How Power Settings Can Affect Your PC/Server Performance

Windows Power OptionsPower Settings on an Operating System can have different effects on system performance. If you want to use less energy and allow your Laptop to run longer then you would set your Power Settings to save power at the cost of performance. In most cases on a PC or Server, you do not want to have any power savings as you want the max performance you can get out of a system. Power Options are sometimes not set properly after setting up a new Operating System Installation or is overlooked when troubleshooting performance issues. You may have a high end CPU with many cores but for some reason even under light load, the CPU usage is over 50%. In this post I will mainly be looking at the Windows Operating System when it comes to Power Settings and things to look for to make sure that your System is running at it’s peak performance.
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Installing VMWare VCenter 6 on Windows Server 2012 R2 with SQL Server 2014

VMWare Vcenter6

With VMWare recently releasing VSphere 6 products, I will show you how to install VMWare VCenter 6 on Windows Server 2012 R2 using MS SQL Server 2014 as the backend Database. As similar to my VCenter 5.5 Update 2 install guide, please read the Prerequisites section first before beginning! The installation is split into 3 sections. The 1st section is getting the SQL Server Prepared, the 2nd Section is getting the VCenter Server Prepared, and the 3rd Section being the VCenter Installation itself. Please note that this installation may not be Best Practice as this is just a guide to quickly get VCenter Running.
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Installing VMWare VCenter 5.5 Update 2 on Windows Server 2012 R2 with SQL Server 2014

In today’s post I will show you how to install VMWare VCenter 5.5 Update on Windows Server 2012 R2 using MS SQL Server 2014 as the backend Database. Please read the Pre-requsites section first before beginning! The installation is split into 3 sections. The 1st section is getting the SQL Server Prepared, the 2nd Section is getting the VCenter Server Prepared, and the 3rd Section being the VCenter Installation itself. Please note that this installation may not be Best Practice as this is just a guide to quickly get VCenter Running.
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Creating Windows Server 2012 R2 Template VM in VMWare Workstation 11

Creating new Windows VMs can be time consuming due to having to create the VM, install the Operating System, and then having to install Gigs of patches which can be time consuming. In this post today I will show you how to create a Windows Server 2012 R2 Template VM which can be cloned to create new VMs in order to speed up the process of deploying a new VM in VMWare Workstation 11.
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Extending your Windows 8.1 or Windows Server 2012 R2 Evaluation License

Microsoft has provided Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 to test for evaluation. For Windows 8.1 you get a 90 day evaluation and for Windows Server 2012 R2 you get a 180 day evaluation. But what if you want to keep testing your software beyond those limits? Well there is a way to extend your trial!

Windows Evaluation Expired
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