Newest Iterations
Exporting Exchange 2007 Mailboxes using PowerShell
Exporting Exchange 2007 Mailboxes using PowerShell Everyone has there own spin on simple ways to export mailboxes from Exchange 2007. What happens if you need something more flexible and easy to use? As the company I work for grows so does the overall demand of the staff people like my self and the other senior level admins are left doing more project work and attending less and less to the day to day operations. However it's the day to day operations that helps keep the company … [Read More...]
Active Directory WMI Filters using Wildcards
Active Directory WMI Filters using Wildcards I was having a hard time finding anything about being able to use wildcards in an Active Directory WMI Filter. Matter of fact I stumbled onto one Microsoft article that states you can use more wildcards when using the "Where X LIKE" statement. We use quite a few WMI Queries for Group Policy Management; mainly centered around specific system names. Let me share with you what we had before I made the updates to simply things. OLD WMI Filter for CSXX … [Read More...]
Cisco SG300 VLAN Setup with VMWare ESXi 5
Cisco SG300 VLAN Setup with VMWare ESXi 5 Part 1 In my VMWare home lab I purchased a 20 port Cisco SG300 switch to manage all of my various VLAN's. The goal as stated in other articles was to try and make the setup to near real world and with that you need port density. Each server has two dual port NIC giving me a total of 4 ethernet connections per server, 5 if I wind up using the onboard NIC. I also have another 11 connections used up for various other rooms through the home, two being used … [Read More...]
Setting up LAG between VMWare ESXi 5 and Cisco SG300-20
Setting up LAG between VMWare ESXi 5 and Cisco SG300-20 In setting up my VMWare vSphere 5 home lab i want to make it as close as possible to a real world working VMWare production environment. Granted I don't have all the big boy toys, but who does on a limited budget? With that said the first thing I wanted to get setup and tested was the LAG (Link Aggregation Group) on the CISCO SG300-20. I can confirm that I am successfully creating the LAG and upon any port failure the traffic is truly … [Read More...]
Getting the Verizon FIOS Actiontec MI424-WR Router to work with multiple VLAN
Getting the Verizon FIOS Actiontec MI424-WR Router to work with multiple VLAN's While working on my VMWare vSphere Home Lab I was running into many issues with not being able to route my internal network traffic which exist on multiple VLAN's to the outside world. Anything that was on the same network of my Verizon FIOS Actiontec MI424-WR router worked fine but as soon as I went to a different VLAN traffic would stop working. The issue is centered around the Verizon FIOS Actiontec MI424-WR … [Read More...]
QNAP TurboNAS TS-459 Pro II Pros and Cons
QNAP TurboNAS TS-459 Pro II Pros and Cons So far I am loving the QNAP TurboNAS TS-459 Pro II over the original Synology NAS I bought for my VMWare vSphere Home lab. I wanted a NAS that is able to meet both my personal needs as well as my home lab needs. The QNAP TurboNAS TS-459 Pro II by far and up to this point seems to be a much more polished device which only costed about $150 more. However like any solution you buy that is not considered a true enterprise solution there will always be … [Read More...]
How to turn the Cisco SG 300-20 into a Layer 3 switch
How to turn the Cisco SG 300-20 into a Layer 3 switch If you would like to turn the Cisco SG 300-20 (or probably any other SG 300) into a Layer 3 switch the following are my notes on how to do just that. Please know that if you plug this switch into a network that has DHCP running the default IP address will change from 192.168.1.254 to something else. Be ready to have an IP scanner utility such as AngryIP to search out what the IP address was changed to; or log into the system/device that … [Read More...]
VMWare vSphere Home Lab Parts List
VMWare vSphere Home Lab Parts List and another guide. I've been working with VMWare for a while now and do not claim to be an expert; just a person who understands the fundamentals and knows how to do some general administrative tasks. I want to understand more and learn more about what's under the hood of VMWare vSphere, ESXi 5 and all the other components that make up the entire VMWare infrastructure by setting up my own VMWare vSphere Home Lab. So after much deliberation on if I should buy … [Read More...]
RSYNC Backups using Windows 2008 Server, EMC Celerra
One of the things I currently do is help our various customers get on board to our hosted services. The challenge is taking 100's of gigs of data and getting it into our data center within a reasonable amount of time. Typically we only have a weekend to complete a full file migration, exchange migration, and SQL database migration. Normally all done by a few people one of them flying / driving back to drop the data off. This time around however I was faced with having to not only perform the … [Read More...]
PowerShell Backup – Backing up Folders with Compression (Part 2)
In my previous post I provided a simple script to backup folders using PowerShell and DotNetZip. The end goal was to manage VMWare Server VM's. In order to safely perform this you should shutdown the servers, back them up and then bring them back online. The script morphed to be a little different because of the process being handed over to non-scripters. So to make this as easy as possible I set forth the following goals: Easy to debug. Easy to configure. Minimal changes made inside the … [Read More...]
