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One of the big takeaways from the EqualLogic sessions this morning was just how many of us are using VMware.  During the tools session, the question was asked, “How many of you are using hyper-v?” Of probably 40 people in the room, not a single person.  No one. Nada. Zilch. 

However, almost everyone in the room was using VMware.  Why does this matter?  Well, for one thing, we all have gotten different answers over time from vendors about what is best for our virtualized environment.  We are all learning the hard way the best practices for deploying iSCSI initiators (VMware says to use their initiator instead of Microsofts, etc), how to do MPIO (right now using the Vsphere MPIO option for round robin seems to be the only solution), etc. 

What is clear is that this is a moving target.  The rules are changing constantly and new tools are coming from VMware and from EqualLogic that we will need to think through.  With anything there will be tradeoffs.  What I would love to see happen is a combined effort from VMware and EqualLogic to prepare a consistent message about best practices.  Certainly documents exist today about best practices, but if they are more than two months old, are they the best resource today?

Hoping that the sessions dedicated to VMware this afternoon will answer some of these questions.  And I’d hate to be running a session in the same timeslot as the VMware ones, because I gotta feeling that the VMware sessions will be standing room only.

As a follow up to the post I wrote several months back (see Why I Love our EqualLogic SAN), I wanted to talk about my experience yesterday with the Dell crew.

I had the great pleasure yesterday to meet with Jeff Sullivan (@sanpenguin) from Dell Tech Center here at Watermark.  We were invited to be part of a case study talking about our choices of technology, specifically around storage and EqualLogic.  Jeff also brought two other individuals with him, Kristin Storer and Stephen Sheppeard to produce and shoot the video.  The greatest asset that Dell has, in my opinon are the people who work there.  Jeff, Kristin, and Stephen were awesome to work with and made our time together a lot of fun and low stress.

We spent most of our time talking through all of the reasons why we love the technology choices that we have made.  As IT leaders, we often don’t take the time to reflect on the good choices we’ve made, but rather get caught up in the day-to-day firefighting and “what’s next.”  Having a camera pointed at you is a great way to make you stop and think, “If I were to do this over again, would I do anything differently?”  Honestly, around our choices with storage, I can say that we made the best choice for our organization.  The bottom line is SIMPLICITY. If you are a small business, a church, or have a limited IT staff… EqualLogic is a great way to go for storage. Even if you are a large organization who has spent millions of dollars in the past on Fibre Channel SAN solutions, you’d be doing yourself a disservice by not taking a hard look at iSCSI and EqualLogic.  When we compared our storage needs with everything out there (direct attached, cloud storage, fibre channel, etc) the numbers just put EQL in first place.  And it’s easy.  And we don’t have to go to training to use it, and it works.  Everytime.

Dell is a big company, but they are a great ministry partner for us.  We are certainly a mixed technology shop… we have Dell, Apple, VMWare, Extreme Networks, Aruba, Palo Alto, Juniper and others playing specific roles in our technology stack.  I can honestly say that Dell has been one of the most active in pursuing us, working with us, and engaging us in discussions about how their products work.

Thanks guys for a really fun day talking about technology.

P.S. We also talked a lot about how we use social media.  That being said, you can find Jeff on Twitter at @sanpenguin, myself at @watermarkgeek, and Watermark Community Church on both Facebook and Twitter

In a previous post, I discussed our process for adding Macs to our Active Directory domain and the issues we encountered with the native Apple Directory Utility.  In this post, I will discuss why we chose to go with AdmitMac for our deployment.

In my original testing we had several issues with getting AdmitMac to work.  Namely, getting the drive mappings to display on the user’s desktop on login.  However, one thing that I have come to appreciate about the folks at Thursby software is the quality of their technical support.  Even though we were not a licensed customer, one of their support reps spent an hour on the phone with me walking me through the configuration step-by-step.  Don’t let that give you pause, there really isn’t so much that I needed an hour of support… it really is simple, but he walked me through everything and answered a ton of questions.  Good stuff.

So let’s talk about the reasons that we used AdmitMac.  First, AdmitMac is easy to install.  The wizard will walk you through several options and will install a new item into your Directory Utility.  Notice that it does not use the built-in active directory service.

Once the software is setup, you will go into the AdmitMac Service to make any changes.  You will be given several options for authentication.

Notice here that you are able to give the users the same options for local or network home that you can give them using the Apple utility, however now in one place.

The local login policy was the one major issue we found with the built-in Apple AD service.  Using AdmitMac, you can set the number of times a user can login remotely before needing to attach to the domain again, AND the user will have administrative priviledges when they are remote as well.  Not having administrative privledges remotely with the same user account was the deal breaker for us, and what ultimately pushed us to this solution.

Here you can set who is the admin of the computer, either domain users or groups.

By default, domain users are placed into a new set of folders on the local hard drive, specifically Macintosh HD/domain/domainname/username.In addition, the AdmitMac product has a “home mover” utility that will take the local user account that already exists and make a copy of the files into this new folder structure, with all the appropriate permissions in place.  Thus, little to no impact on the user.

I was able to successfully use “home mover” to move my files into the new structure.  Note that if the user’s home directory is huge, and there won’t be enough diskspace to make a copy, AdmitMac will let you know before it starts.

Overall, we have had zero issues with our AdmitMac deployment over the past month.  I would recommend you take a look at Thursby software if you are looking for an easy to use solution for Macs and Active Directory.