The new version of StarWind’s iSCSI SAN software is coming soon, and promises to add full high-availability clustering, with fail-over and fail-back support. While I’ve had a look at their video demo , I haven’t had a chance to actually install it or play with it yet, so no full review, obviously. What I like about StarWind has always been that it’s an affordable solution in the small to mid-sized business space, where paying 10’s of thousands for a SAN just isn’t in the cards for most of us, but

If you noticed that the blog suddenly went back to basic ugly, that was an unfortunate and unanticipated side effect of preparing to move my blogging to a new location . We'll be moving to http://msMVPs.com/blogs/russel shortly, but in the process of getting things configured for that move, we appear to have lost our look and feel a bit. Susan has enough to worry about handling the move, so I'll just wait until she's done before trying to fix the look. So, why am I moving? Because, frankly

As many of you know, I wrote the book on Windows Small Business Server 2008, as well as earlier editions. It’s an operating system and a good deal more, giving most small businesses (up to 75 users or devices) pretty much all the infrastructure and enterprise environment they need. We’ve run our writing business on SBS for years, and we recently moved our production environment over to SBS 2008. This was the last piece of the puzzle, and we’re fully 64-bit here except for two old workstations that

In case you missed it, John Howard has updated his HVRemote utility.  This little gem, which keeps getting better and better, can completely configure both the client and the server to enable you to connect to a Hyper-V server from your Vista or Windows 7 desktop. You’ll still need some way to actually manage the server, and that could be the RSAT tools or the PSHyperV project on Codeplex. IAC, grab the new version of HVRemote. John has added even more intelligence and troubleshooting in this

This is just going to be a quickie. I’m busy working on a new book for Microsoft Press, and as part of that I needed to set up a failover cluster to test Hyper-V’s new Live Migration. Well, the folks at StarWind Software were nice enough to send me an NFR version of their StarWind Enterprise Server to use. I admit, I was a bit concerned, since it can be a daunting task to get most iSCSI SANs up and running, and I wasn’t at all sure how well a purely software solution would do. Well, I must say, I

Well, sorry about that. Got a bit distracted after I started writing up my experiences with the ML350 and buried in a project and forgot to get back here. And I’m still a bit buried, so I’ll keep this a bit shorter than I might otherwise. First, the good stuff: Overall, I love this server. It’s quiet (well, as long as the ambient temperature stays under 30 degrees or so), which is a real plus in a small business where the server may well live in a room where people have to work. It’s a workhorse

I've had my Acer Ferrari 4000 for four years now, and it has been a great laptop. Yes, I wish I had a dual core. Yes, I wish I had a laptop that had 4 GB or even more. But honestly, the Ferrari was still a quite good little laptop, iwth a great display (1680x1050 on a 14" screen is hard to find!), a perfectly usable keyboard, and the whole thing is a carbon fibre case that looks cool and weighs in at under 6 Lbs. But a few weeks ago, just as we were getting ready to go on vacation, it came

I got my HP ML350 G5 just about 26 months ago, and as I was sitting here today, thinking about it and what a difference it has made, I thought it was time to provide a real world look at it's strengths and weaknesses after living with it for over two years. We all see reviews of new hardware, and they're interesting, but it's not often we get a chance to hear how a machine is to live with, day in and day out over an extended period. After all, it's easy to love it during the honeymoon

Windows 7 will support a new version of Virtual PC known as VPC7. The big feature that VPC7 adds is application publishing using RAIL technology. This enables the application to directly integrate into the Win7 desktop and Start menu, running as if the application were local, instead of running on a VM. Cool stuff, and essentially the same technology as used by TS RemoteApps. Win7’s Virtual XP Mode includes a pre-licensed and activated Windows XP SP3 virtual machine that uses the RAIL technology

A very interesting post on the official Windows Team Blog: Windows XP Mode for Windows 7. If I read this correctly, it looks like we’ll have a virtual Windows XP embedded directly into Windows 7, with the ability to run applications directly from Windows 7. From the description and the screen shot, this sounds like it has the equivalent to TS RemoteApps, but in this case connecting to a locally running virtual Windows XP. Now that would be cool! And a real solution to any lingering application compatibility