Christian Wickham

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Christian Wickham 's Posts

One of the first steps in preparing for a Business Continuity Plan and developing a Disaster Recovery Plan is to first identify the impact that your business would experience as the result of a disaster. Engage with senior management (as this process takes up considerable time and needs focus and… Continue Reading Business Impact Analysis questionnaire template

Many organisations have allowed staff to bring in their own device for use at work – these are Bring Your Own Device policies (BYOD Policy). It’s becoming more common, but what are the bring your own device policy risks? In this article, when I refer to device, I include phones,… Continue Reading Bring Your Own Device policy risks

You may be one of the many people who ask what is the difference between BCP and DR – that is, what is the difference between a Business Continuity Plan and Disaster Recovery planning? First a little history – back in the pre-computing era, for most businesses, if they suffered… Continue Reading The difference between BCP and DR

Whilst defining your BYOD policy, you might miss some important requirements to producing a document that will help guide your employees when they use their own device for work purposes. More organisations around the world are now providing an allowance to employees to allow them to buy their own consumer… Continue Reading Tips for defining your BYOD policy

You may not know that VMware provides some online courses for free. All you need to do is register for a myLearn account and then you can register for – and complete – various foundation courses. Go to http://mylearn.vmware.com/portals/www/mL.cfm?menu=topfreecourses and you will see an up to date list of the available… Continue Reading Free training courses from VMware!

If you’ve been in IT for a while, you may stick by the rule that with Windows, you should put your pagefile on it’s own disk. Originally, this was when computers had little RAM, and to optimise performance of the pagefile it was advised to use FAT instead of incurring… Continue Reading Put your pagefile on it’s own disk

Many of us have to give directions; it might be in a project, when managing a team, instructions for someone to pick something up for you from a shop, defining a business strategy – but the way to give directions is important. What is wrong with the way people are… Continue Reading The only way to give directions

If you have implemented VMware VM Monitoring (part of HA), and your virtual machine rebooted quickly, you may not know why the virtual machine rebooted. Most often this is due to a Windows bluescreen, but you may want to see why VMware HA took the action to reboot the VM.… Continue Reading Why did my VM reboot?

How do you work out what data you need to capture for a system? This is a question not often asked, at least not in the right way. Designing data entry for a system should be driven by the wants and needs of the output. It’s no good gathering data if… Continue Reading Designing data entry for a system

I frequently get contacted by my customers with concerns that their vC Ops licensing is not working, or that they key they have is not recognised. It’s important to acknowledge the order of installation for vCenter Operations Manager so that the license is applied and acknowledged. Is your vC Ops… Continue Reading vC Ops licensing not working? Common vC Ops licensing mistakes

Some people will just jump straight into Disaster Recovery Planning, without considering what they are planning for – how do you categorise a disaster? Who  decides, and what information do they need to make a decision? What parts of your business can continue to operate using other means – that… Continue Reading Disaster Recovery planning to do before the planning

Commonly, a vCenter integrated with Active Directory through SSO will provide authentication for users accessing vCenter. Creating vSphere SSO groups will achieve far more than you expected. So, if you want to integrate multiple Active Directory domains and LDAP directories or leverage local vCenter users and groups in conjunction with… Continue Reading Creating vSphere SSO groups

With VMware vCenter Operations Manager, you can create custom dashboards that provide at-a-glance information on custom parameters that have been gathered by the vCOps system, enabling in-depth visual analysis of information that is not represented in the default views. The custom dashboard functionality is a value-add feature only available in… Continue Reading Free customised vC Ops dashboards with Standard edition

What is the difference between DR and BCP? For that matter, what is the difference between Backup, Disaster Avoidance, Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity? It’s a mistake to consider all of these as lumped into the same concept, as that leads to further mistakes such as skipping steps. Mistake 1:… Continue Reading 9 big mistakes in disaster recovery planning (DRP)

I regularly have to provide guidance on sizing new hardware for a project, utilising VMware vSphere for the virtualisation platform. The question of sizing VMware hosts does not have a simple answer, as the answer depends upon the needs of the applications being put on the hardware. For example, a… Continue Reading Sizing your vSphere hosts

You may know that with Microsoft’s inclusion of User Account Control, starting from Windows Vista, you need to “elevate” your permissions so that you can do system wide actions that make changes. This simply means that for most tasks, like installing software, you need to open the installer with “Run… Continue Reading Install MSI as another user