Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to the main event!

This bout, sanctioned by the WWAF (World Windows Administrators Federation), will be 6 rounds or until knock-out and referred by Brian Nelson of ArcticLlama.

In the Blue Trunks weighing in at total installation weight, including all used and unused binaries, is Fuuuuuuuullllll Installllaaaaation!

And in the Red Corner, weighing in much slimmer, with just the essential code necessary to run Windows Server 2008, is Serrrrrrvvvvver Corrrrrre!

Let’s get ready to rumble!

Round 1: Resources

This looks like a good one folks. Both of these fighters are members of the newest Windows Academies, but they have very different styles.

Ding!

And there’s the bell. Server Core looks much lighter on his feet than Full Installation.

In fact, with all of that extra code stripped out, it takes up just 1 GB of disk space for installation and can run in just 2 GB of disk space, that’s WAY less than the Full Installation.

Oh, that one hurt Full Installation.

Body blow! Ouch!

Full Installation takes a crushing right jab from Server Core which Microsoft documentation suggests can run optimally in just 1 GB of RAM versus a full 2 GB of RAM for Full Installation.

This doesn’t even look fair.

Ding!

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The road to my career in Information Technology started with a simple little action – copying the contents of one floppy disk to another. Simple enough, right?

I remember typing in the “copy *.*” command and wondering how the computer knew what to do when I typed that in.

Later, this little thing called “Windows” came along, and you could now actually click on icons to get things done.

I found that I still liked working from the command line, and through my 10+ years of being both a Cisco certification candidate and instructor, I’ve found that most Cisco admins like the challenge of working at the command line.

Why? Maybe we just like the challenge. After all, anybody can click on a desktop icon, right? ;)

As I often tell students, the exam will have multiple choice answers, but when you’re at the command line, you either know how to do the job or you don’t – there is no “A”, “B”, “C”, or “D” to choose from.

The command line isn’t going anywhere, but the use of GUIs to configure Cisco routers is becoming more and more common. That includes the popular Security Device Manager (SDM), which also happens to be a major part of the CCNP ISCW exam.

Everyone likes to resist change, and using GUIs to configure a router is no exception. I think there’s a fear that working with Cisco routers will somehow become “too easy” and anyone will be able to do it.

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The title of this article seems to be the underlying theme in every “Mac vs. PC” commercial.

The ones that have drawn my attention recently are the commercials targeting Vista. You’ve seen those commercials haven’t you?

Most of them go something like this:

Mac: “Hello I’m a super hip, fun, exciting Mac for young people that want to improve their lives.”

PC: “And I’m a stuffy, suit and tie wearing, dinosaur PC that can only do calculations and spreadsheets. I suck the fun out of your everyday life.”

Mac: “Hey PC, what are you doing over there?”

PC: “I’m just wondering why Vista has so many bugs.”

Mac: “Yeah Vista is pretty bad and nobody likes it. It doesn’t work for a variety of reasons that I won’t list here. Don’t you wish you were a Mac so you wouldn’t have to wear a suit and tie and be so boring?”

PC: “Hey, Vista may not ever work and Macs may be better than PCs and I may dream about being a Mac but … wait a minute! Oh, you outsmarted me again Mac!”

Mac: “That’s why PC users are so dumb, because PCs are dumb. Come to an Apple store … bring money.”

I may be paraphrasing a bit (are you picking up my sarcasm here?) but I’m a little disturbed at the way Apple looks at the consumer.

Apple assumes that the average consumer will look at these commercials or any publications from the mainstream media and come to the conclusion that Vista is a hassle. Vista has a negative stigma, mostly among consumers that don’t know anything about it.

For those of you that are against Vista, I want you to take a look at the reason why. Is it because of specific problems you’ve had with Vista? Or, is it because Apple and the mainstream media have talked you into a false sense of loathing for Vista because of the problems of a few?

I’m inviting you to pour out your “Steve Jobs Kool-Aid” and take a look at the truth: Vista gets a bad rap for no good reason.

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Recently, I had the pleasure of attending the Windows 2008 Server product launch event in Dallas, Texas, USA.

This was one of the many free events that Microsoft offered, around the world, to educate end users, developers, and IT pros on what their new Windows 2008 Server operating system has to offer.

We had a great time and I would like to thank everyone who stopped by to talk to us at the event!

What happened at the Windows 2008 Product Launch event in Dallas?

These Microsoft Windows 2008 product launch events were officially dubbed "Heroes Happen Here!", as you can see from the sign below at the Dallas event.

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Reliability is an extremely important aspect in networking.

A network that has been designed without the provision of redundancy is a network with a limited life span.

Customers demand to have 100% service availability, while more and more time sensitive services are injected into networks such as voice and video over IP. These services need to be reliable, hence redundancy is a prerequisite in this case.

Cisco’s proprietary Hot Standby Routing Protocol (HSRP) has been designed to provide the software intelligence needed for your extra hardware to successfully provide redundancy in your network.

In this article we’ll take a look at HSRP’s operation in detail and examine, with the help of sample network diagrams, how to configure and enable HSRP.

The "Hot" in HSRP

There are several key points of HSRP’s operation. Some might say these are the things that put the hot in HSRP:

• For enabling HSRP all you need is 2 or more Cisco routers that will be configured to work in groups. These routers provide redundancy so that when the primary group router goes down, the standby router takes over all routing functions of the primary one.
• A group of routers running HSRP share a virtual MAC address and a virtual IP address. Therefore, the active router is responsible for routing packets destined for its virtual MAC address. The active router is also responsible for responding to ARP requests from hosts, providing them with its virtual MAC address.
  
  On the other hand, hosts within a given group need to configure their default gateway with the virtual IP address of the router within their group and not with the IP address of the router’s physical interface.
• HSRP uses a configurable priority value to determine which HSRP router within a given group is to be the default master router.
  
  The router with the highest priority becomes the master and the others become standby. The default priority is 100. In case more than one router shares the same priority value then the router with the highest IP address becomes the primary router.
• When HSRP is configured with Object Tracking, the priority of a router can change dynamically when the object that the router is tracking goes down.
  
  For example if the line protocol state of an interface is used as a tracked object, then when it goes down the active router’s priority is decreased and the next available router with the higher priority becomes the active router.

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