Thanks for that. We were looking at potentially using Disk2VHD and using that to create a VHD for XP Mode for our Autocad software. That would allow us to have our Engineers stop operating one PC for Solidworks and one for Autocad.

What if you could teach Google Chrome how to search VMware documentation faster and more efficiently? And what if you could use it to search vExpert content as well? The answer is custom search engines in Chrome. Get the full article here.

For those who may be VMUG members, I recommend you take some time and check out the VMUG Virtual Event tomorrow. Here's a link to registration if you are interested (not sure if you need to be a member to register) - http://vshow.on24.com/vshow/vmug2015/registration#.

I also see there will be live expert chat sessions with Q and A:

11:30 am – 12:00 pm CT: Cormac Hogan discusses Virtual SAN 6
1:30 pm – 2:00 pm CT: Nick Marshall answers your questions about vSphere 6
2:00 pm – 2:30 pm CT: Chris McCain delves into NSX
2:30 pm – 3:00 pm CT: Chris Colotti talks about the VCDX program

I plan to at least attend a little of it (so long as work does not interfere). I wanted to share nonetheless.

In this episode, it's part 1 of our interview with @Jimmy-T! He talks us through his early career journey and how he got into the Spiceworks community. Get the full episode here.

I'm running 2 Elastix boxes - 1 on premise and 1 on Rackspace that are connected via IAX2 trunk for extension dialing between sites.

One particular user works at 3 different offices. Two of those offices are serviced by our on-premise Elastix box at the main site, and the third office is serviced by the Elastix box on Rackspace. The Elastix box on Rackspace was needed because this 3rd office is a company not completely owned by the same owner as the other two offices.

So in an effort to make this as easy as I could on this executive, I did the following:
Extension 101 at office 1 (serviced by on-prem PBX)
Extension 102 at office 2 (serviced by on-prem PBX)
Extension 201 at office 3 (serviced by Rackspace PBX)

I setup follow me on all 3 extensions so incoming calls will ring the extension called for 5 seconds and then begin to ring all 3 extensions until the call hits voicemail for the extension dialed.

****Calling extension 101 or 102 from 105 (all connected to same PBX)
So, if you dial one of the extensions serviced by the on-prem PBX from another extension connected to the on-prem PBX, phones ring as expected, but the IAX2 channel usage is really strange. You see a couple of IAX2 channels in use from the on-prem PBX to go across to the Rackspace PBX, but you begin to see 2, then 4, then 6, then 8, then more and more and more in use on the Rackspace PBX. When the call is terminated, the channels become free again.

****Calling extension 201 from 105 (connected to on-prem PBX)
If you make a call from an extension serviced by the on-prem PBX to 201 (serviced by Rackspace), the calls ring as expected, but you do not see the IAX2 channel usage go nuts on the Rackspace PBX.

***Calling extension 201 from 202 (both connected to Rackspace PBX)
In this scenario, calls happen as expected, and the IAX2 channel usage is normal.

I've not done much more research than this but did not see anything strange in the Asterisk logs on the PBX. From a quick look at package versions inside the Elastix GUI, the PBXs are at the same patch levels.

Has anyone seen something like this happen? Like I mention here, the issue is only on the Rackspace PBX side (no issues with IAX2 channel usage on the on-premise PBX). I am trying to determine if my issue is really with IAX2 or with my follow me settings.

Check out this week's episode on the move from engineer to architect as we share part 1 of our interview with Jon Hildebrand. The full episode can be found here.

If you happen to be interested, I saw this today - http://www.cybrary.it.

This is the second post in a series in which I am attempting to send Pi-hole logs to Wavefront for analysis. Many thanks to community members who responded to this thread to help me get started choosing the right tool for the job.

Get the full story on the tool I picked and the configuration used here.

Today was an Elastix Webinar Wednesday, and I learned about the Elastix Anti-Hacker Plugin. For $15, it's actually a very neat add-on to your install: http://addons.elastix.org/ or http://antihacker.voip-lab.ru/ for more details. It basically configures fail2ban for you and will send you e-mail alerts about potential hacks, etc. The webinar was with the developer, and the plugin should work on 2.4 or 2.5. It's cheap but seemed pretty effective based on the webinar.

Has anyone here used it to protect or monitor your Elastix install?

If you only had one IT conference in the budget this year, how do you decide which one? What criteria should you use? How would you sell attendance to the boss? We talk through all this and more this week. Get the full episode here.

And yes, we do have Nerd Journey stickers.

This will always be one of my favorites (quoting @scottalanmiller

That's like shooting yourself in the face today to avoid maybe getting a headache next year.

(Taken from http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/232833-creatively-rebuilding-a-server-infrastructure-on-vsphere-5-and-backing-it-up?page=4)

Thus far in our series, we’ve successfully shipped pihole.log lines to a Wavefront proxy in AWS EC2 and verified the proxy’s receipt of the logs. No data from the logs is being passed to Wavefront just yet, so it’s time to take a deeper look at the log contents and extract some data to be used as metrics. We’re looking for time series data (or things we can turn into time series data). Tracking the changes over time and the frequency of those changes could give a great deal of insight.

In this blog post, we see a glimpse of how to create metrics from logs. The time series metrics analyzed in that post came from parsing the data inside logs sent to a Wavefront proxy. Based on this document, we can leverage our logsIngestion.yaml file (or the yaml file we chose to specify using the logsIngestionConfigFile parameter in wavefront.conf) on the Wavefront proxy and grok patterns to perform this transformation. These grok patterns form a collective set of rules that determine exactly what data is sent from the proxy to our Wavefront instance’s collector gateway and thus will show up in the user interface.

Get the rest of the post here.

@thecreativeone91 said:

I've really wanted to be disconnected when I've went camping etc. However Everywhere I've worked still has required us have our email on our personal phones and be available if needed. One even had to take a laptop on his honeymoon.

A laptop on the honeymoon? That just seems wrong.

It's the golden episode (50)! This week we get tips on how to identify company culture from a HR Professional and some ways that HR can affect company culture. Also, how can you better work with the HR team at your organization? Check out the full episode here.

I'd visit http://community.spiceworks.com/support as well and choose the area you want to view the documentation if you would like a compliment to the Spiceworks University stuff.

What things can you be doing today to help prepare for unexpected career opportunities when they happen? And what is an unexpected career opportunity anyway? Check out this week's episode of Nerd Journey as we dive into part 1 of the discussion.

I've seen the buzz about it and watched the webinars. I'm excited about VSAN 2.0 and would like to play with it (not just using HOLs). But I'm not in a position where I have 3 hosts (let alone 3 hosts on the VMWare and VSAN HCL) with a mix of spinning disks and SSDs to do any kind of proof of concept for it.

We use the Essentials bundle of VSphere 5.5 (3 hosts with all local storage and OBR 10) with Veeam for backups. For the most part, we can hit our acceptable downtime window of 1-2 hours. As we look to potentially go paperless out in our manufacturing shops in the next year or so (and thus shrink the acceptable downtime window to 30-60 minutes), I am thinking VSAN may be a good solution to give us an IOPs boost and some additional data resiliency. We might even look to go to Essentials Plus as well.

We're not dying for IOPs right now, but if everything was faster, users and execs become happier people. And if we had a little more storage resiliency, that makes it even better.

Again, we would only do this if business needs require it. But my question is more centered around how people get the gear to fully test out VSAN and do a proof of concept before they deploy it?

This is part 2 in the preparing for unexpected career opportunities series. How would you respond if a recruiter contacted you unexpectedly? Should you respond even if you are not interested? And do you tell your boss this happened? Get the full episode here for answers to all of these questions.

I'd love to know what kind of PBX you have, if it is onsite or hosted, and which provider you use for SIP trunks.

Since I had little to no exposure to playing with Azure outside of having an O365 subscription, I wanted to change that. Azure has the option to create a free account with access to a number of services, so I took the low risk plunge.

I had intended to start with deployment of some basic virtual machines to compare the ease of use to AWS and GCP but found there was little to no availability on the free tiers. That was a step outside my comfort zone, but it’s probably best. In this post, the plan is to create a function app and add at least one function to it. I’ve heard a lot about functions as a service but have never explored them. Are you ready? Let’s do this!

Get the the rest of the story here.