The Grumpy IT Admin

As we support 1500 users we don't manually install anything on PCs. it is all done remotely using, at the moment, Altiris Deployment console (not the nasty web based 7.1 but the rather more pleasent 6.9 with win32 console). We use simple command line stuff to run installers in quiet mode such as MSIs with a /qn or setups with recoreded ini answer files. Every now and again we come across an installer that either doesn't support silent install or tries to do something stupid at the end like display a read me file, complete Muppetry! However we often come across stuff that requires prerequistes installed like Exchange 2010 Management tools. This needs a bunch of Windows features set up in advance, but guess what? The installer knows this but doesn't install them for you and Microsoft doesn't tell you what they are in any documentation or how you should go about installing them, though it does say if you run Setup /r:MT it will install silently, don't believe it, it...

Here's some more weirdness related to Exchange. Basically we saw a lot of slowness, not all the time and not on all sites. This slowness would manifest itself in response times from the CAS/HUB server that sit behind a loadbalancer which comes from Kemp. The CAS/HUB servers use the loadbalancer as the default gateway, now for all our traffic this worked extremely well, the only issue we got was this slow down. Even connecting to the server via RDP would be very slow and unresponsive, the cure was to vMotion the loadbalancer. More of a workaround than a fix but it helped. After much troubleshooting and packet sniffing and a conversation with Kemp it was ascertained that if we change the NIC type from a VMXNET3 to a E1000 all our problems would disappear. Surprisingly this actually worked. Now the CAS/HUB servers are much more responsive and don't fall in to an apathetic well of despair. Would I build an Exchange system that was fronted by a loadbalaner again? Probably n...