Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between
My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together
Category Archives: Microsoft
Managing lots of RSS feeds
Posted by on October 31, 2007
I’ve been into reading people’s blogs and tracking websites like theregister for a good couple of years. I never really found an RSS reader app that worked for me; I wanted to build custom views of feeds, flag and prioritize them and mark things to read later – and I could find standalong apps to do these things but not one that did it all – hopefully this post will show you how I do it – if you have some other suggestions feel free to comment & share them.
Outlook 2007 supports RSS feeds out of the box, and it’s ideal as I already use Outlook and it’s calendar/tasks features to manage my workflow. Outlook 2003 and later (I think) added the ability to flag and tag items and even build a custom category list.
It means I can basically add all my RSS feeds as sources of information in the same way as I use it to manage my company emails, and categorise, flag as required and it all merges with into task list.
I can do this categorization manually or I think automatically via a rule
Custom Categories
Flagging – which passes it into Outlook’s task list
I have two main folder/sub-folder structures – regular reads, for feeds that have a lot of frequent/interesting traffic and another folder/sub-folder structure for less noisy but important feeds (for example software release notifications etc.)
Best of all I can build custom views across of all my RSS feeds using custom search folders – for example I have the following (yes, and lots of unread emails too!)
And this gives me the following consolidated view across all my feeds, sorted by date (but could be lots of other criteria)
The add feed GUI components definitely have the feel of an afterthought but using them works brilliantly for me. Clicking on a page’s RSS feed brings up Outlook but doesn’t want to add it as a feed so I’ve always cut & pasted.. I assumed this was a beta bug but have been using RTM for quite a while now – must get round to investigating that.
Technorati Tags: Microsoft , office , 2007 , Outlook , Cool ways to do things , RSS , managing feeds
Building a Better Test Lab
Posted by on October 22, 2007
This is the outline of a number of posts on building a {relatively} low-cost accurate test lab of your production systems using P2V, VMWare, ESX, custom scripted HP voodoo, HP MSA1500 SAN, Virtual Switch Tagging (VST), Checkpoint on Sun Firewalls and Cisco switches. in order to clone a complicated multi-tier Windows based production platform with lots of DMZ segments into a VMWare farm for use as a test/dev & development environment (and possibly a DR one too in future)
This is all based on some of my recent work with customers* and I hope will help someone else to navigate the pitfalls (both business and technological) I & my team encountered in delivering this idea.
The following is a list of titles or sections and will hopefully serve as an index, but please, don’t expect them all at once I do have a day job to do! 😉
Why do this?
The traditional approach to test labs & why I think it’s wrong
Pro’s
Con’s
Isn’t this all a bit too complicated/mad-scientist/far out?
Reload lab from production process – how often?
is change control important?
What do you want a test lab to do?
Scoping/Expectation Setting
Load Testing – is VMWare right for this
Dynamic/Grid based approach to load testing
Break/Fix analysis
Release Testing
Options for disaster recovery/production failover
What won’t it do?
Storage Design
“Big” SAN’s are always better if you have them, but what if you don’t?
HP MSA 1500 – it’s not big, but it’s clever
Disk/SAN bandwidth – my practical experiences
Server Design
ESX Node specification
The RAM per VM debate
Networking Design
VLAN tagging
VST vs. Guest Tagging etc.
Firewalls
Clone to test lab Process
P2V Tools – VMWare Convertor vs. the rest
Changing IP addresses
HP uninstall Scripts
Build-Out Steps
Build ESX environment
Scripted VMWare installations – automatically create custom Virtual NIC’s/LANs
Adjust install paths for SAN storage
Set administrator password/create accounts
Install Networking
Configure VLAN’ing
IP Load Balancing
Install Firewall(s)
Test Communications between virtual DMZ segments and across hosts
Import Production machines
VMWare Convertor
General issues found
P2V Windows 2003 Domain Controllers – Special Notes
P2V’ing entire Windows Cluster’s – not that easy but do-able
P2V Process over a WAN – issues found & workaround.
Fresh VM 1st boot, changing IP address etc.
HP tools removal
Some further problems caused by changing IP addressing.
Into the Future
Can you use this for disaster recovery?
VMWare Lab Manager
Total Automation – Platespin products?
*This article has been deliberately made anonymous & I’m afraid I can’t disclose the name of the customer or provide any further reference materials without a commercial engagement via my employer, you can contact me for more details on this via this blog.
This article & information contained within is provided entirely without warranty.
Technorati Tags: VMWare , ESX , HP , MSA1500 , Test Lab , P2V , production , clone , Sun , Checkpoint firewall , VLAN tagging , VST
Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between 