You may want to check with Tech Support, but it appears the latest 10.5 drivers will work with 10.6

Link To:

VPN’s come in many different types (protocols).   Some of the most common include the following:

PPTP

Often called “dial up VPNs”, it technically extends the functionality of PPP. It was originally started by Microsoft, US Robotics, Ascend Communication, 3Com, and ECI Telematics.  Their first draft of their IETF document for the protocol extension was submitted in June, 1996.  The protocol extension is supported by Linux, Mac and Windows workstations.

Current versions of all three operating systems include the VPN Client application pre-installed in the operating system.  All three operating system server versions can also be setup to allow PPTP connections. A Microsoft Routing and Remote Access Server (RRAS) typically uses Microsoft Point to Point Encryption (MPPE) which is based on RSA RC4 and supports up to 128 bit encryption.

IPSec

IPSec is short for Internet Protocol Security.  It works on Layer 3, and is often called “Site to Site VPN”.  It is usually used to connect one LAN to another LAN, most times using two hardware VPN units at each side communicating with each other.  It can also be used to connect a workstation to the corporate LAN, typically using proprietary software from the VPN manufacturer/developer (although you can sometimes use the built in software in the operating system – as is the case with Windows). The protocol can function in two modes (Transport and Tunnel) and provides end to end security by authenticating and encrypting the packets between parties.  It can support up to 168bit encryption with 3DES.

SSL VPN

SSL VPN is a type of VPN that allows communication to happen over https via web browsers.  The main advantage of SSL VPN is that no additional client software is required besides a web browser.  Since no software needs to be installed on a computer, a user can access the corporate network via VPN from just about any computer (i.e, Public Computer, kiosk, etc.).   The disadvantage is that because it tends to make the applications you would normally use a web type of application, you often lose some of the intended user experience of those converted applications.

L2TP

L2TP is short for Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol.   It doesn’t do any encryption on it’s own, and is often used in conjunction with IPSec (L2TP/IPsec VPN). The biggest thing to remember about L2TP is that it allows more types of applications to communicate through the VPN connection that otherwise are not supported in a standard IPSec implementation.

In a nutshell, deciding which VPN protocol to implement depends on your budget, the hardware that you have, what will be connecting (workstation/user, or LAN to LAN) and the ease of use.  Please feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to help plan out your VPN infrastructure, or answer any questions that you may have.

Link To:

As partners of Research in Motion, Microsoft and Apple, 318 would be happy to work with you to formulate a unified strategy for managing, application development and application delivery for your mobile enterprise – no matter the platform.

Link To:

Within the Citrix product line you will now be able to provision a thin client-based application and achieve the agility that business units want without the commitment to a specific platform. This means that if your users want Windows Mobile or an iPhone you can publish an application, tailored to their screens and with Dazzle, you can give them the option to choose which applications they want to access, making application provisioning easier for many environments. Because a thin client leaves all of its data on the server, the lack of full disk encryption becomes less of an issue with the iPhone as you can choose to sandbox your business critical data into thin client environments. And finally, you can go to market with solutions that can enhance your business faster in many cases, by leveraging existing efforts and resources.

Overall, we’re happy to add Citrix Receiver in our own portfolio of product offerings. We can now go into any development opportunity with even more options: begin a new application (fat client), deploy a mobile-specific web-based application or bring a thin client solution to the table. From an application lifecycle, being able to look at the iPhone in a similar fashion to how we look at Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X is key to maximizing the capacity an organization towards their the business potential.

Link To:

Of course, as an industry addicted to speed, 10 gigabit ethernet simply isn’t going to be enough; 40 gigabit and 100 gigabit ethernet products are already being announced, although primarily in stacking switching fabrics together.  While the standard for 40 gigabit network has not exactly been ratified, we’ve been seeing a number of products coming out onto the market and standardization by the IEEE is expected in 2010 for 40 and possibly 100 gigabit networking.

The barrier from 100 and is expected to take a little less time than the 7 to 8 year window between when 10 gigabit was released and an expected 40/100 gigabit ethernet.  Terabit networking is expected by 2015, which means that those 10, 40 and 100 gigabit interfaces will not be outdated all that quickly, providing a nice return on the investment.

Overall, 10 gigabit and up can be fairly costly (although with a 40 gigabit release, expect 10 gigabit products to come down in price a bit). However, it can increase the performance of a network environment exponentially when used in the proper locations and with a comprehensive strategy in place. 318 has experience with 10+ gigabit networking and can help in devising such a strategy. Feel free to contact us and we will be happy to review options and potential uses for your organization.

Link To:

VMware has had products available for years that allow administrators to cluster resources and place virtual machines on a virtualized abstraction layer that spans multiple hosts, pooling RAM, CPU and other system resources.  When we had heard there was a raging debate about whether a private cloud was possible, we immediately though of all of our successful implementations of the VI product.  vSphere is designed from the ground up to sit on low cost and energy efficient computing resources and allow for the flexible deployment of systems onto the cluster.  This allows organizations ranging from small businesses to enterprise, from education to government to deploy new data protection and high availability resources, to pool IT assets in a manner not previously available.

The key components of vSphere all not all new.  ESX and ESXi are the hypervisor.  These sit on the physical machines (aka the Hosts) and build the virtualization layer.  Sitting on top of the hypervisors is vCenter Server, which allows for the actual provisioning, monitoring, physical to virtual conversion process and centralized management.  The vCenter Update Manager keeps all of the ESX systems updated (as well as some of the VMs themselves to help reduce the surface space of update management).  The VMware High Availability piece gives failover between hosts.  VMsafe is a another component that provides security APIs; while offerings from 3rd party developers are fairly immature expect this to grow rapidly as the virtualization industry moves into its next stage.

vSphere was built for microprocessers.  The Nehalem and its successor, Westmere, are designed with collaboration from VMware; as such, they are built for virtualization.  When you are looking to plan for a potential upgrade to vSphere, it’s important to keep in mind that each member of a vSphere cloud is going to run at the speed of the slowest host.  Therefore, you will have tiers of VMware virtualized clouds, each with a class of system in it (for larger environments).  The Nehalem and Westmere are designed for 8GB of RAM, so you’ll want to make sure to put plenty of memory into the cluster nodes, which have a deminishing return on investment (in terms of memory) around 120GB (so don’t be afraid of going hog wild on the memory front, those VMs need it!).

Overall, our tests of vSphere have shown a considerable performance gain for the guest operating systems running on hosts with newer hardware.  Older assets have a lower impact on performance, but still have a slight upgrade.  The biggest management features that we’re finding useful are an upgraded vCenter (for converting those physical systems over to virtual hosts), enhancements to Vmotion and automation.  With the latest tools it is fairly straight forward to automate nearly every task using vCenter, including the deployment of new virtual machines based on templates, restarting a virtual machine and migrating them using Vmotion.

While the vSphere product may seem overwhelming at first, it begins to bring into focus a contained and mature VMware based infrastructure.  There are a lot of new features; but there is bound to be a lot of marketing spin and while I’m sure it can, out of the box vSphere will not do your laundry.  In order to help guide you through the planning phases of the next generation of the data center (which is after all, the true target of vSphere 4), 318 is here to provide the experience you need with regards to VMware licensing, architecture and of course support – be it with the guests, the hosts, the storage layer or the virtualization layer itself!

Link To:

LCR can be used to reduce the recovery time in disaster recovery scenarios for the whole database, instead of restoring a database you can simply mount the replica.  However, this is not to be used for day-to-day mailbox recovery, message restores, etc.  It’s there to end those horrific eseutil /rebuild and eseutil /defrag scenarios.  Given the sizes that Exchange environments are able to get in Exchange 2003 R2 and Exchange 2007, this alone is worth the drive space used.

Like with many other things in Windows, LCR can be configured using a wizard.  The Local Continuous Backup wizard (I know, it should be the LCR wizard) can be accessed using the Exchange Management Console.  From here, browse to the storage group you would like to replicate and then click on the Enable Local Continuous Backup button.  The wizard will then ask you for the path to back up to and allow you to set a schedule.  Once done, the changes will replicate, but the initial copy will not.  This is known as seeding and will require a little PowerShell to get going.  Using the name of the Storage Group (in this example “First Storage Group”) you will stop LCR, manually update the seed, then start it again, commands respectively being:

Suspend-StorageGroupCopy –identity “First Storage Group”

Update-StorageGroupCopy –identity “First StorageGroup”

Resume-StorageGroupCopy –identity “First StorageGroup”

Now that your database is seeded, click on the Storage Group in the Exchange Management Console and you should see Healthy listed in the Copy Status column for the database you’re using LCR with.  Loop through this process with all of your databases and you’ll have a nice disaster recovery option to use next time you would have instead done a time consuming defrag of the database.

Link To:

• Primary Internal Network – 128.221.252.100
• Backup Internal Network – 128.221.253.100
• Netmask 255.255.255.0
• IP of Storage Processor A – 128.221.252.200
• IP of Storage Processor B – 128.221.253.201
• Gateway IP of Storage Processor A – 128.221.252.104
• Gateway IP of Storage Processor B – 128.221.253.104

Link To:

In order to cascade Software Updates from one server to another you would first setup your first Software Update Server. Let’s say that we set it up as SUS1.domain.com and set it to run on port 8080. Next you would setup your second server (let’s call it SUS2.domain.com) and edit the “metaindexURL” key (by default it’s set to be swscan.apple.com) of the file, /etc/swupd/swupd.plist. So you would change the key to be SUS1.domain.com/content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist.

Link To: