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Gary Williams
Gary Williams
Gary is a virtualisation, storage and Windows systems administrator who also occasionally ventures into Linux and networking and cloud areas. Container user, Windows tech, Veeam Vanguard, Spiceworks moderator. A very firm believer that the best way to solve a problem is to start with a hot cup of tea.
Gary Williams
  • Gary Williams
  • August 10, 2017

Disaster Recovery and why hypervisor HA may not be best

A lot of the time I see and speak to people asking about DR solutions when what they really want is HA with a few backups so I wanted to use a blog article to go through some of the technical terms used in conjunction with DR. When people say “I want DR”, I’ll ask them about the sort of disasters they are looking to protect against and most of the time the response is “I want to keep working if my hypervisor crashes”.
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Gary Williams
  • Gary Williams
  • May 25, 2017

You can’t have too much monitoring

One of the things I come across time and again is a lack of monitoring in what are supposed to be corporate environments. I am honestly surprised at how little monitoring is carried out on infrastructure. These days, it is quite possible to carry out some very in-depth monitoring by using a freely available software on Linux and Windows. In this article, I’m going to go through the various monitoring tools that I use to monitor both production and my lab environment.
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Gary Williams
  • Gary Williams
  • April 12, 2017

VMware’s Photon and containers in VMware

The past month has been categorized as something of a performance and upgrades challenge as one of the constant calls I hear is “application X is going to slow”, of course, a month ago it was fine but today it isn’t and normally this is just down to increasing load. One of the common fixes for increasing load is to add more vCPU and RAM but often that can cause its own set of problems especially when NUMA boundaries are crossed and when vCPU contention pushes things a little too far.
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Gary Williams
  • Gary Williams
  • March 13, 2017

Using Blue/Green environments to avoid a Gitlab style outage

As most of you are probably aware, Gitlab is, in part, a source code hosting repository which suffered something of a major outage just a few weeks ago. Unusually, they posted a very full and frank report on what actually happened. It’s very rare for a company to do this and even rarer for it to be made public, I wish more companies would do this, even if it was just an internal review with the blame put on the process, it would at least highlight where the weaknesses are in the infrastructure.
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Gary Williams
  • Gary Williams
  • February 8, 2017

Fighting Azure AD Connects custom installer

I’ve recently been spending more and more time looking into various cloud technologies such as AWS and Azure. One of the projects I’ve been working on required the on-premises active directory to be extended to Azure to allow for a future introduction of various Office365 elements. The process for doing this is fairly easy as it’s just a matter of installing the Azure Active Directory Connect tool onto a server, creating the domain in the Azure portal and then waiting for Azure AD connect to Sync.
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Gary Williams
  • Gary Williams
  • January 11, 2017

Exploring VMWare’s VPID Technology

I’ve been using VMWare’s VPID (Virtual Port ID) technology for some time now both in work and in the home lab but I was curious to see just how VMWare handled a NIC going down and then coming back up and it turned out to be a lot more powerful and smooth than I first thought.
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