Latest Event Updates
Liberal Democrats cruising up the M6
When I was driving to work, I saw the Lib Dems in their battle bus going up the M6. Maybe Nick Clegg was on board. I could have pulled into the services with them to have a good discussion about what is actually going to happen in the economy, small businesses and the environment.
I wonder if there was a party going on in the bus, or whether or not some strategic planning was taking place to talk to the people of the north.
You can check the short video here: Lib Dem Battle Bus
ACP Thin Manager deployment
Hi have been working on ACP Thin Manger for quite some time now. You can find information of their products at www.thinmanager.com. This is a great solution for production companies who work in the manufacturing sector and use custom applications to control all of their on site hardware.
The solution is based around Thin Client architecture and uses services like Microsoft RDS as its core and hops onto these terminal connections managing each session to provide a better experience for these custom apps.
It is an all in one PXE, DHCP and imaging solution. The thin clients boot from an image over a network and do not require a hard disk because everything is loaded in memory. You can then push terminal sessions to thin clients or to Windows machines running WinTMC (which is an application provided by ACP) that connect to the Thin Manager server and download their RDS configuration and then connect into the RDS infrastructure.
I am going to roll this out now to a company so that they have a central approach to desktops out in the manufacturing plants. This also means if a thin client fails, they just replace it with a new one.
Simple
Broadcom + Hyper-V + VMQ’s
There have been a lot of posts on the internet discussing VMQ’s. Microsoft had published this LINK to ensure that the best performance was experienced on Virtual machines. VMQ is supposed to offer an intelligent buffer, whereby virtual machines benefit from network cards which can offload and prioritise virtual machine traffic. The fact is that the Broadcom cards cause high latency issues, and inconsistency with network traffic.
I tried a few tests:
1.5 GB file:
- Copying from Physical Machine to Physical Machine: <10 seconds
- Copying from Virtual machine to Physical Machine: 34 Seconds
- Copying from Virtual to Virtual machine: >1 minute
This pointed me to the settings within Hyper-V for the Networking interface and the iSCSI disk layer. I first checked the disks, and the IOPS on the SAN was hitting a maximum of 600 IOPS which is less than average throughput for the SAN, considering there are 24 virtual machines on the SAN volume. Then I tried the network throughput by using a few linux tools, and this proved that the Network interface was at fault. The strangest thing was that the throughput would hit about 200MB/sec and then drop off to about 15K/sec and then spike back up again. I then looked at the network interface and disabled the following setting within the network adapter:
Once this was completed then performance of the virtual machines suddenly increased. They are now running as fast as the Physical ones.
Now its time to change to intel cards.
Broadband for businesses in the UK
It has been a long time since I did an update. This is mainly because I have been rushing around working in London, Derby and Liverpool. Then along came Christmas, and like always it went just as quickly. The New Year then settled in and I went away skiing in France. You can find the pictures here .
Broadband for the UK Business
Recently there have been investments by the government to get your business off the ground. Once of these is a grant offered by the government to step up your business to the fastest broadband available in your area. With technology becoming centric within businesses these days, then this may be an opportunity you cannot miss.
Now, understanding IT and working in IT for most of my life it has to be said that you cannot have a super fast fibre connection if there is no fibre laid in the ground where your business resides. This being said, there are other options available but if you live in the Outer Hebrides don’t be too disappointed if you can’t get a Gigabit connection to your building. There may be other options such as 3G or 4G connections which you can take advantage of.
There is plenty of information out there. Take a look at the government site Connection Vouchers to find out more information on this
Small Business Saturday 2014 in the UK
On December 6th 2014, it will be Small Business Saturday in the UK.
Small business day is a non-profit, non-commercial and non-political campaign to promote small businesses in the UK. A post of this on the Telegraph website from last year shows how much we need small businesses in the UK and explains why we need Small Business Saturday. Last year this helped to generate millions in the UK for small businesses.
There is a website which is dedicated to this that explains everything you need to know about connecting, getting involved and further information at https://smallbusinesssaturdayuk.com/
You can also interact with many people who are supporting Small Business Saturday by logging into Facebook and following the Small Business Saturday page.
If you are a Twitter user, you can follow them on their Twitter Page
Of course there are many other links on the internet about this, but it is important to stress that small businesses in the UK need support for the economy to flourish.
I for one will be getting involved with this, so show your support for small businesses and lets make the business world a better place.
Worton Tech 