Wednesday, June 21, 2006

TechDays June 23rd and 24th

This week, Friday and Sat is the Pacific IT Professionals event, TechDays that I have been helping Doug Spindler put together. It should be a fun and interesting chance for ITPros to hear some great content from the likes of Acronis, EqualLogic, Microsoft, and a bunch of really qualified speakers. I think it is some of the most cost effective training you can get (ok, I don't want to say cheap!) given what is out there today.
I will be presenting along with Mike Hansen from Peak IP Solutions on VMware ESX. We will be covering both 2.5 and the new 3.0 product with a hands on lab that folks can play with to see how to install VM's and how to admin them.
- Ed

Fun with a Cisco 871W Router

I picked up a Cisco 871W Router to play with and I have to admit that I am very impressed with this little (very quiet - no fan) router from Cisco. It has a single F4 FastEthernet port that is run as a routed interface and then it has 4 FastEthernet ports that can act as switchports for access, trunk or any combination you want to do along with irb, Etherchannels and the regular vlan configurations you expect. In addition, I can run cbac, ipv6, nbar, QoS, ospf (v2 and v3), bgp, eigrp and rip (v1 and v2) on this thing. To top it all off, it has a wireless interface built in that can act as a bridge, a standard AP and is completely customizable in terms of authentication and access rules.
I am starting to set up my own internal lab with several of these just to practice some routing and wireless configurations. I am also using them as the basis of my IPv6 labs for the Windows Vista hands on labs. So far they have been great!
- Ed

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

HP Releases c-Class Servers Blades

Well, looks like those of us interested in HP Blade Servers should be excited. The new c-class line has been released (granted it only has Intel Xeon chips for now) but the density and flexibility they are putting into these designs are pretty cool. You can do a full height BL480c or a half height BL460c. I imagine Opteron 64-bit dual core will be released soon. With the full height configuration I would not be surprised if they could fit 4 sockets allowing 8 64-bit CPU's with the Opteron. Wow. VMware ESX junkies have got to be excited about the potential in this...
- Ed

Friday, June 09, 2006

SenderBase - Global Email Traffic Monitoring

So, for those that don't deal with large volumes of e-mail it can be difficult to find some of the great online tools out there simply because you don't need them. One that you should be aware of is SenderBase which allows you to search by all sorts of parameters such as IP address, CIDR ranges and domain name. Lots of interesting things you can find there.
- Ed

Monday, June 05, 2006

VMware Infrastructure 3 announced - but can you download it yet?

Well, it seems that VMware decided to jump the gun and announce what their product offering and bundles were going to be a little bit before the bulk of the products are actually available. Everyone is really interested in getting their hands on VMware ESX 3.0, especially if you didn't make it on the beta.

I'm excited to see all the new enhancements VMware has put into their products. I can sort of forgive them for announcing early, they are doing that to meet the promises they gave the street about product release in this quarter. Gotta keep the street happy or the stock goes in the tank. Still, sort of frustrating to go to the site and try and do the download and only have available ESX Server 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x, such is life.
- Ed

Presenting at SFNTUG tomorrow, June 6th on VMware ESX

Mike Hansen w/(Peak IP Solutions) and I will be presenting to the SFNTUG about VMware ESX and doing a practical - hands on lab with the hardware at the user group. It should be very cool and good fun.
This is a slightly different presentation then the hands on lab presentation we gave at TVNUG since we can't have that many folks on the system building VM's - well not until we get a lot more hardware! Come visit the meeting if you are in the San Francisco Bay Area.
- Ed

6bone will shut down tomorrow!

It is officially here, the 6bone will shut down tomorrow June 6th, 2006. June 6th is also considered IPv6 day as this is the official phased end of experimental use of IPv6. Basically, everyone is saying IPv6 is ready to be mainstream and ready for production.
Wow, sort of cool news.
- Ed