Security Analyst – Jeff Soehner CISSP, GXPN,GPYC,GMOB,GCIH

Wow you can move your SuSE Enterprise Linux server from hardware (or even another virtual box) using the software PlateSpin Migrate. We were able to migrate a 10G hd from a older version of VMware to the newest version of ESXi 5 in under 30 minutes.

With new features like the ability to use thin provisioning you can save space and improve efficiency.

Check out more about these two products from this blog

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Have you ever dreaded recreating a server with all of the little gotchas that you have learnt over the years only to realize that it wasn’t as easy as you thought.  Is seems that whenever you plan for a few hours it ends up taking more than that?

A company called Platespin (was bought by Novell a few years back) has created a great scripting engine that you can install on a windows system as a server that will manage the hardware upgrades for you WHILE THE MACHINE IS STILL ONLINE! It allows either a block based or file based migration and can inject drivers for you.

We recently used it to migrate a domain server to new hardware for a client that was retiring an old server but you can also use it to virtualize the server farm.  http://www.novell.com/products/migrate/

Hey folks;

Have you ever thought of just how long it takes to setup a new XPSP3 system with MS office updates, IE8 and all the patching? Now don’t forget that M$ will be removing support on XPSP3 in less than 3 years so you will also need to think about updating hardware to use the new Windows 7 or 8! (Have I got your attention – read on)

Well I don’t want you to worry because Virtualization has made its way to the  desktop too! VDI is a way to boot a static image in order to connect to a terminal session on a virtual machine (wow talk about everything old becomes new again eh?). We have been busy setting up VDI in a box (from Kaviza) and using X2 (Virtual Desktop Server) to deliver and control a PXE image to boot old computers without the need for a hard drive. Kaviza has a VM that runs on the free version of VMware or Xenserver and X2 is free for a few clients.

We will post some statistics when we have more information but we have it working in the lab on some test systems. More info is available from www.x2.com and http://www.kaviza.com.