Virtualization May Slow Windows Code Rot on PC Systems

Here's what I'm doing with VirtualBox to hopefully slow code rot on my Windows PC system.

How to Manage Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX Together

I assumed that when Microsoft released its Hyper-V server virtualization platform that VMware ESX would face serious competition. I thought that the competition between these two x86 hypervisor tools would almost immediately generate a need for cross-platform management tools.

Installing VMM 2008 for the First Time

I've been spending some time with the newly released Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008. The two most important new features, according to Microsoft, are:

"With VMM 2008, you can create and manage virtual machines running on Hyper-V hosts. When adding hosts,

DNS in Anti-spam--See Basic Network Services for the First Time

I got DNS in my anti-spam product. And I've got anti-spam in my DNS management. This all happened while working on my "Top 10 things you should know about spam" while also putting together an RFP (Request for Proposal) for a review on DNS service tools. DNS plays a big role in identification and verification systems including DKIM (Domain Keys Identified Mail). I'm finding that DNS systems going online today may be asked to take on a bigger network over the next three to six years. Let me break this down. First, I get the sense that DNS and the more comprehensive IPAM (IP Address Management) tools will take on bigger roles as IPv6 begins to gain traction. With an ever-growing collection of devices (both physical and virtual) needing IP address service and management, DNS will move from the shadows--where it has played a reliable and remarkably understated role in...

Splunking for who-what-when

Splunk is a software application that uses a search language and log aggregation techniques to assist IT help desk staff and managers get to the root cause of system, application and infrastructure problems. Splunk 2.2 takes log data from almost any source and parses out the time information in the message in order to execute fast searches based on user requests of the basic form "what was happening at such-and-such time." While Splunk can work without any training and end users should be able to come up to speed on the product with little training, getting the most out of the reams of data that Splunk processes does take skill. Besides knowing the right questions to ask and formatting those problems correctly operators can also tag found events to make the system work even better. Tagging and searching do get better over time and that is part of what I've...