I registered today for my first Triathalon! It's in May and is a sprint format...aka...easy. It's a 300m swim, 11 mile bike, and 2 mile run. Sounds easy, eh? Well, considering I am not much of the workout type, this is a big deal for me. You can get a lot more information from their website including the location, the course, and registration should you feel the urge to join me.

Wish me luck!

I was recently installing VMware Server 2 on my Windows 2003 host and came across an error 1718 during the installation. I also found in the release notes from VMware that this is a known issue with a known fix. Worked for me.

Microsoft KB reference and solution
VMware Server 2 release notes

I have completed dozens of P2V migrations for various clients and have to walk down the same path each time. One of these days I will get around to scripting some of this stuff, but wanted to at least highlight the steps I take here. I do all of this work on the new VM, despite that it could be done on the physical server before doing the migration. If you do that though, you lose the ability to roll back to the physical server as a failback. I would rather do the work on the VM knowing I can always simply power up the physical box. Steps below:

Microsoft has a great KB article that lists a number of best practices to consider when virtualizing domain controllers. Most notable of these below:

1. Disable Write Cache on volumes hosting ESE based databases. This was also tossed around on the VMware forums a while back and there doesn't appear to be a conclusive answer how to deal with this suggestion.