Post Election thoughts and Hyper-V

So the election ended (actually ended about 9pm EST once Ohio went Obama.) But we do have a new president and he is a Democrat. For better or worse, I'm not really sure and I will not use this blog as a political soap box.

I am sad for one of my buddies who has done a vast amount of work for the McCain campaign and was promised a job in the White House if McCain would have won, which he didn't so my buddy was pretty torn up about it.

He came down Wednesday and we went to the NIN concert together and I'm thinking that was good for him. I mean, angry, hate filled music, along with the most amazing light show you've ever seen in your life...always does a body good. The show was amazing, like nothing I've ever seen before as far as lights go. I would describe it for you, but I don't think the written word can even do the show justice...you just have to experience it for yourself, it was that good.

Anyway, so the NIN show ruled, and I'm glad the election is over and it was a clean election (unless you live in District 5 in Virginia which still has a contested race.) On to matters related to work....

We have been using the new Virtual Machine technology from Microsoft called Hyper-V. If you haven't seen this technology yet, it's really cool stuff. Basically it has all the parts of VMWare but way easier to use. There are some draw-backs to Hyper-V that I've discovered. The biggest one being that Trend Micro Office Scan(our anti-virus and firewall software) doesn't play nice with Hyper-V at all. From what I've been able to tell, it seems that Office Scan's firewall will only recognize physical NIC's and not the virtual NIC (which is what Hyper-V uses for network communication.) This causes a huge problem because the default policy for Trend for any network card, is to plug up all firewall holes, and not let anything in, or out. So then you run into problems where you can't connect to the VM's you just created and the VM's themselves won't even start. Kind of annoying, but I think I have a workaround that will allow us to have Trend installed on the machine and still use Hyper-V.

I have had some good luck with VM's to this point though. We have some of our various services (Virus Scanning and CAD licensing) being hosted on VM's now and they seem to be running with out a hitch *knock on wood*

Ok, that's about it from me for now. More later on.

~C