Blog ala Vidar

As a part of the Christmas presents to myself, I bought some new hardware for my server. I had a main board laying around with a quad core AMD processor. Yes, I hate AMD, but it’s better to use it than just having it laying around.. Anyhow, I bought 8GB RAM and 2x2TB disks for it. I’m running Windows Server 2008 R2 on it with Hyper-V, so it’s running 7 virtual servers, including Active Directory, SQL, Web etc.

Over you can see how good I am in Visio! This is a bit outdated since I’ve now bought a Gbit switch to put in my living room so my HDPC, PS3 and my soon to arrive Xbox will all be connected. Hyper-V has a cool feature which enables me to add an internal network between the servers. This is running on 10 Gbit! It’s used for backup, service-monitoring etc. So, why do I need 7 virtual servers? For testing! I’m generally VERY interested in technology, and this enables me to do almost what ever is possible. For instance, I’ve never had the time to check out SharePoint. I know it’s some kind of web-server-thingy, but that’s about it. Also, I want to check out Exchange 2010 and some cool features related to AD in 2008 R2, including Direct Access. The SQL Server is of course running 6 instances (2005, 2005Express etc). I’ve also installed BizTalk on vsWEB. What’s BizTalk? Have no idea! That’s why I’m doing this 🙂

So, to sum up. I’m going to test out SharePoint, Exchange, BizTalk, System Center Operations Manager, AD and of course play a bit with some SQL features I haven’t used too much time with: Analysis Services and Reporting Services. I’ll hopefully get to blog about my findings, if I’m not TOO exited when getting my Xbox. If there’s something in particular you want me to blog about, please let me know!