In one of my previous blog articles I promised to give you a closer look at the Dispatcher Discovery process. It took me a while but now I will fulfill that promise. Together with my colleague Bas van Goor I created an overview of the discovery process and in this article I will walk you through it.

Why do we actually need a discovery process? The RES Automation Manager Agent doesn’t communicate directly with the database. It does so by means of one or more Dispatchers and for an uninterrupted communication process it needs to have a list of functional and reachable Dispatchers in its memory. Building an initial list of Dispatchers in memory is what we ... READ MORE>>

In honor of the launch of Automation Manager 2011, including Service Orchestration, we will be rolling out a mini blog series surrounding the Top 5 Benefits of Automation Manager 2011. Previously known as RES Wisdom, the development of RES Automation Manager 2011 began two years ago. Today, Automation Manager features three different modules: • Task Automation • Resource Provisioning • Service Orchestration RES has made updates to Automation Manager 2011 in the following areas: • IT as a Service • Scalability • Integration and Compatibility • Security We encourage you to leave comments and opinions as each new post goes up.  Look out for our first post on Tuesday, where we will talk about how Automation Manager helps IT ... READ MORE>>

The content of this post is a bit more complicated than usual, but if you need to implement a change inside a VM in a vCenter environment with vMotion and DRS, I believe it's worth the read. In RES Wisdom 2009 you can create a connector to an ESX(i) host to manipulate VMs. This way, you can create a snapshot before you apply a change inside a VM (see: http://blog.ressoftware.com/?p=55). So your Run Book could look like this: Run Book (Default behaviour: stop on error) Module 1: Get-VM-Host (The PowerShell Script) Create Snapshot (Using the ESX environment variabele) Module 2: (only exception: continue on error) Implement Change on VM (e.g. install SP2 on 2003 server) Module 3: (on error ... READ MORE>>

Employees come, employees go, computers come, computers go... What (often) stays are their accounts. In my consulting days, I've checked many Active Directories for old and unused accounts. I've never ever seen one that didn't contain at least 10 accounts that were not used anymore.

This, in itself, is nobody's fault. When a new employee arrives, HR requests a new account, simply because the new user cannot work without a login and password. When the same user leaves, nobody thinks about the account that's left behind.

Same goes for computer accounts. The new computer is made a part of the AD, but when it dies nobody thinks of updating the AD.

To make an administrator's life a ... READ MORE>>

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