• Live chat October 21 3 PM Central Time US When to Use Which Storage for Virtualization
• New topic series starting with the October 28 chat: Flexible Computing 101

Recent TechCenter Activities

• TechCenter made it on Microsoft’s Virtualization blog this week in a guest post about delivering a 33 percent performance per watt improvement running 40 VMs on Hyper-V with the 6-core R900. In the full article on the TechCenter you’ll also see how it delivers a 27 percent performance advantage over the DL585 too.
• Looking to build some redundancy into your iSCSI network design for maximum availability? The Redundant iSCSI Setup thread in the TechCenter Discussion Forum points out some best practices and debates the number of concurrent failures that you can realistically design to withstand.
• What to do with Free ESXi almost seems like a challenge to the IT community. If you don’t mind doing a little extra work as discussed in the thread Manage ESXi with DRAC, you’ll get a reasonable single-server solution. Of course, there’s also a VMware ESXi Embedded Hypervisor page on the TechCenter with more information including a Poor Man’s Failover for ESXi.
• Looking to get out of the server room and let IT Assistant send you e-mails when it sees something awry? Some members weigh in this week on how to Configure SMTP Alerts to do just that.
• One of the advantages of EqualLogic arrays for virtualization is its tight integration with the software. See what this means for snapshots and thin provisioning with VMware and XenServer in this blog post on the Virtual Frontier. It even has pointers to videos of this in action.
• Do you have SMS 2003 and looking to use it to update your Dell servers? Microsoft MVP and TechCenter member Greg answered that question from another member with advice and references.

Favorite of the Week

• “Equal dude came on site and inside of 10 minutes the array was up and running,” isn’t bad for starters in last Tuesday’s chat, Benefits and Uses of EqualLogic iSCSI for Virtualization. Conversation on EqualLogic arrays continued further, though, ranging over implementations with VMware, Hyper-V, and XenServer.

Getting to Know the Dell TechCenter

• A destination for peer-to-peer sharing of best practices on Dell enterprise products
• Technical discussions around solving business problems—design, not support
• Open-ended and inviting contributions from the TechCenter staff
• Dedicating three weeks toward featuring a customer-centered topic
• Looking for ways to keep up with your areas of interest on the TechCenter? Check out the options on the Blog-Chat-RSS page and the video site walk-through
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