Jaggubhai's Weblog

Peformance Gathering Tools

jaggudon — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 04:37:17 +0000

Below is the link to some performance measurement tools..

http://flippingbits.typepad.com/blog/tools.html

Filed under: Tools

Cisco ASA IPS and IDS SKUs

jaggudon — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 07:15:25 +0000

Cisco has ASA skus with IPS enabled, below link provides those skus.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/vpndevc/ps6032/ps6094/ps6120/ps6825/product_data_sheet0900aecd80404916_ps6120_Products_Data_Sheet.html

Filed under: Uncategorized

Microsoft Product Life Cycle Search

jaggudon — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 06:54:09 +0000

If you need to know about a particular MS Product life cycle you can use following link.

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/

Filed under: Uncategorized

FIM 2010 Training Videos

jaggudon — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 06:52:32 +0000

Seems like microsoft has some training videos available for FIM 2010.

They are located at

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/forefront/ff793470

Filed under: Uncategorized

How to rebuild Sysvol and Netlogon Folders

jaggudon — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 06:50:57 +0000

I ran into an interesting issues where at a customer site netlogon and sysvol folders had disappeared from both domain controllers they had and I had to fix it so that my Citrix Profile Manager GPO will apply correctly (Totally out of the scope for the VDI project). Anyhow what I ended up having to do was backup sysvol contents, setup FSMO role holder authorative for FRS replica and setup another DC as non-authorative recpient for FRS replica. Step by step details are provided in MS KB article below

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315457

While reading up on it I also came across few interesting reading topics as well which are listed below

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316790

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947022

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd277429.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc758169%28WS.10%29.aspx

Filed under: Active Directory

P2V Failure using Vmware Converter

jaggudon — Sat, 10 Dec 2011 15:21:53 +0000

Ran into an interesting issue.. I was trying to convert a Windows XP VM from xen to vmware using vCenter Converter Standalone. Conversion will fail in 10 seconds with Status “Failed: Unable to create a VSS snapshot of the source volume(s) Error Code: 2147754776 (0×80042318)..

Upon examining Application event log – I saw two different VSS errors for every attempt I made

Error:12302

Volume Shadow Copy Service error: An internal inconsistency was detected in trying to contact shadow copy service writers. Please check to see that the Event Service and Volume Shadow Copy Service are operating properly.
and

Error: 5013

Volume Shadow Copy Service error: Shadow Copy writer ContentIndexingService called routine RegQueryValueExW which failed with status 0×80070002 (converted to 0x800423f4).

upon running

vssadmin list writers on target I received Error: 0x8000FFFF. Inconsitency have been detected. That’s it nothing else.

Upon researching further I came across following link which spells out solution

http://forum.storagecraft.com/Community/forums/p/266/991.aspx

End user had uninstalled visio from the machine so to reslove this issue I had to delete visio key located under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ContentIndex\Catalogs

It is also vaguely documented on Microsoft knowledge base

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940184

Filed under: Uncategorized

Discovery and Health check processes

jaggudon — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 03:12:38 +0000

I am currently working on putting together IT environmental discovery processes, health check and standard documentation processes in place goal is to put together these documents for following areas, it will take me a while but hoping to get it done in next couple of months…

1. Microsoft Active Directory

2. Exchange

3. SQL

4. VMWare Vsphere

5. VDI Readiness

6. Citrix XenDesktop

7. VMware View

8. Storage Environment – FC, FCoE and iSCSI

Filed under: Uncategorized

Dell Performance Analysis Collection Kit – DPACK

jaggudon — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:51:14 +0000

Dell just came out of with a new server profiling tool. Dpack can be downloaded from support.dell.com can and typing DPACK in search box. It can scan Windows, Linux and ESX/ESXi 3.5, 4.x and 5.x using VCenter.

It allows collection periods from 4 hours to 24 hours unless changed from command line to increase the period by using /extended switch in that case it will allow for data collection for up to 7 days It runs from memory and is 596k executable.

Dell encourages to include end user information in final report. it saves iokit file. report includes IOPS, MB/Sec, Avg. IO Size, Avg. Latency and Queue. It is not clear or documented that how to parse iokit file.

Filed under: Tools

Nirsoft, Sysinternals and WSCC

jaggudon — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 14:07:10 +0000

I use Nirsoft and sysinternals tools quite a bit. They are very useful in complex troubleshooting scenarios. They go through updates regularly. In past I will manually check their website to download newer version but I just came across Windows System Control Center it updates those utlities automatically for you.

WSCC can be downloaded from www.kls-soft.com/wscc/. Nirsoft utilities are located at www.nirsoft.net and Sysinternals Suite can be downloaded from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals

Filed under: Uncategorized

Workload Consideration for Virtual Desktop Reference Architectures

jaggudon — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 18:03:44 +0000

VMWare has a nice tool to do VDI workload testing for capacity planning and architecture validation perspective Desktop Reference Architecture Workload Code, it is available to VMWare partners only from Partner Central. Below is the link to RAWC white paper and nice blog post from Ivo Beerens explain the tool and it’s purpose.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-WP-WorkloadConsiderations-WP-EN.pdf

http://www.ivobeerens.nl/?p=447

Filed under: Tools, VDI, VMWare View