I'm Rob Marshall, a consultant who specialises in the Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager product. I like to share, i do so by blogging and helping out when I can in the MS SMS newsgroups and participating in the ConfigMgr MVP program.
I was awarded and joined the program in 2009. It'd be an understatement to say it has to be one of the best experiences an IT engineer can have, if they really enjoy specialising in a product.
My biggest weapon for troubleshooting is, my formidable knowledge, no, only joking, you, the community. I find if I cannot answer a question, then I can usually find the answer from using Bing\Google, pouring over the documentation, and if that doesn't work, tinkering in mine or someone elses virtual lab.
The blogs pretty much about ConfigMgr, but it is also a platform for me to express my random urges to display something I've stumbled across, and that I imagine would entertain you or what not as equally as it did me.
This guide kicks off my tour of System Center 2012 Configuration Manager, and we begin with the foundation of your testing platform, the lab hardware.
You can read this and more fantastic articles from Rob here
you don't need to be mean with my lab :)
hehe wait until you see what I picked up on the weekend ... a 2U Intel blade server for less than £100! I'd lend it to you, but I think your wife would throw it out of the house due to it sounding like a harrier jump jet about to land!
Point to note on the use of “green” drives; if you use them in a RAID config you may find at best a performance deg or at worst, a loss of data. This has to do with the power saving technology incorporated in these drives.
Handy to keep in mind Joe ... I elected to use a storage pool to check what they did with it in Windows 8 ... I'm not seeing the love here, the disks seem slower than when I had them as two stand-alone disks with manual VM load balancing deploying VM's in a round robin fashion.
I'd like faster disk IO, I don't need redundancy in the lab just quantity and speed. Not keen to invest in a mega-expensive controller right now :-( Rather wing it with the built in SATA3 controller and the speeds you get from it.
I'll look to see if the HDD power saving features can be turned off, but as everthing stands right now the box is so fast I've not had to fiddle with anything!