Network Audit and Documentation, CENTREL Solutions Blog

With XIA Configuration Server it is now possible to manually document the disk shelves connected to your Windows and Unix servers.   Using relationship mapping you can then link your Windows and Unix servers to the disk shelves in a similar way to tape libraries. For more information see our Network Audit Tool page or download a free trial .

The XIA Configuration Client now includes an SNMP data collector and SNMP MIB browser utility. This allows users to scan and explore the SNMP settings of their devices. This is useful when Diagnosing SNMP related issues Providing information to  CENTREL Solutions  for the inclusion of new SNMP device types and hardware manufacturers. Simply enter the SNMP connection details into the connection dialog. Load additional MIB files and view the currently loaded MIBs Information can be loaded and saved to XML to make exchanging the data between your networks and CENTREL Solutions  without needing to install additional software. For more information see our Network Audit Tool page or download a free trial .

With XIA Configuration server you can now automatically document the relationships between hardware and software devices on your network. This can be extended with manually created relationships and user defined relationship type definitions. The system also allows you to create manual relationships using the built in search functionality. In additional to the built-in relationships it is possible to extend the system with custom relationship type definitions. Interested? Take a look at the other features or buy now .

When you start a Generation 2 virtual machine on Hyper-V you may see the following error message Hyper-V server reports Boot Failed. EFI SCSI Device. No Operating System was loaded. This can occur if you are running a Generation 2 virtual machine when the boot disk is configured for MBR not EFI (GPT). More bad news, it's very difficult to convert an MBR disk to GPT with current tools. Windows Disk Management MMC requires that you delete all partitions. There are free tools such as gptgen.exe however using them made the test system I was using unbootable, so it's not without risk. The simplest solution is to create a generation 1 virtual machine and boot from that. If you have used any tools that safely convert GPT disks to MBR then please feel free to comment below. For more information on our Hyper-V documentation tool please see our site .

With XIA Configuration Server you can easily track changes to your items with the new item comparison user interface, simply Select the items to compare Select the version of the items to compare Compare the items to the web interface, PDF or XML Open the comparison results in Microsoft Excel to allow simple and fast analysis of the changes. For more information see the item comparison page of our web site.

Today I've been working with Hyper-V on a desktop Windows 8.1 environment as an alternative to VMware Workstation. There seem to be a myriad of options when it comes to converting the virtual hard disks from VMDK to the new(ish) VHDX format. After trying various ones the information seems to be confusing and contradictory some don't support VHDX, some support VHDX such as Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 3.0 graphical interface, however require you to be running VMware ESXi and vSphere, whereas I'm using VMware workstation. The best solution I've found is to use the PowerShell commands for Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 3.0, Download Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter 3.0 http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=42497 Open PowerShell as an administrator Type C: cd "\Program Files\Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter" Import-Module .\MvmcCmdlet.psd1 To see the available commands type get-command -module mvmc* The command...

With XIA Configuration Server version 6.2 searching the configuration management database has become easier and faster. The new search interface is integrated directly into the toolbar. Select a location, container, customer or item type to focus the search The search results are now integrated into the grid, allowing all the functionality you expect when browsing the CMDB. For more information on the XIA Configuration Server search capability see the following Search Feature Page .