Tech Round Up 11th November 2012

A set of links with some brief notes and images, of interesting tech things unearthed since 4th November. With stuff from: Citrix, Huawei, Microsoft, Netapp, StarWind, and VMware!

## Citrix ##

If Citrix is your thing, I’d highly recommend running through Citrix KC Top 10 October list!

ShareFile with StorageZones gives IT the flexibility to choose between customer-managed StorageZones allowing IT to leverage on-premises storage within their private cloud or Citrix-managed secure cloud storage options in multiple worldwide locations.” Think Dropbox for Enterprise with on-premise!

A very useful set of recommended antivirus exclusions for Citrix Provisioning Server!

A few recommended Server Side file exclusions:
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CVhdBusP6.sys => (PVS 6.1)
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CVhdBus2.sys => (PVS 5.6)
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CFsDep2.sys => (PVS 5.6 and PVS 6.1)
C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services\BNTFTP.EXE => (PVS 5.6 and PVS 6.1)
C:\ProgramData\Citrix\Provisioning Services\Tftpboot\ARDBP32.BIN => (PVS 5.6 and PVS 6.1)
D:\Store => (i.e. local vdisk store)

A few recommended Server Side processes to be excluded:
C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services\StreamService.exe => (All versions)
C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services\StreamProcess.exe => (All versions)
C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services\soapserver.exe => (All versions)

A few recommended Target Device exclusions:
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\bnistack.sys => (Only targets, Win2003/XP)
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\bnistack6.sys => (Only targets, 2008/Win7)
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\BNNF.sys => (Only targets)
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\BNNS.sys => (Only targets, Win2003/XP)
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\BNNS6.sys => (Doesn’t exist anymore with PVS6.1 Agent)
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\BNPort.sys => (Only targets)
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CFsDep2.sys => (Only targets, Win2003/XP)
C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CVhdBusP52.sys => (Only targets, Win2003/XP)
C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services\BNDevice.exe => (Only targets, 2008/Win7)
C:\Program Files\Citrix\Provisioning Services\TargetOSOptimizer.exe => (Only targets, 2008/Win7)

## Huawei ##

“Chinese storage interloper Huawei has shattered standards body SPEC's sfs2008 Network File System (NFS) benchmark, scoring 3,064,602 IOPS, 49 per cent more than an Avere cluster and 51 per cent more than a NetApp cluster.”

## Microsoft ##

Don’t like Windows 8’s missing start button – try Classic Shell!

“Take a short survey that assesses your current IT environment with regard to systems, processes, and productivity.  The survey information creates a custom non-commercial report that provides recommendations on your IT state and helps you evaluate the benefits of cloud computing.”

Sysinternals Live Sync Tool!
Ever wanted to keep the sysinternals packages on a server up to date - now you can!

More flexible than the built-in MMC Remote Desktops snap-in!

“Download the datasheets, white papers and technical presentations that will help you evaluate Microsoft SQL Server 2012” – a hefty 129.8MB of information!

“Windows Azure hosts do not offer a feature which Hyper-V has called Live Migration. Azure runs a dedicated, Microsoft developed hypervisor, not Hyper-V. Azure has been designed for a PaaS role in which an application is served by multiple instances, and when a single instance fails there are no issues. So in the architecture of Azure, a Live Migration feature was not a requirement.”

## NetApp ##

“Our new NetApp FAS3200 Series enables flash, clustering to improve IT performance and agility.”

More on the new FAS3200 range:
“We now get:
- A FAS3220, an uprated 3210, with up to 480 drives, 1.44PB capacity, and 1TB of flash cache; its drive count and flash cache amount have both doubled.
- A FAS3250 with a maximum of 720 drives, 2.16PB of capacity, and 2TB of flash cache – replace(s) both the FAS3240 and the FAS3270 …”

Exchange 2010 two member DAG virtual server OS, DB, and Log volume migration to Netapp
No link, just a note from a discussion on Linkedin:
Use NetApp SnapDrive to migrate Exchange 2010 from EqualLogic to NetApp, and then SnapManager for Exchange (SME) to back it up.

## StarWind Software ##

A couple of interesting StarWind iSCSI SAN PDFs for HA Shared Storage:

## VMware ##

What’s new in the VMware IO Analyzer 1.5?
- Test scheduler
- More detailed storage/network/CPU statistics
- Tests and results annotation

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