At first I didn’t know what its all about on QoS, what I learned from my colleagues is that it will give priority of bandwidth to certain predefine applications over the Corporate network environment; mainly is for those critical production applications, so that the applications traffic will not be affected even when there is a high peak on Corporate network traffic.

Here is the detail explanation from Wiki:

In the fields of packet-switched networks and computer networking, the traffic engineering term Quality of Service, abbrivated QoS, refers to resource reservation control mechanisms rather than the achieved service quality. Quality of Service is the ability to provide different priority to different applications, users, or data flows, or to guarantee a certain level of performance to a data flow. Quality of Service guarantees are important if the network capacity is limited, for example in cellular data communication, especially for real-time streaming multimedia applications, for example voice over IP and IP-TV, since these often require fixed bit rate and are delay sensitive.

I just know that it’s call QoS…but I’m not sure what it stands for until this morning when I read on an article from PC World on how to secure your Wi-Fi network. It’s called Quality of Service in full.

My initial understanding is that this feature only application to those high-standard and expensive Cisco routers in the Corporate, but I was wrong. This article show that we can even apply this cool feature over our house wireless router.

With this, you can give priority to your VOIP application like Skype and set a lower priority for online games.

If you have multiple users running multiple application over your house network which consume a long of network traffic, do give it a try it your router support this feature.

Tags: server technology wireless qos networking

Personally I do think that server virtualization will helps your company to stay competitive. If your are a software based company, you will need a numbers of servers for your code simulation and testing, code version control as well as your database server. Each server will easily cost you around USD 5-20k depends on your server specifications.

However, if your analyst your server performance and utilization in details, you may been shock and realize that each of your server may be only utilizing 10-20% of the total server’s CPU and memory usage. The remaining 30-70% of your server resources are remain idle in most cases.

Will it be nice that you can fully utilize your server resources and you will most probably needs 2 out of 5 servers running in your company. What you will get in returns? Here are the 5 main reason that you shall always make use of server virtualization:

1. Saves money $$$$$

The is the main important in any business case as it keep your products competitive and saves $$$ on buying too many servers that you actually not needed. Of cause, this will not saves you on your Microsoft Server OS licenses but it saves on your server hardware in the long run.

2. Saves spaces on your data center (server room)

As you do not have to maintain so many servers, you can fully utilize the spaces in your office for other purposes, additional office space for more staff as your company growth? Further more, Server racks is also an expensive equipment to locate all your servers, you save space and save $.

3. Save on server maintenance

You will need specified professionals in fields like System Engineer/ IT Engineer to take care of your servers. Windows Security Patching, hardware monitoring, performance monitoring on hardware failure as well. If you cut down the numbers of server you actually needs, you can saves man power in this area and may be they can focus on other area which will improve your business competitive further.

4. Save the environment

Less servers = less power consumption. With lesser servers, you need less power cable, less high power air con to maintenance the server room temperatures; and at the end, it’s more environmental friendly and you play your part in saving the environment from Global Warming.

5. Improve your product build time/time to market

During coding implementation and testing, you may crash your own coding and causing the testing environment stop working. With virtual server, you can actually create a snapshot of the ‘working’ version prior to your new release or testing. If anything happens to your coding, you can just ‘playback’ your previous ‘working version’ in no time. It will definitely improve the time to market of your products.

Above are just some of the examples and reasons that I recommended for virtual server.

You can google it for the virtualization software in the market and make good comparison to math your business needs. Meanwhile, VM Ware and Microsoft Virtual Server are some of the BIG players in the market.

Tags: Virtual Server VMWare Virtualization Global Warming Energy Saving

If you type “echo %date%” in your command prompt, it will display today’s date by following your regional setting (“Mon 03/09/2007” for example).
What you need to do in order to display the date in format of yyyymmdd? Ok, what you need to do is just type “echo %date:~10,4%%date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%”, it will now display today’s date in yyyymmdd format (“20070309” in this example), and you can always manipulate the date format you desire by just changing its sequences.

If you would like it to display as ddmmyyyy, it shall be “echo %date:~4,2%%date:~7,2%%date:~10,4%”, simple isn’t it?

Technorati Tags : Command Prompt, Script, Windows

Technorati Tags: Command Prompt, Script, Windows

Below are the reasons that i can think of as I’m of the users of virtual servers.

1. It provides more flexibility. As long as your hardware can support, you can install multiple OS to your computer or server. You can use all this different OS in just one hardware and it saves your cost of buying or maintaining hardware. Will be most ideally used for testing environment.
2. Preserve the state of virtual machine. You are able to create snapshots as an image, in case your software or application crashes and caused instability of  your OS, you can always reverse it back wit h the snapshots that you capture earlier. It saves your job for rebuilding or reinstalling the OS from scratch.
3. Convenience. You can switch between operating systems easily in Microsoft Virtual PC 2007and VM Ware. Each and every virtual machine can have it’s own PC name and you can define the memory and space allocated for each virtual machine.
4. Environment-Friendly effort to fully utilise your pc or servers. With  Microsoft Virtual PC 2007and VM Ware, you are able to fully utilise your pc or server hardware especially for testing environment without buying new hardware and it saves your electrical power consumption.
5. Accelerate Development. With the ease to prepare virtual machines for testing, it increase the quality assurance for software or application release on multiple OS platform. Time-to-market reduced as time saved on installation and configuration.

Technorati Tags: Virtual PC, VMWare, Microsoft

Technorati Tags: Virtual PC, VMWare, Microsoft

After installation of Microsoft Windows ( from image cloning software like Norton Ghost or Windows 2003 Automated Deployment Services (ADS)), you will need to reinitialise your Microsoft Windows to its initial state so that you can reset your computer name, domain or even SID. This is where Sysprep will be very helpful.

What you need to do is just get Sysprep from Windows XP SP2 Deployment Tools or Windows 2003 SP2 Deployment Tools. Extract all the files to your local hard disk and double click on Sysprep.exe.

Choose “Reseal”, your windows will automatically shut down and you shall able to reenter the computer name, domain and regional setting on the next start up, this will reinitialise your windows while preserve all the applications that installed on the master image.

For the first post on this topic, i would like to talk about NewSID from sysinternals of Microsoft TechNet. This tool is applicable for both server and desktop computers.

We built quite a numbers of server monthly to cater for new software deployment and databases roll out in production. Most organisation will use disk image cloning software like Norton Ghost for desktop computers and alternatively, you can use HP Proliant Essentials Rapid Deployment for Microsoft Windows or Linux deployment on servers platform.

The advantages of disk cloning is that you does not have to go through the installation process for each and every computer or server. What you need is just an image to clone it over to new hardware.

The disadvantages is that, after cloning, the computer or server will keep the initial Computer Security Identifier (SID). This will give error to some applications like Organisation’s Antivirus software, making the auto updates of Antivirus fails.

NewSID from sysinternals will be really handy in this case. What you need to do is just run this tool once in your computer or server after cloned over. It will assigned a new SID to the windows to make you windows a real fresh unit after cloning and you can avoid most of the application error caused by the SID problems.

Technorati Tags: Servers , Microsoft

Technorati Tags: Servers, Microsoft