Now why would you do THAT?

Episode 3 - " Are we there yet? " Last time , we had the RX2600 plugged in and talking on the Management Processor (MP), and burned a copy of OpenVMS to a DVD.  Now let's get this thing running.  The green on black terminal mode is not required, but it does make things feel so much more serious.  I recommend it. Of course, it's not as simple as it sounds! My system had previously been configured with HP-UX as you can see from the Boot Manager menu.  With the DVD in the internal drive, I scrolled down (using the "v" key) and hit enter to boot it.  Wait a while (patience is a virtue...), you will get an OpenVMS startup message.  So far so good! After a long time you get the installation menu for OpenVMS.  Wait a while again... Alright!  Now, type INITIALIZE (Aussies, Kiwis, Brits etc, just tolerate the spelling) because this is an existing disk, and we're going to clobber it. And this is why my problems began...  ...

An update on my Hyper-V adventures: I tore it all apart and rebuilt to clean up my mistakes from the first time around, and it is much simpler this time.  Here's a rough set of steps: Make sure you have a working Windows domain first (2012 is preferable, but 2008+ works) It's best to have one Windows Server 2012 machine to administer everything from. Boot the host from the DVD you built, and install onto the local storage.  At this point it's better if any external storage is disabled After the reboots, log in, set up one NIC and join the domain Install MPIO if required Attach the external storage if required Use the Storage manager to configure it.  There's another post coming on why you don't need DISKPART anymore Tell Hyper-V how to use the extra storage Create a Virtual Switch to connect to the outside network Go virtualise something. Next time, we'll dive more into the intricacies of the Hyper-V universe

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...