Cameron Sturdevant

With support for the latest Intel “Nehalem” processors, Sun Microsystems’ Sun Fire x4170 server packs copious amounts of compute power, local storage, network bandwidth and PCIe expansion capability into a neatly engineered, 1U footprint. While there is uncertainty about the future of Sun after Oracle’s acquisition of the company, the Sun Fire x4170 is a […]

LABS GALLERY: Sun Fire x4170 Packs Plenty of Compute Power in 1U Server by Cameron Sturdevant Sun Fire x4170 The server has room for eight 2.5-inch SAS, SATA or solid-state drives. Here you see my test unit with four 146GB 10,000rpm SAS drives. Easy Field Service The top cover is articulated to provide easy access […]

LABS GALLERY: System Center Virtual Machine Manager R2 Is Essential for Hyper-V by Cameron Sturdevant At a Glance I’ll start with the ending. This screen shows in summary what I was able to do with SC VMM 2008 R2. Starting from the top left, you see that I have seven physical host systems under management. […]

Hot on the heels of the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 is System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, an essential management companion for the Hyper-V component of Microsoft’s server platform. Any organization that goes beyond dabbling with Hyper-V should use System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, or SC VMM, to manage virtual […]

Microsoft released Windows Server 2008 R2 with a newly improved version of Hyper-V. Even so, VMware is still miles ahead in terms of the features and innovation that lay the foundation for sustainable virtualization for midsize and large enterprises. In fact, I think VMware-with its just-released vSphere 4-has raised the bar so high that Microsoft’s […]

Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Service Pack 2 is a no-cost upgrade that provides only modest improvements to the productivity suite. Microsoft’s service packs for Office are primarily evolutionary, and this one is no exception. IT managers should have little problem deploying the SP; indeed, during my tests, installation was no problem. However, there is […]

LABS GALLERY: Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac SP 2 Provides Small Productivity Boost Default Theme The ability to define default themes in PowerPoint is new in this version. Path Animation Also new in PowerPoint is the ability to add path animation to a slide. Here you see the starting and ending point for my text […]

New in VMware vSphere 4 is the ability to streamline the configuration of new ESX hosts. As part of my ongoing testing of the vSphere 4 platform, I put the new feature through its paces in the lab. Host profiles help to solve the finicky problem of ensuring uniformity among the groups of physical ESX […]

Labs Gallery: Citrix XenServer 5.5 Makes Advances in No-Cost Server Virtualization Space by Cameron Sturdevant Add a New Server XenCenter is the Windows-based management interface for Citrix XenServer 5.5. Here, I’m connecting for the first time to the three physical host systems on which I’ve installed XenServer. Small-Shop Security Approach Here, I’m setting the master […]

Citrix’s no-cost XenServer 5.5 stacks up well compared with VMware’s freely available ESXi; adding the $2,750-per-server Enterprise edition or the $5,500 Platinum edition bumps XenServer 5.5 into vSphere 4 territory. The Essentials pack provides high availability, dynamic workload management and a host of other features; the Platinum edition adds a year of free upgrades along […]

When I reviewed VMware vSphere 4 in June, I gave it an eWEEK Labs Analyst’s Choice. I clearly think the platform, formerly called VMware Infrastructure, is solid, and so do the many organizations out there that have implemented it. Recently, eWEEK Labs Executive Editor Jason Brooks asked me what I thought it would take for […]

Sun Microsystems’ xVM VirtualBox, a no-cost virtualization tool that enables virtual machines to run on a variety of standard operating systems, continues to improve its position as a potential challenger to workstation products from VMware and Parallels. Sun released Version 3.0 of xVM VirtualBox on June 30 and added symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) as the major […]