Everybody Has to Print—Or Do They?

It feels like we have been promised the paperless office forever. When I first entered the IT industry in the mid 1990s, it was a mantra, and it is still a mantra today. The fact is, we still need to print. We may have moved away from managers’ administrative assistants printing emails for them to read, …

Why Microsoft Might Just End Up Owning the Future

The past two years have seen an arms race at the high end of the virtualization arena. The biggest players in the space have competed furiously to add features and capabilities to their combined platform offerings, either by swallowing up smaller companies or investing heavily in product development. MDM, DaaS, hybrid cloud, profile management, application …

Death to Active Directory? Is the Windows Domain Still Relevant in the Modern IT World?

In a meeting recently, I was quite taken aback to hear a reason given for not moving to 2012 R2 forest functional level—a reason to which I hadn’t previously been privy. The stated reason was, “in a few years, the Windows domain won’t be relevant anymore.” As someone who cut his IT teeth on Windows …

Working with LDAP and Microsoft Active Directory

Working with LDAP and Microsoft Active Directory: For most IT professionals, there has been some point in their career where they have connected a product or service to a Microsoft Active Directory with LDAP for authentication. This is really nothing new and has been done for years, but I discovered a different way to set up the connections years ago when I was working on a script that would connect to Active Directory with an LDAP call to get a list of members of a group. I really thought most people already knew this and it was pretty much common knowledge, but it seems lately that every time I work with someone new setting up the LDAP configuration they seem to be quite surprised at the way I do things and I thought this should be something that I share out.

vSphere 4.1 Released – More Dynamic Resource Load Balancing

With the release of vSphere 4.1, VMware has added to their Dynamic Resource Load Balancing (DRLB) suite of tools that I hinted at in my post on Dynamic Resource Load Balancing that I wrote last week as well as providing new memory over commit and other functionality. In essence, vSphere 4.1 is more than a point release, this update includes many features that aid in security, reliability, and is a direct response to customer requests.