I'm Robert Marshall, director and senior consultant at SMSMarshall Ltd who's specialism is in the Microsoft System Center 2012 Configuration Manager product and all of its dependent products covering all aspects from Architecture, Implementation, Migration to Break-Fix.
I've been using computers for over 30 years, beginning as a programmer and now a senior consultant in an enterprise product. I only count my career as starting 17 years ago when I began my first serious role as a deployment engineer. I've seen 8 bit through to 64 bit, the rise and constant refinement of the GUI, the rise of the Internet from land-line based modem access to the powerful broadband connections we have today, mobile phones come into existence, and I've seen Microsoft evolve from a handful of employees to the company it is now while pretty much tinkering with every OS they have released; As well as seeing an industry that has evolved around those humble beginnings to become what we have today. You could call me an IT Dinosaur but I'm still as mentally able as I was back then, perhaps even more adept now since I've had broad exposure to so much and seen trends come and go. I'm a keen technical puzzle solver, which sets me apart as I love to solve gnarly problems around my area of specialism.
I like to share, i do so by blogging here, and helping out when I can as a moderator and answering questions when I have time on the TechNet Social forums for ConfigMgr 2012 and ConfigMgr 2007. I am a guest poster on TechNet UK Flash magazine and an MVP since 2009 (Most Valuable Professional) in the ECM (Enterprise Client Management) exclusively dedicated to ConfigMgr. the MVP status helps me to help others in more depth due to the closeness to the product group and access to other MVP's the program affords me.
The blogs pretty much about ConfigMgr, but on the odd occasion I also use it as a platform to express my random urges to post something I've stumbled across, be it technical or non-technical, and which I imagine would entertain you or what not as equally as it did me.
(2013)
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!