Dugie’s Pensieve

Following up from my last Home Server post, here is a list of all the tools, bits, photos and prices that I used to build my replica arcade machine to hide my Home Server - all for under $500 AUD.

Here’s the list of materials I had to buy, prices included where I have them:

• +1 premade X-Arcade controls - 250
• +1 1L tin flat black easy coat - 24.72
• +2 tins 310 gm plastic cote flat black spray paint @11.00 ea - 22.00
• +2 pack disposable rollers and paint tray - 8.98
• +1 pack of 2 zinc hinges - 3.10
• +1 pack of 2 magnetic door catches - 6.98
• +4 lengths 1.8m x 42 x 19 dressed pine - @2.19 ea - 8.80
• +2 sheets 1800 x 900 x 12mm MDF panel for the sides @ 21.00 ea - 41.00  
• +1 box 1000 screws, gypfast 6-18×30mm - 14.98
• +2 lengths of 1200 x 600 x 12 MDF for front and back panels
• +1 sheet 600 x 1200 Perspex - 34.00
• +3 lengths of big ass pine plank
• +4 castors
• +1 pack of 100 screw caps
• +1 pack 4 metric drills
• +1 set Logictech X-230 2.1 speakers

To see the tools and photos of the cabinet assembly download my PPTx Slide Deck, that I presented at the December Usergroup in Brisbane.  There we go, that’s everything.  Go forth an pimp your home server!

All previous updates #: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Yes I’ve been hiding under a rock, but I’m alive and well.  And tomorrow I’ll be doing even better, because it’s Australia Day!    …and probably my all time favouritest holiday of the year.

It’s hard to mess with perfection, so I’ll just repost-my-post from last year; which was the same as the year before :)

It’s Australia Day here in Oz, and the rest-of-the world wonder with sometimes morbid fascination on our ability to celebrate our National Holiday with a good old BBQ (and might I add I do a pretty good BBQ Brunch)

So What is Australia Day?  Well, a perfect Wiki definition is “Australia Day is Australia’s official national day, January 26. It commemorates the landing of the First Fleet in Sydney Cove on that day in 1788.”

Personally, I reckon the end of Sam Kekovich’s controversial commercial Buy Lamb for Australia Day says it nicely:  Whack on the BBQ, invite everyone over — if you can’t pronounce their name, just call them “mate” –; and celebrate living in the best bloody country on Earth.

Havagoodaustraliadayeveryone, I’ll be celebrating, kicking it by the Pool, chillin near the BBQ, and enjoying the company of friends!

BTW:  MikeFitz, if you’re reading this - we make it in the top 5 google hits for "australia day bbq"

By now you’ve all heard the announcement that Microsoft SCVMM vNext (the one that betas 45 days after Hyper-V) will manage VMware Virtual Infrastructure.

Well Rakesh Malhotra (the Group Program Manager for SCVMM) has posted some info on what managing VMware Infrastructure means to him and his team. 

You can read more in his post “Why we decided to manage VMware and what that means“, and a heavily edited snippet is below:

We think we can do a better job - …It’s about managing applications and services and today, many if not most of those run on Windows. Understanding the application in detail is absolutely critical to making intelligent management decisions. For example, migrating a VM when the CPU spikes to 80% for 10 minutes is not a particularly smart way to make that decision but if the VM is a ‘black box’ to you, it’s the only choice that you have. With our management tools, you’ll be able to set policies and rules based on application specific criteria. For example, if the average amount of time it takes for your order entry system to process an order exceeds 10 seconds and CPU is the reason, add more CPU capacity to the VM.

….Finally, I want to emphasize that when we say “manage VMware“, we mean that day to day, you’ll be able to use our console and command line interface to fully manage your Virtual Infrastructure environment (including live migration), Virtual Server and Hyper-V environments seamlessly. In addition, we’ll be able to extend the management capabilities that VMware offers today so you’ll get an enhanced solution even on a non-Windows OS.

It’s sounds pretty snazzy, I’m looking forward to road-testing then net version of SCVMM and putting it through it’s paces.  Anyway, as I find out more about screenshots, demos and stuff I’ll post back.

Yes you can, and it’s awesome.  It took about 10 minutes, and about 10 screws.  But why would you?  Well I’m glad you asked!

I robocopy all my DVD’s up to a couple of Western Digital My Books.  That way all my DVDs are at my fingertips, and it stops my little man from putting vegemite toast in the DVD drive of the Media Centre :)

But Christmas Santa gave me quite a few DVDs.  So it’s time to copy them up, but I’m out of space.  So I bought a couple of WD 750 SATA disks on special.  $200 AUD each, a bargain!

The upgrade was quite painless:  popped of the chassis of the My Book, removed the cage screws, removed the drive screws, one screw out of the PCB.

Then I just popped in the new drive, put it all back together, plugged it back in and Voilla!  The My Book is now 250Gb larger.  I’m just copying over all the content from the old disk now.  ….23 minutes remaining.

Ok, it must be Mark Russinovich day.  James Senior at Microsoft has good all the details in his blog post “Mark Russinovich talks Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V and Windows Vista“.

A copy and paste is below:

Mark Russinovich is the founder of SysInternals the software company that was acquired by Microsoft recently.  He’s been made a Technical Fellow (the highest technical role at Microsoft) and is now working on the Kernel of Windows, so he knows his way around Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista and Windows 7 pretty well.

I just finished watching this great Channel 9 video recorded before Christmas where Mark delves into the guts of Server 2008, Virtualization featuring Hyper-V and Windows Vista.  You can see the video yourself here.

As he was talking I made some rough notes using OneNote and I thought it would be useful if I shared them with you.  He also did some whiteboard diagrams which I captured in powerpoint for you.

Here are my notes…..

See James’s post for more info

Ok, so I’m late to the party on this one.  Blame all the Egg Nog over Christmas.

Douglas Brown has come through in fine form to interview Mark Russinovich.  Now if you don’t know who Mark is, then it must be very nice on whatever tropical island you live :)

Anyway, Doug and Mark chat about Microsoft virtualization, you can check out Doug’s blog post “Virtualization Podcast with Dr. Mark Russinovich“, and a snippet is below:

• Brief Introduction of Dr. Russinovich and discussion on why he is a virtualization expert
• Security implications of virtualization
• Mark’s perspective on the virtualization world today
• Advantages and disadvantage of virtualization
• Explanation of the VHD (virtual hard drive) file format
• Citrix and Microsoft announcement that XenSource will support the VHD format
• Mark’s response to VMware’s statement that “Virtualization is the end of the OS”
• Mark’s response to the question “If you where king for a day what would you do and how reasonable would it be to achieve?”

The above podcast runs 33:40 minutes.

Microsoft have just released a VHD of the Identity Lifecyle Manager 2007, a 5 part download a total of 3.3Gb.

You can find out more in the Readme (a self extracting EXE), and all the passwords accounts in the demo are “password”

If you want to know more about Lifecycle Manager (it the new MIIS) check out the Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 Frequently Asked Questions

I just saw this fromall round good guy, Greg Low.  Michael Otey is from SQL Server Magazine is presenting an on-line session on virtualizing SQL workloads. 

If you want to register for the Virtual Event, register over on the “Get Ready” web site.

If you’re after some prereading, I’ve put together a couple of links below:

• Using SQL Server 2005 in a Virtual Environment [MSFT]
• SQL Server Performance in VMware Infrastructure