Hi, Given the recent events, I just wanted to repost one of my older posts which goes over using WSUS’s SQL DB to get the update status of a computer(s).
History: Let me give you a little back story before digging into the meat of this post. My team and I make a very concerted effort to keep our servers firmware and drivers updated. We’ve gone so far as to purchase software from Dell, implement a process on how firmware / drivers are to be updated, and ensuring that...
Disclaimer: These are opinions, not facts and these opinions are mine, not my employers. Introduction: Upon receiving the news that HP was to acquire Nimble, I can’t say I was exactly thrilled. Nothing personal against HP, they make great servers, but I like Nimble the way it is right now. None the less, I know the...
Introduction: One of the things I’m struggling with, is how to balance the number of posts per naming convention. It would be easy in some ways to use a single post per server type, but it would also be overly redundant in many ways. I originally wrote a dedicated post to SQL server naming conventions, and realized...
Introduction: I wrote a really quick review here about MVP systems JAMS product about 1 year or so ago (maybe a little less). At the time, I was in search of a solution that could help me glue together several disjointed systems in a workflow. Specifically, we were trying to integrate Veeam and CommVault backup’s...
Introduction: If you’re not in a DevOps based shop, or living under a rock, you may not know that Microsoft has been working on a solution that by all accounts sounds like its poised to usurp GPO / GPP. The solution I’m talking about is Desired State Configuration, or DSC. According to all the marketing hype, DSC is...
Introduction: In general, I’m not a huge fan of hyper converged infrastructure. To me, its more “hype” than substance at the moment. It was born out of web scale infrastructure like Google, Facebook, etc. and IMO, that is still the area where it’s better suited. The only enterprise layer where I see HCI being a good...
Introduction: I hate dealing with tapes, pretty much every aspect of them. The tracking of them is a PITA, having to physically manage them is a PITA, dealing with tape library issues is a PITA, dealing with tape encryption is a PITA, running out of tapes is a PITA, dealing with legal hold for tapes is a PITA, and I...
Sometimes the WSUS console, just doesn’t give you the info you need, or it doesn’t provide it in a format you want. This query is for one of those examples. This query can be used in multiple ways to show the update status of a computer, computers or computer in a computer target. For me, I wanted to see the update...
This is a simple query you can use map your computers to their various targets in a nice easy to export table. I’d love to say the script is sexier than that, but its really not. You can find the sql query here. There is only one section worth mentioning because it can change the way a computer is mapped to a computer...
Quick Powershell post for those of you that may on occasion want to retrieve data out of a SQL table via Powershell. I didn’t personally do most of the heavy lifting in this, I simply took some work that various folks out there did and put it into a repeatable function instead. Firstly, head over to here to my GitHub...
If you haven’t seen by now, VMware plans to dump the c# client in the next release. Article is here for your review. I was the first one to comment, and maybe its just a coincidence, but it seems like I got a small fire started. If you have any strong feeling either way, maybe its worth posting your view in their...
In general I have to say I’m not a fan of VAR’s for many reasons. Most of which because I find little “Value Add” in having them resell technology that would probably be cheaper if I wasn’t stuck going through them. However, there’s always an exception to the rule, and after a recent mess up I wanted throw a shout out...
Building off my last function Get-ECSPhysicalDiskToLogicalDiskMapping: which took a windows physical disk and mapped it to a windows logical disk, this function will take a VMware virtual disk and map it to a windows logical disk. This function has the following dependencies and assumptions: It depends on my windows...
I figured it was about time to knock out something a little technical for a change, and I figured I’d start with this little function, which is part of a larger script that I’ll talk more about later. There may be a time where you need to find the relationship between a physical disk drive and your logical drive. In my...
Disclaimer: I’m not getting paid for this review, nor have I been asked to do this by anyone. These views are my own, and not my employers, and they’re opinions not facts . Intro: To begin with, as you can tell, I’ve been running Nimble Storage for a few years at this point, and I felt like it was time to provide a...
No one likes admitting they’re wrong, and I’m certainly no different. Being a mature person means being able to admit you’re wrong, even if it means doing it publicly, and that is what I’m about to do. I’ve been writing this series slowly over the past few months, and during that time, I’ve noticed an increasing number...
Just wanted to post this quick, and I may have time to do a more through post later, but this will do for now. In our backup solution, we had to join together two solutions, CommVault and Veeam. Veeeam backed up the data to disk and CommVault backed the data up to tape. The problem with this solution is the systems...
The pro and the con of a software defined storage is that its not a turn key solution. Not only do you have the power to customize your solution, you also have no choice but to design your solution. With Storage Spaces, we figured most of this stuff out before selecting it as our new backup storage solution. At the...
Of all the types of storage we looked at, this was the one type that I kept coming back to. It was a storage technology that I had the most personal experience with, and having just finished implementing my companies first SAN, I was pretty well versed in what was out on the market. There were other reasons as well....
Anyone who’s heard the word “cloud” as it pertains to technology knows its a fairly nebulous term. About the only thing people seem to grasp is that its means “not in my datacenter or home”. When we talk about “cloud storage” the term is still fuzzy, but at least we know it has something to do with storage. For this...
While evaluating EMC’s DataDomain solution, our EMC rep suggested we also take a look at their Isilon product. Not being a person to turn down a chance to check out new technology I happily obliged. Before we get into my thoughts on Isilon, let’s go over a simplistic overview of what scale out storage is, and what...
When VMware first announced vSAN, the premiss of the solution was just pure awesomeness. After all, VMware has the best hypervisor (fact, not opinion), they’re in the process of honing what I think will be a Cisco butt kicking software defined network solution. Basically vSAN was the only missing piece to building a...