my world of IT

When I was first setting up Lync 2010 for VoIP one of the things that really stumped me for a while was Normalisation Rules. In short these rules take human readable numbers and convert them to the standard for international calling (E.164) – its kinda like how computers take human readable DNS addresses (e.g. bbc.co.uk) and converts them to IP addresses… Read more

If you are running System Centre Data Protection Manager (2010/2012) on Windows Server 2008 or 2008 R2 you may or may not know that when you are running a Bare Metal/System State Backup you are actually using the built in Windows Server Backup feature to keep your data safe. One thing that baffled me is why on some servers the backups… Read more

Currently our VDI setup is only used in the Library and so we very rarely max out the usage on our server, however ealier today I spotted that we had 19 of our 20 VDI clients in use, by in use thats students logged in actively engaging with their computers. I couldn’t resist checking up on the performance stats and… Read more

Unless you have had your head buried in the sand for the past few days you will know that Microsoft has showcased their take on Windows 8 tablet PCs. Dubbed Microsoft Surface (the big table surface has been renamed PixelSense) this new family of tablets comes in a ARM processor based version (aimed at the day to day consumer) and… Read more

Proving that PCI-E SSD works fine in standard servers (like the HP DL line) is a key goal of this series of posts, above you can see the PCI-E SSD churning away quite happily serving up virtual desktops.

Recently we have been deploying shiny new Lync phones at work. These phones mix in with the Lync software client on our staff PCs and in some cases the phones don’t even have dial pads! The Lync phones we are going to be using are- Polycom CX200 (desk tied staff) Polycom CX700 (reception) HP 4110 (common areas) HP 4120 (feature… Read more

One of the most interesting features of the OCZ RevoDrive 3 X2 is that in many situations you can boot a OS right off the drive (great for super fast gaming PCs). The only issue with this is not every motherboard out there will support booting right off a PCI-E SSD (OCZ do have a list here though) but also more… Read more

While setting up our new backup server (System Centre Data Protection Manager 2012) one of the issues we came across was with it failing the data synchronizations with a error message like this one- Type:     Synchronization Status:  Failed Description:        Changes for Volume C:\ on <servername><domainname> cannot be applied to \\?\Volume{4fac41a1-0f58-11dc-8993-806d6172696f}\ProgramData\Sophos\AutoUpdate\Cache\savxp\. (ID 112 Details: Cannot create a file when that file… Read more

For the past few months we’ve had a donated storage server sitting in our storage room, with 8x1TB HDDs it was the perfect chance for us to supplement our daily tape backups with the speed of hard drives and move tape to monthly. The only issue was that the server came with a rather pants Intel Core2Duo processor that didn’t… Read more

As promised to those that came along to the recent VDI Demo Day the PowerPoint slides are below with the video playlist above. The day covered a wide range of topics from how to setup a Citrix VDI-in-a-Box proof of concept, the options for thin clients from 10zig and how to take things one step further with Application Virtulisation through… Read more