Now why would you do THAT?

FreeBSD, IBM x-Series and UEFI I banged my head on the rack for quite a while getting an x3250M3 to boot FreeBSD 9.1 recently, and I thought I would share what I learned. I am using the standard LSI Logic RAID controller (mpt device) with a pair of mirrored 500GB SATA drives.  Ultimately I intend to attach it to a DS4700 array I have lying around in the lab as well, but that's a topic for another post.   So we could boot from the Mylex controller, it is essential that you enable "legacy" boot in the boot manager I could boot from the 9.1 (AMD64) DVD and everything would install just fine.  When I rebooted, the system would just hang.  Oddly enough, I could boot NetBSD from the same machine, so what was the difference? Probably a lot, but then I stumbled across a FreeBSD UEFI WIKI, https://wiki.freebsd.org/UEFI which had the following gem: " Partitions not seen. When using GPT, FreeBSD will create a protective MBR. This MBR has one partition entry coveri...

Believe the Hype(r-V)? I run a modest-sized VMWare shop, and we just went through the exercise of moving to VSphere 5.1, so why am I writing about Microsoft's Hyper-V Server 2012? Mostly because I can.  More and more people I meet these days are coming back to look at Hyper-V.  It hasn't been " quite there " up till now, but by all reports in it's 2012 incarnation, there is much to recommend it. Firstly, the licensing: Hyper-V Server 2012 is a free download from Microsoft .  OK, so is VMWare or Xen, but Microsoft have effectively uncoupled Hyper-V and Windows.  But you'd better like PowerShell, because that's all you get out of the box to manage it.  And like ESXi, about all you can do is to complete the basic setup. Hardware offload of IPSec: For us, this is pretty important.  We use IPSec heavily, and it's a pig within a VM.  Hyper-V lets me offload this task from the guest to the physical hardware in the system (I'm speculating how t...