IT Knowledgebase Articles

David Davis walks us through the new VMware vSphere 4.1 feature which allows importing of Hyper-V virtual machines into vSphere. Complete instructions for importing Hyper-V VMs into vSphere, including what you’ll need to get started (vSphere 4.1, vCenter 4.1, vCenter Converter 4.2 installer). Video included.

Tips from Daniel Petri for blocking Windows Automatic Update of Internet Explorer 9. Internet Explorer 9 Blocker Toolkit from Microsoft blocks automatic delivery of IE9 to machines in environments where Automatic Updates are enabled. If you’d previously used the IE7 or IE8 Blocker Toolkit, you will still need to run the IE9 version, as each version of the toolkit uses different registry keys to block or unblock automatic delivery.

Sean Wilkins covers the basic factors to take into consideration when configuring Quality of Service (QoS) with VoIP, including bandwidth, delay, jitter & loss, and the high level QoS methods available to achieve quality voice traffic.

Bruce Mackenzie-Low discusses the major storage architectures that can be used in a Windows environment. This article provides an overview of Direct Attached Storage (DAS), Storage Area Networks (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS).

Step-by-step guide by Jennifer McCown on creating a basic data load package in SQL Server Integration Services. SSIS is used to extract data from sources such as SQL Server databases, flat files, Excel files, Oracle and DB2 databases, perform data manipulation and transformation, and deliver it to one or more data destinations.

Sean Wilkins provides an overview of the basic concepts of voice operations as they relate to VoIP implementation and the CCNA Voice Exam.

Using PowerShell for changing job owners in SQL Server. Sean McCown demonstrates how PowerShell is a more efficient option than SSMS or T-SQL when changing job owners in bulk.

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.