After the VMUG the standard vBeers will take place. If you’ve somehow never heard of vBeers before the below is just for you . Sadly yet again I can’t make the VMUG or vBeers after due to my being on holiday
vBeers
Is an informal get together of virtualisation enthusiasts and professionals to meet and discuss all things IT. It’s a great opportunity to network, learn and meet like minded people.
Enjoy Talking Virtualization? Come & Socialise at vBeers!
Fancy meeting up every month with other IT virtualization enthusiasts to socialise and chat over a cold beer, wine or soft-drink? If so, then vBeers is for you! This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…
vBeers is open to everyone so whether you are a VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer user/fan or none of the above it really doesn’t matter as “it’s all about the virtualization”.
The London vBeers meet-up is held at the Pavilion End Pub. Details and directions below:
When & Where
The London vBeers are held on the first Thursday of every month or after a VMUG meeting starting at 6pm in the ‘pavilion end pub’
One of the bits of information I took out of my VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security course was setting up vMA for Remote logging of the syslog files from your virtual centre server and ESX hosts. I have played with vMA bit before but over the past week I’ve made a concerted effort to try better my skills as it is something i really need to strengthen before the next realise of vSphere which has no ESX included and therefore I need to know how to do my daily role through vMA and PowerCLI (everyone recommended I learn both as each has it’s pro’s and con’s).
I’m not going to get too in-depth with the process as some top bloggers have already done such a great job of it I would only be re-covering what they have already said. If you haven’t used vMA before then I would recommend a document created by William Lam of virtuallyghetto.com fame all about Getting Started with the vMA and there is even a VMware KB TV video all about vMA here
Next I secured my credentials in vMA by following the knowledge base article here. This is something I learnt on the course and maybe it’s overkill as someone would have to take the VMDK files of my vMA and reverse-engineer the encryption algorithm and decrypt the passwords but it’s always good practice to try secure your passwords as best you can so I did it
Having changed my keyboard layout from US to UK(EN) I noticed that due to this my vi-admin password wasn’t what i wanted it to be so after looking around and asking on twitter I was pointed to logging into my vMA using single-user mode and resetting my vi-admin password that way. I used this Red Hat FAQ to show me how to make this change.
Next I configured my vMa for Active Directory Authentication as recommended and detailed in the vSphere Management Assistant Guide on page 14. Also William Lam did a great posting detailing in a bit more of a user friendly fashion.
Now my vMa is remote logging,secured and using Active Directory Authentication.
Since my last All Things Virtual there has been a massive amount of news coming out of the virtualisation arena. One of the main sources of these were due to VMworld Europe happening from the 11th to the 14th of October. I was fortunate enough to attend and I was very pleased with the amount of views my All Things VMworld Europe Day1, Day 2 and Day 3 blog postings received.
The week prior to me attending VMworld I was able to attend a day arranged by VMware and Alan Renouf where some of the top VMware GURUs came to London and gave some exclusive presentations on VMware API’s, performance, PowerCLI and Onyx. The day was seriously in depth and really opened my eyes to the amount of data and things you can get and do with the VMware API’s and ESXTOP. Alan has posted the slide decks from each session ran on the day on his blog.The sessions are listed below with their links, these are something I am planning to get through in my preparations for the VCAP exams
Due to there being such a large amount of time between All Things Virtual 18 and All Things Virtual 19 (a month and a half) there are a few articles on my list that are a few weeks old but nevertheless still brilliant and so I kept them on here.
As I have said before I ,like a large number of other professionals in the virtualisation field am preparing and studying for the VCAP exams. For my own usage and because amazingly a few people sent me messages saying that my VCP4 Study Resources(Part 1, Part 2) proved very helpful with their preparations for their VCP4 exams and were asking if I planned to do the same for the VCAP exams. So I have created a dedicated page for all the resources I will be using in my preparations and will constantly try to update it with any new resources I find. The page has only been up for a month and a half and already over 1000 people have viewed it which is really great and hopefully it is helping people find out about great podcasts/blog postings/videos that will help them be prepared for the exams.
Duncan Epping of Yellow bricks fame posted a very small but very important posting all about Storage IO Control Best Practices. If you attended either of the VMworld conferences then I would recommend watching the session Duncan speaks of in his posting “Tech Preview: Storage DRS” and another session i watched all about SIOC “prioritizing Storage Resource Allocation in ESX Virtual Environments using Storage I/O Control”. Speaking of SIOC Luc Dekens has posted a brilliant posting on how to automate SIOC.
While at VMworld Europe Mike Laverick of RTFM.com fame went around and got himself a bag full of Swag and is raffling it all off in aid of UNICEF. The competition is open to anyone worldwide so go get yourself a ticket and donate to a very worthy cause at the same time.
Eric Sloof posted all about the availability of the the Technical White paper for Application HA. My knowledge of Application HA has only started growing very recently after attending VMworld this year and actually seeing some of providers stands and exhibitions of the technologies and their capabilities. I haven’t as yet read the white paper but like so many of these great resources it is on my technical reading list. Eric has also posted a video of the installation of Symantec Application HA.
Simon Seagrave of TechHead fame posted about some great free NTP Time Sources and the NTP Pool project. I’ve already been using the same source for my NTP synchronisation for my home lab and it works a charm
During VMworld Europe David Davis of Trainsignal’s VMware vSphere Video Training fame was able to do a video interview with VCDX001 Mr John Arrasjid. The video is a brilliant one for anyone looking to take on the VCDX certification as John is one of the main people involved in the VCDX and gives great insight into the certification and how it is all done.Jason Boche was also interviewed by David at VMworld US all about the VCDX certification here. These are two really great resources and have been added to my VCDX study list .
Speaking of Jason Boche he posted a brilliant posting all about the conversion of CPU ready to %RDY in ESXTOP. I am currently learning and strengthening my knowledge on ESXTOP and how to utilise it for my daily job and Jason’s posting is a great resource for learning all about how the %RDY value is calculated. I would recommend reading through a posting I did a while back about Understanding and using ESXTOP/RESXTOP as this will give a great base knowledge before going through Jason’s posting.
Steve Jin of DoubleCloud.org Fame posted all about using vSphere APIs to Collect vCentre and ESX Logs.After having attended the VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security Course last week I’ve gained an even keener interest in learning all about collecting logs for security reasons as well as troubleshooting reasons and Steve’s posting was right on time for my interest in learning more about it all. I would recommend everyone learns how to do this as it will be a life saver at some point for you.
Vladan Seget posted all about a whitepaper by VMware on the top ten most forgotten things when building your disaster recovery plan. The white paper is a really great resource and has some very good pointers and recommendations when you are building out your disaster recovery plan. If you have a disaster recovery plan or are planning one then I would highly recommend reading the white paper.
The next is an unusual one but one that I experienced myself and therefore feel I should link to it here even though I have already added it to my Upgrading from ESX,VMware Update Manager and Virtual Centre 4.0 to Version 4.1 posting. VMware have put out a KB article on an error where after upgrading your Virtual Centre Server to version 4.1 the transaction log for the vCentre Server database grows excessively large. Thankfully someone posted the KB article on twitter and i noticed it and fixed the problem before it severely impacted my Virtual Centre server.
Bas Raayman posted some really nice installation tips for installing VMware vCloud Director. I am yet to install vCloud Director to my home lab and so the installation tips are now part of my build documentation to go through when i finally get round to installing it.
Duncan Epping of Yellow-Bricks.com fame posted one of the best articles of the year over a week ago now all about VMotion, the story and confessions. The post covers the initial idea and building of a VMotion(misspelling intended) prototype to a number of top bloggers confessions on how amazed they were when they first saw or heard about VMotion and how it has impacted their work life and for some their career paths.
Well that’s all the postings of the past few weeks that have gained my interest.
Monday,Tuesday and Wednesday this week I was fortunate enough to attend the VMware vSphere: Manage and Design for Security course. The course is one of the recommended courses for the VCAP: DCA exam so I was looking forward to learning quite a few things and get some of the questions I had built up while doing my preparations for the VCAP: DCA exam.
The course started a little slow on the Monday morning,as to no fault of the lecturer the first two modules were him giving best practices and recommendations and covering a lot of things I had learnt before either in my VCP courses/studies or via real world experience. The course material is very well structured and the extra explanations and examples in the study materials will be great reference documents for my VCAP preparations and for my design one day when I’m hopefully prepared to put my design up for the VCDX certification. The afternoons material was a lot more engaging and started to get into the kinds of things I was hoping the course was going to cover in teaching good design practice and fixing and preventing common problems in todays virtual environments. The day finished off with a few labs helping you visually fix common design errors and problems.
Tuesday we got into protecting the the management environment and Protecting your ESX and ESXi hosts. These were some of the topics I was really interested in especially for learning good design practices for my current job and for my future VCDX design. The biggest take away from this section had to be learning all about how you can use vMA to retrieve and store all your individual ESX hosts log files and how to add and use SSL certificates to secure the login into the Virtual Centre server. I’ve even already started looking at implementing the vMA log retrieval and storage into my own environment I was so impressed with it. Tuesday finished off with some labs learning how to setup vMa to retrieve and store the logs and had a really great lab for someone like me that hasn’t done it before on how to request and add an SSL certificate to your Virtual Centre server.
Wednesday consisted of finishing off learning about how to protect my ESX/ESXi hosts and then covered all the ways to harden my virtual machines and learning about configuration and change management. We were lucky to have a VMware employee in the course with us who had actually written parts of the vSphere Hardening Guide and therefore could give us great tips and additional resources to help learn more about securing our VMware environments. The two things that were the most interesting from what he told us was all about a product by HyTrust which “offers IT managers and administrators of virtual infrastructure a centralized, single point of control and visibility for hypervisor configuration, compliance, and access management” It comes in a virtual appliance and there is a community edition for me to play with in my test environment . Hopefully I can write up a posting on my experiences with the product for anyone interested. The next very informative tip he gave us was all about a document created by Horst Mundt a Technical Account Manager at VMware Germany on the VIOPS.VMware.com site detailing all the alarms and what they do in vCentre 4 and vCentre 4.1. The document is frighteningly thorough. The course finished covering the remaining topics and then we got to finish off our labs which were really good compared to a few courses I have been on as they really did teach you some in-depth skills and tips.
I would highly recommend the course to anyone wanting to strengthen their knowledge on securing their VMware Environment and it really is a great course if you are planning on doing your VCAP: DCA exam as there was loads and loads of pages and resources i marked down for me to study before I sit the exam.
Just a very quick posting to remind those around the London area this Thursday (October 28th 2010) that after the London VMUG there are the customary vBeers happening.If you don’t know about vBeers then the below is just for you 🙂 I’m hoping to make an appearance at vBeers even if for just one beer as unfortunately work commitments mean that I cannot make the VMUG on Thursday.
Also while fiddling around today I noticed the VMworld sessions are now available to view for VMworld Europe attendees like myself. If you are one of the people writing the VCAP-DCD Beta exam then some of the sessions are a brilliant learning resource. If you went to the US one then you should have had access for over a month already. I wasn’t selected as a beta exam writer but when I do start preparing for the exam (after my VCAP-DCA exam) then I’m sure these resources will be brilliant.
vBeers
Is an informal get together of virtualisation enthusiasts and professionals to meet and discuss all things IT. It’s a great opportunity to network, learn and meet like minded people.
Enjoy Talking Virtualization? Come & Socialise at vBeers!
Fancy meeting up every month with other IT virtualization enthusiasts to socialise and chat over a cold beer, wine or soft-drink? If so, then vBeers is for you! This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…
vBeers is open to everyone so whether you are a VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer user/fan or none of the above it really doesn’t matter as “it’s all about the virtualization”.
The London vBeers meet-up is held at the Pavilion End Pub. Details and directions below:
When & Where
The London vBeers is held on the first Thursday of every month or after a VMUG meeting starting at 6pm in the ‘pavilion end pub’
Recently we decided we needed to take the plunge and start the upgrade process of our Virtual Centre,ESX hosts and Update Manager to Version 4.1. The upgrades were fairly straight forward due partly to us having to rebuild our Virtual Centre Server recently and therefore had already completed the pre-requisite of the virtual centre OS being x64 and the ODBC requirements.
The point of this posting is to summarise all the resources i used to prepare and make sure that the upgrades would run as smoothly as they did to my relief.
The VMware ESX 4.1 Release Notes were the first resources I used to fully understand all the new features of version 4.1 and to make sure all of our equipment met the Hardware, Software, and Guest Operating System Compatibility Lists
Next I went through the Upgrading to ESX 4.1 and vCentre Server 4.1 best practices to make sure I was obviously following the best practices for the upgrade 🙂 This was a really great resource for the upgrade and covered all the things I needed to tick off in my preparations.
The other resource that was amazing for reference and preparations was the vSphere Upgrade Guide for ESX and vCentre to version 4.1. It covers everything needed and i had it printed out beside me during the upgrades just in case.
This next resource was brilliant as it had a great table to make sure everything I needed to have done was done and the video in it showing how to do the upgrades via VMware Update Manager(the way I did my hosts)
Even though everything did go to plan I also looked around and read different blogs by people who had done the upgrades already and any snags they may have hit in the process. The best three that covered everything was
Duncan Epping’s small but so important posting all about the ODBC problems due to the VMware Update manager and vCentre needing to be installed on a x64 OS.
Well that’s everything I followed for my upgrade. Thankfully mine was really straight forward but with all the above resources I knew that I had covered everything i could to make sure I didn’t hit any problems during the upgrades.
Sadly today was the last day of VMworld. It really has been personally an amazing experience and I hope I can come back for many years to come. My day started off early again as I wanted to get in at 8am to be able to do a lab or two before it got really busy. The lab I did was the VMware vCenter vShield lab which was recommended to me to do before I did the vCloud Director Networking lab. The lab was top class and was a really great follow on from the vCloud Director: Install and Configure I did yesterday. I’ll definitely be looking through all the documentation of vCloud Director and be deploying vShield in my home lab when I get back to the UK .
While leaving the labs I spotted the infamous Duncan Epping of Yellow Bricks fame. Who else is a better person to meet and chat to about your vCloud Director oriented lab than Duncan who was more than happy to chat with me about it and gave me some nice tips of how to get my head around all the vCloud technologies and features. Duncan and I then made our way to the bloggers lounge but due to it being empty still he made his way back to the labs and I sat around for a bit to quickly complete yesterdays All Things VMworld Europe – Day 2. Within half an hour I was surrounded by some of the top people in the industry such as Frank Denneman,Nick Weaver,Maish Saidel-Keesing ,Chris Dearden ,Duncan Epping(who made his way back),Vladan Seget and Scott Lowe to name but a few. I also nabbed myself a vWife shirt for the missus in the process from Scott via his wife’s Spousetivities. If you aren’t on twitter or the VMware Communities or blog have a look at this video from VMworldTV all about the social media side of VMworld and VMware. I gained so much this past week never mind over the months I’ve been using these resources and would highly recommend getting into it if you wish to gain knowledge from the top people in the industry.
After an amazing amount of knowledge transfer from so many VCDX’s in the bloggers lounge I went and did my second lab of the day VMware vCloud Director – Networking. As I stated this was the third bit to completing my vCloud Labs plan and the lab did just that. Even though it was very in depth and technically daunting the lab gave me loads of knowledge on how everything merges together and left me with a much stronger understanding of the technology.
From here I had some lunch and then went right back into the labs as I wanted to complete two more labs before the 4PM closing time. The lines were massive and at one point the waiting list to be seated was over 65 people. Once I got in I decided to do the VMware vSphere Performance & Tuning lab. The lab was very interesting and due to my only having upgraded my home lab to ESX 4.1 I hadn’t had any experience in SIOC and Memory Compression. The new features for resource management in vSphere 4.1 look to be really great and I’m looking forward to enabling SIOC in my work environment as soon as I have it upgraded.
Seeing as I had just enough time I quickly exited the labs and went straight back in for my last lab of the conference VMware View 4.5 – Install and Configure. I really wanted to do this lab as I haven’t had the opportunity to use VMware View very much at all and with the massive demand for VDI I felt it was something i needed to gain some knowledge in. the lab was good but obviously very simple and due to the large amount of people trying to get one last lab in like myself the installations of the instances need for View 4.5 meant that a large amount of my time was sadly used up waiting for each bit to install but I did gain a good base knowledge of the product.
At the end of the day I made my way back to the bloggers lounge and a whole bunch of us gave our feedback to John Troyer about what we enjoyed and what we hoped to see next year. The main talking point of the week and one of the big conversation we had in the bloggers lounge was enabling the ability for VMworld delegates to gain access to the labs. Early this morning I noticed a promising statement by the VMWorld twitter account “@vmworld: VMware is looking at how and when we could host labs in the cloud throughout the year. We have a team investigating options. #vmworld” i really hope this is true as it would be amazing to be able to do all the labs as they are such great resources.
Day two started off early as I decided to not hit the massive parties so that I could get into the labs as they opened at 8am. The Bella centre was empty and I was one of five people in the labs at opening time. I went to the VMware vSphere PowerCLI lab and got a really good foundation of PowerCLI commandlets and it was a great starters lab for a point and click person like myself.
I then made my way around the solutions centre and spoke to Alan Renouf about the lab and all other general things and got a great picture of him at the booth.I then hung out with a number of the top bloggers at the bloggers lounge and got to meet John Arrasjid (@vcdx001),Bas Raayman (@BasRaayman), the vNinja Christian Mohn (@hobbel) ,Steve Bruck (@vColossus) and the Chad Sakac (@sakacc).
Next on my schedule was Kendrick Coleman and David M Davis’ Ten Best Free tools for vSphere. The session was packed but I had made my way in early so ended up being in the second row due to them not allowing you to sit wherever you wanted. The session was brilliant and seemed to go down extremely well with the audience. I would highly recommend you check out Kendricks Top 10 Free vSphere ESX Tools and Utilities posting here and have a try with all the tools as I use a large amount of these tools already and they are brilliant and will make your daily role a lot easier while not costing your department anything.Also go vote for your top ten free tools of 2010 on David’s blog here.I also managed to nab myself a vNerd shirt from David Davis from his employers Trainsignal. Yes it’s sad I really wanted a shirt saying vNerd but I love it 🙂
I then attended the Project Horizon session which was really informative and the concepts covered were really exciting but obviously due to it being in development still the talk wasn’t vastly different from what was covered in the keynote yesterday morning. I’m hoping to get myself some more hands on experience of the product once it is available as the the product does look to be one that is going to become massive with all it’s features and the push of people to be able to do their work through iPads,iPhones and Android devices.
From there I made my way to a VMware vSphere Troubleshooting lab which was highly informative and the best lab I had done yet as it was great to test my own troubleshooting skills and learn a few new ones/perfect them. It was also very refreshing to work on an environment that was broken yet not mine as then the obvious pressure you normally have wasn’t there 🙂 The lab was also a great introduction to the official course being run and I’m looking forward to doing the course and learning all of it.
From here I had to catch up with some office work and then made my to the VMware Party. The party was really impressive with great food, loads of drinks, some crazy performers from circus performers to break dancers and then the bands Bjorn Again (an ABBA tribute band) and MADHEN (the house band). ABBA had broken up before I was even born so I enjoyed playing table football (foosball) against some VMware employees more than the bands but I do have to say the crowd was absolutely loving them and my wife and parents would have been front row of the performance.
Due to my wanting to get into the labs at opening time again I left around half eleven. The second day was really great as I got a good amount of time with fellow bloggers for some knowledge transfer,the sessions to learn the new products and features and the labs to be able to play around and gets some hands on experience of the new products and strengthen my knowledge on technologies I have been using for a while.
Well I made it to my first VMworld and have already met a massive number of the people I speak to on twitter and whose blogs I follow at last nights VMUG party. The highlight of the party for me had to be David Davis of train signal fame saying that he really enjoys my All Things Virtual postings 🙂 .
The first real day of VMworld started today with the opening keynote. It took a lot for me to try drag myself out of bed for it but the efficiency of the Danish public transport system meant that I got in really quickly. I got into the keynote fairly early and made my way to the bloggers area but decided to sit on one of the more comfortable chairs beside the bloggers area as all the bloggers area seats had little tables attached which was irritating to me. The keynote then started with the very funny “what is the cloud” video and even though I had seen the video before seeing as it was shown in San Francisco also it is still a great simplistic way of explaining the cloud to people.
The keynote speeches were pretty much exactly the same as the ones from San Francisco so I won’t go over it all again as most people will have either seen or read about the keynotes so if you haven’t watched the keynote I would recommend watching it here . The main announcements that were new for VMworld Europe was the announcement that the vCentre iPad app will be available to download at the end of this month as well as the VMware View 4.5 iPad client. I’m sure not many people need a reason to get an iPad but I’m sure the releasing of these clients will be a number of peoples reasons for buying themselves one in the near future. Another of the big announcements was Project Horizon. The application looks really exciting and is going to be a firm favourite with a lot of people I am certain. I am really looking forward to learning more about the product in the coming weeks and months. Here is an excerpt form the VMware site about the product “Project Horizon: Architecting the Next Generation End-user Computing Model:At VMworld 2010 in San Francisco, VMware will preview a cloud-based management service – codenamed Project Horizon – that will securely extend enterprise identities into the cloud and provide new methods for provisioning and managing applications and data based on the user, not the device or underlying operating system. Project Horizon will establish a user’s “Cloud Identity,” securely extending on-premise directory services between private and public clouds and enabling customers to take advantage of the flexibility and new services in the public cloud while maintaining the security and control from their private clouds. “
After the keynote I made my way to my first session which was VMware vCloud Director Technical Overview which was a highly interesting and informative session especially seeing as I may need to roll it out in the coming months. The big let down as a large amount of people have also stated though is the need for an oracle database for the implementation. There are rumours and don’t hold me to this that in the next realise that there will be support for MsSQL.
Next I went to the VMware View Technical Overview session. This session is one I added as like vCloud Director there is a big push for this kind of technology and so I needed to gain a bit more knowledge of the product as I haven’t had the chance to play around or fully read up on the product. The session was good and covered a fair amount of the features I was hoping to learn. The only downside to the session personally was that the session was finished in half an hour.
Next I made my way to the bloggers lounge where I got to do some serious people spotting of more people whose blogs I read and who I follow on Twitter. The notable ones have to be John Troyer (@jtroyer), Maish Saidel Kessing (@maishsk), Gabrie van Zanten(@gabvirtualworld), Simon Long (@simolong_) and Eric Sloof(@esloof). I also got to chat to John briefly which was really great as last year I watched religiously his videos from VMworld US and now I’m attending a VMworld and chatting to him.
I then made my way around the solutions exchange and watched a couple of the presentations being run all of which were highly interesting and from the amount of questions they got asked seemed to go down very well with the crowd. From here I decided to get some lab time down and went to the lab section and did the vCloud Director Install and Configure lab. I’m really pleased with the amount of information I learnt and how much I was able to see and do. I’m hoping to do quite a few more labs before the week is done.
The day finished off for me with a relaxing free beer with a few free beers with a few Twitter friends and a few pass and present colleagues. I was nicely invited to the Veeam party but opted out as I want to do some labs early tomorrow morning.
Just a very quick posting of the two VMKernel problems I noticed in my VMware environment this morning and the very simple fix i found for it.
The errors I was receiving was “ScsiCore: 1119: Invalid sense buffer: error=0x72, valid=0x0, segment=0xb, key=0x0” , “SCSILinuxAbortCommands Failed, Driver ata_piix, for vmhba3”
I noticed these problems was happening when one of my vm’s became unresponsive for a few seconds also. So I checked the settings of the vm and noticed that the vm had the CD/DVD Drive setting set to a hosts device location. Once I changed this back to Client Device the problems stopped appearing and the vm hasn’t become unresponsive again 🙂
As I said a very simple fix but thought I’d put it out there just in case someone isn’t as lucky as I was in noticing the errors came at the same time as a certain vm became unresponsive.
). If you haven’t registered i would highly recommend you do so ASAP as these are more often than not fully booked a week or two before the event.
. Sadly yet again I can’t make the VMUG or vBeers after due to my being on holiday
![vBeers[7]](https://i0.wp.com/www.techhead.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/vBeers7.jpg "vBeers[7]")
Fancy meeting up every month with other IT virtualization enthusiasts to socialise and chat over a cold beer, wine or soft-drink? If so, then vBeers is for you! This is a great opportunity to meet with other virtualization enthusiasts and professionals and enjoy discussing all things virtualization, and in fact anything else that comes up in conversation…
. Hopefully I can write up a posting on my experiences with the product for anyone interested. The next very informative tip he gave us was all about 
TheSaffaGeek 