IT Knowledgebase Articles

Bruce Mackenzie-Low covers free Windows tools for storage performance monitoring, including Task Manager and Perfmon. These tools gather and display performance metrics to help identify any I/O bottlenecks or saturation. Stay tuned for future articles on using other free tools such as PAL and xPerf, to analyze storage performance data.

Sean McCown provides an overview of working with cmdlets in PowerShell. Covers how to run help on cmdlets, and search specific cmdlets to learn what’s available in PowerShell, including the use of format-table and get-member to control how resulting information is displayed.

Overview of PowerShell basics by Sean McCown. PowerShell makes it possible for DBAs to easily manage multiple servers at once, often with very little coding. This article explains how PowerShell is organized, and how to get information about the different drives you work with.

Just released from the team at Train Signal and certified instructor David Davis (VCP4, VCAP-DCA, CCIE, and vExpert), is their new VMware vSphere Troubleshooting Training. Learn how to solve real-world vSphere virtual infrastructure problems as well as prepare for your VCAP-DCA certification with this 14 hour video training course.

Why Should DBAs Care About PowerShell? Sean McCown answers this question by demonstrating the simplicity of scripting in PowerShell, in contrast to T-SQL and VBScript, through a variety of real world examples.

Microsoft will be celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, and for those interested in the history of the world’s largest software company, this infographic from Train Signal Training will give you a quick history of Microsoft’s sales, stock & revenue, and a historical timeline of the company’s history.

Christian Mohn provides a walkthrough of Microsoft’s Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT) for license and activation management. In addition to license administration, VAMT allows admins to manage and activate Multiple Activation Key (MAK), Key Management Service (KMS) and retail product keys.

Sean McCown builds upon past 2 PowerShell scripting articles (Scripting Database Objects in PowerShell & Scripting Database Objects with Advanced Options in PowerShell) to discuss how to build a scripting process which enables each object to be scripted to its own file.

Overview of wireless LAN technologies including 802.11 standards variations, channel planning and options for implementing Cisco Access Points.

vSphere based backup solutions such as VMware Data Recovery and Veeam Backup and Replication v5 rely on vSphere’s snapshot technology to backup live VMs, which excludes Fault Tolerant VMs as they do not allow snapshots. In this article, Tom Finnis explains how to use custom scripts to work around these restrictions and enable regular scheduled backups of Fault Tolerance protected Virtual Machines.