Tim Ferrill
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Tim Ferrill
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Just-in-time IT infrastructure: How to attain it for strategic advantage
A big lesson brought home early in the COVID-19 pandemic is that IT requirements can suddenly change at an explosive rate, and the only way to prepare for such events is to build as much flexibility as possible into corporate networks.Many large enterprises had already embraced this concept, but smaller ones with fewer financial resources had not. The pandemic moved the needle for many of them from viewing flexibility as a luxury to seeing it as a core functionality they can’t afford to be without.SD-WAN buyers guide: Key questions to ask vendors So what goes into achieving the level of flexibility that lets business adjust on the fly to 100% of their employees working remotely or situations where critical staff can’t come into the office?To read this article in full, please click here
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Just-in-time IT infrastructure: How to attain it for strategic advantage
A big lesson brought home early in the COVID-19 pandemic is that IT requirements can suddenly change at an explosive rate, and the only way to prepare for such events is to build as much flexibility as possible into corporate networks.Many large enterprises had already embraced this concept, but smaller ones with fewer financial resources had not. The pandemic moved the needle for many of them from viewing flexibility as a luxury to seeing it as a core functionality they can’t afford to be without.SD-WAN buyers guide: Key questions to ask vendors So what goes into achieving the level of flexibility that lets business adjust on the fly to 100% of their employees working remotely or situations where critical staff can’t come into the office?To read this article in full, please click here
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10 top automation and orchestration tools
IT process automation sells itself: automating tasks is not only cheaper than paying a human to perform repetitive activities, but it’s also more efficient and predictable.While it’s possible to develop automation tools in-house with enterprise staff, that can be challenging, so ultimately, to embrace automation in a big way, it may be necessary to enlist commercial software tools. [ Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters. ] Some tasks are simpler to automate than others—managing IT systems, provisioning physical and virtual machines, managing server configuration, identifying policy drift—and many IT systems are now built with features that make it easier to move along the path toward automation without seeking commercial platforms.To read this article in full, please click here
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9 hot jobs in the evolving data center
As data centers evolve, the skills needed to run them change as well, creating both a challenge and opportunity for current data-center workers.By necessity, modern data centers are at the forefront of efficiency for energy consumption, space utilization and automation. That efficiency extends to the personnel that staffs them and who must swiftly implement hardware, software, and architecture changes as best practices improve. That calls for new roles in administration, management, and planning.Existing career fields and legacy skill sets won’t cut it in many cases, but IT pros will be able to augment their existing skills to fill new roles as they open up—jobs with a more forward-looking focus.To read this article in full, please click here
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9 hot jobs in the evolving data center
As data centers evolve, the skills needed to run them change as well, creating both a challenge and opportunity for current data-center workers.By necessity, modern data centers are at the forefront of efficiency for energy consumption, space utilization and automation. That efficiency extends to the personnel that staffs them and who must swiftly implement hardware, software, and architecture changes as best practices improve. That calls for new roles in administration, management, and planning.Existing career fields and legacy skill sets won’t cut it in many cases, but IT pros will be able to augment their existing skills to fill new roles as they open up—jobs with a more forward-looking focus.To read this article in full, please click here
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How to inventory server software with PowerShell
Being able to quickly identify what software is installed on your servers has value for a host of reasons. Managing software licensing costs and entitlements, planning upgrade budgets, identifying candidates for server consolidation, or even responding to security incidents are all common reasons for performing a software inventory.There are of course enterprise tools for tracking software inventory. But these tools can be expensive and complex, or could have access limited to specific groups or individuals in your organization. Fortunately PowerShell can help with some of the leg work in analyzing the software on your systems in order to help drive your planning and incident response.To read this article in full, please click here
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How to inventory server software with PowerShell
Being able to quickly identify what software is installed on your servers has value for a host of reasons. Managing software licensing costs and entitlements, planning upgrade budgets, identifying candidates for server consolidation, or even responding to security incidents are all common reasons for performing a software inventory.There are of course enterprise tools for tracking software inventory. But these tools can be expensive and complex, or could have access limited to specific groups or individuals in your organization. Fortunately PowerShell can help with some of the leg work in analyzing the software on your systems in order to help drive your planning and incident response.To read this article in full, please click here
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How to inventory server storage with PowerShell
Making inventories of computer storage, particularly on severs, is complex due to the number of factors involved. There might be multiple physical media devices each of which contains multiple logical volumes. Volumes could span multiple disks with hardware or software-based RAID configurations. Each volume could be configured with its own drive letter, and folders throughout the file system could be shared on the network.Those inventories are important because gathering data on physical storage media can identify what type of storage is available and what physical storage capacity servers have. PowerShell can help with those inventories, particularly the Get-PhysicalDisk cmdlet, which uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) under the covers. Get-PhysicalDisk uses WMI to query the MSFT_PhysicalDisk class, with the WMI class providing numeric values for things like MediaType and BusType, while Get-PhysicalDisk returns descriptive text values.To read this article in full, please click here
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How to inventory server storage with PowerShell
Making inventories of computer storage, particularly on severs, is complex due to the number of factors involved. There might be multiple physical media devices each of which contains multiple logical volumes. Volumes could span multiple disks with hardware or software-based RAID configurations. Each volume could be configured with its own drive letter, and folders throughout the file system could be shared on the network.Those inventories are important because gathering data on physical storage media can identify what type of storage is available and what physical storage capacity servers have. PowerShell can help with those inventories, particularly the Get-PhysicalDisk cmdlet, which uses Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) under the covers. Get-PhysicalDisk uses WMI to query the MSFT_PhysicalDisk class, with the WMI class providing numeric values for things like MediaType and BusType, while Get-PhysicalDisk returns descriptive text values.To read this article in full, please click here
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Best new features in Windows Server 2022
Windows Server 2022 was released this summer ready to take on production workloads with a host of new features. What’s hot in the latest edition of Windows Server? Let’s take a look.New network protocols It’s no surprise that a major focus for Microsoft in Windows Server is performance. Most people using Windows Server are using it to host critical business services and applications that directly support either employees or customers. In either case time is money, and the platform your critical systems run on needs to be both stable and efficient.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Microsoft has included some notable networking improvements to Windows Server 2022. For starters, the Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol developed by Google has been added and enhances UDP connections in a number of ways including encryption, reduced latency, connection reuse, version control, and extension frames. UDP also gets some love in the form of UDP Segmentation Offload (USO) and UDP Receive Side Coalescing (UDP RSC), each of which moves a lot of the work to assemble UDP packets off CPUs and onto network adapters that support the protocols.To read this article in full, please click here
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Best new features in Windows Server 2022
Windows Server 2022 was released this summer ready to take on production workloads with a host of new features. What’s hot in the latest edition of Windows Server? Let’s take a look.New network protocols It’s no surprise that a major focus for Microsoft in Windows Server is performance. Most people using Windows Server are using it to host critical business services and applications that directly support either employees or customers. In either case time is money, and the platform your critical systems run on needs to be both stable and efficient.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Microsoft has included some notable networking improvements to Windows Server 2022. For starters, the Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) protocol developed by Google has been added and enhances UDP connections in a number of ways including encryption, reduced latency, connection reuse, version control, and extension frames. UDP also gets some love in the form of UDP Segmentation Offload (USO) and UDP Receive Side Coalescing (UDP RSC), each of which moves a lot of the work to assemble UDP packets off CPUs and onto network adapters that support the protocols.To read this article in full, please click here
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How to inventory server hardware with PowerShell
Most of us have dealt with hardware that stays in service well past its planned end-of-life date or that, for reasons of budget and bureaucracy, doesn’t even make it into service until well into its lifespan.Step one in planning and prioritizing server-hardware upgrades is inventorying and evaluating your existing hardware, which may seem like an appropriate job for an IT intern, it’s also a perfect job for PowerShell.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Read system telemetry with PowerShell The primary PowerShell cmdlet throughout this discussion is Get-WmiObject. Most server admins will have at least a passing familiarity with Windows Management Interface (WMI), a set of telemetry points to help monitor performance and server health, among other things. WMI is frequently used to filter the application of Group Policy Objects to only those computers that meet a specific set of criteria. WMI is Microsoft’s implementation of Common Information Model (CIM), which is an industry standard. The Get-WmiObject cmdlet is able to access both WMI and CIM classes.To read this article in full, please click here
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How to inventory server hardware with PowerShell
Most of us have dealt with hardware that stays in service well past its planned end-of-life date or that, for reasons of budget and bureaucracy, doesn’t even make it into service until well into its lifespan.Step one in planning and prioritizing server-hardware upgrades is inventorying and evaluating your existing hardware, which may seem like an appropriate job for an IT intern, it’s also a perfect job for PowerShell.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Read system telemetry with PowerShell The primary PowerShell cmdlet throughout this discussion is Get-WmiObject. Most server admins will have at least a passing familiarity with Windows Management Interface (WMI), a set of telemetry points to help monitor performance and server health, among other things. WMI is frequently used to filter the application of Group Policy Objects to only those computers that meet a specific set of criteria. WMI is Microsoft’s implementation of Common Information Model (CIM), which is an industry standard. The Get-WmiObject cmdlet is able to access both WMI and CIM classes.To read this article in full, please click here
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How PowerShell can find features and roles on Windows servers
The PowerShell Get-WindowsFeature command—or, more properly, cmdlet—can retrieve a list of Windows features, including server roles, that are installed on a server or workstation running Windows, making it a handy tool for server admins.Learning about it can point up its value and how a broader knowledge of PowerShell commands may lead to more efficient administration of Windows servers.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Tim Ferrill By default, the output of the Get-WindowsFeature cmdlet provides something of a hierarchical view with individual features having boxes checked or not depending on their installation status. (Click to expand the image at left.) This is great for quickly eyeballing a single server to get an idea of what functions it provides, but as the list contains upwards of 250 roles and features, it starts to lose practicality when you are looking for a specific set of features or want to inventory multiple servers in a single pass.To read this article in full, please click here
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How PowerShell can find features and roles on Windows servers
The PowerShell Get-WindowsFeature command—or, more properly, cmdlet—can retrieve a list of Windows features, including server roles, that are installed on a server or workstation running Windows, making it a handy tool for server admins.Learning about it can point up its value and how a broader knowledge of PowerShell commands may lead to more efficient administration of Windows servers.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.] Tim Ferrill By default, the output of the Get-WindowsFeature cmdlet provides something of a hierarchical view with individual features having boxes checked or not depending on their installation status. (Click to expand the image at left.) This is great for quickly eyeballing a single server to get an idea of what functions it provides, but as the list contains upwards of 250 roles and features, it starts to lose practicality when you are looking for a specific set of features or want to inventory multiple servers in a single pass.To read this article in full, please click here
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How to choose the best NVMe storage array
Storage will never be as fast as system memory--that’s just the nature of system architecture. But thanks to NVMe (nonvolatile memory express), SSDs can deliver such blazingly fast performance, the penalty of “going to disk” tends to be miniscule.NVMe encompasses a family of specifications for how software talks to storage. It works over a number of transport methods, including PCI Express, RDMA, and TCP. Storage arrays that support the NVMe standard are the sports cars of storage, exposing super-fast storage media more directly and efficiently than any other mainstream method allows.To read this article in full, please click here
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How to choose the best NVMe storage array
Storage will never be as fast as system memory--that’s just the nature of system architecture. But thanks to NVMe (nonvolatile memory express), SSDs can deliver such blazingly fast performance, the penalty of “going to disk” tends to be miniscule.NVMe encompasses a family of specifications for how software talks to storage. It works over a number of transport methods, including PCI Express, RDMA, and TCP. Storage arrays that support the NVMe standard are the sports cars of storage, exposing super-fast storage media more directly and efficiently than any other mainstream method allows.To read this article in full, please click here
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10 features of Windows Admin Center to streamline server administration
A lot of the value built into Windows Admin Center has to do with it being a remote-management tool that can have a lot of upside in a modern IT shop, including implementing best practices by not logging directly into servers, bringing flexibility to the management architecture, and performing admin tasks from high-DPI or touchscreen devices.Considered a complement to System Center, Admin Center is a free app, downloadable here, that runs in a browser and can manage Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows 10, Azure Stack HCI through Windows Admin Center Gateway, software installed on Windows Server or domain-joined Windows 10.To read this article in full, please click here
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10 features of Windows Admin Center to streamline server administration
A lot of the value built into Windows Admin Center has to do with it being a remote-management tool that can have a lot of upside in a modern IT shop, including implementing best practices by not logging directly into servers, bringing flexibility to the management architecture, and performing admin tasks from high-DPI or touchscreen devices.Considered a complement to System Center, Admin Center is a free app, downloadable here, that runs in a browser and can manage Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2012, Windows 10, Azure Stack HCI through Windows Admin Center Gateway, software installed on Windows Server or domain-joined Windows 10.To read this article in full, please click here
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IPv6: How to configure static and DHCP IP addressing and deal with DNS
As IP technology has matured, the range of devices that the internet protocol supports goes well beyond computers to include cell phones, entertainment systems, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices, which created the need for more IP addresses and the development of IPv6 to provide them.With more and more device types requiring network connectivity, the demand for addresses in an IPv4-based network is at a premium. It can provide somewhere south of 4,294,967,296 unique addresses. IPv6, on the other hand, can yield roughly 3.4×1038, which should be ample for a very long time.To read this article in full, please click here