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The 'normal' way to update ESXi - say from 8.0 GA to 8.0 U2- would be to use vCenter and vMotion to migrate VMs from one node of a cluster to another. Works fine and with 'fast boot' - if your servers support it - very little down time. If you don't have shared storage but do have two or more servers in a single 'datacenter' then vCenter can still [...] Read more

SNMP is essential for monitoring network devices and all recent versions of Windows have the option to turn the SNMP service on. Once it is on range of software can be used to check a vast array of statistics form the sever remotely. The core SNMP service can be installed interactively via the Server Manager but can also be done via PowerShell, [...] Read more

Regular Windows keyboard combination Key combination for RDP Description of what hotkeys do Win key or Ctrl+Esc Alt+Home Opens the Start Menu or Start screen Alt+Tab Alt+Page Up Displays the Alt+Tab switcher where pressing Page Up while Alt is held down will switch programs from left to right Alt+Shift+Tab Alt+Page Down Displays the Alt+Tab [...] Read more

SNMP is useful to have on systems as at the very least, it can give you the 'system up time' so you can be confident systems are not restarting behind your back! In VCR 8 SNMP is not enabled by default and can't be managed via the GUI, either in vCenter or on port 5480 via the management interface. Instead, it needs to be enabled and managed via [...] Read more

This excellent network monitoring tool can use SNMP to retrieve how log a system has been up, and generate alerts if this value is too small - that is, something has crashed or restarted unexpectedly. The reply is in msec which is fine, but humans prefer days and hours, so use this string in the 'Tune up reply value' box to do just that. [...] Read more

Shadowcopy, the ability of Windows systems to retain pervious versions of files which can elp in responding to accidental deletions and similar event, is a very useful tool. But imaging you want to restore only new and/or changed files to a drive, and there are many hundreds to restore. Wouldn't it be useful to be able use a tool like Syncovery to [...] Read more

MS's latest security patches have an unfortunate side effect of blocking file links which are in Outlook e-mails. The e-mail arrives OK but if one tries to click on the link then a black & yellow popup arrives, stating 'Something is wrong with the URL'. There is no 'Allow/OK or accept' option. So the user can't open the document from inside [...] Read more

Various useful Powershell scripts to manage Microsoft Exchange systems To remove messages from queues which match criteria. Get-ExchangeServer | ?{$_.IsHubTransportServer -eq $true} | Get-Queue -Filter "Status -eq 'Retry'"|get-message | Remove-Message -withNDR $false -Confirm:$false -whatif Remove the '-whatif' from the end to use and note that no [...] Read more