ThinkPad X1 and Windows 8

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

In the last days I got my new machine for work, a Lenovo ThinkPad X1. As usual I always want to work with the latest and greates technology, that’s why I have chosen to set up the ThinkPad X1 with Windows 8.

Even in Developer Preview state Windows 8 runs very stable and brings a lot of cool new features which I can use for my daily work. I love the new PowerShell versions and Internet Explorer 10. But the best and the biggest feature for me, is the integration of Hyper-V 3 in Windows 8. So I don’t have to use VMware Workstation or VirtualBox to run virtual machines on my notebook for testing or presentations. I also can simply use the VHD (or VHDX) format to play with virtual machines or even boot them via boot from VHD.

The downside of the Windows 8 Developer Preview is missing .NET framework 3.5, but I think the Windows 8 beta, which should be released by the end of February, should fix this.

Maybe some people have realized that I am a big fan of business style notebooks. And what would be better business design than the ThinkPad series. Lenovo tried to combine good old ThinkPad values with new design features, and in my opinion succeeded. I really like the ThinkPad design in this very slim chassis. It looks elegant and business “high-class”.

The build quality of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 is like you would expect it from a ThinkPad. It feels great and very robust. Keith Combs describes it in his review ”The ThinkPad X1 is build like a tank. It’s probably the most solid notebook I’ve ever had in my hands.” and I have to agree with him.

More information on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 here.

My new Nokia Lumia 800 – Windows Phone

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

Last week I got my Nokia Lumia 800 and even I already have read a lot of articles and reviews about it, I am impressed about the beautiful design and the build quality.

The first problem noticed was the battery life. My HTC Titan had something like two days of battery life and the battery of my Lumia 800 was empty after just one day. At the same day I also got the Windows Phone update (7.10.8107.79) and I deactivated the Exchange Push for my work mail account. Now the battery life seems to be the same or better than on my HTC Titan.

Now the Lumia 800 (3.7-inch screen) cloud be a bit bigger for me (the Lumia 900 with a 4.3-inch Screen could be perfect). I also miss the Internet Sharing feature, but there should be an update soon to activate this feature.
Overall I really like the Nokia Lumia 800 and it will be my main phone for the next months.

Lenovo ThinkPad T430u

Posted on January 8, 2012 by Thomas Maurer

In the last days Lenovo showed pictures of the Lenovo ThinkPad T430u for the first time. The ThinkPad T430u is a 14-inch ultrabook which will be release in 2012. There is not a lot of information about the specs of the T430u but it will use one of the new Intel Ive Bridge CPUs and should also be available with Nvidia discrete graphics options.

This could be a very interessting notebook option for business users. My hope for the T430u is that it will bring a great high-resolution display option. But we will see it later this year or maybe at CES 2012.

More Information about the T430u on theverge.com.

Cisco UCS C200 M2 – Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC)

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

The first things I tried with the new Cisco UCS C200 M2 servers was the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller). CIMC is the remote out-of-band management solution (IPMI) provided with Cisco servers, it’s basically the same like HP iLO or Dell DRAC.

One of the biggest advantages is that CIMC is included for free, so there is no extra license you need for extra features like KVM or stuff like that.

After working some hours with the CIMC I was really happy, no problems at all everything worked as expected. From the design it’s like the Cisco UCS Manager but better . I think it is much easier to use and much faster (it’s not Java).

Keyfeatures

Web based front-end
KVM and Virtual media
Change BIOS Settings
Active Directory connector
SNMP
IPMI (Very interesting with the Bare-metal deployment in SCVMM 2012)
SSH
Health Monitoring

Continue reading →

Cisco UCS C200 M2 – Hardware

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Today my two new virtualization nodes from Cisco arrived. For my Microsoft Hyper-V lab I needed two new nodes and I got a really good offering for two Cisco UCS C200 M2 High-Density Rack-Mount Servers.

The whole Cisco server series is optimized for virtualization and offers very cool features like a buildiin Cisco Integrated Management Controller (without extra charge) and Ciscos Extended Memory Technology which allows to use up to 192GB RAM.

Technical Specs

The Cisco UCS C200 M2 server is a high-density, 2-socket, 1 rack unit (RU) rack-mount server built for production-level network infrastructure, web services, and mainstream data center, branch, and remote-office applications.

Up to two Intel Xeon 5500 or 5600 Series multicore processors
Up to 192GB of industry-standard double data rate (DDR3) main memory
Up to eight 2.5-inch or four 3.5-inch internal SAS or SATA disk drives; up to 8 terabytes (TB) total
Built-in RAID 0 and 1 support for up to four or eight SATA drives; RAID 0 and 1 support for up to four or eight SAS or SATA drives with optional mezzanine card; and RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10 support for four SAS or SATA drives and RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 support for eight SAS or SATA drives with optional LSI MegaRAID card
Two half length Gen 2 PCIe slots-one full height x16 and one low profile x8 PCI Express-two integrated Gb Ethernet ports, and one 10/100 Mbps Ethernet management port for accessing the controller
Front- and back-panel interface with video, two USB, and serial port connections

More Information on Cisco.com

Hardware

The Hardware makes a really good first impression.

One of my next posts will be about the CIMC (Cisco Integrated Management Controller) which I really started to like.

Building a new Hyper-V Private Cloud Lab

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Thomas Maurer

Two years ago I created my first real IT Lab with some HP ProLiant ML110 G5. I used this in the past years to test new products and projects. The Lab at this time was very limited, no storage, no cluster, not much RAM and weak CPU performance. Not much help if you work a lot with Hyper-V Clusters and System Center products.

I was looking around for some time now to find a cheap offer for new servers. In the last week I found a offer from Cisco with c200 M2 servers and I couldn’t resist to buy two of the for my Hyper-V Cluster nodes. The offer was a special deal which was even cheaper than building the servers by my own, at this point thanks to my former employer Atlantis Informatik AG.

Now what I will do is creating a new Hyper-V Cluster friendly environment with two Cisco C200 M2 Hyper-V nodes, one HP ML110 G5 as Storage Server and one of my old HP ML110 G5 servers as Hyper-V Server which all my Management servers and Active Directory will run on.