Sam McGeown

Sam McGeown

Sam has been working in the IT industry for nearly 20 years now, and is currently working for VMware as a Senior Technical Marketing Manger in the Cloud Management Business Unit (CMBU) focussed on Automation. Previously, he has worked as consultant for VMware PSO, specializing in cloud automation and network virtualization.  His technical experience includes design, development and implementation of cloud solutions, network function virtualisation and the software defined datacentre. Sam specialises in automation of network virtualisation for cloud infrastructure, enabling public cloud solutions for service providers and private or hybrid cloud solutions for the enterprise.

Sam holds multiple high level industry certifications, including the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) for Cloud Management and Automation. He is also a proud member of the vExpert community, holding the vExpert accolade from 2013-present, as well as being selected for the vExpert NSX, vExpert VSAN and vExpert Cloud sub-programs.

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All posts by Sam McGeown

Written by Sam McGeown on 11/9/2008
Published under
I needed to use PowerShell for something today on my Vista laptop, but was unable to install the file. I had the normal UAC permission required when I ran it, but then it failed with this error Installer encountered an error: 0x80070422 The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it. It turns out that you need to enable the Windows Update service in order to use an MSU file.
Written by Sam McGeown on 10/9/2008
Published under Microsoft
Well, I’ve been away with my friends at Firebrand again and guess what…MCSE Windows Server 2003! 70-293 Planning and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure 70-294 Planning, Implementing, and Maintaining a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Active Directory Infrastructure 70-298 Designing Security for a Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Network
Written by Sam McGeown on 21/8/2008
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*** Unfortunately the Real Man Cycling challenge has been cancelled for this year due to planning issues - I’m disappointed but I hope to do it again next year *** I’m doing the Real Man Cycling Challenge in London on the 14th September. It’s a 34km ride through london in aid of The Prostate Cancer Charity, which is a really worthwile cause. If you’d like to sponsor me, head on over to http://www.
Written by Sam McGeown on 24/7/2008
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I thought this would be fairly common knowledge by now, Exchange 2003 being quite mature in it’s 5th year, but it’s not something I’ve had a problem with before and therefore I’m going to write about it! So a big email comes in; lets say it’s 8MB. Your Exchange 2003 server, set to it’s defaults for size restrictions, rejects the email. Why? Take a look at this Exchange TechNet article:
Written by Sam McGeown on 18/7/2008
Published under Microsoft
We have a Bonded ADSL solution for our servers to provide the necessary upstream transfer speeds for the applications we host. We have bonded ADSL because our exchange still doesn’t support SDSL, and a leased line is overkill. Theoretically, we should have 28.1 Mbps download and 3.2Mbps upload - what I am actually seeing is about 1.7Mbps down and 1.9Mbps up. I have tested this on various servers, over various times and file sizes, there is no doubt that the performance is POOR.
Written by Sam McGeown on 16/7/2008
Published under Microsoft
Outlook Web access is a fantastic tool for our company, providing on-the-go access to people’s mailboxes - which is of course secured by SSL and uses Forms Based Authentication. Internally, we have an intranet portal that allows us to access the various systems - one of which is OWA. One of the stipulations for this internal portal is that it is all Single Sign On using NTLM authentication integrated authentication. This is where the problem lies because enabling OWA with Forms Based Authentication over SSL disables Integrated Authentication.
Written by Sam McGeown on 15/7/2008
Published under VMware
We recently needed to upgrade one of our applications, and the new version requires an addition server instead of the application and SQL it requires a back end search, a front end web server and a SQL server. The specifications of the new server which are “required” to qualify for support are pretty high. The problem is that the actual processor usage is very light, and it is very hard to justify buying a whole new server that I know is going to be barely used.
Written by Sam McGeown on 15/7/2008
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“Nothing can come of nothing” - to quote King Lear, but it seems this is not always true. Marc Andre is giving away an album, and all he asks in return is that you mention it to your friends. I’ve not listened to it yet, but even if I hate it…it was free! Thanks to Matt Hellyer for the tip off.
Written by Sam McGeown on 14/7/2008
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I noticed a post over at David Overton’s blog today that highlights a new release of Windows Search. Normally not that exciting, but it is if you’re using Outlook to open up another users mailbox. I have quite a few mailboxes that are opened for historical reasons, people leave a company and I need access to their email. I don’t want to bloat my mailbox with all their email, it’s hard enough to find my own emails!
Written by Sam McGeown on 22/5/2008
Published under
It seems that the nice people at Microsoft were looking out for us, lest the evil people in the world see how we categorise our email, and decided to strip away any category information from sent and received objects by default. Sure, I understand if you were categorising emails from someone as “sneaky git” or “numbnuts” then you might not be too happy about sending those out…but really it should be your choice right?