The Ramblings of Ken

I think it is time for my yearly blog post. I've been meaning to post something about Microsoft Hyper-v for quite some time now.
When I started at my current position we were running mostly physical servers, but we had a couple of virtual servers running on Microsoft Virtual Server 2005. One of the first things I helped with was to get those virtual servers migrated to VMware Server 2.0. After running on VMware Server for a year or so, we realized that it just wasn't going to fill our needs. It had not been updated for a very long time and it appeared that VMware was going to drop support for it. We then decided to migrate to VMware ESXi. It was a very good product for us. The performance of our virtual machines definitely improved significantly. However, just after getting everything migrated over and running smoothly, the state of Utah dropped their contract with VMware. We made the decision to migrate to Hyper-V.
In all honesty, we struggled in our test conversions from ESXi to Hyper-V. System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 looked to have all of the functionality we needed to perform the conversions built in to it. In all of our test conversions the process would make it to 90% or so and then fail with a cryptic error message.
Finally, we decided to give up on the built-in functionality and use VMware Converter. We shut down the virtual machine we were trying to convert and exported the ESXi VM to a VMware Workstation VM. After that it wasn't a problem at all to import the VMware Workstation VM into System Center Virtual Machine Manager and get it up and running. The process was very smooth once we followed the VMware Converter workflow. Every VM converted and imported just fine.
I was reluctant to move to Hyper-V, but we are very pleased with it. The one item that completely blew me away is how much better Microsoft's backup solution is. We were using the built-in VMware Data Protection product before. It was very unreliable for us. The worst part is that restore operations would take hours. Now we are using Microsoft's System Center Data Protection Manager. It is much more intuitive and restoring a complete VM takes only a matter of minutes.
Microsoft, you've earned one more fan here with Hyper-V.

Update - 1/29/2013:

This turned out to be a partitioning error.  I created a new virtual disk with a new partitioning scheme and cloned my data over to the new partitions.  That fixed the problem.

Original Post:

Something is very wrong here.  I've been trying for about six months to upgrade an old Windows Server 2003 file server to Windows Server 2008.  I have been getting a weird error message when it tries to reboot after the initial copying of files from the DVD.  The error is:

Update 1/29/2013:

I am now using a micro sim adapter for my nano sim.  Obviously, this works much better.

Original Post:

I got my iPhone 5 on Friday.  I'm loving the device.  However, this post isn't a review of the device.  I won't go into any details about it.  I just want to talk about the nano sim in this post.

As you may know from a previous post, I like to tether using my iPad.  The Verizon iPad 3 comes with free tethering.  I've gotten used to moving my Verizon LTE sim card between my phone and iPad. However, the iPhone 5 presents a new challenge.

I just got done migrating all of my old posts from backups of my website dating back to 2005!  I just got years of history back and I am excited about it!  I forgot how much I used to actually post on my site.  It used to be an engaging place for conversation amongst my friends.  It's all back now.

Take a look for yourself by using the archive links on the right.  For example, here's all the posts from 2005.  You just might find comments from yourself that you forgot about.

My ugly redirect from www.tigrao.org to my USU hosted blog has now been eliminated.  I have fully migrated tigrao.org to be a Google Apps domain.  I just finished exporting all my WordPress content to Blogger.  It looks good so far.  This doesn't necessarily mean that I will post more often.  I really should, but we'll see.  I always hated the ugly redirect, though.  This is much better.