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Tuesday, August 7, 2012

Just some links

While I've learned a lot, I really haven't had much time to actually write about any of it. I'm in the process of rolling out Spiceworks as a helpdesk and inventory solution. It's kind of clunky to work with, honestly. My employer wants layers of helpdesk categories, and that functionality isn't built-in, so I have to rely on volunteer developers for a solution. I LOVE that people like to code, and I love free stuff (who doesn't) but in a year when I have to upgrade this those people might have moved on, and the project abandoned. I just don't have the time to get intimate with a solution right now, so I'm taking the position that if we want all the features of a for-pay helpdesk system, then we pay for it. If you want something nice and flat, then sure, we can do Spiceworks and save a few grand.

I'm also working on learning about our SAN, and our vendor (Mass Mountain) gave me a flash drive with their software on it (it's a 60 day trial once you create a volume group). You just boot from the flash drive and run it on whatever hardware you have lying around, which is pretty cool. I wanted to run it in VMware Workstation 8, where I have a VMware lab - 3 ESXi hosts in a cluster with High Availability and Distributed Resource Scheduling configured, a domain controller, a vCenter server, a FreeNAS iSCSI server, an OpenFiler NFS server, and a Server running Veeam that's backing up 3 servers running ON the ESXi cluster. Unfortunately, I had some problems getting VMware Workstation to boot from the USB drive. I found this workaround using a boot manager ISO called Plop, which did the trick.


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