.tools.startup = "0"  
 time.synchronize.tools.enable = "0"  
 time.synchronize.resume.host = "0"   

Note: The value of setting can be 0, false, FALSE, False. All these value have the same effect - not synchronize time after particular VM operation.

You can use following PowerCLI script to set these VM options to particular VMs.

 Clear-Host  
 $o = Add-PSSnapin VMware.VimAutomation.Core  
 $o = Set-PowerCLIConfiguration -InvalidCertificateAction Ignore -Confirm:$false  
 
 # Connect to vCenter  
 Write-Host "Connecting to vCenter ..."  
 $VC = Read-Host "Enter one vCentre Server or multiple vCenter servers delimted by comma."  
 Write-Host "Enter vCenter credentials ..."  
 $CRED = Get-Credential  
 Connect-VIServer -Server $VC -Credential $CRED -ErrorAction Stop | Out-Null  
 
 # Array of virtual machine names   
 #$vm_names = "W2K8R2-test1","W2K8R2-test2"  
 $vm_names = "W2K8R2-test"  
 
 foreach ($vm_name in $vm_names) {  
  Write-Host "VM: [$vm_name]"  
  try {  
   $vm = get-vm -Name $vm_name -ErrorAction Stop  
   New-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vm -Name tools.syncTime -Value 0 -Confirm:$false -Force:$true  
   New-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vm -Name time.synchronize.continue -Value 0 -Confirm:$false -Force:$true  
   New-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vm -Name time.synchronize.restore -Value 0 -Confirm:$false -Force:$true  
   New-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vm -Name time.synchronize.resume.disk -Value 0 -Confirm:$false -Force:$true  
   New-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vm -Name time.synchronize.shrink -Value 0 -Confirm:$false -Force:$true  
   New-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vm -Name time.synchronize.tools.startup -Value 0 -Confirm:$false -Force:$true  
   New-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vm -Name time.synchronize.tools.enable -Value 0 -Confirm:$false -Force:$true  
   New-AdvancedSetting -Entity $vm -Name time.synchronize.resume.host -Value 0 -Confirm:$false -Force:$true  
  } catch {  
   Write-Warning -Message "VM doesn't exist";  
  }  
 }  
 Disconnect-VIserver -Server $VC -Force -Confirm:$false  

Current version of PowerCLI script is available on GitHub here.

How to Install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for VMware vCenter 4

Very nice article how to Install Microsoft SQL Server 2008 for VMware vCenter 4 ...
http://lonesysadmin.net/2010/10/21/how-to-install-sql-server-vmware-vcenter/

If you need to know wwhat TCP/UDP ports are used by MS-SQL then check
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc646023%28SQL.100%29.aspx

VCAP-DCA Index

http://www.seancrookston.com/vcap-dca/