Blog.
- August 24, 2015
XenServer iSCSI Storage Repositories: What the Documentation Misses
Connecting XenServer to iSCSI shared storage is more nuanced than the documentation implies. Most guides walk you through the happy path — discover the target, create the SR, done. They skip the …
- July 14, 2015
XenServer Resource Pools: Configuring Shared Storage for Live Migration
XenMotion — XenServer’s live migration capability — requires shared storage. If all your VMs live on local storage (the default after a fresh install), you can’t migrate them between …
- May 18, 2015
XenServer Pool Master Failure: What Actually Happens and How to Recover
The pool master is XenServer’s single management control plane for a resource pool. All XenCenter connections, all xe CLI commands that operate across the pool, all pool-level configuration …
- March 31, 2015
XenServer vs VMware ESXi: A Practical Comparison for Small Business
I’ve deployed both XenServer and VMware ESXi for small-to-medium businesses, sometimes switching between them for the same client as their needs evolved. The right choice depends on several …
- February 10, 2015
Getting Started with XenServer 6.5: The VMware Alternative I Actually Liked
In 2015, I was working with a mid-size client who needed to virtualize roughly 20 servers on a budget that made VMware’s licensing difficult to justify. They’d looked at Hyper-V but …
- November 15, 2014
Exchange 2013 Performance Monitoring: What to Watch and When to Worry
Exchange 2013’s new Information Store architecture — where each database runs in its own worker process (Microsoft.Exchange.Store.Worker.exe) — changes what you monitor compared to Exchange …
- September 30, 2014
Planning Your Exchange 2013 to Office 365 Migration: Lessons from the Field
By late 2014, Office 365 had matured to the point where the question wasn’t “should we consider it” but “when do we move.” Organizations that had just completed Exchange …
- August 22, 2014
Exchange 2013 Mail Flow Troubleshooting: A Methodical Approach
Mail flow issues are the highest-urgency Exchange problem category — users notice immediately when email stops working, and everyone assumes it’s the mail server’s fault even when …
- May 9, 2014
Exchange 2013 Storage: Disk Layout, Sizing, and What Goes Wrong
Exchange 2013 was designed to tolerate slower, cheaper storage better than any previous version. Microsoft optimized it heavily for JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) in large enterprise deployments. For …
- February 18, 2014
Exchange 2013 Certificate Management: The Part Nobody Documents Well
Certificate issues are the most consistent source of Exchange 2013 headaches I’ve encountered across different organizations. The platform handles certificates in a specific, opinionated way — …