Back in November 2008, I blogged  about Setting Up PBX in a Flash, Part 1: Configuring a Virtual Machine. That article discussed running PBX in a Flash (PiaF) under Microsoft Virtual PC or Virtual Server 2005. Within a couple weeks, I abandoned the virtual machine approach and published Moving PBX in a Flash from a Virtual to a Physical Machine.

Recently I've been testing Microsoft's free bare-metal hypervisor, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. Especially now that Hyper-V supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux, could Hyper-V be the answer to virtualizing PiaF on a Microsoft platform?

Let's try it and see what happens.

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I recently installed a Dell PowerConnect 2824 switch, my first foray into managed switches and gigabit networking. I blogged earlier about how to set it up and how to use it for bandwidth monitoring.

The client where I installed the switch reported that an XP workstation (a Dell OptiPlex 755 with a gigabit NIC) was extremely slow to log on immediately after a reboot. Like five minutes or more slow. Once the logon did finally complete, I saw that a logon script had failed to map network drives, although I could map them manually. The issue did not seem to happen on older workstations with 10/100 NICs.

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