Its Alive (the blog)... and my VMWare build (not alive, yet)
Well here it is, my first blog post there isn't much here right now, and I have to say I am not overly impressed with WordPress.com. I would much prefer to have hosted this blog on my own server in order to take advantage of expanded customization, specifically syntax highlighting since I intend to do a bit of blogging about T-SQL. That being said, I wanted it up and running cheaply and quickly, that much is accomplished. I expect that with time, I will migrate to a self hosted .org implementation in order to gain access to these features as well.
I decided to start this blog in order to regurgitate my experiences with new technologies in hopes that I could give back to the IT community. I spend so much time on forums and reading other people's blogs when I am trying to solve problems, I decided it was time to at least give others the opportunity to draw on my experience as well. So, a little about me: I am 26 Years old, Married, 1 Child, 1 Motorcycle, Countless Computers. I drill with the North Carolina Army National Guard as a Signal Officer, although I have not been branch qualified yet. I graduated in May 2011 with a BS in Information Systems and Operations Management from the (late bloomer on the higher ed). I should be starting a Masters program there in the Fall of 2012. I currently work as a DBA/Sysadmin at and I really enjoy my work. Prior to this job, I was a freelance IT Consultant working for a couple small businesses, which I still do part time. I am really enjoying the opportunities I have been given to expand my technical knowledge via experience, and plan to continue doing so. Lately I have really been interested in learning more about enterprise class storage and virtualization.
That brings me to the actual topic of my first post. of was kind enough to provide a pretty thorough hardware to building a home VMWare cluster about a year ago. Additionally one of my consulting clients recently approved a proof of concept build for a small VMWare cluster. I contacted Jason, he gave me some pointers, and I have just recently ordered the parts to get the build going. Without further adieu, I present you with the first piece of useful information towards building a home VMWare lab, an almost verbatim ripoff of Jason Nash's home build, with a CPU and Memory upgrade:
In addition to VMWare, I am currently working a lot with Sharepoint, SQL Server Reporting Services, and Microsoft ForeFront Threat Management Gateway on a project I've been assigned. We are working on getting the TMG in as a Single Sign On solution so that we can turn this SharePoint site into an extranet of sorts, its proven to be quite a problem child as even though I have successfully published the SharePoint site, as well as the SSRS site via their SSO mechanism, the data sources (SQL 2k8R2/SSAS 2k8R2) are failing over to NT Authority\Anonymous, a clear indication of a breakdown in the kerberos delegation chain. More to come on this later...