iSCSI > NFS for VMWare - Just don't buy a Drobo

A while back I posted about fighting with VMWare ESXi to get an NFS share mounted as a datastore. Eventually we pulled the trigger on an iSCSI device to start our own little SAN. The SAN was a good idea, but the Drobo B800i that we bought was not. Even with the recommended hard drives the performance is very poor. We are using it to run our Exchange server but that's about all it can handle - even on a dedicated gigabit network with jumbo frames enabled. Apparently "VMWare Certified" does not mean all that much.

JitBit again

We've been using JitBit for about 6 months now and I'm pretty happy with it. It isn't very feature-rich but it keeps track of tickets just fine. There are probably equally good free solutions out there but now that we've paid up we might as well stick with it.

Quite a while ago I configured our old phone server as a monitoring box running Nagios and Cacti. The combination has been invaluable to me. There is nothing more satisfying than getting a call from a user about a problem and being able to say that you've already found and fixed it. The configuration requires a lot of manual work but it was definitely worth it.

JitBit

I'm trying out another ticketing system for work. We need something that will manage internal support tickets as well external access for customer service. I've done quite a bit of research and decided to try out JitBit Help Desk. Its free to try and only about $380 for the full version (if you host it locally, which I am).

If it doesn't work out, ZenDesk looks really good. Unfortunately its a subscription service and I'd rather not add anything else to our monthly bills.

I Heart Newegg

I ordered 4 Hanns-G monitors from Newegg yesterday around 3pm. They arrived this morning at about 9:30.

I love you Newegg. Don't ever leave me.

Deploying Ultra VNC with Group Policy

I found a program on Sourceforge today that customizes an UltraVNC Server install and repacks it into an MSI file for Group Policy installation. The whole setup went very smoothly. Just don't forget to add a Windows Firewall exception to the GPO.

The download also includes the installer for UltraVNC itself.

Print Migrator

I just migrated about 30 printers from our NAS box (running Storage Server 2008) to our Server 2008 AD controller. I used Microsoft's Print Migrator software and the whole operation took about 15 minutes. Linky

NFS shares for ESXi Servers

There are a lot of good tutorials out there to guide you through setting up a NFS share host VMs for VMWare's free ESXi server platform. Unfortunately, a lot of them leave out some details that can make setting your server up a bit challenging.

• Make sure that the NFS permissions for your share are set to allow anonymous access
• Make sure that the UID and SID for the "root" account are set to '0' in SFU
• Add the "Anonymous User" account is a member of the same OU as the "root" account.
• Set the permissions on your NFS share to "read+write" and check the "allow root access" box