Performance

I’m an IT Manager in a medium-size special education center. I am running a shop with 100-plus VMs running on Windows Server 2008 virtualization hosts. How do I minimize time/resources/disruption, while migrating to Windows Server 2008 R2? As per Microsoft recommended best practices, all the VHDs are a fixed size, and each VHD file is on its own individual LUN. Even though some of the VHDs are stored in mirroring capable hardware, I don’t see any alternative to doing a file copy of the VHDs, because I want to deploy multiple VMs on a single Clustered Shared Volume (LUN). The file copies ...

I am a web site architect for the European Patent Office, which employs more than 7,000 people. As my day job and also in my spare time, I create and implement web sites and constantly run into issues with IE6, 7 and 8 which are simply not present in Firefox 3.x nor in Safari. Examples are css related (round corners), Image related (png handling), Dom related (Iframes not showing external sites, resize issues, no support to get the browser size). Can you advise me and other Web site developers out there if there will be a more agile release of IE ...

Our Web site, TweakTV.com, has been growing incredibly fast, and we have gotten to the point that our current servers are not keeping up with the growth. In the past we have had both the database services and Apache running on the same server, but as this was too much for the server, we moved the services to separate servers. As we have continued to grow, we now see periodic “hangs” on the site where it can take upwards of 30 seconds for the page to show.  When analyzing these hangs, we see that it is being caused by heavy disk use ...

We’re a small, 30-person commercial contracting company. Because of the nature of our business, everybody has a laptop that they take home with them. The problem is that these laptops are running either XP or Vista, with different software on each, and because the users use them at home they end up with viruses and spyware, and Windows patches are often out of date. How can we force users to always keep their systems patched, virus software installed & updated, and free of spyware without being too restrictive or causing a headache for our single IT guy? In addition, how ...